Sermons tagged with Repentance

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and every now and again, as your pastor, and as a part of Grace, I just kind of get overwhelmed at how good God is to us. So this isn't the sermon, but one of my favorite parts about communion is just getting to see everybody walk by, and I get to know names and stories. And Jen commented to me, we've got about five very pregnant girls in the church right now. And each of those babies was prayed for fervently and is being prayed over. And what a blessing it is to see that happening. Bert, I'm about to start crying. If you could get me some tissues from the coffee bar, that would be great. I'm being serious, Bert. Snap to it, please. We've got folks in the church fighting cancer with relentless faith, recovering from strokes with faith. We've got faces, thank you, sir, that I'm happy to see every week, including birds. We've got tremendous friends and friendships and communities. And we are just tremendously blessed. We are chock full in our children's spaces. We are parking people at big lots. And it's just an exciting time to be a part of grace. And it's also a humbling time to be a part of grace in this community. So I just wanted to express that and hope that you feel it too. I also wanted to pray at the beginning of my sermon, so this kind of works out, because we've got a team going to Mexico Saturday. How many years have we had a relationship with faith ministry? A lot of years, decades. We've got some really sweet relationships down there. Unidos, unidos. Right, Jeff? He's got the t-shirt on. How many people are going this year? Okay. So we're going to pray for them. We're going to express some gratitude for grace. We're going to pray for the families that are about to grow. And we're going to pray for those fighting hard through difficult times. And then I'm going to try to get it together and give you the sermon I'm supposed to give you this morning. So let's pray. Father, we're grateful for this place and this family. Me, maybe most of all, this morning. We thank you for the love that's represented here. We thank you for the young women who are about to be young mamas and the young men who are about to be fathers. God, we thank you for those in our midst who are fighting hard with faith through challenges that they did not foresee and do not welcome and yet embrace as a part of a journey for you. We thank you for the growth that we see in our children and our children's ministries. And we just pray, God, more than anything, that we would be good stewards of those young souls for the time that they are entrusted to us. And I pray the same thing over everyone else that calls Grace home, that we would take good care of the folks that you have entrusted to us. We lift up our team going to Mexico and we just pray that you would continue to further those relationships and that those who are going would be moved towards you and that those who are going for the first time would be indelibly impacted by what happens there. In Jesus' name, amen. Alright, let's try this again. Run the bumper again. Let's just do that for funsies. I'm being serious. Do it. I'm going to mute my mic and blow my nose, and then we're going to have like an actual sermon. All right? Thank you. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This morning we are finishing up our series called The Traits of Grace where we're answering the question, if you're a partner of grace, which we don't have partners, we have members. We walked through that for a week. So if you're confused, you can listen to that sermon. If you're a partner of grace, this is what we want you to become. This is what we're trying to build you into. If you were to ask what should define someone who's been a partner of grace for many years, it would be these five traits that we've been walking through for the last five weeks. And so this week we arrive at what I believe to be the ultimate trait of a partner of grace. I think all the other traits build to this one. And so I'm just going to come right out the gates with it. If you're taking notes, you can write this down. At Grace, we are kingdom builders. At Grace, we are kingdom builders. We've got these five traits now emblazoned on the wall over the glass doors and the windows out in the lobby. As you walk out the center door, the one in the dead center on purpose is kingdom builders. This is something that we want every person at Grace to become. And this idea of being kingdom builders began to germinate for me about a decade ago in a staff meeting at my previous church called Greystone Church. Greystone is a church in suburban Atlanta. It's one of these kind of big multi-campus churches where you get simulcast out to multiple campuses when you preach, that kind of deal. And we took a staff retreat down to a lake house. And there's about 25 or 30 of us. And we're sitting in this brainstorming session where the lead pastor, Jonathan, who in many ways has been very gracious with me over the years. We're sitting in this brainstorming meeting where he's asking this question about Greystone. What defines people at our church? What do we want to instill in them? What defines us as people? What's in our DNA? And I kind of broke in and raised my hand and I said, I think we need to build a church of kingdom builders. And I kind of explained why I thought that, which is going to be some of the things that I explain to you in a minute. And Jonathan, like he listened to me. He was kind. He goes, yeah, that's great. That is super important. And then he didn't write it on the whiteboard. And I don't know if you've been in those meetings, those brainstorming meetings where you have an idea, you feel like it's a good idea, you say it, and whoever's in charge of the meeting goes, that is good. That is very good. Thank you so much for sharing that. Does anybody else have any ideas? And it doesn't go on the whiteboard. And when that happens, it's infuriating. And I know because I watch my staff get angry with me when I don't put their ideas on the whiteboard. When you do that, it hurts a little bit. So I thought maybe he didn't understand me right. So a few minutes later, I kind of approach it in a different way. You know, I'm nothing if not persistent. And he's like, yes, that's a good idea. Not right now. And then we move on again. And I thought maybe, I know, I know what'll do it. And so I explained it in a different way and because this is a Mike Tomlin's he's a coach of the Steelers he says that young young people getting involved in their profession have all the ideas and none of the responsibility that was me I had all the ideas and have any of the responsibility of execution so I mentioned it again until finally he said, Nate, we've heard you. It's a great idea. That's not going to work with what we're doing. We don't need to talk about that anymore. Okay. That's kind of what it takes sometimes for me to hear you. So I said, okay. But I couldn't let go of this idea that this seems so clear to me. And then about, I would say, seven years after that, I'm in a meeting at my church with my staff asking the same question. What are the traits of grace? What's important to us? What do we want to produce and who do we want to become? And I hadn't thought about it in a while, but it occurred to me. And so I said, hey, I just want to throw this out there. I think we were meant to be kingdom builders. And I explained why. And the staff responded enthusiastically. Yeah, that's good. Put that up there. And I know that often when there's someone leading a meeting and there's people who work for that person, that they are incented to support the ideas of that person. So that might not be authentic. But I will also tell you, and Aaron Gibson's in here somewhere. He will tell you if I'm lying, that sometimes I present ideas in staff meetings and it's just met with crickets. Just uncomfortable silence because no one wants to tell me it's a bad idea. And I go, okay, that didn't get any traction. We won't do that one. So I do feel like I can trust him. And then I presented it to the elders and the elders liked it too. So that became one of our traits, kingdom builders. Then maybe about a year after that, I was in a conversation that I believe I've told you guys about before with someone who was going to become a very good friend. And this guy was pressing me on grace and on my leadership. And he was saying, what do you want for grace? What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be true of grace in five years, ten years? What's your vision for grace? What's your vision for your leadership? What do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of you in five years, ten years? And I answered by saying, well, I've had these experiences in the past and I don't want to replicate those for people who work with me or for people who come to church with me. I've seen church do these things. I don't want to do those things. And after a while, he stopped me and he said, I've heard a lot about what you don't want to be, but I have no idea what you do want to be. And I realized in that moment that I had really never had a greater vision for grace than simply being healthy. And that grace required a greater vision than that. So I chewed on that for months. And finally, I came to this conclusion that this is why this idea has been germinating all along. Because I believe that grace needs to be filled with people who are passionate about building God's kingdom. I believe that the best work that we can do is to produce people who want to spend their lives building the kingdom of God with every ounce of energy that they have. And really what I would say is I want to produce a church full of people who are or are becoming John the Baptist. I want to produce people who have the same mindset that John the Baptist had, who are becoming more and more like John the Baptist in practice. And here's what I mean. Jesus called John the Baptist the greatest man ever born of a woman, which means Jesus thinks that John the Baptist is the greatest man to ever live. That's an incredible statement and a remarkable stance, and it's worth wondering why does Jesus think that, and I think, I think that this is why. John the Baptist, about 30 AD, was an elite rabbi that was allowed to have disciples. So I don't know how much you know about Jewish culture and Jewish context, but at this time in history, in Judaism, the rabbis were the pastors. Rabbi simply means teacher. And there was presumably hundreds of rabbis in Jerusalem at the time of John the Baptist, but there was this elite class of rabbis, the best of the best, that were allowed to have disciples, and John the Baptist was one of these elite rabbis because we see him having disciples with him. And he had built, in our words, in our terms, in our context, a very successful ministry. He would not, John the Baptist would not identify this way or with this, but in our context, the way to understand him best is to say that John the Baptist was a very successful pastor. If he were a modern day pastor, he would be invited on all the podcasts. He would speak at all the conferences. He would have a large church with multiple campuses. He would have this huge ministry. He'd be a best-selling author. And listen to me. I don't think that anything that I just said defines true success for a pastor. I have a much deeper respect for men and women who humbly serve their community in the name of God, in the being virtually unknown but faithfully pour their life out into a community and manage to retire as a pastor because they kept it between the ditches the whole time. I have a much greater respect for those people, for those men and women, than I do for people that have skyrocketed into Christian fame. Not that I don't respect that. I just don't think that's how God measures our success as people, how big our ministry is. But by the world's standards, what I want you to see is that by every measure, John the Baptist was a popular pastor with a successful ministry. He was baptizing people. People were following him and listening to him every day by the hundreds. Hugely successful and locally famous. And then Jesus comes on the scene. And John the Baptist actually baptizes him in the Jordan River. And Jesus and John the Baptist are cousins. And just so we're clear, John the Baptist is different from John the Apostle. John the Apostle was a disciple of Christ. He was the disciple whom Jesus loved. He wrote John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and Revelation. That's a different John. John the Baptist is the cousin of Jesus who paved the way for him and was prophesied about and who was eventually beheaded by Herod. Different Johns. And people started peeling away from John's church, again, crude language, but for us to understand, started peeling away from John's church and going to Jesus' church. And some of his disciples come to him, and they go, hey, you're losing members. People are not following you anymore, they're following Jesus. And this is John's response. And I think the heart of this response is why Jesus thinks John the Baptist is the greatest man to ever live. Verse 26, chapter 3 in the book of John. And said to him. And they say, John, that guy that you baptized, Jesus, people are following him now. They're leaving you and they're following him. And John the Baptist says, good. That's the way it's supposed to work out. See, John had spent his adult life building a kingdom, amassing a ministry, building a following, establishing a name for himself, becoming successful. He had spent his life building a kingdom. And then Jesus comes on the scene and Jesus begins to peel off portions of that kingdom for himself. And John's disciples come to him and they go, hey, this kingdom that you've been building, it's shrinking. And John says, no, it's not. It's growing. It was never my kingdom. Those were never my people. I was always just holding them for Jesus. I'm part of the bridal party. He's the groom. When he shows up, I don't get disappointed because everyone's paying attention to him and not me. That's dumb. I did a wedding yesterday and I'm in line to walk everybody in and the groomsmen are talking about, is it right over left or left over right? And I looked at them and I said, doesn't matter. No one's looking at you at all. John the Baptist knew his place. He's in the party. He's not the party. And so when Jesus shows up and his disciples say, hey, he's taken your kingdom. John the Baptist says, no. He's just claiming what's his. It was never mine to begin with. They were never following me. I was a conduit to Christ. I was never baptizing them in my name. I was always baptizing them in his name. And then he says that remarkable phrase, he must become greater and I must become less. That rings true in so many different scenarios for so many different reasons. And I would say in our life, one of our great challenges as Christians is to really understand what that means, that he must become greater and I must become less in every situation. So here's what I want you to see this morning. And here's why I believe this idea is so crucial and critical. Because I talk about people trying to build ministries, talk about people trying to build kingdoms, and I know that at least over half of us, if not more of us in here, we're not trying to do that. We're not trying to build a big ministry. We're not trying