Sermons tagged with Righteousness

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. I can't remember the last time I got up here and thought, gosh, I'm not sure how to follow those excellent announcements. But well done, Haley. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to put her on staff. We will pay you $25 a week. As Haley mentioned, this is the second part of our series called The Treasury of Isaiah, where we're diving into the very rich Old Testament book of prophecy called Isaiah written by the prophet Isaiah. Last week, we started in Isaiah chapter one, and it really wasn't like an introductory sermon in the sense of acquainting you with the book of Isaiah. So that's what we're going to try to do this week. This week probably should have been week 1 of the series, but if I started Isaiah and didn't preach to you out of that passage last week, my little head was going to explode. So I had to do it. Last week I was preaching. This week I'm going to be teaching. It's going to be a little different because we want to do an overview of Isaiah. And I want to take some time on the front end this morning to make sure that you guys understand what a prophet is, the role of a prophet, how the books of the prophets fit into the Old Testament and the Bible narrative. So up front, we're going to spend probably eight or nine minutes just understanding what this is, and then we're going to get into the overall message of the book of Isaiah as it presents Christ to the people of Israel. So we'll kind of march down that path today. The first thing I wanted to talk about with kind of an overview of the idea of prophecy is the idea of a prophet. Because I think that many of us who are maybe haven't been exposed to a deeper study of them, just hear the word prophet or prophecy and just think about some guru making guesses about the future. Somebody's been given a vision and they're going to tell us what's going to happen in the future. This is what a prophet does. A prophet tells the future. It's kind of how we think about them. And a prophecy is something that tells the future. Prophesize what the future is going to be. And this is in part true, but a vast majority of the prophecy that we have in the Bible is not that. It's not projecting forward years and years and years. And the role of a prophet is not to tell the future. Somebody mentioned this to me years ago, I think in one of my seminary courses, and I found it to be a very helpful phrase and it's in your notes. Here's the role of a prophet. A prophet has an ear to God and a mouth to the people. A prophet listens to God and delivers that message to God's people. And sometimes that's a prophecy about what's going to happen in the distant future. And that's what we're going to look at today. Isaiah and his messianic prophecies, his prophecies about Jesus in the very far future, hundreds of years away. But 85%, if not more, of the prophecy that we have in the Bible is prophets warning the people of Israel, the children of God, what's going to happen if they don't get right. It's very rare that a prophet is called upon to give good news. It's kind of the cruddy part about being a prophet. Prophets are not gurus and seers that tell the future. Prophets are cantankerous, grumpy old men who tell it like it is and just don't mind telling the truth and not being liked for it. That's what a prophet is. And they have a very specific role in God's kingdom. And as a matter of fact, to show you how hard it is to be a prophet, particularly in the Old Testament, we can look at Jeremiah. Jeremiah is referred to as the weeping prophet. He wrote the book of Lamentations, the saddest book in the Bible. It's just all sad. It's all bad. There's one verse in there of hope. And we actually preached about that in Great is Thy Faithfulness in the songs we sing. The book of Lamentations is very sad. And Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet because his entire life, God gave him a message and no one listened to him. People stopped showing up. They told him to shut up. We don't want to hear it. We're tired of it, Jeremiah. Jeremiah's like, if you don't get right, the path you're on is not good. It's going to lead to destruction. And nobody's listening to him. Nobody wants to hear him. Nobody believes him. And so not only does he spend his whole life ostracized and pushed to the fringes of society with no friends and nobody likes him, but also he has to watch this slowly sinking ship of Israel fade into oblivion. He knows destruction is coming and they will not listen to him to try to stop it. That's the life of Jeremiah. Because what prophets have to say is almost always negative, is almost always a warning. It's almost always God kind of grabbing Israel by the scruff of, by their collar and shaking them trying to get their attention. It's very much what it sounded like last week in the first group of verses that we read. That's typically what prophecy sounds like. Because those messages are so hard, for many believers, the books of prophecy are difficult and unapproachable. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but I bet if we did, the percentage of people in this room who can honestly say you've read all of the books of prophecy in the Bible, all the major prophets and all the minor prophets, would be pretty slim. This represents, for many believers, kind of a gap in our biblical knowledge. So to that end, I just wanted to try to demystify it a little bit for us and make it more approachable and maybe encourage some of you to introduce this into your studies. But here's, there's 17 books of prophecy in the Old Testament. There's five major prophets and there's 12 minor prophets. Now, don't answer out loud, but in your head, what's the difference between a major prophet and a minor prophet? The length of the book. That's it. That's all it is. It's not import of message. It's not impact in the kingdom. It's just four dudes wrote five long books and 12 dudes wrote 12 short books. That's all it is. And we got real creative in how we titled that. now it's forevermore Major Prophets, Minor Prophets. The five major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The 12 minor prophets are Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Those are the 12 minor prophets. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, very much. There's actually, one of the reasons I did that is to be able to bring up, we're challenging the kids to learn all of the books of the Bible. And that's the trickiest section. Don't let anyone tell you different. That's the trickiest section. We're challenging them to learn all the books of the Bible. If they do, then they get to pie Miss Erin in the face. But some of them have mutinied and insist that it gets to be me. So that could be in our near future, and I would very, very happily smile under the shaving cream and take the pie to the face, because I think that's a wonderful reason to do it. So if you have kids, talk to them about that, and if they're up for it, get them to do it. It's a really, really good endeavor. I don't want all of them to pine me in the face, but, you know, we'll do what we have to for Jesus. But those are the major and the minor prophets. And here's how they fit into the Old Testament. I want you to understand this. I know that this is academic, but I want you to understand your Bibles as you approach them. Okay, so Genesis through Esther is really the narrative portion of the Old Testament that's telling the story of the nation of Israel from beginning to end the books of the law are a little bit different Genesis Exodus Leviticus numbers in Deuteronomy the first five books those are a little bit different because there's they're not all narrative there's some details in there like the book of Leviticus that gives specifics about sacrifices and religious rites and things like that. And then Deuteronomy kind of repeats things. It means law repeated. So it's not all linear. But basically from Genesis to Esther is the linear story of the Old Testament, the story of the children of Israel. It reads like a novel. Every page you turn, you're progressing in the story. Then you get to the books of wisdom, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. The books of wisdom are exactly what they sound like. They're just wisdom books. They're nestled right there in the middle of the Bible, and they offer good wisdom. And you really don't need a lot of context to appreciate what's in those books. The context does help, particularly in the Psalms. Then after that, you move into the prophets, the major prophets and the minor prophets. And those, this group of prophets fits back over the narrative story and just offers different details of different portions of the story that's told in the Old Testament. And while we're here, 1 and 2 Chronicles is basically a retelling of 1 and 2 Kings from a different perspective. Now you know your Old Testament. For those of you who have never taken the dive into the minor prophets, and you want to, a few years ago, it's more than a few now, I realized that I had a shameful gap in my knowledge of Scripture and wanted to tackle the minor prophets. And I was able to find a great commentary by, I think, Dale Ironside, that it's a one-volume commentary for all of the minor prophets. So if that's something that, if you're a sicko and you want to dive into that, do it and email me and I'll get you the book or you can borrow mine. It's a great way to study the minor prophets. So that's what a prophet is, ear to God, mouth to the people. Those are the books of prophecy in the Old Testament. That's where they sit and how they relate to the rest of your Bible. Now what I want to do is look at the book of Isaiah and look at an overview of the messianic prophecy within the book of Isaiah. So we can ask the question, who is the Savior that Isaiah presents to God's people? And it's appropriate to do this with Isaiah because depending on who you ask or AKA what you Google, there is no book more quoted in the New Testament than the book of Isaiah. Some people say Psalms, some scholars say Isaiah, but it's up there in how often it's quoted. And there is no book of the, there's no prophetic book that's more quoted in the New Testament. And there's no books of prophecy that contain more messianic prophecies than Isaiah. So it's right and good as we camp out in the book of Isaiah to look at how he portrays our Savior. So he does this kind of in three different ways. Isaiah portrays Jesus as king, servant, and conqueror. And for my overachievers who like to take extra notes, he portrays him as a king in chapters 1 through 37, a servant in chapters 38 through 55, and a conqueror in chapters 56 through 66. So it kind of follows this flow. So what I want to do is look at some highlight passages within each of those groups of chapters to show how Isaiah portrays Jesus in this way, the words that he uses to do it to familiarize us with some of the prophecies. And then I want to ask, what's that role mean and how should we respond to it? So the first way that he does it, the first half, a little bit more than half of the book, is he portrays Jesus as a king. And maybe the most well-known passage that does this is in Isaiah 9, verses on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. So this is Jesus being