Sermons tagged with Soul

Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Good for you for being here today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. Do we have anybody here who particularly cares who wins, feels very stridently about the Eagles or the Chiefs? No one's willing to admit. Okay. All right. I saw one fist up indicating neither team, but go your team, Kay. I will be cheering for them tonight on your behalf. This is literally, in my opinion, the worst weather possible. It's almost freezing and it's raining, but it's not cold enough to actually have anything fun happen, so we just trudged through it together, and here you are. Thanks for being here. This morning, we are appropriately talking, based on the weather, appropriately talking about mourning and grief and sadness. As we go through our series, The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the Beatitudes that come at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus's first recorded public address. And he opens up that address, that sermon, with a list of nine blessings in the book of Matthew. You find them in chapter five, and then the following sermon in five, six, and seven. And when he opens up with these blessings, he's speaking exactly to where the Israeli people are at the time. And he says, if this is you, then you're blessed. And so last week we opened up the series and we talked about that word blessed. And it's important that we define that and understand what it means to be built, to be blessed by God. And what it means very simply is to be fully satisfied, is to have all that you need, to be lacking for nothing, which when you think about it is a pretty profound definition of blessing. Because we can be in all different stages and all different instances in life, in all different situations, we can have plenty, we can have a little, we can be hurting, we can be exuberant, and in that moment we have all that we need, God says we are blessed. So this morning we look at one of the blessings, and it's probably the blessing that I find to be the most counterintuitive. It's when Jesus says this in Matthew chapter 5 verse 4 very simply, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. When this blessing is recounted in Luke, it says blessed are those who weep for they will laugh. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. And I don't know what you think of when you think of mourning, people who mourn. And maybe my perspective as a pastor is a little bit different than others. I don't know. I don't have another perspective. But there's things in life that we are sad about that cause us to grieve, right? The loss of a relationship when you're in middle school or high school. The person you like doesn't like you back. That's devastating. This causes us great mourning and teenage angst. We know about this. The loss of a job, the loss of an opportunity to get a promotion. Something bad happens to your kid and you mourn that. There's a little bit of sadness. There's different degrees of sadness and mourning. But what I think Jesus is talking about here, where my mind goes, what I think is implied in the Luke version of it, blessed are those who weep, what I think of is this deep, soul-aching sadness that there really are no words for. If you've lived life long enough, you have walked through a grief like that. Or you've walked with others or seen others as they walk through a grief so deep and so profound that words fail you. What do you say to parents whose eight-year-old had an adverse reaction to a prescription drug that they were given for a simple illness and it causes them to die and you have to do their funeral, what do you say to those parents? What do you say to people who are young who lose their parents way too early in a profoundly sad way. What do you say? What do you say to people who sit in the midst of the wreckage of their marriage? Sometimes because of decisions they did not make, and now they are grieving not just their marriage, but the future they had always envisioned for them and their kids. What do you say in the midst of that grief? What do you say to the wife with three kids under five who just lost her husband? What do you say when your friends have miscarried for the third time. When I think of mourning, grief, sadness, that's what I think of. Those times in life when the sadness is so profound, the ache is so present, that words fail you. And it would feel altogether stupid to hug them and say everything's going to be okay. Because it just doesn't seem sufficient. What do we say in those moments? Well, here's what Jesus said. That you're blessed if you're there. Because you will be comforted. Now, all those situations I just listed out for you are situations that I've been in. Situations I've seen. Situations I've walked with other people through. And it never occurred to me in those moments, nor will it occur to me in the future moments, to say to them, you know what, I know you're hurting right now, but you are blessed because God's coming for you. And yet, this is what Jesus says to a grief-stricken people, to dads who can't afford to feed their children, to a society in which the average age of death and infant mortality rate were respectively incredibly low and incredibly high. They knew pain and sorrow and grief. And Jesus says to them, you're blessed for you will be comforted. How is it that Jesus can say that to those people? How is it that Jesus can say that to us in the midst of our grief and our pain? And how is it that mourning can be a blessing? That in our mourning, we can see that we actually have all that we need. I think