to build a big kingdom. We've got very humble goals in our life. But what I want you to see this morning is this. We are all building a kingdom, all of us. The question is, whose kingdom are you building? We are all building a kingdom. Make no mistake about it. The question is, whose kingdom are you building? Even if you're sitting here and you're going, my life is small. I have humble goals. I want to raise a good family. I want my children to love me when they grow up and want to come back home. I want to love my spouse and love and serve them well for the remainder of my days. I want to be a good friend to the people around me. I want to be a good part of the church that I love. We might have humble goals, but make no mistake, that's still our kingdom. It's a kingdom of safety and security and affection and compassion. It's how we leave our mark by leaving children behind us or a family behind us. So even if we have humble goals, we still have goals of building kingdoms. And oftentimes those kingdoms are our own. We're not building those for God's sake. We're building those for our own sake. Others of us are on the other end of the spectrum. I have a friend that I talk to often. He's a couple years older than me. He's like 45. And he talks about how driven he feels all the time. How even if he had the money to retire forever right now, he's like, I don't think I could just do nothing. I don't think I could just bounce from pleasure to pleasure. I have to build something. I have to wake up every day and spend time knowing that I'm building something that matters. He very much struggles with rest. He relentlessly pursues the building of his kingdom. And some of us have big lofty goals. We want to build the company. We want to build the ministry. We want to leave the legacy. We want to climb the ladder. We want to get to this position. We want to do this thing and make these impacts. Whether or not we build a kingdom operates irrespective of our ambition. Do you understand? No matter how ambitious you are or are not, you will spend your life building a kingdom. The question I want to put in front of you is, whose kingdom are you building? I would remind you of what Jesus says in Matthew. Do not put about it. Friendships rarely echo for eternity unless they're intentional. Family in and of itself doesn't echo for eternity. The company that you build doesn't echo for eternity unless you're using it for the kingdom of God. The wealth that you amass, the friends that you get, the power that you hold, the impact that you make doesn't echo for eternity unless it's for the sake of God and his kingdom. So God says, invest your life in things that will ripple throughout eternity. Don't invest your life in things that are buried with you. It's this hugely important principle. And it's important to me that you understand as I hope to compel you to consider what it looks like to build God's kingdom with your life. I don't want to talk about it in vague terms of building God's kingdom. I want us to understand exactly what it means to build it. To build God's kingdom is to actively and intentionally, this isn't in your notes, but you can write it down if you want to. To build God's kingdom is to actively and intentionally grow the kingdom in breadth and depth. It's to actively and intentionally grow the breadth of God's kingdom and grow the depth of God's kingdom. When we grow the breadth of God's kingdom, that's evangelism. When we grow the depth, that's discipleship. Evangelism, telling other people about Jesus, bringing them along with us. I tell you all the time, as much as I can, the only reason you are on the planet and not in heaven right now after you became a Christian is so that you can bring as many people with you on your way to God's kingdom as you possibly can as you live your life. So we're constantly looking for ways to expand the breadth and the reach of God's kingdom by sharing our faith. And in the South, this is really easy for us. You might think it's really challenging to share your faith in the South because it's saturated with the gospel. I actually think that makes it easier because I try to tell you, if you have friends or family members who live in the South and don't go to church, they don't claim a faith, I would be willing to bet you lunch that they have a good reason for that. It's not because they've never been invited. It's probably not because they don't have any experience with church. It's because whatever experience they do have with church wasn't good. Whatever experience they do have with pain and struggle has made them move away from the faith, not towards it. But if we went to your neighbors right now who are still at home, have no interest in going to church this morning, it wasn't even a thought for them, should we go? It's a Sunday for them. And you said, why isn't church a priority? They wouldn't be like, why is it what now? Why isn't what a priority? Why don't you know Jesus? Who? They know. They have answers. So in the South, if we want to be effective evangelists, our antenna are always up to have conversations with people about spirituality because here's what's really interesting in the Southern United States. Your explanation for why you're still in church. Your explanation for why you're still here. Your explanation for why you still claim a faith, why you've chosen to prioritize it, and it's important to you. And if we can have conversations not about, here's why you should be a Christian, here's why you should get back in church, but conversations about, here's why I still believe, here's what faith does for me, here's what I see and why I can't walk away. If we can have those conversations, we can start to open people's minds to a different church experience and a different experience of Jesus and their personal lives and maybe move them towards the kingdom of God and grow that kingdom in its breadth. And then as kingdom builders, we grow it in its depth. We grow the depth of the people who are Christians. We make disciples. At Grace, we call this being step-takers. Understanding that discipleship is nothing more than taking the next step of obedience that's been placed in front of you. And so we come alongside young mamas and we say, hey, here's what I've learned in my journey of being a mom. We come alongside young men and we say, here's what I've learned in my journey of being a father. We come alongside young divorcees and we say, here's what I've learned in my journey as a single woman or a single man. We come alongside parents. We come alongside young believers. And we walk them through that area of life and we grow them in their breadth, in their depth. So when I say, what is it, when I talk about building a kingdom and using our life to build God's kingdom, that's what I'm talking about, is using our life to grow it in its breadth and in its depth. We should go through life with our antenna up at all times, looking for opportunities to do just that. And this idea of what it is to build God's kingdom and how devoted we should be to it is really what the Christian life is. And the Christian life is a progressive revelation of this truth. It's a progressive revelation of what it means to build God's kingdom. And really, what the reality of it is, that that's the only reason that we're here. And I'll tell you where this started to occur to me and change the paradigm in a way that I thought about my faith. I was 17 or 18 years old at a summer camp called Look Up Lodge, and the speaker was a guy that really impacted me named Greg Boone. I can't remember if it was my first or second summer there, but at one point he wrote, he drew a circle on a whiteboard, and he said, I want you to tell me the things in your life that matter to you. Tell me about the different parts of your life. What does your life consist of? And so we said family. He draws a family slice. And then we said sports, friends, faith, hobbies, college, education, whatever it was. And so we kind of made this pie chart of all the different areas of our life. And Greg says, it's interesting that you made this sliver of faith. That's your Christianity. That's the part of you that's devoted to God. And we're like, yes. And he goes, okay. God's not interested in your slice. He wants the whole dang pie. And as adults, we do this too. We offer God a slice and he wants the whole pie. I bet if I sat down with you, just like somebody could with me, with no context, and I said, hey, I got a thought exercise for you. Can you draw a circle on a piece of paper? And you did that. And I said, okay, can you just draw up a pie chart of your priorities in your life? And could you try to make the slices proportional to how much you actually feel they're important? You know, we draw a big family slice, right? Some of us would draw a big church slice, big career slice, hobbies, interests, curiosity, whatever else is in there. I'd be interested to know, and only you know this, I've no doubt that virtually everyone in here would have a faith slice. How big would that be? Would it be a sliver? Would it be a huge chunk? Regardless, God's not interested in either of those. He wants the whole pie. He wants all of you. Do you mean God intimately cares about how I conduct myself in business meetings? Yeah, I do. I do because you're his agent in those meetings and through you should spread the fragrance and the knowledge of God. We should be salt in people's saltless lives. We should be lights in darkness. Do you mean that God cares about how I behave in traffic? He actually does. That one stings. Do you mean God cares about how I father? About how much I participate in church? About how much of my finances I give? About how I behave with my friends? About what I watch on TV and whether or not that helps me run my race and build his kingdom? Do you mean to tell me that God cares about what books I read and which people I spend the most time around? Yes, he cares deeply about all of those things. He cares where you live. He cares who your neighbors are. He cares how you carry yourself. He cares about your reputation in your community. He cares about everything, not just your church attendance and not just how much you read his word and not just how much you pray, but he cares about how you treat the person when you're on vacation that you will never interact with again in your life. That interaction matters deeply to God because it is indicative of your character and whether or not your light is shining and the fragrance is spreading. Those things matter to God. That's why I say that this realization of what it is to be a kingdom builder is a progressive revelation throughout your whole life. When I understood the pie chart analogy when I was 18 years old, I thought I got it. Intellectually, I'm there. And every year that goes by, I realize that God is asking me for more, that I've been holding back from him, that I've been considering my piece of the pie. And let me show you how powerful it is when it finally clicks with us, that we are here to build God's kingdom and not our own. I want us to look at Peter, and it's actually Gibson that gave me this point. I thought it was a great one. Think about Peter in the Gospels, what we experience of him. Peter was one of these guys that he was ready, fire, aim, right? Just the first one to speak. My dad likes to say about me, my family calls me Nathan, and he likes to say about me, Nathan having nothing to say, thus said. That's what he says about me. All right. Zach knows what I'm talking about. Nathan having nothing to say, thus says, there are those of us who are just wired, ready, fire, aim. I got it. I'll go. And we see this in Peter, which is why I love him so much. He's the first one. Jesus is walking on the water. Jesus is like, okay. Or Peter says, well, I'm walking on the water too. And he walks on the water for a little bit. And then he sinks. And everybody's like, oh, Peter doesn't have any faith. And it's like, you sissies are still in the boat. At least he got out, you know. Jesus says, Peter, I need to wash all of your feet. And Peter goes, you will never wash my feet. And he says, if I don't wash your feet, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven. And Peter says, well, then don't stop at my feet. Go all the way to my head. He requests a sponge bath from Christ. That's the boldness of Peter. Jesus says, you will deny me. Peter says, I will die before I deny you. And then in his weakness, he denies him three times. Whenever Jesus would ask one of those really hard questions, who do you say that I am? And all the disciples would clam up and not make eye contact and please don't look at me. Peter was the first one to be like, you sissies, I got this. And then he'd answer. And sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong, but he was always the one willing to be out in front. He was always brash. He was always courageous. He was always the leader. And so we see flashes of this giftedness in Peter that's not directed in the right way just yet. And then after Jesus dies and comes back and finds a despondent Peter on the banks of the Sea of Galilee and restores him to ministry. Beautiful. He spends 40 days with the disciples encouraging them. And then he leaves. And he says, I'm going to go to heaven. And I want you to go to the ends of the earth and I want you to baptize them and make disciples. I want you to go. He didn't use this language, but it's our language this morning. I want you, Peter, to go and your job is to grow my kingdom through this thing we call the church in breadth and in depth. Go evangelize to the whole world and go make disciples of them. Grow the kingdom in breadth and depth. And then he sits in the upper room for 40 days waiting for the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes, he realizes what his job is. They go out on the porch. They preach. 