portrayed as a king. He's going to sit on David's throne. He's going to rule forever. Wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. Isaiah is laying out for us that he is going to be the king of the universe. And it's difficult reading this when it's so very clear he is going to reign forever, how the Hebrew people, how the Israelites could have construed that to mean, oh, he's going to sit on David's throne and he's going to reign in Israel. It's going to be an earthly kingdom. But that's what they thought. But here, very clearly, he's coming to reestablish David's throne and to rule an eternal kingdom that will last forever. And this is a famous prophecy that we see a lot, like I said, particularly around Christmas time. I'm toying around with the idea. Jen mentioned it to me, and usually Jen's ideas are pretty good. Our Christmas series may be based entirely out of this passage where we look at a wonderful counselor. So we look at the adjective, and then we look at the title, and we talk about why those things are important. So it might be those four things, wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. This might be our Christmas series, but in it and in the first 37 chapters, Jesus is portrayed as a king. And so it's worthwhile to ask, what does a king do? What's the role of a king? Well, a king historically rules and protects. That's what they do. If you've read your history books, if you like learning about that stuff like I do, what you find over and over and over again played out in all of mankind and all of history is that a king rules over people and promises to protect them. So in exchange for the king's protection, I offer my fealty. I will now serve you because you are the king. I will submit to you because you are the king. And you rule over me, so I accept that rule. And in my submission, in my servanthood, and in exchange, you protect me. And so this is what Jesus does as he sits on the throne. We allow him to be the Lord of our life. He rules over us and he protects us. Now we can't misconstrue that and make that let us think that he protects us from all bad things, from all hurt and all pain. We know experientially that's not true, but he does protect us from the schemes of the devil, and he does come to rescue us, and he is building an eternity for us in which we will be protected for the rest of time. So a king rules and protects, and in exchange, we offer our service and our servanthood. Now, here's's wonderful about our king is he's also servant. We see this in Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 is probably the most famous passage of prophecy in the Bible. I'm going to read verses 3 through 6. yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. And the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. In this middle section of the book, Isaiah prophesies about the coming Messiah, portraying him as a servant. This is the remarkable thing about Jesus. Because he is the Prince of Peace. He is the Lord of Lords. He is the King of Kings. He is Almighty God. And he does not have to humble himself to serve us and yet he does, yet he chooses to. We see him when he condescends and takes on human form. When he gives up his God form and he takes on our human flesh. And he comes down here and he literally washes our feet. In the series that we just got done with on the Upper Room Discourse called Final Thoughts, we talked one week about how he washed the feet of his betrayer so that he could go take his payment with clean toes. Jesus did this. He serves us in this way. And this is the role of what a servant does. And we think, why is it important to know that Jesus is a servant? Well, a servant loves and provides. A servant loves you and provides you, provides for you. If you're serving someone else, you're loving them in that moment and you're providing something for them in that moment that they need. And the remarkable thing about the servanthood of Christ is that he doesn't have to do it. You understand that? He doesn't owe you service. He condescends to serve you. And there's something powerful about that kind of service. I think service is most compelling when it is inverted. Service is most compelling when it is inverted. Service is most compelling when the person offering the servanthood has nothing compelling them to do that and nothing to gain from that servanthood. And the person receiving the service has no right to that service. And no one looking on would assume that they were going to get that service. And so we invert our roles. The best example I think I've ever seen of this is my late father-in-law, John Vinson. John was a remarkable man, and stories about him would leak out all the time, because you could never get him to tell you what he did and what was going on. But after, in retirement, they bought a house in a neighborhood called the Georgia Club outside of Athens, Georgia. And that club, he spent his career as a senior VP for Bell South and then AT&T. And so when he got done, they moved out to the Georgia Club. It's a gated community with a golf course and sidewalks, and it's a peaceful little place. And when you live in the Georgia Club, you don't have to cut your own grass. It's one of those places. HOAs are probably sky high, but a crew comes through and they buzz your Bermuda once a week, so you don't have to fool with it, right? So I would go over there from time to time. Sometimes we'd play around a golf with John. Sometimes I'm going over with Jen just to visit or whatever. And sometimes there'd be this white cooler on his front sidewalk. And we couldn't figure out, John, why is that cooler out there? And he'd go, I just left it. And we'd be like, do you want me to get it? No, it's fine. And you'd go out there and look in it. And there was Gatorade and water and fruit and snacks and ice and we couldn't get out of him what it was he wasn't a man of many words and he wasn't the kind of guy you wrestled to the ground to pin down stuff while you just let him be but we figured it out that that cooler miraculously appeared when it was the day for his yard to get mowed and what he was doing every week for the crew that was coming around is providing them with Gatorade and water and fruit and snacks. He wasn't telling anybody about them. He didn't have to do that at all. That's just how he wanted to serve those guys. We found out after his career that there was some parking attendants and security guards that AT&T had hired to monitor its executive parking garage. And John learned the names and birthdays of those guys and on their birthday would bring them a dozen donuts, tell them happy birthday and hand them a little card with a gift card in there. He didn't have to do that, but he did. Another time, he was getting his car worked on, and he was talking to this young mechanic. And the young mechanic was sharing with John excitedly that he had just saved up enough and ordered this dream motorcycle that he had always wanted. And John thought that was great. So the next day, John shows back up at the garage with two of the best motorcycle riding gloves he could find that he knew would match the motorcycle that the kid was getting because he had told him about it. The last one I'll tell you, I think I've shared this before. One year, Jen and I bought John a nice North Face fleece for Christmas. And when you're in your mid-20s and you're both working in ministry and you're poor, a $95 North Face fleece is a big deal. Like this is, we love you, right? So we, everybody else got like a $20 Christmas gift that year so we could give John the $100 fleece. So we give him the fleece. And over the course of the winter, we realized this fleece is really not making any appearances. We don't, did he hate it? Did he not like it? And finally, Jen was so hurt that he didn't like it. And we gave it to him and yada, yada, yada, that he admitted that he was driving down the road one day. And it was a particularly cold day. It was sub-free freezing. And he looked on the side of the road. There was one of those sign spinners and the sign spinner was just wearing a long sleeve t-shirt. And John thought he must be cold. So he pulls over, gets out of his car, takes off the fleece, hands it to him and said, you're going to need this a lot more than me. And gets back in his car and keeps driving down the road. Let me tell you something about that kind of humility and servanthood. Those small actions resound and ripple for eternity. I went to that man's funeral, and it was an outpouring of service like that. It was an outpouring of this inverted servanthood where he had spent a lifetime serving people he did not have to serve. Whenever I would go over to his house, he would have Andy Griffith on the TV 100% of the time. I don't know how he found that many episodes. And whenever I would go in, he would immediately change it to whatever sport was on. Even if I didn't want to watch that sport. He just knew I liked sports. So he would always change it. And I'd beg him not to do that, and he would insist on doing that. And when we had his funeral, the church was filled with hundreds of people that John had quietly and faithfully served for his whole life. So when we see the service of Jesus, the king who chooses to serve us, the correct response that we should have is to serve others as Jesus serves us. It's Isaiah's way of preaching Jesus's new command in the upper room discourse what's the new command that the disciples were given in John chapter 13 go and love others as I have loved you the Isaiah preaches that exact same message he just says it this way go and serve others as Jesus has served you go and offer Jesus type service to people who don't deserve your service. Go be a humble servant to everyone you meet. And let's be honest about this, Grace. In this room, we have an unusual concentration of people who have opportunities to invert that service and to serve people around you who probably don't think they deserve your service. To serve people around you that you have nothing to benefit from by serving them. When someone is on a lower echelon in life, experience, wealth, position within a company, whatever, and they serve someone higher, that's natural, that makes sense. But when someone higher serves someone lower, those kinds of acts push people towards Christ. Those kinds of acts change minds and change lives. And we have the opportunity to do that. So I'd love to challenge you through the book of Isaiah to think about the people in your life you might serve more. Or better. Or differently. Let's not look for the opportunities to be served. Let's be like our good and gracious king and look for opportunities to serve. And as we do that. As we serve like our king, we wait on our conqueror. This is how Isaiah finishes up his book in chapters 56 to 66. And we have two verses that I want to look at. The first is Isaiah 56 verse 1. This is what the Lord says, maintain justice and do what right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed. So he's like, hang in there, keep doing justice, keep serving people, keep flipping things on its head, serve the oppressed, because my righteousness is coming. My salvation is coming. It will be revealed. There is something that's going to happen at the end of this. And then we get a little bit clearer picture over in 62 verses 11 and 12. The