one thing that is helpful for me, it might not be helpful for everyone, but one thing that is helpful for me based on the Luke iteration of the Sermon on the Mount. In Luke's version of the Sermon on the Mount, there are blessings and then there are woes. There are woes to counterbalance those blessings. So when Luke records it, he remembers that Jesus says, blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh. And then later when he gets to the woes, he says, woe to those who laugh, for they shall weep and mourn. And so he introduces kind of this cyclical nature of life. There will be seasons of mourning and there will be seasons of laughter. There will be seasons of celebration. There will be seasons of sadness. And so what we see in life, what we see in Ecclesiastes, what we see in the biblical text over and over and over again, and what we know experientially is that morning is as natural as morning. Morning in life is as natural as morning in the day. What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that 18 hours from now, if Jesus doesn't come back and stop it, morning's coming, right? I don't know if I did the math right. I'm just throwing out 18 hours. You might disagree. I don't know when sun rises tomorrow, but technically speaking, if we don't have any more UFOs invading our country, Lord knows what's going on there. As long as Jesus doesn't come back, in 18 hours, it'll be morning. It's coming. There's nothing we can do about it. Whether we can see it or not, like today, whether we want it or not, unless Jesus stops time or returns and breaks the cycle, morning is coming. And in life, until Jesus returns, until he breaks in and breaks the cycle, mourning is coming. So when we mourn, when we hurt, when life is hard, we ought not be surprised by that. We ought to just think, it's my turn. This is inevitable. Everyone mourns. And I think it's really important to point this out. It's one of the large reasons. I had nine blessings to choose from. I chose this one, and it's one of the big reasons I chose to spend the morning highlighting mourning and the fact that it is cyclical and inevitable and will happen. Because as long as I am your pastor, I will do whatever I can from this small stage to beat back the idea that once we sign up for God's agenda, that he gives us a get out of grief free card. There is this pernicious idea in Christian history that when I begin to follow God, everything else is going to go okay for me. I'm going to close the sale and I'm going to avoid the big hurts and I'm going to avoid the big things and the raindrops of grief will miss my head and my family's heads. And yeah, sure, I mean, I'm going to have to go through some sadness at some times, but it's not going to be too bad. He'll never give me more than I can handle. The Bible has nothing to say about that. Nowhere does Scripture indicate that following God is a get-out-of-grief-free card for his children. And it's an incredibly damaging thing to teach otherwise. Because what happens is we find ourselves in the midst of mourning and we think, my God has betrayed me and let me down. Because he's allowing me to hurt this much. And what right and good theology says is, no, no, no. God never promised that those things wouldn't happen to you. But he does make a lot of promises to us in the midst of that morning. One of my favorite ones, it's one that I mention in funerals when I do them. It's one that buoys me that I am reminded of. There's a passage in Isaiah that says, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we hurt the most, God is closest to us. When we are crushed in spirit, when we are weeping, when we are mourning, when it's that soul ache is when God himself sees us most and clings to us hardest. I can't ever hear that verse without thinking of the dynamic, and maybe it's because we're in the season where we have young kids. I can't ever hear that verse without thinking of the dynamic of how a young kid, when they hurt, runs to mama or runs to daddy, right? How the only thing they want in the world is the shelter of their parents. Jen was able this week to see this play out in real time. Lily was involved in a spelling bee, and it was an off-campus spelling bee. So Lily, or Jen had to take her to another school. Jen is my wife, by the way. Lily's my daughter. They're not just two random people I talk about. So Jen was taking Lily to the spelling bee, and they get there. And the way that this thing was set up is they gather all the kids together, and they take them into the classrooms, and the parents sit in the gym. And they just silently watch these double doors. And it's grades one through eight. And as it's your kid's turn, you don't know what's happening in the classroom. As it's your kid's turn, they spell and you know, they get it right and they stay in the classroom or they miss it and they have to do the walk of shame in front of all the parents. They come trickling through the double doors, dejected, and everyone knows you're not very smart. And then here they come. And so the parents are just sitting there staring at the doors. I'm, I'm at the house hanging out with John, who is my son. And, and just, I can't get enough. I'm just texting Jen nonstop. I'm on, I'm on the edge over here. I can't take it. What's going on? What's going on? Who's coming out? She's giving me live updates. Oh, but someone like someone's been defeated from our little school. Uh, the, the, this little boy, this little girl, they've come out. They said, Lily's hanging in there. It's round 15. She's fighting hard. I'm like, go, Lily, you know. But as these kids come out one by