3,000 people become Christians that day. And then we get this wonderful picture of the early church in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47. And day by day, God added to their number those who were being saved. So now this movement is off. Now the kingdom has exploded. And the Sanhedrin, the religious leaders of Israel at the time, take notice of this. They're like, we've got to stop this. What are we going to do? And so they bring in Peter and John, and they put them on trial. Defend yourself. Two chapters later, they bring in Stephen to defend himself, and he becomes the first Christian martyr, and he's stoned to death. Eighty days prior, Jesus had to defend himself on the same charges, and they crucified him. So make no mistake about it. In this defense for what they are doing, their lives are at stake. They've just healed someone, and the authority of Christ, they are preaching the gospel of Christ, and now they're being put on trial in front of the Sanhedrin, and I want you to see their amazing response. Also, if you're looking at the clock, I'm going long. Suck it up. Acts chapter 4. You're going to see verse 9, and I'm going to start in verse 8. name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. He says, it's on you. You want to know whose name it's in? It's in the name of Christ, that guy that you murdered. That's what we're doing this in. Incredibly courageous, speaking truth to power, completely vulnerable to the death penalty. They do not care. They're stepping. He is Peter. He's a leader. He is brash, ready, fire, aim. But now he has purpose and he's speaking with incredible courage. Verse 11, Jesus is the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone. Salvation is found in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved. When they, the Sanhedrin and the people around them, saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished. And they took note that these men had been with Jesus. When they saw the courage and the eloquence of Peter that day, they knew we can't touch these guys or we're going to have a riot on our hands. So we've got to step away and try to play this a little bit differently. With his life on the line, Peter boldly proclaims the gospel of Christ and speaks truth to power. And what we see is these flashes of giftedness in the gospels where we get a glimpse into the character of Peter. Now he has a place to put it. Now he has traction in his life. Now he has understanding and context for, oh, that's what these gifts are for. And now he can use them courageously and fearlessly and correctly with efficacy to do his job and grow the kingdom in breadth and in depth. So here's what we see from the example of Peter. And here's what I want you to feel in your life. With the realization of purpose comes the application of our gifts. Each of you, each of you are gifted in some way. I know this to be true because the Bible says it over and over again. Paul talks about in Corinthians that the church is the body of Christ, and everybody is a part of that body, and everybody has a part to play. We're told in Ephesians, I remind you all the time that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we should walk in them. You have a good work to walk in. We're told in Ephesians chapter four that we have the gifts of Christ, of pastor, apostle, shepherd, evangelist, or teacher. Every one of us is one of those five things. We have those gifts. And when we can match those gifts with purpose, we light the world on fire. When we align God's divine purpose for our life with the gifts that God has given us in our life. And we have the narrative traction in our life of a purpose that is larger than ourselves to build God's kingdom. And we look at our gifts and what he's given us and suddenly we have an alignment of purpose and giftedness and we understand for the first time why God made me this way and how we are to use those gifts to build his kingdom. We light the world on fire. That's when magic happens. That's when we add day by day to those who are being saved. That's when you get up in the morning excited about what God has for you. Can I just say to you that if you have noticed in your life that you've been spending your days bouncing from distraction to distraction and from pleasure to pleasure and you're walking listlessly through your days and you're not super motivated for what you're doing, can I just suggest to you that maybe it's because you're living your life, building your own kingdom and you you realize it stinks, and that what you need to realize is that God designed you to build his kingdom, and he's gifted you to do that. And if you can figure out what that means and how your gifts can align with purpose, you will never wake up again wondering how you should spend your day. You will know because you will be directed because when our purpose is revealed, we have an application for a giftedness. So here's my prayer to you. Here's my prayer for you and the prayer that I want you to pray. God, show me how I might be used to build your kingdom rather than my own. God, show me how I might be used to build your kingdom rather than my own. And here's what I really like about this being kind of the apex trait of grace. I'm going to say this and then I'll wrap up. As I was considering what kind of church do we want Grace to be, where do we want to push people, what's our heart, how do we want to grow, what's our focus as a church? You know good and well some churches answer that question and they say missions. We're a missions church. That's what we're going to do. If you're involved with this church, we're going to move your heart towards missions to give and to serve in that way. Some churches say next generation. We're going to focus on the next generation. We're going to invest in our children and in our students. And if you're a part of the church, we're going to move you in that way. Some churches say foster care and adoption. We're going to push everybody in that way. Some churches choose local impact and local ministry. We want to make a big impact in our community. And different churches choose different paths. And I have no critique for any of those paths. but as I thought about this, I didn't want to limit your vision for building God's kingdom to whatever my passion of the day was or whichever direction the wind was blowing in the elder board. We didn't want to limit what people should do with the giftedness that God has given them. If this means you need to leave and start your own church because you've got that fire in you, go and do it. We love you. We support you. If this means you need to move and start a ministry somewhere, go and do it. We support you. But if we can be your home base as you go out into the community and in the world and build God's kingdom, we want to continue to foster that within you and build a church of fierce builders of the kingdom of God. And that can look different ways for different people. For my wonderful father-in-law, they got a lake house. And I remember when they bought this lake house, they were like, we're going to use it to serve the kingdom. And I was like, I bet you are. Sure you are. What, are you going to pray on the boat? But every weekend, while his daughter was in college, 10 or more kids would come and they'd spend the whole weekend being fed and pulled around on the boat by, they called him Professor Benson. He was not a professor, but they were in college, so fit. And they came every weekend. And when those kids graduated, he got invited to weddings. And when they had their first baby, he got texted pictures. And when I had the chance to speak at his funeral, there was a row of about 20 of them that had traveled from all over the country to come pay their respect to John. He used that lake house to build God's kingdom. I know a man who's been successful in business. And he's taken that success and he uses that company to support people who spent their professional years in ministry and now don't have the means to take care of themselves in retirement. They're on the payroll even though they don't do anything because he has a heart for them and how they spent their life. He uses different people in his company to do the finances for nonprofits for free and they give away large portions of their profit, more than 10% to other ministries and he uses his business acumen to sit on the board of nonprofits and help them become effective in their ministries. He has a vision for what it is to use his giftedness to build God's kingdom, not his own. Or maybe, maybe what God has for us to do right now is to build up those children, is to patiently, daily, with consistency and godliness and grace, build the character of our children so that they might enter into the world with a larger vision for what this life can be and simply what they want to do with it. And maybe we can build the kingdom like my mom did. I don't know what it looks like for you to build God's kingdom. But I do know that it's how you should spend the rest of your life. I don't care if you're 85 or 15. Let's pray that we would be a church full of passionate kingdom builders and just see how God lights the world on fire around us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for imbuing us with purpose. Thank you for giving us something to live for that's bigger than ourselves. God, I pray that we would each have a passionate vision of what it is to be used by you, no matter how big or how small that vision might be. Lord, show us how we can use the gifts that you've given us to have a metamorphosis like Peter, where we see these flashes of our giftedness and how you've created us. But God, then we get some traction with some purpose, and our gifts align with that. Let us experience what it is to wake up every day excited to be used by you. And God, where we are building our own kingdoms, we repent and we apologize. And we ask you to help us, reorient us towards your kingdom. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see everybody. And it sounds like to me that only the singers come during the summertime. You guys were singing great. And that was really always love it when the church sings together like that. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby. After the service, you have dropped in. If this is your first time, you've dropped into the middle of a series called Idols that's loosely based on a book by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods. If you haven't picked up a copy of that, we are out, but they are competitively priced on Amazon and will be brought right to your door for ease of purchase. So I would encourage you to grab one of those and kind of read through that as we finish up the series. This is week four. Next week is the last week. Week five, we're going to talk about comfort next week, which I'm very excited to talk about that because I think it's something that every American alive needs to hear. And I think it's going to be an important one next week. This week, we're looking at the source idol of control. And when I say source idol, one of the more interesting ideas that Tim Keller puts forward in his book is the idea that we have surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are the ones that are visible to us and people outside of us, a desire for money, a desire for friends, a desire for a perfect family, for appearances, things like that that are a little bit more visible. Source idols are things that exist in our heart beneath the surface that fuel our desire for those surface idols. And he identifies four. Power, which I preached about two weeks ago. That's the one that I primarily deal with. And then approval, preached about last week that's what he deals with a lot that is not one that that's probably the one I worry about the least and then control this week and comfort next week so as we approach this idea of control in our life I want us to understand what it is and what it means if we struggle with this source idol. And again, an idol is anything that becomes more important to us in our life than Jesus. It's something that we begin to prioritize over Jesus and we pour out our faith and our worship to that thing instead of to our Creator. About four or five years ago, I was in my therapist's office. I was seeing a counselor at the time just doing general maintenance, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's probably time for me to get back in there and let them tinker around a little bit. But one day I got there and whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, what a cliche, but whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, he would always ask me what's been going on, what's happened since I last saw you. That was always the first question, so I knew that was the question. So in the car, in my head, I'm thinking, how am I going to answer him? I can tell him about this thing and this thing and this thing. I think that'll be enough. Well, I'll start the bidding there, and we'll see where it goes. So I go in, I sit down and he asked me the question, how's it been going for you? What's been happening? And so I told him my three things, five or eight minutes. I don't know. And I get done with it. And he just looks at me and he kind of cocks his head and he goes, why'd you tell me those things? And the smart aleck in me is like, because you're a counselor, because this is the deal? Because that's what I'm supposed to do? What do you want me to do? But I said, well, I knew that you were going to ask me what happened, and that's what happened. So I told you those things. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but he pushed back on me and he goes do you do you ever enter a conversation without knowing what you're going to talk about and what the other person is probably going to talk about and I said not if I can help it I always plan ahead whenever I have a conversation or meeting coming up I always think through all the different ways it could go and how I want to respond because I don't want to be caught off guard in the moment. And he said, how many times are you in a situation that's taken you by surprise and you didn't expect to be there? I said, very rarely. And he goes, yeah, I think maybe you've got an issue with control. Because you have a hard time not being the one driving the bus, don't you? And I was like, you have a hard time not being the one. And I kind of thought about it, and I said, my gosh, is it possible that this need for control is so ingrained into me that the reason I told you those stories is so that I could control where the conversation went and we would talk about things I was willing to open up about and I could steer away from the areas that I wasn't willing to talk about. He said some effect of, and circle gets the square. Good job, buddy. And so this need for control that some of us all have to varying degrees can be so sneaky. Sometimes we don't even recognize it in ourselves until someone points it out in us. So let me point it out in you. Some people deal with this so much that it shows up in every aspect of their life. For me, it's relational, it's conversational. I don't want to look dumb. If someone has something negative to say, I want to be gracious and not be caught off guard, whatever it is. But for some of us, we're so regimented and ordered that we have our life together in every aspect of it. We have our routine. We wake up at a certain time. We go to bed at a certain time. Our kids do certain things on certain days. If you have a laundry day, you're gaining on it. If you make your bed, you're gaining on it. Like there are things that we do. We have a workout routine that we do. We have the way that we eat. We have the places that we go. We have our budget. We have our work schedule. We are very regimented. And a lot of that can come from this innate need to be in control of everything. I think about the all-star mom in the PTA, the one who runs a better house than you, who drives a cleaner car than you, and who makes cupcakes better than you, that mom. And her kids are always dressed better than your kids. This is this need for control. And if you're not yet sure if this is you, if this might be something that you do in your life where everything needs to be ordered, and if it's not ordered, your whole life is in shambles. I heard in the last year of this phrase that I had not heard before. I'm in the last year of the Gen Xers. I think the millennials coined this phrase. You boomers, unless you have millennial children, you probably have not heard this, but maybe you can identify it. It's a term called the Sunday Scaries. Anybody ever heard that term? You don't have to raise your hand and out yourself, but the Sunday Scaries. Okay. Now for me, I have the Saturday Scaries because about three times every Saturday, I kind of jolt myself into consciousness and ask if I know what I'm preaching about in the morning. So that's, that's what I have for me. Sunday scaries are when you take Sunday night to get ready for your week. And on Sunday afternoons and evenings, you begin to feel tremendous anxiety because the meals aren't prepped and the clothes aren't washed and the schedule isn't done and the things aren't laid out and the laundry isn't all the way ready and you start to worry, if I don't, I've got this limited amount of time, if I don't start my week right, everything's going to be off, it's going to be the worst and so you get the Sunday scaries and you experience stress on Sunday night. If that's you, friends, this might be for you. And when we do this, when we make control our idol, when we order our lives so that we manage every detail of it. And listen, I want to say this before I talk about the downside of it. Those of us who do live regimented lives and who are in control of many of the aspects of them, that ability comes from a place of diligence and discipline. That's a good thing. That's a muscle God has blessed you with that he has not blessed others with, but we can take it too far. And we can allow that to become what we serve. And we can allow control over the things in our life to become more important than the other things in our life and to become more important than Jesus himself. And here's what happens when we allow this sneaky idol to take hold in our lives. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful of the control we try to exert over them. I'll never forget, it's legendary in my group of buddies. I've got a good group of friends, eight guys, and we go on a trip about every other year. And one year we were in another city and one of my buddies named Dan just decided that he was the group mom on this trip. And I don't really know why he decided that, but he was bothering us the whole time. Don't do that. Don't go here. Where are you guys going? What are you guys talking about? Come over here. Be part of the group. Put your phone down. Let's go. Like just bossing us around the whole time. And we got mad at him. He spent the whole trip anxious. He didn't have as good a time as he could. And we, we spent the trip frustrated with Dan to the point where whenever he starts it now, we just call him mom and tell him to shut up. When we try to control everything in our life, we make ourselves anxious and we make the people around us resentful. We make ourselves anxious because we're trying to control everything. Everything's got to go according to plan. And now that we've structured this life, we have to protect this life with all the decisions that we're making and see all the threats, real and imagined, to this perfect order that we might have. And then the people around us grow to resent us because we're trying to exert unnecessary control over them as well. And it's really not a good path to be on. And the best example I can find in the Bible of someone who may have struggled with this idol of control and made herself anxious and everyone around her resentful is Sarah in the event with Hagar. Now, I'm going to read a portion of this, Genesis 16, 1 through 6, to kind of tell the story of Sarah and Hagar and Abraham. A couple bits of context. First of all, I know that at this point in the story, technically, her name is Sarai and his name is Abram, okay? For me, it feels like saying the nation Columbia with a Spanish accent all of a sudden after I've been talking in southern English for 30 minutes. So I'm not just going to break out into Hebrew. Okay, so they're going to be Sarah and Abraham, and you're going to bear that cross with me. And then what's happening in the story is in Genesis chapter 12, God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was in the Sumerian dynasty. He says, I want you to grab your family. I want you to move to this place I'm going to show you that became Canaan, the promised land in modern day Israel. And when he got there in Genesis 12, God made him three promises. He spoke to Abraham and he said, hey, this land is going to be your land and your descendants' land forever. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. He made those three promises to Abraham. Can I tell you, the rest of the Bible hinges on those promises. If we don't understand those promises, we can't understand the rest of Scripture. But all of those promises require a descendant to come true. Sarah and Abraham were getting on up there in age, maybe in their 80s. And Sarah had still not born Abraham a child. She was barren or he was impotent. And she begins to get concerned enough about this that she takes matters into her own hands. She arrests control away from God's sovereign plan. And this is what happens in Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 through 6. We're going to read it together. I don't see any problems so far. Okay, a little recap here. I, for one, am shocked that the story went that way. After she said, hey, here's what you should do. I have an Egyptian slave. You should sleep with her. She'll carry a baby, and then we'll raise that as our own child. I don't know what Abraham's moral compass was at this point in his story, what laws of God he had been equated with and not. I don't know how aware he was of the myriad egregious sins happening in this one instance. But this goes exactly how you'd think it would go. After a wife, likely much older than her slave, says, why don't you sleep with my slave and you all have a child together? And then what happens? She gets anxious. She gets resentful. She sees that Hagar is haughty towards her. And then she begins to resent Abraham, blames it on him. This is your fault. Excuse me. I'm sure it was your idea. And then runs Hagar off. By taking control in this situation, she made herself anxious about everyone around her, and she made everyone around her resentful of who she was. You can see it in Abram's response in verse 6. He says, listen, she's yours. You deal with it. Don't come to me with those problems. He's tired of dealing with it. And as I was thinking about the sin of Sarah, and as I was thinking about what it's like when we take control of our own life, when we kind of take the wheel from God and we say, I've got it from here, you can ride passenger, I'm going to be in control and orchestrate everything. That what we're really doing when we take control is this. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. We just get in the way. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. What did Sarah do? She got in his way. He had a story that he was writing with Isaac. He knew exactly when he would, God knew exactly when he was going to allow Abraham to make Sarah pregnant. He knew exactly how the rest of the story was going to go. Ishmael doesn't need to exist. That root of Ishmael doesn't need to exist. If Sarah would have just been patient and waited on God and his timing, if she had just been patient and waited on God to write the story that he intended, if she waited on his sovereignty and his will, but she got tired of waiting, she thought it should be happening differently than this, so she took control. And as a result of that control, we have this split in the line of Abraham that has echoed down through the centuries that we're still dealing with today, over which we are still warring right now in Abraham's promised land because Sarah took control when she wasn't supposed to. She got in the way of the story that God was wanting to write. And the more I thought about that, what it's like to be getting in God's way when he's trying to direct our life the way he wants it to go, I thought about this. Now, you can raise your hand for this one. Who in here loves themselves a good cooking show? I love a good cooking show. Just me and Jeff and Karen. Perfect. Nobody else likes cooking shows. You're liars. I love a good cooking show. At our house, the things that are on the TV are house hunters, cooking shows, and sports. That's it. By the way, my three-year-old son, John, calls all sports golf. Yesterday I was watching soccer, and he said, Daddy, you watch golf. And in our house, we have a rule. When a kid is making a dumb mistake like that, we do not correct them because it's adorable, and we want them to do it as long as possible. Like the days gone by when, to Lily, anything that had occurred before today was last-her-day. Could have been last year. Could have been last week. Could have been a couple hours ago. It happened last-her-day, and it was great. At some point, she figured it out, and now we don't like her as much. But I love a good cooking show. And my favorite chef, no one will be surprised by this if you know me, is Gordon Ramsay. I really like Gordon Ramsay. I like watching him cook. I like watching him interact. I think he's really great. And so I watch most of what he puts out. And I was thinking about this, getting in God's way. And I think this fits. Let's pretend that at an auction, at a charity auction from Ubuntu, which would be a great prize, I won a night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. First of all, I was given a significant raise. Second of all, I've spent it all on this night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. And the night comes around. I'm so excited. I would be thrilled to do this. It would really, really be fun. I do like to cook. And so let's say that night finally rolls around and I go to his kitchen and I walk in and all the ingredients are out on the counter. And he hasn't told me what he's going to make, but all the ingredients are there. And what I don't know is he's planning to make a beef Wellington. That's one of his signature dishes. I've only had one beef Wellington in my life. I loved it. I would kill to have one that was cooked by him for me. That would be amazing. But the deal is, I look at the ingredients and he's going to teach me how to do it. So he's going to walk me through it step by step. First, you want to sear the loin. Get that, get the skillet nice and hot, sear it. Then you rub the mustard on it. Now dice up some mushrooms. And I don't know where we're going or what we're doing. I'm just following him step by step doing what I'm supposed to do. And his goal is to show me how to make a beef wellington that we've done together. Great. Except stupid me sees the ingredients, sees the steak, sees some green beans, and I go, you know what, Gordon? Actually, I've got this. It's your night to cook with Nate. What I'd like you to do is just go sit behind the bar on the other side. Let's just chat it up. I'd like to hear some of your stories. I'm going to make you steak and green beans. And I take those ingredients, and I get in his way, and I go make overdone steak with soggy green beans, and I slide it across the table to him. Having no idea what I just missed out on. Because I insisted on taking control and making what I thought I should make with those ingredients. I think that when we insist on turning all the dials in our life ourselves, taking control of every aspect of our life. That what we do is very similar to being in the kitchen with a master chef and telling him we've got this. We see the ingredients available to us and we make the thing we think we're supposed to make. Having no idea that he had so much better plans for those ingredients than what we turned out. And as I was talking about this sermon and this idea with my wife, Jen, who has a different relationship with this source idol than I do, she pointed out to me, she said, you know what they're trying to make? If your idol is peace, you're trying to make in that kitchen or if your idol is control. She said, we're trying to make peace. People with the idol of control, you know what they're trying to do with that control? They're trying to create a peace for themselves. They're trying to create rest for themselves. If this is your surface, if this is your source idol, and you try to control every aspect of your life, chances are that what's really motivating you to do that is a desire for peace in all the areas of your life. It's why your spirit can't feel at rest until your bed is made. And this is true. Why did I think of the things that I wanted to say to the counselor? Because I didn't want to get sidetracked. I didn't want to get surprised. I wanted to walk into that office with peace. Why do we prepare ourselves for the situations that we're going to face? Because we want to be peaceful in the midst of those situations. Why do we prepare for the week and get the Sunday scaries? Because we want to enter the week feeling at peace, feeling ready to go, feeling that we are in a place of rest and not a place of hurry. But here's the problem with the peace that we create with our control. It's fragile. It's threatened. It's uncertain. It's always at risk. We can do everything we can to create peace in our life with the way that we control every aspect of it. But the reality is we are one phone call away. We are one bad night away. We are one accident in the driveway away. One bad business decision. Two bad weeks of just being in a bad spot away from ruining all that peace. There are so many things that happen in life that are outside of our control that any peace that we have created for ourself is only ever infinitesimally small and thin and fragile. And when we live a life, even achieving peace, but when we live that life of a threatened peace so that now we have peace, we've done it, we've orchestrated, we've controlled, we have what we want, everything is ordered as it should be. Things are going well. Then where does our worrying mind go to? All the things that could possibly happen to disturb this peace. All of the threats real and imagined to my peaceful Monday. And then here's what we do. I know that we do it. I've seen it happen. Then we pick a hypothetical event that could possibly happen three months from now to threaten the peace that I've created, and we decide to stress about that today. And it's not even happened yet. But we're already jumping ahead because our anxiety monster needs something to eat. And I am reminded with this idea of a threatened and a fragile peace of the verse we looked at in our series, The Treasury of Isaiah, Isaiah 26.3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Isaiah says, and God promises, that he will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. And so what's our part in that peace? It's trusting in Jesus and not ourselves. And it occurs to me, I'm not saying this for sure, because it could just be poor planning, but I kind of believe in the Holy Spirit and the way that he times things out. I've seen over and over and over again how we've had a sermon planned for eight months, and I'll preach that sermon on that day, and someone will say, this is my first time at Grace. I'm so glad I heard that sermon. That's exactly what I needed. It's the Holy Spirit. I know that we just visited this verse. And I know that we just talked a couple weeks ago about a fragile peace. But maybe we're doing it again because some of us just need to hear it twice. Maybe some of us in this room need to hear this again and let the Holy Spirit talk to us again and be honest with God about what we're holding dear to our heart and what we may be idolizing without having realized it. Because what God promises us is a perfect peace. You know what perfect peace is? Perfect peace is an unthreatened peace. Here's what perfect peace is. Jen's family used to have a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And my favorite thing to do when I would go down there was to kind of separate from everybody, big surprise, and go and lay in the hammock right next to the lake. Because when I got in that hammock, and I could hear the occasional boat putter by several hundred yards away, and I could hear the waves slowly just kind of lapping against the wood at the edge of that lake, and I could hear the birds and the sound of the lake, that was all I could hear. It drowned out everything else. It never seemed to matter what was happening in life when I laid down in that hammock. Everything was at peace and everything was okay. When we trust in God's sovereignty and in God's peace instead of our own, it's like laying down in that hammock next to the lake. Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. God is in control. He knew this would happen, and I trust in him. I don't know what story he's writing. I don't know where he's going. This is not what I would have made with these ingredients, but I know that he wants what's best for me, and he wants what's best for the people that I love, so I trust him with the results of this. It's laying in that hammock and trusting in the sovereignty of God. Perfect peace is trusting in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness, in the truth that we know that he always, always, always wants what's best for us. And that he will bring that about in this life or the next. And we can trust in that. So, here's what I would say to you. My brothers and sisters who may struggle with control. I'm not here this morning to make you feel bad for your worry or your anxiety or to make fun of you for your Sunday scaries. I think all of those things are natural and a normal part of human life. It would be weird if you never worried about anything. I think it's a good goal to grow towards. But I'm not here to make you feel badly about that. But here's what I would say. If you're a person who's given to worry and anxiety and seeks to exert control, and when you don't have it, it starts to freak you out a little bit, that doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like laying in the hammock next to the lake trusting in God's protected peace rather than trusting in your fragile, unprotected, risky peace. You see? And so what I would encourage you to do is to see things this way. Excessive worry is a warning light. Excessive worry on the dashboard of your life is a warning light that should cause you to wonder what's really going on and what you're really worried about. A few weeks ago, I talked about those of us with the issue of power being a source idol and how that begets anger, and I said the same thing. Anger is the flashing warning light for us. When I'm having days when I'm excessively angry or frustrated all the time, I need to stop and pause and go, what is the source of this, and why am I so upset, and why do I have a hair trigger? What's going on with me? And wrestle that to the ground. For my brothers and sisters who who struggle with control maybe more than you realize before you walk in the door excessive worry and I don't know what excessive worry is I can't define that for you that's that's between you and God to decide how much is too much but here's what I do know excessive worry is a warning light and here's. And here's what it's telling you. It's telling you I am not existing in perfect peace. And what's our part of perfect peace? To keep our mind steadfast by trusting in him. So somewhere along the way, we've started trusting in ourself a little bit more to grab those ingredients and make what we want. Somewhere along the way, we've started taking control back from God, trusting in our sovereignty, not his, and beginning to create our own peace that is fragile and stressful. And so the question to ask yourself when that warning light starts to go off is simply this, whose peace am I trusting? I don't know what to tell you to do. Because I'll be honest with you. Like I said, I talked this sermon through with Jen. And she kind of said, yeah, all that's true. Okay, I get it. I agree. All true. What do I do? How do we not do those things? How do we not worry more than we should? What are my action steps? And I said, well, what advice would you give to so-and-so? She goes, I don't know. You're the pastor, so I'm asking you. Here's what I would simply go back to, is this question of whose peace am I trusting? Am I trusting in the peace that I've created? Or are my eyes focused on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, so that my mind is steadfast in him and I'm trusting in his peace? Whose peace are you trusting? My prayer for you is that you'll experience the rest of trusting in God's peace. And as I enter into prayer for you, there's a prayer that I found in a devotional that I have from the Common Book of Prayer from 1552. It's amazing to me how timeless the truths of faith and spirituality and Christianity are. And how this could be written today and still every bit as accurate. But I'm going to read this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. And then we're going to enter into a time of prayer together and then we'll worship. Oh God, from you all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works proceed. Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our heart may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Father, we love you. And we thank you that through your Son, we can have perfect peace. God, we are sorry for not claiming this gift that you offer us more readily. God, we are sorry for grabbing the ingredients and trying to make our own peace and write our own story. God, we are sorry that we sometimes trust in our wisdom and our sovereignty more than yours. Lord, I pray that no matter where we sit with this idol or how we might wrestle with it, that we would leave this place more desirous of you than when we came. And God, for my brothers and sisters that do struggle, that do find it difficult to give up control, that do find themselves battling that demon of worry sometimes, God, would you just speak to them? Would you let them know that you're there, that you love them, That you have a plan for them that they don't see but that they can trust? And would you give us the obedience to just do the next thing that you're asking us to do, not worrying about what the result is going to be, but worrying about just walking in lockstep with you? Father, make us a people of peace so that we might give that peace to others and that they might know you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. You guys have packed it out. I thought for a second that you guys were excited about church in June, which is wonderful. But what I've realized is inflation has hit all of us. We're too poor for vacations. So it's going to be a great summer for church. Before I get started, as one of the pastors, I get the opportunity to meet with folks who are new to the church sometimes. And this week I had the opportunity to grab brunch with a couple that's been visiting for a couple of weeks. And they shared with me that on their very first, they were going to look at a bunch of churches, but on their very first visit with Grace, that they struck up a conversation with another couple in the lobby that approached them. And that conversation went so well that they just invited them to lunch. So on their very first visit at Grace, they got invited to lunch and made friends. And I thought that was fantastic. So just sharing that with you, let's be that kind of church, Grace. Now there's a couple of people here for the first time and they're like, but don't, don't be that kind this week. All right. We don't, we would like to go to our own lunch. I'm sure it makes sense in the conversation, but when good things happen, I like to share them with you guys. Last week, we launched into this series called Idols and we looked at kind of how much more given to idolatry in our life we are than we might think we are or might have thought we were. And we talked about this idea that idols can't bear the weight of our worship. And I spent a lot of time saying we shouldn't idolize our children, our families, our spouses, and our communities, different things like that. And I just want to be clear. I meant to say this last week and I didn't say it and I should have. I just forgot. Those are good priorities. It's good to prioritize family and spouse and marriage and even career. That's fine to do that. But they make terrible gods because they can't carry the weight of our worship. And then at the end, I kind of told you what the rest of the series was going to be about. I had somebody tell me before the service started this morning, she was like, I caught up online. I was serving in children's last week and you got to the end about the four source idols, the four invisible idols. And once I listened to that, I did not want to hear the rest of the series. It's like, I was tracking with you on the other ones. Those are fine. I got those in check. And then I talked about the four source idols of power, control, approval, and comfort. And she was like, no thanks. Don't need to hear that. It's going to be too convicting. But it's this idea that there are surface idols. We idolize money. We idolize success. We idolize friends. We idolize whatever. But that idolizing is fueled by a source idol of one of those four things I just mentioned. So we're going to spend the next four weeks, including this week, looking at those different source idols, how they show up in our lives, and what we can do to invite the Holy Spirit into our life to make some space to root those idols out. Five or six years ago, I went with Jen, my wife, to Washington, D.C. with some friends of ours, Heath and Ashley. They flew into Raleigh, and then we drove up together. It was a really great trip. We stayed in an Airbnb. The first night we were there, we looked out the window, and there's this little bar-pub situation going on across the street. And so we said, let's just go over there. It'll be simple. It looks fine. So we walk over there. It was crowded. There was a little bit of a wait. And so I find one of the servers, and I say, hey, how long is the wait, and can we put our name in? And he says, oh, no, we don't do that. It's just first come, first serve. I said, like, free for all? Just, like, grab a table when someone gets up? And he goes, yep. All right. And I found out later it was trivia night. So it was a busy night. So we're kind of standing there waiting for something to pop open. And I excuse myself. I'm going to walk back to the restaurant. I'm going to go use the restroom. In the restroom. Not just in the back of the restaurant. So I'm going'm walking through and I look over and there's this high top table party of three and they're starting to get up there's four seats at the table I'm like perfect so I say are you guys about to get up and they go yeah and I said I'm running to the restroom would you mind waiting when I come back y'all get up we'll take your table and they go that's fine so that's what I did I come back and they see me and they start to get up. As they start to get up, I can see two dudes from either corner of the bar start to center in on this table. Right. So as that guy's, as the dad is getting up, I'm like, thanks very much. And I'll just kind of sit down like there's stuff still on it. They're putting on their jackets. They get their stuff. They move. These two dudes come to my table. And one of them, right off the bat, aggressively says, you can't sit there. That's not your table. That's our table. And I didn't like that. I didn't like that. And so I looked at him, and I said, that's funny, because it looks looks like my table because I'm sitting here. And he said, we've been here. I've watched you walk in. We've been here 30 minutes longer than you waiting for a table. This was the next table up. The right thing to do is to get up and give us this table. So get up. And I said, I don't think so, man. And I'm kind of motioning at my party to come sit down like for in a million years Jen's walking into that situation because I'm trying to tough guy this thing these two dudes are way bigger than me if this goes down it's not going to go well for me and then as I'm doing that they're still giving me lip then the server comes over and he starts clearing off the table. And the guy that was being aggressive says, hey, tell this, words I can't say in church. He said, tell this guy that this is our table. He needs to get up. And the guy said, I don't really get involved with that. Just kind of backs away. He was like, you boys got to figure this out. So he keeps at me. And I said, listen, man, I can acknowledge that you were here before me. I can acknowledge that you probably deserve this table more than I do. And I'll be happy to give it to you if you ask me nicely and say, please. And he said, excuse me and threatened me one more time. And I said, all you got to do is be a nice guy and say, please, and I'll give you this table. And finally, his buddy goes, dude, just say please. And he goes, he goes, all right, would you, would you mind giving us this table, please? And I said, sure, that'd be great. Here you go. Happy to give it to you. Walked off. Jen's shaking her head. Now, now listen, if you listen to that story and your internal monologue was, God, I don't really know if that's how a pastor should be acting. That's kind of, probably should have just had the grace in the moment to get over being slightly offended and let that person have the seat and maybe, you know, like be a grown up. If that's your internal monologue, that there was a better way to handle that, you're right. There was. And I agree with you. I do think, I can admit that story is funny. I am not proud of it. I wished I would have handled it differently. I do not think anyone is listening to that thinking, and through Nate would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ in that particular instance. If you listen to that story and you loved it, and you were like, yeah, tell them, don't move, make them say please, make them pay you for the table. If you're thinking about what you would have done in that situation and you would have been equally upset, you need to pay attention this morning as we explore the idol of power in our lives. This idol of power, I told you last week I had to admit that it was mine. I didn't want to admit it. Because it sounds like you want to be in charge of everything all the time. And that's really not what it is. That's part of what it is. But what it's really about is we just don't want to be told what to do. Just don't tell me what to do. If you know anything about me, you know I do not want to be told what to do. Karen Lotta got me a mug. I drink out of it at least once a week that says, I was going to do that. And then you told me to. All right. If that's you, then like me, you struggle with the idolatry of power, of being in charge, of being the guy, of being respected. It doesn't mean you have to be the boss everywhere you go, but there's certain pockets in certain places where you're just not going to put up with it. And here's how you can really tell if power is the idol with which you struggle deeply. The manifesting sin of power is anger. The manifesting sin of power is being angry, is having these flashes of anger that cause you to do and say things that you wish you could take back. I acted that way in that restaurant in D.C. because I was made angry, because he had the guts to