Lord has made proclamation to the ends of the earth. Say to daughter Zion, see your savior comes. See his reward is with him and his recompense accompanies him. They will be called the holy people, the redeemer of the Lord, and you will be called sought after and the city no longer deserted. The end of Isaiah, Jesus is portrayed as a conqueror. My salvation is coming. My righteousness is coming. Recompense for evil is coming. And the city will be conquered, and it will not be called deserted. And see, here's why it's important to see Jesus through these lenses of Isaiah, particularly Jesus as conqueror. Because a conqueror presses forward and the scales of justice tilt in his favor. A conqueror presses forward and the scales of justice tilt in his favor. Now here's what I mean. A conqueror does not sit back. A conqueror does not establish defensive lines and erect bulwarks. That's not what a conqueror does. A conqueror doesn't think about defensive postures and keeping things out. No, a conqueror presses forward. A conqueror goes to get. A conqueror goes to claim. Jesus, we understand, is on the move. Jesus is pressing forward. And when people have conquered in history, you can look through history. When people conquer, they write the history books. The scales of justice tilt in their favor, rightly or wrongly. I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying it's right when one group of people moves in and takes over a continent and then they get to write the history books about it. I'm not saying everything that happened was good and right and fair, but the scales of justice tilt in their favor because they write the history books. So when Jesus conquers, when he moves forward, he will tilt the scales of justice in his favor. And this is great news for us because it will be right and good and it will be fair. And when Jesus conquers, the only people who suffer are the people who deserve it. The only people who suffer are the ones who have not submitted to him. That's it. And then the scales of justice are tilted in the direction in which they should be tilted. They're tilted towards right and good and true. They're tilted towards Revelation 21 where the former things have passed away. And what's interesting to me as I look at this overview of Isaiah and we see Jesus as a king and a servant and a conqueror, is it's so similar and follows thematically that same refrain I remind you guys of so often, that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Which follows the pattern of Isaiah. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the king of the universe. He's divine. He's the king. Isaiah, Jesus is king. It's to believe that Jesus did what he said he did. He came as a servant and he suffered for us just as Isaiah said he would. And then he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come and conquer sin and death and shame for you. And he's going to claim you and take you back to the perfect future where he will protect you. It follows that refrain that I offer you guys of explaining salvation follows exactly the message of Isaiah. When things sync up like that, I just kind of think, God, you're pretty neat in the way that those things get drawn out. And so what we do in light of this, in light of this overarching picture of Jesus through the lens of Isaiah, and I wrote this down because I wanted to get it right. As we wait on our conqueror, we submit to our king by serving like our savior. As we sit in the here and now, we wait on our conqueror. He is going to come claim us. As we wait on him, we submit to our king. And we submit to our king by serving others like our savior served us. And in that service, we will build up this kingdom and draw more people to our Jesus. And I think that's what we can take away from the message of Jesus in the book of Isaiah. As we wait on our conqueror, we submit to our king by serving like our savior. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your prophets. Thank you for the men and women who have been submitted to lives of being ostracized, being ignored, being disliked, being relegated to the fringes because they had to say hard things on your behalf. Thank you for their courage and for their bravery and for their example and for leaving us a record of what they've said. God, I pray that we would continue to learn from your servant Isaiah, that what he says and what we discuss would push us closer to you. And God, I pray that you would give us eyes to see this week that we might serve other people as you've served us. Give us opportunities to serve people who don't expect our service, Lord, and in so doing, would they see a little bit of Jesus in us? And would we bring people into your kingdom as we go through our lives serving others as you served us? It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

All right. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. First things first, to my Wolfpack friends, no jokes this morning. Well done. That was a fun run. You guys should have enjoyed that. I hope you had fun. I'm sorry it ended with an 8'11 buzzsaw yesterday, but that was a good run, lots of fun. I tried, just so you know, I pulled out, I have one shirt that's Wolfpack colors, a black and red flannel. I pulled it out this morning, and I'm fat, so I had to switch it out to the big boy shirt, but I was with you in spirit, I promise. Also, before I jump into the sermon, I don't normally do this, but there's something coming up I want to tell you about, and I want to tell you about it because of what's been going on, excuse me, kind of behind the scenes in discussions with our missions committee and on our elder board. So you probably heard Aaron say a few minutes ago something that we say regularly, which is 10% of everything that's given goes to ministries happening outside the walls of grace. It's our conviction to be generous as we ask you to be generous. And so the missions committee, which predates me, that was here before I got here, is the group of people from the church with a heart and experience in missions who determines where that 10% goes. They determine who we partner with. So we have three local partners and three international partners, and they're the ones that make sure that we're partnering with the right people in the right ways. And one of the things that they've been talking about, and one of the things that the elder board has been talking about, and so as two separate bodies, we've been talking about this together, is how can we get the partners of grace, you guys, more involved with our ministry partners beyond just passively giving and seeing 10% of that go to ministries outside the walls of grace. And so we've been actively looking for opportunities for our partners, church partners, to get involved with our ministry partners outside the walls. And so we've got that opportunity coming up next Sunday. Addis Jamari is one of our ministry partners that we support. They're doing wonderful work with families and orphans in Ethiopia. The thing that's near and dear to my heart is poverty is so pressing there that when a young family or a young mother has a child, she's very often faced with the decision of, do we give this baby up for adoption because we can't afford it, or do we lose our home or lose something else? Do we keep this baby because we're not sure that we can feed it? Which, to my knowledge, no one in faced that choice that's an excruciating decision and so by supporting them we're able to provide those mothers the resources they need to to keep their babies at home and not have to give them up for adoption which is a huge huge deal so to that end as we seek to continue to support at a story there's a trip this summer some of the teens are going and beyond the teens we have three adults from our church who are also going and so there's a fundraiser for that trip and it's a trip this summer. Some of the teens are going. And beyond the teens, we have three adults from our church who are also going. And so there's a fundraiser for that trip, and it's a way to get involved. There's a barbecue next Sunday. Wes, where is the barbecue? It's at Falls River Slim Club. That's right. Okay, so Falls River, the Greenway Club over at Falls River. There's a barbecue. You can go there. You can get some food. You can take it home, watch the Masters. You can also contribute food to that, and you can just show up and volunteer. It'll probably be a good place to hang out. There's more information about that in the Grace Vine, and you can talk to Wes after. He's one of our elders, and he happens to be married to the lady running the joint, so he knows more answers than I do. So I just wanted you guys to be aware of that as an opportunity for us to begin to partner with our ministry partners. Now, as Mike alluded to, this morning we are starting a new series called The Treasury of Isaiah. I am particularly excited about this series because I think this series was Jen's idea. Jen's my wife. I think it was her idea back in the fall when I was asking her what we should talk about, and she said you should do some stuff out of Isaiah. And that's tough because Isaiah is 66 books. It's a book of prophecy in the Old Testament. It's got all the themes of prophecy in it, and it's 66 books long. And if I tried to preach through the book of Isaiah, you guys would probably find another church, and I would probably find a new job. So I don't think that's what we can do. But there's so many wonderful, rich texts in this book that what this series gives us an opportunity to do is to dive into those and begin to learn them and see them and appreciate what they are because we don't often spend time in Isaiah on a Sunday morning. So we're going to do that for the next seven weeks. Now next week, I'm going to work to give you an overview of the role of a prophet and prophecy and what it is. And we'll look at a big sweeping view of the messianic prophecies in Isaiah, the prophecies about Jesus. But before I can even do that, I have to jump into this text in Isaiah chapter 1. If you have a Bible, and I hope you do, I hope you're bringing your Bibles, I hope you're marking them up. This is a mark-up passage. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. In Isaiah chapter 1, we have these nine verses in Isaiah 10 through 18. And I know that I say that things are my favorite, but this is, and I mean this without equivocation, my favorite passage in Isaiah. In Isaiah. Okay? Maybe in the Bible, but definitely Isaiah. And I'm not even interested in approaching the rest of the book before we talk about this because I love the deep conviction of this passage. This passage kicks you right in the teeth. If you didn't come for that this morning, I'm sorry a little bit. But we see God speaking to his people in this passage about as harshly as you see him speak. And I'm the kind of person that needs you to do that to me or I'm not going to listen. So I love this passage. I love the conviction of it. I love the challenge of it. I love the relief of it. And in this passage, we find the very nature of the gospel. So my hope and prayer is that this passage can become for some of you what it has been for me for so many years. This is a hugely important passage. For just the slightest bit of context before I start to read it, this book is written to God's people, to the Hebrew people, to the Israelites. It is written to them at a time when they are spiraling morally away from God, when they have lost their way. And the role of the prophet Isaiah is to convict God's people. And that will become a very clear goal of his as we read this text. But God's chosen people, they have every reason to be following God. They know are they to me, says the Lord. I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and of fattened animals. I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of your blood? Listen. your worthless assemblies, your new moon feasts and your appointed festivals. Listen, I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Yo, God is big mad at his people. He's incredibly angry at his people. You can tell it with the way he starts off because he says, hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom, you people of Gomorrah. Listen, Sodom and Gomorrah to the ancient Hebrew mind were synonymous with evil. Those cities represented what evil was. It would be like calling a conservative Southern Baptist the mayor of Las Vegas. All right. It's it's when they think of that place, they think of sin and evil and debauchery. And they think of themselves as a shining people city on the hill. We are the chosen people of God. And guys go, no, no, no, no, no. Listen, listen, you sinners. Listen, you evildoers. You've lost your way. And then he goes down and he details for them. Here's what's interesting. He's not mad at them for the traditional sins that we would think of God being angry about. He doesn't say you're debaucherous, you're gluttonous, you're filled with lust, you're sleeping around, you're selfish, you're greedy, you're hoarding, you're oppressing the poor, you're mean and unkind to one another. He doesn't say those things. He actually gets onto them for doing things that he's asked them to do. Did you catch that? Look. He says, God, you asked us to give these sacrifices. The blood of bulls and lambs and goats, they mean nothing to me. God, you asked us to do that, he says, I detest them. They are a burden to me. It wears me out to have to deal with you when you show up on Easter. These are harsh words from God. And the question worth asking, if God is this angry with his people, then why does God hate the very actions he's prescribed? They were told to do those things. There's a whole book, the book of Leviticus, that details in painstaking detail exactly what they're supposed to do. If you've ever tried to read through the Bible in a year, two-thirds of you stopped in Leviticus. And it was because the book of Leviticus is laying out all of these things. When do we offer incense? When do we offer prayers? When do we offer sacrifices? What kind? When? Bulls and lambs and goats. When do we do that? When are the calling of convocation? New moons, new Sabbath, all the festivals? How do we do those? That's all in Leviticus. God has given them in detailed instruction exactly what he wants them to do. And now here in the book of Isaiah, he is raining down fire on them for doing those things. So why is it that God hates the very actions that he's prescribed? Because what God wants is the heart behind those actions, not the letter of the law and the actions themselves. We are told by David that God can despise sacrifices, but a fearful and contrite heart he will not despise. That God requires mercy and brokenheartedness, not sacrifice. God is interested in the heart behind the actions and the motives behind the obedience. He wants to see day in and day out that they actually love him and care for him, not just when they show up at church and go through the motions. I think of it like this, how the people of Israel were acting and what God was frustrated about. When I was in college, I think Jen and I started dating when we were, I was 20. So somewhere around the age of 20, 21. We're dating. And I had not really been in a serious relationship before this. I had been in relationships, but they weren't serious. And I didn't really know how to be in a relationship. I'm still not positive that I do. I think it involves vacuuming. And so we're dating. She knew how to be in a relationship. And she looked at me one day and she said, I can tell something's wrong and I'm kind of probing. And eventually she just says, I just don't feel very special to you. And I said, oh, I'm sorry. You are. So I don't really know how I handled that conversation. But we parted ways. She went back to her dorm, and I went back to my dorm. I lived in an on-campus house named Beulah. She lived in a small women's dorm named Troy Damron, and they were kind of reasonably close to one another. I went back, and I thought, gosh, my girlfriend doesn't feel special to me. I need to figure something out here. So I came up with a plan. I went to Walmart, and I bought a king-size bed sheet. And this is not going where you think it's going. This is a Christian college. So I got a king-size bed sheet, and I lay it out on the living room floor. And my roommates are watching me do this, and I trace out in big block letters, Jen, you are very special to me. Love, Nate. I draw it out, and then I get the Crayola markers, and I'm coloring it in. I went through a whole pack. I was up to like 2 or 2.30 a.m. This is painstaking work here that I do, and then I sneak over to her dorm. We still have the sheet somewhere. I know that we own it. It's somewhere. I went over to her dorm and I tack it to the pillars on her front porch. So it's facing the front door. So everyone who comes out that door, the seven or eight girls that live there, they will see that clearly Jen is special to Nate and she will know beyond a shadow of a doubt what she means to me now. Let me tell you something. That did not get the response I thought it would. It turns out that what Jen wanted was for me, through the little things of day-to-day life, to indicate to her that I cared about her, that she was special to me. What she didn't want was a big, dumb, grand gesture with block letters that would provide sermon illustrations for decades to come. What they were offering God is the block letters. You are special to me, God. Happy? And God says, no, absolutely not. And what they were guilty of doing, and this is why God is coming down on them so hard, is they were going through the motions. They were going through the motions of their faith. They were doing the bare minimum required of them to be seen as in the faith. We're still good. I'm doing my sacrifices, God. I'm coming to the special assemblies. You know, can't make it every week, but Christmas and Easter, I'm your guy. And they were just going through whatever they decided was the bare minimum of what their faith required of them to prove to God and whoever else that they were in. And it's interesting to me that in the corporate world, we now actually have a term for this. It's a new term that we've been blessed with by the Gen Zers called silent quitting, where people who have corporate jobs understand that HR, God bless them, can sometimes make it really difficult to fire your butt when you deserve it. And they realize that they have some job security, not going anywhere, so they make a conscious decision to put in the minimal amount of effort possible that will still allow them to keep their job and collect a paycheck, while fairly clearly communicating to everyone around them, I couldn't care less about this job. Just in it for the check. Doesn't mean anything to me. Now, I know that's a harsh way of depicting that, and I do actually see some positives to it, but I'm not making a joke. I think work-life balance got ridiculous, and the next generation is course-correcting for us a little bit. It's just going to be wonky. Anyway, sorry, that's social commentary. What God is telling the Israelites is, you're silent quitting on me. You're putting in the least amount of effort possible to still appear as if you're a people of faith. But you don't really care about me and what I've asked you to do and where your heart should be. And if you are at all like me, in my old Bible, I had a note next to these verses that said, Dear God, please don't ever get this angry with me. I never want to give God a reason to be this frustrated with me. That he says to me that when you bow your head to pray for me, to pray to me, I will not listen to you. When you come to church, you are trampling my courts. When you get up on Sunday and you put on your church finest and you show up at church, it is a burden to me. I am weary of your hypocrisy when you show up and pretend like you love me. And I want to write, God, please never be this angry with grace. And if you're like me, you're wondering, when and how do I go through the motions? When and how in my faith have I simply been giving God lip service? When and how have I silently quit on my faith? When the things I'm doing are just to be seen, are just to be considered in. I thought about enumerating the ways we can go through the motions. But I really think the more interesting thing to bring up when we consider how we might do this is to think about two things. I know for me, if I want to be honest about examining my life, about when I'm going through the motions of my faith, when I'm giving God the actions but not my heart, is to think through what motivates me when I do spiritual things. When I get up in the morning early to read my Bible? Am I getting up to read it so that I can check a box and say I've been spiritual today? Or am I getting up to read it because I just want to know the heart of God more? Because I'm curious about the scripture and I want to dive in in a fresh way. Do I get up to read it so that my Bible can be on my desk and my daughter can come down the stairs and see it there and I get the good dad award for today? Or am I doing it because I want to pursue the very heart of God? When I listen to worship music in the morning with Lily in the car, am I doing it so that she thinks daddy listens to worship music in the morning? Or am I doing it because that's what sets my heart right for my day? When we go to Bible study, we attend small group. Am I doing that because I want the people around me to think that I'm spiritual and I'm the kind of person who reads my Bible and attends small group? Or am I doing it because I want to be spiritually nourished by my community of faith? When you come to church, are you doing it because you're supposed to and there's somebody that you want to see and you want to keep up appearances? Or are you doing it, are you getting out of the car with the thought, God, speak to my heart and move me closer to you today? When you perform spiritual actions, prayer for a service, prayer before a meal, leading a small group, attending a small group, showing up and partnering and serving with something in the community, what is motivating that service? Is it the way that service will make you appear? Is it how it positions you in the eyes of others? Or is it because you can't help but serve your God? Let me tell you. When we do spiritual things for the way it makes us look to other people, we are going through the motions, and our hypocrisy is burdensome and wearying to God. The other thing that we think about to assess if we're going through the motions. Can I say with authenticity that I'm the same person on Friday night that I am on Sunday morning? Is there one version of me that everyone in my life sees? And you see it on Sunday morning. You see it on Monday afternoon. You see it when my kids are driving me nuts. You see it on Friday night and I've got some freedom and I can cut loose. You see it on Saturday at the tailgate. Am I the same person everywhere I go? Or do I put on different faces for different people to appear in different ways at different times? Because if we are not the same person in all of the pockets and circles of our life, then somewhere we're going through the motions. Either we're faking being like the world, and we don't really mean it, or we're faking being godly, and we don't really mean that. And normally, people who are walking with Jesus and zealous about him don't bother faking it for the world. What motivates your spiritual actions? How consistent is your character with the people that you see? Are there different versions of you? Because if there are, you might be going through the motions too. And this temptation to go through the motions of our faith without meaning it with sincerity, without being properly motivated, is a trap into which the historical church has fallen in over and over again. There is not a single person here who's been a Christian for more than three days who has not at some point gone through the motions. You may be sitting right now in deep conviction, thinking, Father, I've been going through the motions for years. And if you are feeling that, good. I'm not going to disavow you of that. Sit in it. It's helpful. And we should be asking, if all of those things are simply going through the motions, then what things does God want from me? What does he want me to do? What actions does he require of us that can begin to shift our heart towards him and prove to him that we're in this for him? What does God actually want from us? I'm glad you asked because Isaiah answers that question. In verses 16 and 17, he says this, wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. What does God actually want me to do? If he doesn't want me to go to church and pretend, if he doesn't want me to just do sacrifices and tithe and go to small group, what does he actually want me to do? I'll tell you what he wants you to do. He wants you to stop doing evil. Learn to do right. Defend the cause of the oppressed. Seek justice. Defend the widow and the orphan. Care for those who can't care for themselves. That's what he wants his Christians to do. That's what he wants his children to do. He wants you to go do the things you can't fake. Go do the stuff you have to really mean. And listen, this verse 16 and 17, this resolution, stop going through the motions. Stop faking your faith. Stop being insincere and burdening me with your hypocrisy. Go and do what I actually want you to do. And what is it that he actually wants us to do? It's to defend the cause of the fatherless and plead the case of the widow. It's to pursue justice and correct oppression. And I don't know of sitting with a group of men Friday morning talking about this topic and I became so frustrated with how I was taught my faith because I don't know where we decoupled justice and defending the cause of the fatherless and the widow and caring for those who can't care for themselves. I don't know where we decoupled that from the message of the gospel, but somewhere along the way in our churches, we made it optional and it's not. James tells us at the end of the Bible, true religion that is pure and undefiled before the Lord is to do this, is to take care of the widows and the orphans. Why is it widows and orphans? Because in the ancient world, those two were down and out. If you're an orphan, they did not have orphanages that you could go to that would feed you and care for you until you were 18 and send you to college. You begged in the street until you died. If you were a widow, your husband had died, and you did not have children to care for you and bring you into their home, you begged until you died. There's no social safety net. So when God says care for the orphan and the widow, does he mean specifically them? Yes, and he still does. But what he really means is those who can't care for themselves. That's why in the laws in the Old Testament over and over again, we see this principle of gleaning. When you're plowing your fields, leave the corners of them unharvested so that the sojourner, the alien, the homeless, the oppressed, the marginalized, the widow and the orphan can eat off of your field. That's theirs and it actually belongs to them. And if you harvest all of your field, then you're actually stealing from the oppressed and participating in the oppression. I'm not going to belabor this point too much because we may have a whole series about this coming up. But whenever we see the heart of God revealed, it is always for those who have less than us. When you see the idea of giving in the New Testament, it is almost always associated with giving to the poor. When you see Jesus handle the poor, he says, whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me. When Jesus begins his ministry, he goes to the poor, blessed the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. You see him caring for the oppressed. So if we want to do the things that God really wants us to do, then we have to, in a non-nebulous, very specific way, get involved with caring for those who can't care for themselves. Go to the Ades Jumari thing next week. Dip your toe in it. See what it's like. Start to talk to people in your community and find out how you can be a part of that. This is not a theoretical, metaphoric instruction. This is a literal instruction. That if we are guilty of going through the motions and the thing that God wants us to do is to care for those who can't care for themselves. So let's get active about that. Now here's the thing that I love about this passage. Because you might be thinking to yourself, why is this one your favorite? This is a little rough. Here's why. Because it doesn't end in verse 17. In verses 10 through 15 we have this tremendous conviction. You're going through the motions and your hypocrisy is burdensome to me. I'm weary of you. And then in 16 and 17, we have this very high challenge. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Stop being dumb. Learn to be good. Go and do it. What do I want you to do? I want you to care for the poor. Go care for the poor. Go. But then we get verse 18. And verse 18 is the best. And verse 18 kind of, to me, feels like this. Sometimes in my home, my daughter Lily and I can clash. We're very similar. And that means that sometimes our words get sharp. And sometimes there's a little battle of will about whose words are going to be louder. And I win those. But sometimes I wish I hadn't. And whenever we clash, whenever she's gotten in trouble and she feels bad, I always go find her or she'll come to me and I'll pull her alongside of me and I'll hug her and I'll kiss her little head and I'll say, I love you. I'm proud of you. It's going to be okay. You're going to do better. I'm going to do better. Because I don't want it to end with the conviction and the challenge. I want to call her alongside and I want to comfort her. And when I read verse 18, to me it has the tone of God coming alongside us, putting his arm around us, and telling us it's going to be okay. Here's what he says in verse 18. Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. I love that verse because we experience the conviction of 10 15. And the challenge of 16 to 17 to go make it right. But then in 18, God sidles up next to us, puts his arm around us, comforts us and says, but hey, this isn't all on you. You've messed up, sure. But though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. How does he do that? Through shedding the blood of his own son that's prophesied about later in this book. So that when God looks at you, he doesn't see all the times you've walked through the motions. He doesn't see all the times you've failed to help the poor. He doesn't see all of your shortcomings and misgivings. And he is not burdened by you or weary of you. He sees you clothed in the righteousness of Christ and he is happy to pull you up alongside him and put his arm around you. So really, this is the reason why I love this passage. Because Isaiah 1, 10 through 18 is the gospel. It is the gospel. Do you see this? See, I think a big problem with the American church is that we start the gospel message at verse 18. We start the gospel message at verse 18. We begin it right there. Hey, guess what? Jesus died on the cross for you, so you're not accountable for your sins. Hooray. Just accept him and walk with him. And I think that's the reason why we have people going through the motions in their faith. Because all they need to know is, what's the minimum amount I have to do to stay right with God for that salvation to count for me? What are all the things I can do over here that I'll be forgiven for eventually? What's the minimum amount of the things that I need to believe so that I'm in and God loves me and that salvation accounts for me? And what do I have to do? What's the get in the door price for this salvation? Because we started the gospel at verse 18. But when we do that, we cheapen the power of the gospel. The power of the gospel operates in direct proportion of our realization of our need for it. The power of the gospel resonates more deeply with you the more deeply your own sin resonates with you. The more deeply your own shortcomings resonate with you. And that's why we experience the relief of verse 18 because we have the conviction of 10 through 15. Oh my goodness, God is so angry. And then we have the challenge of 16 and 17. Go and start doing right, but God, that's so hard. And then we have the relief of verse 18. And so what I want us to do now is I'm going to read all nine verses in the tone and inflection in which I think they're intended. And we're going to collectively feel the relief of verse 18 when we get there. And you in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who asks this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing me meaningless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me. New moon Sabbaths and convocations, I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your new moon feast and your appointed festivals, I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves. Make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. Though they are like crimson, I will make them like wool. That's the power of the gospel. The power of the gospel is to feel deeply the conviction in 10 through 15. And if you're here this morning, I've prayed that you would feel the necessary conviction. If you have been going through the motions, in part or in whole, it's not news to God. Confess it to him. If you're challenged by 16 and 17, and you think honestly about your life, and you go, gosh, I don't know what I'm doing for the poor and the oppressed. I don't know what I'm doing to correct injustice. Then let that conviction determine you to find ways to get involved in that. And then, and then, once we've sat in the conviction and we've sat in the challenge, then sit in the comfort of verse 18 and the gift of the gospel and allow that gratitude from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. Allow