tell me what to do. And until he acknowledged who had the power, I was not going to back down. It was immature and gross, but that's what was happening there. The besetting sin of power is to be someone who is angry whenever that power and that license and that freedom is threatened. And anger, we know, is a terrible thing to have festering in our lives. If you are someone who struggles like I do with being more angry than we should be sometimes, then you know experientially and intuitively that what James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16, is true. When James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16 is true. When James says, my dear brothers and sisters, take note of this. Everyone, oh 19, everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. And then in the next verse, he tells you why. Because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Now listen, most of you in this room, because I know you, I know that you've been Christians for a while. And so a lot of the big sins, the big stuff that we shouldn't do, you've got that in check, and that's good. But for some of you in the room, maybe even most of us, if I were to ask you, what moments in the last month or two do you wish you could get back? What moments in the last year or two or decade do you wish you could have back and redo them and get again and do them right? If I were to ask you that question and you go to those moments that you wish you had back, I'd be willing to bet that for most of us, what flashed in those moments was anger that we didn't handle well. For most of us, what happened in that was we became angry and then we acted out in a way that we wish we could go take back and have a more level head about. I know that that's the case for me. And see, here's the thing about anger, and this is why we're told to avoid it at all costs. Because unchecked anger will unravel your life. Unchecked anger that you are not dealing with. Listen to me, if you are a person who is prone to anger, who just snaps, and you'll snap at your kids, you'll snap at your co- coworkers, you'll snap at your spouse, you'll snap at the guy driving down the road, and you'll stop singing a praise song to cuss at that person. If that's you, you deal with anger. And I know because I am one, and I have to keep a check on this. But let me tell you something. If you deal with anger in your life, unchecked anger that we don't allow the Holy Spirit to root out of our life will absolutely cause our lives to unravel. How many of us know a dude, it's almost always a dude, who has a power idol that manifests itself in anger? And because that anger is always brimming under the surface, his kids have distanced themselves from him. His wife has distanced herself from him. His coworkers or his employees do not trust him. And sometimes that unravels into alcoholism to mitigate the anger. Sometimes that unravels into divorce or separation. How many of us can tell a story of a life that unraveled because there was unchecked anger there? So if this is us, if this is our besetting sin, we need to listen and pay attention. I think there is no better example of an angry life unraveling in Scripture than that of King Saul. So if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to open to 1 Samuel 18. We're going to be in 1 Samuel 18, 19, 22, and 28. We're going to hit some highlights here. So if you have a Bible, be flipping with me so as I give a little bit of context, you can see that context as well. If you're a note taker, there is a point in your notes before the verses start. I'm just going to move that point down below the verses. So we'll get to it. We'll jump back and fill that out. Don't freak out. But let's look at the life of Saul. Now Saul is one of the most tragic figures in the Bible, I think. Because Saul was the first king of Israel. He was anointed by God through the prophet Samuel. And he had the whole world at his feet. If you really think about it, it should be the star of Saul flying over Israel now. It's not. It's David. It could have been the throne of Saul that Jesus would ascend to. It's not. It's David's. Because Saul's life unraveled. And I would contend with you that it unraveled because of anger produced by his idolizing power. So we pick up the story in chapter 18. Chapter 17 is David slaying Goliath. Then the story kind of picks up and people have started to really like David. He's coming to national prominence. And Saul one day hears this song. Saul has slayed his thousands. David has slayed his tens of thousands. It's always a joke. I'm sure in Hebrew it flows better than that. But that was the song. And this really angered Saul. And here's his reaction and he hurled it saying to himself I'll pin David to the wall, but David eluded him twice Saul was afraid of David. What else could he take but my kingdom? This is my kingdom. This is my identity. I'm in charge here. That's disrespectful to me. This is mine, mine, mine. David is not going to come tell me what to do in my kingdom. I will not give up this rule. I have to protect my power. You see? And so he tries in a fit of rage to kill David. Doesn't work. David eludes him twice. And then he does what kings have done for millennia. He kind of exiles him for a period of time. Leaders of countries have been doing this for centuries. Someone upsets them. Someone in their court is causing too much trouble or noise. You're now the ambassador of Croatia. Go have fun. Get away from court. You're now going to lead these troops in this far-flung territory where we will forget about you. Go. And so his anger caused him to exile David to remove the problem. Well, the problem was David kept having success. And so we see the next highlight in chapter 19, verses 9 and 10. Saul has decided by now he's going to kill David. Jonathan, Saul's son, the heir apparent, is very good friends with David and talks Saul out of trying to kill David. David's a good man, don't kill him. And Saul says, I promise that I won't. But then this happens in verse 9 when David comes back. But an evil spirit from the Lord 20, you see that Saul becomes determined to kill David. Now it's a cold-blooded plot to kill him. It's not in the heat of the moment. It's not just, I'm so mad right now. It's no, no, no. I am going to end this threat to my reign and to my power. And so he begins to pursue David through the wilderness. In chapter 20, what we see is that Jonathan and David have worked out this scheme where Jonathan's going to give David an indication, you have to flee. My father is dead set on killing you. And so David flees and he goes. And in this fleeing, Saul spends the rest of his adult life pursuing David. We're talking about a 10, 15, 20 year period of time where Saul's rage and anger is fueling his life. He is on a singular quest to kill David. It's like one of those dumb movies with Liam Neeson where something bad happens to his family, and the rest of the movie is just rage-filled revenge. He said, this is bad and actually happened. So he's chasing David all through the countryside. And at one point, David goes into this temple, and the priest at the temple helps David and his men, feeds him with the bread that was supposed to be given to God, but it was okay in that instance. I won't get into why. And then he gives David Goliath's sword, and they move on. Well, Saul is hot on the trail of David, and he goes in there, and he finds out that this priest has been helping him. And you can imagine how he responds in chapter 22 verses 16 and 17. But the king said, you will surely die Ahimelech, you and your whole family. Ahimelech was the head priest in this particular temple. Then the king ordered the guards at his side, turn and kill the priests of the Lord because they too have sided with David. They knew he was fleeing, yet they did not tell me. If you keep reading, what you see is that the king's officials didn't want to have anything to do with that. They did not want to kill these defenseless priests. So Saul turns to someone who would, apparently, Doeg the Edomite. If you're pregnant, you're looking for a boy name, Doeg. Great. Doeg, I don't know, kills in cold blood 85 priests at the word and the bidding of Saul. His rage has now spilled over where he's killing 85 innocent men because they sided with his enemy. And we can see his life spiraling towards unraveling. And then in 28, we have one of the most curious conversations in scripture where Saul goes to see the witch of Endor, a medium, and somehow or another has a conversation with the soul of Samuel. Now, what I'd like to do is spend the next 12 minutes explaining to you exactly what happened and that I understand it. I'm kidding. I have no idea. I don't understand this chapter. I don't know how we talk to mediums and how he's talking to the soul of Samuel. But this is what happens. And's this powerful king. He goes to see a witch, and he's laying prostrate on the ground with nothing left in him, so much so that his men worry about him and have to carry him out. The next day, he dies on the battlefield along with his sons, just like Samuel said he would. It is a picture of a life completely unraveled because he allowed his anger to exist in him unchecked. And what I want you to see from the story of Saul that we can relate to is when power is our idol. Being the king of our kingdom becomes our identity. When power is our idol, when you will respect my authority, you will respect who I am, you will not tell me what to do. When power is our idol, we take on the identity as the king of our small kingdom or the queen of our small kingdom. And so when someone comes into your workplace and they threaten your expertise, they question you. They think you don't know what you're doing. No, no, this is my kingdom, and now we're mad because you're threatening me. When someone's hired and you think they're going to take your position, and so you become adversarial with them, that's you being the king of your kingdom. If you run a business, you have employees, and one of them gets out of line with you and you take personal offense at that. It could be you just being angry because you're the king of your own kingdom. And we see and saw what he was really mad about was David was threatening his identity. He was threatening who he thought he was. And when you have a power idol, when people question you in your kingdom, that really makes you mad. Let me tell you how I know this is true. This has been something for me and parenthood that's become so important. So parents, if you're in the thick of it right now, if you have children in your home, I'm speaking specifically to you. I would like to share with you something I've learned about my anger and frustration towards my children. There are times when your children say disrespectful things to you. Things that you don't deserve. They say things in anger. They flash hot. They lash out. They disrespect. In southern terms, they show their tail. And let me just tell you, when my kids get mouthy with me and start saying stuff that I would never say to my parents, I get real hot, real fast. I start to do the, hey, uh-uh. You will not talk to me that way in my house. What does that even mean? In my house. Oh, tough guy. It's the banks, dude. For like 27 more years. To come off it. But I flash hot. And I get mad. And I put them back in line. And I think back to my childhood. Because in our house, we don't spank. Maybe I'll regret that choice. But we don't do that. We just try to go about things in other ways. But growing up, they did not share that policy. And if I said some of the stuff that my kids say to me, to my dad, my tail would have been worn out. My dad was the, he was, he perfected the slap and grab in the four seat car. The no look, slap and grab right on my thigh, slap it, squeeze it as hard as you could. I'm writhing in pain. And you know what I did? I shut up, is what I did. It's masterful. But here's what I would ask you, parents. When your kid says something disrespectful to you, bosses, when your employees say something disrespectful to you, and you get hot, you get angry. What's fueling that anger? Is what's fueling that, because for me, when Lily says something to me that she shouldn't say, and I get hot, I'm not angry because, oh, baby girl, I just want you to grow up to be better than that and manage your emotions, and I've told you this so many times, and I really want to help you manage your big emotions. I know you have big feelings, but you've got to learn to manage those. And it's fueling my anger because I'm just so frustrated with watching you trip over yourself like this and you don't have to do that anymore and there's a better way. Is that what's fueling my anger? No. What's fueling my anger is you better get right because I'm the boss here. You're not. My voice is louder than yours. You want to find out? I'll make it. Parents, how hypocritical is it of us to yell at our children for not managing their emotions well? What the heck are you doing? You verbal bully. That's what I do. When anger flashes like that, it's really helpful to stop and go, where is this coming from? Am I angry because I want them to do better or am I angry because I've been disrespected in my kingdom? And if it's the second, grow up. Get over it. Give grace. Let them have the table. When you're an employer and an employee says something to you that you don't care for, are you upset because they had the audacity to question your authority at work? Probably so. And that's not good. That's us protecting our kingdom. When your spouse asks you a question and you flash hot at them, a lot of times it's because they're questioning us and we don't care for it in our kingdom. And so if that's you, if this is something that you struggle with, if anger is a part of who you are, what do we do? How do we allow the Holy Spirit to begin to remove this idol of power in our life? I think it's as we can't just say, hey, just stop being mad. That's not going to help. So what do we need to do? How do we think about things? I think we think about it like this. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. You don't have to be the king of any kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of the kingdom. Just acknowledge it's not yours anyways. You don't have one, and you're never dead. And when you die, poof, it's gone. His kingdom exists for all eternity. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom and you gleefully serve Jesus. You humbly serve Jesus. Can you imagine? Imagine the different story that is written with Saul's life if he simply would have done that. Let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. And understood, Israel's not mine. It doesn't belong to me. It didn't belong to me when I was born. It will not belong to me when I die. And if Jesus wants to give his kingdom over to another person, fine. It's his. I'm here to serve. And what's remarkable about that is that was the attitude of his son. There's a part in the narrative where Saul says, don't you know he's going to take the kingdom from you? And Jonathan's essentially like, I think that's great. David's a great guy. He's going to make a good king. That's awesome. Can you imagine how much different the story is that is written with the life of Saul if he simply would have let Jesus be the king of Jesus' kingdom. Moms and dads, especially dads, you're not the kings of your house. Jesus is. Let him be the king of it. Your authority doesn't need to go unquestioned all the time. It's not your job to keep everybody in line. It's your job to point everybody to Christ. And when we respond, dads, in anger that's unwarranted, then the only way that's left to point our children to Christ after that is to go humbly apologize for not pointing them to Christ in the first place. Try to do better the next time. Bosses. Where you work, your department, your company, that's not your kingdom. That's Jesus's. You let him worry about that stuff. You're his servant there. If we would simply let Jesus be the king of his own kingdom and acknowledge that it's not ours, how much different will you handle the disrespect of your children? How much differently, how much more grace will you give your spouse? How much more grace will you give your coworkers, your employees, your boss, if you'll just acknowledge this isn't mine anyways? I think if we can bring ourselves back to this thought, just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. That we can allow the Holy Spirit to begin to slowly chip away and show us where we hold these idols of power in our life that are manifesting themselves in unchecked anger. So I would encourage my angry brothers and sisters, the ones of you who really liked that opening story, let anger be a warning light that flashes in your life. And when it happens, take a step back and ask yourself, am I angry because Jesus' kingdom has been threatened or am I angry because mine has? And then remind yourself, I just need to let Jesus sit on his own throne and I'm gleefully here to serve him. Let's pray. Father, give us open eyes, minds, and hearts. Let us see how these different idols and really sources of sin work their way into and manifest themselves in our lives. Help us see ourselves as you see us, as broken, sinful, but yet loved and clothed in your righteousness and value. Help us understand, God, that our power is pretty useless when we don't have a kingdom we're worried about protecting. And God, remind us as we go through our days and our weeks and our months that all we need to do instead of trying to protect our kingdom and our identity is to find our identity in you and to simply let you sit on your own throne. God, I pray that we would do that and I pray that for those of us who are prone to become angry, God, I pray that we would know that, we would acknowledge that, we would take steps to keep that in check so that you might bring about in us the righteous life that you do desire. In Jesus' name, amen.

I feel like I need to do some preaching after singing like that. You guys were on it this morning. That was really, really great. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. And I'm so glad that you guys are here in this June Sunday. I can't believe the perfect weather that we're having. I like to laugh at Southerners because during the summer we complain that it's too hot all the time. And I just wish it would cool off. And there's like a week and a half where God gets it right, and then we complain that we're too cold, and I wish it would warm up. And it's like God's got to be in heaven going, you know, pick a spot. So to you that can never be happy, praise your God for this last week because it was amazing. This morning, we are starting a new series called Idols based on the book that Michelle mentioned, Counterfeit Gods, by Tim Keller. These are available out there on the information table. I got about 30 because I didn't want to lose my rear end on them if you guys didn't want to buy them. But we're just asking for $10 a piece for those. You can just add $10 to your tithe, go online and just do a $10 transaction. You can put $10 in the offering basket or one of the boxes when it comes by and then grab one afterwards. If you've already grabbed one because you saw them there, I noticed we have less now than we did before you guys were invited. So you have stolen and you are in the debt of the church. All right. That is on your head. All right. You have to deal with that. If you happen to put $10 in the offering basket when it comes by and then there's no more books out there, thank you for your donation. We appreciate that. I can get it back to you. It's a very complicated process. You can email me. When we plan series, we sit in a staff meeting and I ask everybody who's on staff to come to the meeting with one idea that they feel like is so good for a series that they'll be disappointed if we don't do it. And then I try to come with my own ideas as well. And then we put everybody's idea up on a whiteboard and then we just pick out the worst ones and we humiliate one another until we whittle it down to a series that we like. This series was Gibson's idea. So if it's good, tell him so and thank him for that. If it's bad, it's definitely in the delivery. It is not in the material, I assure you. But we put it on the calendar. And this was, I mean, we planned to do this probably back in the fall. This is just the order and how we do things. And I had kind of forgotten about it. And halfway through the last series, I realized I need to start getting ready for this one. And so I'm like, hey, what was that book? And on a trip down to Atlanta, I listened to it and then listened to it on the way back. And I'll be honest, when I kind of reached back out to Gibson, I was like, hey, what's the series? What are we doing? Can you help me wrap my head around it? When he was explaining it to me, I remember thinking like, why did we agree to this? What is, that staff let me down. This is a terrible idea. But before I canned it, I read the book, listened to the book. And as I was listening to it, I just thought, man, this stuff is so good and so important that I think every believer needs to think through these things. Now, if you're not familiar with Tim Keller, it would behoove you to be. He was a Presbyterian minister in Manhattan for at least 30 years, I think. Wonderfully smart, wonderfully thoughtful, and a very good speaker and author. Very professorial in his approach. And as I listened to it, I knew that we needed to talk about this topic together. So this week is going to kind of be a setup for the next four weeks. And what I'm going to do is invite you to just be thoughtful with me, to think about the topics that we're going to be discussing. My prayer for you is that the Holy Spirit will open your heart and open your eyes to let you see what's inside you. And then hopefully, if what's there isn't what's supposed to be there, then we move through a process of repentance together and allow God to begin to eradicate some of the sin that we might have in our lives that we might not know about. As we approach the topic, it's based on this one verse in Exodus, this very short verse. We're going to do a whole series out of this singular verse, Exodus chapter 20, verse 3, you shall have no other gods before me. Now, my Bible scholars know that that's at the beginning of the Ten Commandments. As the Israelites, God's children, are freed from slavery, wandering around the desert, eventually God says, I'm going to now give you the Ten Commandments. And Moses comes up on this mountain with God, and God himself writes on these tablets the Ten Commandments and a bunch of other stuff. There's a bunch of other things on there besides just the Ten Commandments, but he starts with the Ten Commandments. And I always think it's interesting to point out, I'm not going to camp out here, I'm just going to mention it and let you think about it and process this. It's very interesting to me when God chooses to give his children the Ten Commandments. When God chooses to give his followers the rules. Because I don't know if you've thought about this or not, but God was interacting with humanity for several thousand years before Moses comes on the scene and he gives them the rules. God's already interacting with people like Melchizedek and Abraham and Enoch and Noah and Adam and potentially Job. God's already been interacting with his children and revealing himself to creation for several thousand years before Moses comes onto the scene. And I think that's important to acknowledge. And I think as we think about the Ten Commandments, again, I'm not going to linger here, but God knew that when he gave us rules, we'd make it all about the rules. He knew we'd mess it up, that we'd get off track, and that Jesus would have to come correct things. So we do not start here to make the point that God is a God of rules. He really is not and wasn't for thousands of years prior to this, and I think that's important. But as he decides, finally, to give his children the rules, here are the ten most important ones. The very first one, right out of the gate, you should have no other gods before me. Now, I don't necessarily think that the sixth commandment is of greater import than the ninth commandment because the ninth commandment comes later. But I do think it's very interesting which commandment God chooses to lead with. You should have no other gods before me. You shall have no other idols. There shouldn't be any idols in your life. And when we think about that in our context, our minds know where to go. We've done that exercise before. In the ancient world, there was other gods. There was other gods to choose from. We still have other gods to choose from. I mean, you could leave today and be like, you know what? I think I'm going to go with Norse gods. I think Thor is real. The movie is dumb, not an accurate depiction, but he's there, and I'm now Norse. Okay, you could go be a Druid if you wanted to, but most of you in this room are probably not going to make that choice. So we don't think about it like the ancient mind did, choosing some other god. We've chosen our god. But we also understand that when we have something in our life that's more important to us than Jesus, then that becomes an idol and that that is a problem. We understand that. But the way that Tim Keller frames it up in his book, I found to be very helpful for me. And it made me put a much finer point on what idolatry is and what I idolize in my life. And it's a little bit of a kick in the teeth when you have to answer the question, but I'm getting kicked in the teeth too. And we're going to move through this together. But he defines an idol as whatever goes in this blank for you. My life only has meaning slash I only have worth if I have blank. Whatever you put in that blank, that's your idol. Whatever you put in that blank that isn't Jesus, then that's a God that you have before our God. And I think that that's pretty tough. Because if I'm being honest, there's probably several things at different parts of my life that I could fill in that blank with. I know for me, there was a season, and I think, I genuinely think I'm over it. I also hope I never have to find out if it's true. But there was a season where my job would fill in that blank, my title and my position. That if you took this from me, and I don't get to be a pastor anymore, that's part of my identity, that's who I am. That if this got taken from me, I wouldn't really know who I was, and I really wouldn't feel nearly as valuable as I once did. And so it's absolutely true of me that there have been seasons where I've idolized my career. I hope that I don't still do that. I think I'm secure in who I am and who Jesus has made me to be and how he wants to use me in his kingdom. And if it's not doing this, I think I'd be okay with it. But I don't want to find out. My career goal is to retire from grace because, A, I just want to know what it is to do ministry in one place, in one community for decades. And man, I just get, this is just an aside, but I was so moved by our community last week, by our church gathering around those families that got to baptize. It meant so much to me, and I'm so grateful for the community of grace and the way that we love each other. So I want to be a part of that for a really long time. And then if you manage to retire as a pastor, it means that you went for pretty much all of your life without doing anything really, really stupid, and that seems important. So I want you to, yeah, thanks, Harris. You two are cute, by the way. I wasn't going to say anything, but then you did. I know, I totally lost my place now. That's what I get for being a smart aleck. I don't know what you would fill in that blank with. I don't know, I know some of you, I know some of you. I know you well enough to know that if you can't admit that you have filled in that blank with your career at seasons in your life, you are lying to yourself. I know that there's plenty in the room that it might not be career, but it might be the title of mom or dad, that without having this role in my life for my children, I would not feel worth and I would not feel valued. And in that way, we can idolize parenthood. Maybe at different points, we say I would not feel worth or value if I didn't have my spouse. And without meaning to, we begin to idolize them and put them in a place where they don't belong. And if you guys could join me in praying for Jen, that's her great struggle. It's oppressive. But my guess is that there is something in your life, your money, your status, your success, your friends, there's something in your life that you could place there. That if this were taken away from me, I would really struggle to feel worth or value and my life would be void of meaning. When you can fill in that blank with anything besides Jesus, then that's the thing that you're idolizing. And here's what happens when we begin to make an idol out of something in our lives. Do you understand that when you have an idol, that you are fundamentally worshiping that thing? That your worship is devoted to that thing. We sang at the end of the song set. Our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. And I'll brag on Aaron a little bit because I told him right before the service that I was going to use that song. And what's the name of the song? And he told me, he goes, do you want me to just put it at the end of the set? And I was like, you can do that? Yeah. And you guys, y'all didn't know that wasn't even planned. He just did it. Very good. But we sang together and I heard you sing. I heard you say it. Our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Jesus, we love you. Oh, how we love you. And I love that song. And that's a wonderful song. But when we have idols in our life, can I tell you what we're singing with our lives? With our mouths on Sunday, we say our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. But in our efforts Monday through Saturday, we sing with our lives, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of my career. Our affection, our devotion, my affection, my devotion poured out onto my children. Oh, how I love them. Yes, I love them. My affection, my devotion poured out at the feet of acquiring more, poured out on the feet of status, poured out. Can we be honest about ourselves in this culture that many of us, our idol is materialism? Our idol is things? Our idol is a perceived lifestyle? I mean, as a culture, we've invented influencers. Try to explain that to your great-grandparents. Some of you in here are going, I don't know what that is. You are better for it. It's just people who create a lifestyle that other people want to have, and then we make our idol being perceived as having the lifestyle that we want to have. And it's absurd. But when we allow these idols in