that grace that has been poured out from you from his fullness that it's not all on you to go do all the right things, but that God is already working in and through you and you are forgiven for the times when you've fallen short. Let the gratitude of that motivate the right behaviors and let the things that look like going through the motions be an outpouring of the faith that you've expressed through helping the poor and seeking justice for the oppressed. But we will never do those things if we do not allow God to bring us to a place of tremendous gratitude and comfort of the words of the gospel and the promise that we can reason together and though our sins are like scarlet, he will make them as white as snow. So I'm going to pray. And as I pray, if you need to pray to God on your own, do that. If you need to confess to God that you've been going through the motions of your faith, confess it. If you need to confess to God, I'm not doing anything for justice or oppression, confess it and ask that he would show you what to do. And if you are not overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for the gospel and him covering over your shortcomings, ask God to fill you with gratitude. And if you are filled with gratitude, express that to him. As I pray, you pray, and then we'll have a chance to sing together. Father, thank you for your servant Isaiah. Thank you for the power of your words through him. God, we know that at different times and in different ways, our hypocr forget the conviction, but that we will allow the power of your word to rest on us. Father, I pray for myself and openly confess I go through the motions all the time. But Lord, I pray that you would imbue my actions with a sincerity filled with gratitude. I pray that for the people here as well. God, give us the courage to be convicted and to confess. Show us ways to get involved with what matters most to you. And Lord, would we leave here with just a deep gratitude for your sending your son to cover over our sins. And though they are like scarlet, you will make them white as snow. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

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

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I'd love to do that after the service. Or you could just come to Discover Grace right after the service. We've got food for you and we've got space, so hang out with us there. Just for a little bit of clarity, Mikey, I don't know where you're sitting, but I lied to you in front of the whole church. This is not great. This is fine, I would call it. This is what I'm about to tell you is average. This is an average sermon for me. So let's adjust expectations to whatever you think my average is. If you think my average is good, then I got good news for you. You're going to like it. If you think it's not so good, then, you know, good luck in finding another church. And I mean it. I hope they serve you better than I can. This morning we are in the letters of John, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. We've been moving through the books of the New Testament. This summer and next summer we're doing a series called 27 where we go through the 27 books of the New Testament. But sometimes we are grouping them together because the letters of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John really all three have the same message. And 2nd John and 3rd John are one chapter. So it'd be tough to give you an overview of that one chapter. It's better to just group them together because the message that they preach, the message that they proclaim, is very similar all the way throughout. Now, John, the disciple, wrote these letters. He wrote them probably towards the end of his ministry. It's the same John that wrote the Gospel of John, in which he describes himself the disciple whom Jesus loved We've talked many times about John's unique relationship with Jesus. They were uniquely close They sat next to each other at dinner. Jesus told John some things that he didn't share with the other disciples There was a relational closeness there that I'm not sure Jesus or John experienced anywhere else in their life. And then John also wrote the book of Revelation that we're going to get to next summer. And then towards the end of his ministry, he wrote these three letters. And John is also super significant in church history because we believe that he probably kind of replaced Peter as the leader of the church after Peter passed away. Then John was a leader of the church. And then he discipled some guys named Ignatius and Polycarp, and they like took the church after John did. So he's kind of the link between the last of the biblical figures to lead the church. And then guys that we learn about in history books, not in the Bible. So these are significant letters that they fall at the end of his ministry and reveal to us what he thinks is most important to share with the people. And unlike some of the letters like Thessalonians that's written specifically to the church in Thessalonica, these letters are written to all the churches, to take one, to read it to the congregation, and then to get it to the next church down the road so they can read it there the next week. So these are just general advice, advisory letters to the church. And in 1, 2, and 3 John, we see this theme, this instruction, this singular idea come up multiple times. When we decided to do this series going through the books of the New Testament, I knew when we planned the series what I was going to preach when we got to the epistles of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. Because they proclaim one loud message the whole time. I knew what I was going to be preaching. To me, now maybe somebody else has preached an overview on these three, and they pulled a different theme out, and I don't want to be critical of that, but as I read it, when I look at these letters, there's one theme to talk about that if we don't talk about that, we're doing a disservice to these letters from John. And I went through, and I read the theme. I know what it is. And so I read the letters in preparation for the sermon. And I counted 12 times in seven chapters that John says basically the exact same thing. It's the most reiterative book in the Bible that I know of, besides maybe Proverbs. Just the same idea over and over and over again. He keeps bringing your attention back to this one singular principle. And it's captured in a lot of passages, but I'm going to look at 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6. It's kind of the seminal passage that captures this idea that shows up 11 and the other 11 ones that I counted off for myself is simply this idea. If you love God, your actions will prove it. If you love God, your life will bear that out. So clearly, I'm talking to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a a Christian then you get to kind of watch from the outside and see what you might want to get yourself into or what you might be considering but this isn't for you this is for the believers in the room and if you're a believer you've said at some point that you love God and what John says is that's great if that's true then your actions will bear it out we will it. And what's great is all of these letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, are like a commentary or a blow-up of this teaching that Jesus offers to the disciples that's only recorded in the Gospel of John. In John chapter 15, when Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. He says, to abide in me, you keep my commandments, and my commandments are that you would love. So then at the end of his life, John is reflecting back onto that singular teaching of Jesus. If you abide in me, you'll bear much fruit. How do you abide in me? You obey me. What does it mean to obey me? You obey my commandments. What's my commandment? That you would love one another. So then 12 different times in his swan songs to the church, he reiterates this idea. If you love me, if you love God, your actions will bear that out. And when you think about that, it makes a lot of sense because that's true of every relationship, right? Like I have a wife named Jen. She's wonderful. And if I told her every morning when we woke up, sweetheart, I love you so much. You're the best. Text her in the middle of the day, just thinking about you. I love you. Before we go to bed at night, hey, you're the best. I love you. That's great. But if my actions don't bear that out during the day, if I'm an unholy, impatient jerk to her, if I'm a terrible father to her children, if I give her crud about the house being dirty when I get home, when she's had a way more hectic day than I have, if I refuse to be helpful around the house, if I nitpick her and just make these little demands, if I just take the service that she offers the family for granted and I never express how much I appreciate it, if I don't cut the grass, if I'm lazy around the house, if I just don't do any of the stuff that a halfway decent husband is supposed to do, eventually she's going to stop believing it when I tell her that I love her, isn't she? If Aaron Winston, our wonderful children's pastor, says she loves the kids and she loves their families, but she doesn't bother to learn their names when they show up, eventually y'all are going to stop believing her when she says that she loves them. It's one thing to say it, but John says, put your money where your mouth is. If you say that you love God, then act like it. Then do the things that communicate love to him. If I want Jen to know that I love her, then I need to learn her and do the things that I know communicate love for her. I need to show up randomly in the middle of the day with a Chick-fil-A Coke because she didn't sleep well last night. When I do that, she knows that I love her. Jen needs to laugh at my jokes. That's all I need from her. That's all I require. Touch me sometimes. Just give me a pat on the back. You're great. And then when I make a joke like laugh and I know as long as she laughs at my joke the world is right everything's okay that's all we need but we learn to love in the language that people receive love and God says you know what I want you to do you know the important thing if you say that you love me you know how you show me you obey me you submit to submit to me. You trust me. You keep my commandments. So really the question becomes, why is obedience the thing that God asks of us to prove our love to him? And it's not that we have to prove our love to him, but why is that the proof of our love to him? I think it's for this reason. Obedience admits that God is the expert and we trust that expertise. Obedience admits that God is the expert on life, on humanity, on love, on the human condition, on the universe, and that we trust in that expertise. I'll tell you what got me thinking about that in this way. Sometime last year, some of the kind folks in the church started gently encouraging me that, hey, you know, it'd be great if we could have a cross somewhere on the stage. And so I thought through it, and I thought maybe there's a chance we can inlay one in this center panel. And we've got a lot of talented woodworkers at the church, and none of them were available. But Greg Taylor has tools. So I called Greg, and I asked if he would be interested in this. Some of y'all are picking up on that. I asked if he could help with this. And he said, yeah. He got excited about it, and we started kind of talking about what we could possibly do. He kind of sketched some stuff out and told me what he was thinking. And as he was telling me what he was thinking, I honestly thought, like, I don't think it's going to look good. I don't think, I don't, I don't think that's the way that we should go. It's not really, I don't see it like you see it. So that doesn't sound like a good idea to me. But I also know this, that knowing just a little bit more than most folks about the Bible does not make me a good interior designer. So you know what I did? I shut up. And I was like, all right, Master Woodworker, I don't see your plan. But you do, and you seem excited about it, so go ahead. And then he did that. And I came in here and I saw it. And I thought, I sure am glad I shut up, because that looks phenomenal. looks phenomenal thank you Greg the whole church got better because of that often in my role I have to trust the advice of others who have an expertise that I don't last summer when we were going through the purchase of the land we own four acres off of Litchford Road we'll find out more about what's gonna go there on the 10th of December, two weeks from today. Oh, December, I said? We're going to delay it even more. It's going to be so fun. It's going to keep you guys waiting. Yeah, thanks. Two weeks from now, September the 10th. I'm so focused on that sermon that what I want to say in that sermon kept me up all night last night. I couldn't go to sleep because I was thinking about that. And then I woke up and I was like, I kind of came to this morning. I was like, that's not even what I'm preaching this morning. I have to focus on this. I'm thinking about that a lot. But as we were going to buy the land last year, there was a team of people that were kind of informing us, informing the elders, informing me on the decisions that we should make. And they were spearheaded by one of the great partners of our church, a guy named Scott Hurst. Scott Hurst is a lifelong corporate real estate guy. And so he would call me and he would say, hey, what do you think we should do about this? Do you think we should make this kind of offer? Do you think we should do this or that or whatever? And I would always tell him, Scott, I don't know. Your vote is my vote. Whatever you think we should do is what I think we should do. I have no right to usurp your expertise and insert myself and think I know what to do as we evaluate whether or not to purchase land. I'm just trusting in your wisdom. In the same way, we had a group of people that we put together from the finance committee, from the elders, and one of the bankers that we have at the church. And we put together, I don't know if they're the finest financial minds in the church, but they were the most available at this time. So we put them in a room and we said, how much do we need to raise so that when we build the building, we're borrowing a responsible amount? And they gave me an amount. And as soon as they gave me the amount, I said, that sounds great. That's fine. Zero pushback. No questions. Let's go. Because I trust in the expertise of those people. So I'm happy to submit to what they think. Now, how ridiculously absurd would it be of me to hear the advice of those people and slough it off? To hear Greg say, hey, this is what I think we should do with the cross. And for me to be like, listen, Greg, I know you spent a lifetime in your basement, in your shop, working on projects. And I couldn't do what you've done in a whole lifetime. But I was a trim carpenter for six months when I was 25 years old. And I know a thing or two. And I'm just going to tell you, I don't like your vision, man. You need to rethink that. What if I looked at Scott Hurst when he gave me some advice on something? And I said, you know what? I didn't take a course on corporate real estate and sales deals when I was in seminary, but that was in the class right next door. And I picked up on some stuff. And I think I know a little bit better. What if I push back on the team of people that we asked to advise us on how much we need to raise? What if I push back and I said, that's not, that's a bad idea. That's not doable. I would be dumb. I'm not saying that I'm not. I'm just saying that would be proof. That'd be what you would need. I would be incredibly prideful and incredibly obstinate and incredibly short-sighted and incredibly myopic if I just threw off the advice of the experts in my life and just chose my own way. I was like, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to do this. Because I know how to read the Bible and run my mouth for 30 minutes, I'm the smartest and we're going to do what I say. No, it's dumb. It's silly. It's short-sighted and prideful to throw off that sort of wisdom. And yet, you guys see where I'm going with this? God is the author of the universe. Jesus is the founder and perfecter of your faith. God knew your very soul before he knit you in your mother's womb. He knows the hairs on your head. He knows the number. He knew the good work that he created you to walk in before he ever created you. To say that God knows you better than you know yourself is a vast understatement. He doesn't just know you. He knows the depth of you and all the possibilities of you and all the inclinations of you and all the future pathways of you. He knows all the things that bring you joy. He knows all the things that fill you up. Not only you, but everyone around you. For all of history, he designed all of this. He is the author of life. He is omniscient, meaning he is all-knowing. He is omnipresent, meaning he is everywhere. He can see every possible outcome of every possible scenario, and he can play that out better than any computer we could ever touch. He has all the algorithms. He can figure it out. We can't see past this minute, and he can see every outcome for all eternity, and he's told us some things about how we should live our lives, things that we should do and things that we shouldn't do, things that we should pursue and things that we should cut off, things that are good for us and things that will damage our soul. The author of the universe who sees into the infinite has told you those things and yet we choose to trust in our own wisdom and not his. In different ways and in different seasons and at different times. We throw off the wisdom of the infinite for the blindness of the broken. We have access. Through his word. Through his presence. Through his spirit. Through prayer. Through others. Who call Jesus their savior. We have access to him. To the divine. To the infinitely wise. And he makes it very clear what he wants us to do with our lives. He makes it very clear how we are supposed to love and how we are supposed to serve, how we are supposed to outdo one another with humility. How we are supposed to avoid certain things and embrace certain things. And in the face of that infinite wisdom that only wants what's best for us, we continue to choose the blindness of the broken. The pleasures of today sacrificing the joy of tomorrow. And I don't know where you are in your obedience to God. When I say things like, you know, there's ways in which we're all being disobedient, I don't know what comes to your mind. For some of us, we flash right away. We know the areas where we're allowing sin and the things that so easily entangle to prohibit us from running our race. When I say, what's an area of your life where you're just not being fully obedient to God, you know right away. And that's good. Others of us, because we've been at this a while, have probably settled into this place where we've begun to settle for good enough, where we worked really hard, we've done pretty well, things in life are going pretty good, we've got our spiritual disciplines, we've got our regimens, and we don't do them all the time, but we do them most of the time. And when I compare myself to the other people around me, I seem to be doing pretty well. And I know that there's more work that I could do, but it's hard. So I'm going to stop. And we settle into this kind of middle-of-the-road faith where we're just comfortable. And God, through his word and through his prayer and through worship, beckons us to more. He calls us into deeper obedience. He calls us to walk with him in stride. He calls us to abide in him. He offers this much more full life that's waiting for us on the other side of obedience, and yet we just choose to throw off the wisdom of the infinite that God knows what's best for us in favor of the blindness of the broken. No, I know what's best for myself. Do you understand that when we sin, that's what we do? We throw off God's wisdom and we choose our own wisdom? No, no, no, I know that you are the author of the universe. I know that you kind of wrote this thing and you know all the things there are to know, but for this one, I'm right. Listen, if you think I'm dumb, if I were to ignore the advice of Scott and corporate real estate, what does that make us all when we ignore God's expertise in our own life and we choose our own? It seems really silly to be disobedient when we put it that way, doesn't it? What must it feel like to God when we regularly and habitually refuse His expertise and choose our own? Is there anything, is there anything in life more infuriating than when you're talking with someone and you know you're right about a thing and they will not give it to you? They insist that you are wrong and that they are right and you don't know what universe they're from because you're right and you know you're right. And if you're a parent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This happened sometime last year and I don't remember the particular word. But Lily, my daughter, she was six at the time. And I think I've shared a little bit of this before. And again, I'm making up this conversation. I remember the gist of it, but I don't remember the word and the actual things that were said. But this is pretty much how the conversation went. She pointed to a word. It was mañana, the Spanish word for tomorrow. I think that's right, right? That means tomorrow. Yeah? You're Spanish adjacent. You should know. His wife speaks Spanish. And I said, she pointed to the word. She said, how do you say this, Daddy? And I said, you say that mañana. And she goes, I don't think that's right. And I'm like, based on what? Based on what expertise do you think I'm wrong? Like, I'm open. Maybe you know something I don't. And she goes, well, that's not, that's not how my, how my teacher at school says to say it. She's taking Spanish at school. She says, that's not how the Spanish teacher says to say it. And I said, how'd the Spanish teacher say that you should say it? And she says, banana. And I'm like, excuse me, banana? That's what you're going to enter the chat with? And I just kind of look at her. I said, I said, baby, that's not right. And she goes, yes, it is, dad. That's what my Spanish teacher said. I said, I do not believe that that's what your Spanish teacher taught you. Because if it is, there's going to be a really strongly worded email. Not that I'm passionate about Spanish education, but that's ridiculous. I'm going to write an email about that. And we're going back