our life, when we begin to idolize things, to put things in a position of primacy where they do not belong, we begin to worship those things. And if we're honest with how we invest our time and our money and our talent, then we can be honest about the things we're idolizing. And like you, I have sung on Sunday that I pour out my devotion at the feet of Jesus and by Sunday afternoon I have forgotten that and I'm pouring it out to the God of comfort or I'm pouring it out to the God of performance or I'm pouring it out to the God of lifestyle and materialism and perception and approval. But I think it's really important for us to admit that we have idols, active idols in our life that we continue to put in place in positions of primacy for which they were not designed. Because if you would have asked me this question before I really started thinking about this, before I read this stupid book by stupid Timothy Keller, and it made me feel bad, if you would have asked me that before I started thinking about this topic, hey, Nate, do you have idols in your life? I would have said, without much thought, yeah, yeah, of course I do, absolutely. There's seasons where I make this more important or that more important. There's seasons where things get wonky and I'm not really living for Jesus day in and day out. I get convicted and I get back to it. I've certainly had idols, but I would tell you that I don't think that there's any one thing that I idolize too much. But now what I realize is that's being far too kind to myself. And I think our temptation is to be far too kind to ourselves too. And so what I want you to do this morning is be really honest about what goes in that blank. Be really honest about what we need to put there. Because here's the thing, I don't know what your idol is. I don't know what your idol is, but idols cannot bear the weight of our worship. Idols cannot bear the weight of our worship. Robbie, if you need to take a break, man, you can go take a break. Okay. You're fighting a good fight over there. I'm trying to give you an out. You can go out there and make all the noise you want. Our idols cannot bear the weight of our worship. Do you understand how awesome of a thing worship is? What a great responsibility it is. This idea that there can be a life devoted to a thing that we can go through the years and go through the decades and you can watch the lives of other people and see the things that they're devoted to and see the things that they worship and that our worship is an awesome thing because God created us to worship him. And when we get into eternity, into the perfect eternity for which he has purposed us, we will worship him for all of eternity. It's what our soul yearns to do. We were designed intentionally to be worshipers. So when we put something in the place of primacy in our lives, we are fundamentally worshiping that thing. And the problem is the idols that we worship cannot bear the weight of that worship. Our career can never, ever make us happy. It can never make us satisfied. It will never be enough. There will always be another mountain to climb. There will always be another deal to close. If that is what we are worshiping, then we will never find a place where we are happy. And I'll tell you where we can see in real time that idols cannot bear the weight of our worship. As you parents who have kids that play competitive sports, and you see these other parents losing their minds at the ump or at their child or at the ref or at a coach. You see these dads literally punishing their sons for what they perceive as underperformance. Those men and women are idolizing their children. And they're idolizing the performance of their children because it's their identity. How good their kids perform is how good they get to feel about themselves. And those children were not designed to bear the weight of their parents' worship. Your spouse was not designed to bear the weight of your worship. They will be human and they will let you down. Money was not designed to bear the weight of your worship. There will never be enough. You will always want just a little bit more. I heard this anecdote last week or week before last, and I thought it was appropriate. At some point or another, Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, and Andrew Heller, the author of Catch-22, were at a party in the Hamptons at this just monstrously huge house. This extravagantly wealthy person throwing a huge party and Kurt leans over to Andrew and he says he says he makes more in a week than you ever made than you have made and ever will make from catch-22 your greatest accomplishment and Heller says yeah but I have something that he can never have and Vonnegut says what's what's that? And Heller says, enough. Well, that's a great point. The things that we idolize cannot bear the weight that our worship places on them. And they will always, always end in misery. Idolizing something that isn't Jesus, organizing our life around something that isn't Jesus, pouring out our affection and our devotion at the feet of things that are not Jesus will always lead to discontentment, to dissatisfaction, to misery, to unhappiness, to anxiety. It will always lead down a bad path. Always, always, always. What's at the end of those pursuits, if we dedicate our life to anything that is not Jesus, what we have at the end of that road is dissatisfaction and misery. And not only does it make us dissatisfied and us miserable, but the people around us too, while we flail around trying to achieve happiness and meaning and meaning and identity from things that are not equipped to provide that for us. So this is why I think God puts it first. Because you can go follow the other nine commandments, but if you've got this messed up, then you're on the wrong path right out of the gate. Nothing we can pursue in our lives can lead to the contentment and happiness that a pursuit of Christ leads to. Everything else will fall short and is empty. This is why Paul tells us that we are to live our lives as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is, he says, our spiritual act of worship. If we, by default, worship the thing in our life that we hold most dear, then if we are going to be people who are worshipers of Christ, it cannot just be with our mouths on Sunday. It has to be with our lives on Thursday. We have got to do that. And here's the other thing that I think is so wonderful about this commandment. When I was a kid and I heard this commandment, I grew up in the church. I don't know when you first encountered this idea there should be no other gods before me. But I remember hearing that as a kid and I kind of thought like, yeah, that checks out. I mean, he made us. He's the boss and he wants us to think of him as the boss. So like that makes sense. I get it. Okay. But when you really think about it, and when you look at how dangerous idols can be to us as people, what we understand is that God is looking out for us in this commandment, not himself. The reason he leads with it is because he's like a parent watching a 17 or an 18 year old make a series of bad decisions and he knows what's going to happen. He knows that's going to end in pain. He knows you're going down the wrong road, but you're not willing to listen. And he's just going to have to sit back and watch the train wreck and help the child pick up the pieces. He knows that when we, I, that we are so given to idols, we are so given to put other things in that place of primacy. We will by default worship things, and God knows that. And he knows that if we worship anything that isn't him, if we devote our life to anything that isn't Jesus, that that's going to end in misery for us and for those around us. And so he's trying to help us avoid that by saying, give me your worship. Give me your affection and devotion. I will not let you down. I am a capable bearer of the weight of that worship. You were designed to worship me. I am the only right receiver of that worship. This is what God wants for us. This is what is best for us. And I actually love this principle about everything that God ever tells us to do. Any standard that we can find in the Bible, anything he says about what it means to pursue holiness, any rule that we feel like we're given, anything that we're supposed to live up to and pursue, all the things that God tells us to do, do you realize that not a single one of those things is self-serving? Not a single thing God asks us to do is somehow self-serving as the creator. I'm the boss and I want you to treat me like it. Every single thing in scripture that we are told to do, that we are encouraged to do, that we are forbidden from, that we are pushed towards, every single thing is for our best. Every single thing is for our good. That's all God ever wants for us. And really, I think that the Old Testament says that you should put no other gods before me, and the principles there remind me of the principles in one of my favorite verses, John 10, 10. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. And I believe that most of Christian life comes down to whether or not we think that's true. Do I believe that God actually wants to give me life to the full, the best, most meaningful, richest, most purposeful life possible? Do I really actually believe that? Because if I do, I will not idolize other things over him. If I do, I will actually trust him and follow him. If I believe that the words that John wrote are true, that Jesus came that I might have life and have it to the full, that I might have the richest life possible here. Now he gets to define that life. We don't, but what we'll find at the end of the road is that was the best way to live my life. And so much of Christianity comes down to, do I believe that or not? And if you have an idol in your life right now, and listen, you do, what you are saying to God is, yeah, I understand that you want me to have a full life, but I actually think that by putting my efforts into this, I'm going to create a better life for myself than you could if I were to follow your standards. So I'm going to try this for a while and not do it your way. And then, because we're Christians, here's what we do. And we all know we do it. Don't act innocent here. We choose other things to prioritize over Jesus in our life. And then because we're Christians, we turn to Jesus and we ask him to bless the things that we've prioritized over him. Jesus, could you please help me be a better parent so that my children can behave better so that I can feel better about myself? Really reworded is Jesus, can you please help my sinning and misprioritizing my family over you go a little bit more smoothly so that I can feel better about it? God, I know that I've placed my career in a place where it doesn't need to be and that that occupies a place of primacy in my life, but I'd really like it if you could just help me out with this so you can make my sinning over here more easy. And I know, I know that that's harsh language. I know that that's very direct, but I'm not being direct top down. I'm being direct with myself and with you. That when we just sprinkle a little bit of Jesus into our life because we're Christians, what we're really asking him to do is to bless the ways that we are sinning so that sin, so that that sin can be more peaceful. Maybe the best thing he could possibly do is make it harder until you fully rely on him and quit looking at those other things. And this is why I think it's worth our time to take the next four weeks after this going through this idea of idolatry and how it sneaks into our lives. And I hope that you leave today with at least an awareness that you're more given to idolatry than you thought you were when you got here. I know that I am convicted of that. And this is how we're going to spend the rest of our time. There's this really interesting idea, I think, in the book that Tim Keller presents, and it's something I had never thought of before, and it's the thing that when Gibby mentioned it to me, I went, yeah, that's pretty interesting. We should think through that. It's this idea. Our visible surface idols have invisible source idols. So our visible surface idols, the things that we would fill in the blank with, our children, wealth, career, sex, approval, materialism, lifestyle, the things that we have marshaled our lives around, those surface idols that are visible, all have what he calls source idols. And the four source idols are power, control, approval, and comfort. And I think what's so interesting about these motives of our idolization, of our idolizing, is that we could have said, you could have said, I don't know that anybody outright says this, but this could be an answer, that your thing is greed. My idol? Money. I just want more of it. I just like making it, and I like watching it grow. Great. You picked money. But what Tim Keller says is, there's a reason you picked money. And it wasn't just because you love money. It was because you either love the power that you feel like money brings. Now you're untouchable. Now you can do what you want. Or maybe you like the comfort that money provides. I be at peace here and that's that's my hedge around myself or it could be for control and money provides you that or it could be because your source idol is approval and money provides you with that so with these source idols the surface idols can be fueled by any of those four and so we're going to look at the next four weeks. We're going to look at those source idols. Because each of those source idols has a besetting sin that will manifest itself in your life. The first one we're looking at next week is going to be power, because that's mine. And I really am uncomfortable admitting that. I thought it was control, but the more I looked at it and thought about it, it's power. And there's a besetting sin of anger. And we're going to talk about that next week. And I think we're all capable of having multiple sore cycles. So I hope that you'll get the book. I hope that you'll be willing to walk through this with us. I hope that we'll be willing to think through this together. And again, my biggest prayer as we go through the series together is that we would allow the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and our hearts to what we have put in a position of primacy in our life that does not belong there. And how we can slowly begin the repentant process of putting Jesus back where he belongs so that our affection and our devotion will be poured out at his feet and not the feet of something that is unworthy of our worship. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the conviction of idolatry. God, thank you for helping me to see that I am far more guilty and vulnerable to that sin than I thought I was. Father, I pray that we would see the very real threat that that sin is to us and how these idols seek to weave themselves into our lives and into our psyche so that we organize our lives around them instead of around you. And Father, would you please forgive us for asking you, for treating you like someone who is designed to help with our pursuit of things that are not you, for sprinkling you into our lives rather than devoting ourselves to you. And Father, I pray that grace would be a place that when we sing songs like that, that we would not only mean them with all of our hearts on Sunday, but we would live them out on Tuesdays. Be with us as we go. In Jesus' name, amen.