and forth. And I'm literally like, I'm even pulling out reason like, Lily, you have taken two months of Spanish. You're largely illiterate in English at this point in your life. I promise you, I know that it's mañana. Do you see that? That's an ñ. That means ñ, mañana. That's what that means. That's why it's there. And it didn't matter to her. Like, Lily, I took Spanish three times in high school. I only made it through. I took Spanish two twice. But I did take it three times, technically. I've been to Spanish-speaking countries. I've been exposed to that. If you drop me in the middle of Costa Rica, I could get home. There would be hand motions and things, but I could get back. Like, I know that's manana. And it was so infuriating because it didn't matter what I said. She was right, and I was wrong, and I literally had to finish the discussion about manana manana with agree to disagree. We have two different opinions about this. I was so mad. How infuriating is it? When you know the right thing to do, you know the right answer. And the person you're talking to is like, man, that's not right. And yet, as I was talking to our student pastor, Kyle, about this this week, he pointed it out and I thought it was a great point. Our God experiences so very little of that frustration. In those moments, when we're obstinate and we are insisting to him that it's pronounced manana, I do not believe that our God experiences frustration like we experience frustration. I do not believe he is angered by that like we are angered by that. In those moments of our profound obstinance, I believe that God is more hurt by our disobedience than he is frustrated. I believe he is more hurt by our disobedience than he is frustrated. I think of it like this. Some of you have walked this path. My children are not old enough to have walked this path, but I've watched other people walk it. And you know the pain of being a parent with adult children and watching those children choose a path that leads to pain. You've watched those children make choices and you can see the end of that road. You know how that's going to end. You know their life is going to be shattered because of it. You know their heart is going to break because of it. You know that they are going to shipwreck themselves with the choices they are making and you are impotent to stop them. And all you can do is sit back and hope that the crash isn't so bad. And hope that when they're ready to pick up the pieces, they ask you to help. Some of my older parents in the room know the pain of watching an adult child collide towards catastrophe knowing there is nothing that you can do. And I think that this is what our Father in Heaven experiences every day. Watching us just careen out of control, spiraling towards a collision or a blow-up or a shipwreck, knowing that what's there is going to end and hurt for us, hoping that when we get there, we allow him to help us pick up the pieces. I do not think our God experiences anger and frustration with us when we're disobedient the way that we understand those emotions. I think he experiences hurt because he knows he has something better for us. Do you ever think about why God asks us to do things? He tells us, he makes it very clear in scripture that we're not to lust, that we're to avoid sexual immorality. Are we to do that just because God wants us to live puritanical lives that aren't as exciting and interesting as those who don't put themselves under the standards of the Bible? Is that what God wants is just his children to be more puritanical and less indulgent than other people, and so let's just keep a lid on that. No. God knows that if you are married, that every time you look at someone who's not your spouse and you desire them in a way that you don't desire your spouse, that you cheapen your spouse and you make the relationship worse. Every time you look at someone outside your marriage and you compare them to who you are married to and you want things that they seem to have that your spouse doesn't seem to have, then you cheapen your spouse and you weaken your marriage. Every time. And God knows this. So he doesn't tell us not to lust because he wants us to be Puritans. That's a happy accident of avoiding lust. But the point is, it's only when we never do that, it only deepens our devotion to our spouse. It only deepens our attraction to our spouse. It only heightens our desire for them. And then in living within this happy, fulfilling marriage where you two are mutually desired, guess what you experience? Maximum happiness and joy in a happy marriage, which is what we all want. God says, he tells us in Psalms, David writes this. In his presence there is fullness of joy, his right hand is our pleasures forevermore. It's the idea that if we pursue him, if we obey him, then the best things are waiting for us there. Why does he tell you not to be greedy? Because he doesn't want you to have nice things? Because he wants you to live the life of a pauper? No, because he knows that if you're greedy, that those things that you want are going to own you. That you're going to live a life serving stuff and image. And it'll throw off your priorities and you won't be the spouse that you're supposed to be and you won't be the parent that you're supposed to be and you won't be the member of God's church and kingdom that you're supposed to be. Because you spend your life pursuing and hanging on to stuff. And there's no joy to be found there. If you think about anything in the Bible that God tells you to do, anything in the Bible that requires your obedience, and you ask yourself, and listen, I'll give you a hint. I always preach this. Whenever there is an instruction from God in the Bible, and I have to present it to you, hey, guys, we need to not be prideful. Hey, guys, we need to not lust. Hey, the Bible tells us that we need to pursue humility. Like, whatever it is, I'm always thinking in the back of my head, why? Why is it important for God that we would do those things? Why would he instruct his children in those things? And the conclusion, it looks a lot of different ways and a lot of different sermons, but this is the basic formula. He tells us to do something, A, because when we do it, we love other people and him better. Bottom line. When we don't lust, we're loving God and others better. When we're not prideful, we love God and others better. When we're not greedy, we love God and others better. When we show humility, we love God and others better. When we offer hospitality, we love God and others better. That's always the first answer. And then ancillary to that, the benefit of that, that should push our selfish souls directly to it, is that also it's what's best for us. Also, there is the greatest joy found in obedience. There is the greatest joy in the fullest life found in following the good shepherd. God asks us to be obedient. He puts things in front of us, not for his weird pleasure, not because he wants us to feel bad, not to browbeat us and make us puritanical, but because by walking in obedience to God, we love him and others better, and we find the greatest joy possible. So he urges his children to obey him. That's why I love this verse in John 10.10. It hangs over my desk. I think in this verse is the fundamental question for all of Christendom. Jesus in John 10 is referring to himself as the good shepherd, and he says he lays at the gate of the pen to protect us, and then he says this, the thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. Other translations say, have it to the full. And I love that verse. I love that thought, that point. Jesus came that we might have life and have it to the full. And so it's no mistake. It's no exaggeration to say that Jesus wants the best life possible for you. That's not health and wealth, praying that. I'm not telling you if you follow him, you're going to be rich and no one in your family is ever going to get sick. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is in Jesus the promise is, if you follow your good shepherd and go where he leads you, and don't wander into your own fields trying to find your own sustenance, but if you trust him and you follow him and his wisdom, he will lead you to the best pastures, and in those pastures, you will find fullness of life, life to the full, life abundant. Meaning, there is no greater life waiting for you outside of God's commands. Which brings us to the fundamental question of Christianity. Jesus says, he's the good shepherd. Do you believe him? Jesus says, he will take you to the best pastures. Do you believe him? Jesus says, if you just put your head down and follow him, if you just abide in him, that you will find a fullness of joy there that you can find nowhere else. Do you believe him? He beckons with that teaching the simple question, hey, hey, hey, do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust Jesus? And John, at the end of his life, as he distills all the teaching of a lifetime to this singular point, hey, do you trust Jesus? Do you say that you love him? Do you say that you know him? Well then, obey him, because obedience proves trust. I don't know what areas of your life you would look at and say that they're out of sync with God. I don't know where you would find your disobedience. But whenever there's an area of our life that's not submitted to God and his wisdom, what we are saying with our actions is, I'm the expert here. I don't need you. I do not trust you to be the good shepherd. I will be my own shepherd and I will find my own pastures. Thanks very much. So that's the question that I would leave you with. When Jesus says that he's the good shepherd, when God says that he cares for us, when we're told that he's going to lead us into green pastures, when we're told that in his presence there is fullness of joy, in his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. Do you believe that? If you do, then obey him. And if you need to pray while I'm praying, if you need to pray while we're singing, and offer some areas of your life over to God where you've been walking in disobedience, declare that now before you walk out those doors that you will offer those over to him and you will walk in obedience and trust him to be the good shepherd. Prove to God with your obedience to his commands that you love him and you trust him. And what you'll find there is the best life possible. Let's pray. Father, I always say that we love you. And we do. I know that we do. And God, we believe. But sometimes we need you to help our unbelief. God, I know that this room is full of people who love you, who want to love you more, who want to know you better. But we have so many things clinging on to our souls, entangling us, keeping us from running our races. So we simply pray this morning, God, that you would help us see them. What are the things holding us back? What are the pockets of disobedience that we've clung to and allowed and fostered and nurtured over the years that we need to expose and let go? God, if there are things pressing on our hearts and our souls right now, would you not let us leave this place until we agree to submit those things to you? To walk in obedience in those areas once and for all. Lord, we love you. We pray that our actions this week would bear that out. That we would love you and others well. In Jesus' name, amen.