one, they come through the door. And what do they do? They're scanning the room for their parents. And they run to mama, and they hug mama. And the first kids who get out, they're fine, you know. They didn't have high expectations for the day. They're good. Let's hit the road, mom. Maybe there's a Shake Shack down here. But the kids who lasted longer, man, they were in it, right? It gets stressful in that room, first grade for two and a half hours spelling words. They start to hope. Lily wore her gold shoes that morning. She thought she was going to win. And so gradually they start to come out. When they hug mama, they're crying, they're hurting. They're releasing the stress of the day, the disappointment, maybe a little embarrassment. And the only one in the world who can comfort them is their parent, right? They're hurting. They're mourning. And sure enough, Lily comes out of there. She looks around for Jen, runs to her. They cry together. Lily cries because she's disappointed. Jen cries because she's a mom. And she sees that she has a different perspective on the pain than Lily does. She has a different perspective on the disappointment that Lily does. And she cries mostly because she just hurts for Lily. And after a minute or two, classmates start to gather around, and everyone gives their condolences, and then one little girl tells Lily very happily, they have cake pops here. And then suddenly, the spelling bee fades, and we're cake pops and grilled cheese at Zaxby's, and the world is right. But this is what we do when we hurt. We come through the gym doors and we scan the horizon for our Heavenly Father. We're drawn to Him. And He's drawn to us. And He sees us in those moments. And then, in those moments, when we need him, when we need his arms to wrap around us, when our soul aches, and we will never be too big, and we will never be too tough, and we will never be too manly, or whatever other stupid adjective we could put there to need our heavenly father to wrap his arms around us. We will never be beyond that. And when we hurt the most, He offers Himself the most. He comforts those who are crushed in spirit. He is close to the brokenhearted. And when He is close to us, do you know what He does? John 11, 35, He weeps with us. He holds us and he weeps too because his perspective on our pain is a little different. Because he knows that we don't really understand what it is we're walking through, but he sees it for what it is. And he holds us and he comforts us. This is what Jesus does in John 11, 35 that I mentioned. His best friend Mary has lost her brother Lazarus who's very close to him too. And she weeps to Jesus, why'd you let this happen? And he doesn't answer her, he just weeps with her. I will never get over the idea that there is an all-powerful, divine being who spoke the vast universe into existence, who knows who I am, and he knows the hairs on my head, and when I weep and when I hurt, he weeps with me. He is that intimately involved in our lives. Whether it's a small hurt or a big one. He's there. And what I find interesting about the way that God comforts us is that so often if you say, well, how does God wrap his arms around me? I think so often he does that through his other children, right? So often God comforts us by sending his children to be the ones who are the vehicles of that comfort, to wrap their arms around you, and maybe to say everything's going to be okay, and maybe just to say, I know it seems like everything isn't going to be okay, and I don't know what to tell you, but I'm here and I love you. And I'm pretty sure God loves you too. And let's just let that be enough right now. So often when we hurt and it says that God is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. How does he do that? By sending his children, his hands and his feet into our lives to comfort us. And what's so amazing about this comfort when they offer it is that the best comfort, and you know it if you've been through it, the best comfort when our soul aches only comes from people who have walked that path too. Many of you know that part of our story is that in 2019, Jen's dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he fought that battle hard until the end of 2020. And it was in early December of 2020 that we were about to have a service and I got a call just before the service. Jen's uncle was down there with her dad in Athens and outside of Atlanta. And he called me and he said, hey, it's time. You need to get the family down here. And I said, okay. Did the service. Went home. Jen was packing up the kids, getting things ready. And in our scramble to get out of town, there was a knock on the front door. And it was her friend Lisa. She had heard that it was time to go. And she came over. And she knocked on the door and she hugged Jen. And I don't know exactly what she said, but it was not much. But she essentially just said, I'm so very sorry. And they hugged and they cried. And Lisa left and we went to Georgia. Now what makes that hug and those words so profound from Lisa is that she had just walked through that with her own mother. So when she looked Jen in the eye and she said, I am so very sorry. She knew exactly the path that Jen had walked for those previous two years. The ups and downs and the good phone calls and the bad phone calls and the hoping and the praying and the staying up at night. She knew all that. She knew how terrible that was. And she knew how terrible the next few weeks were going to be and what we were going to see and witness and walk through. She knew that. And all of that went into, I'm so very sorry. And those words brought Jen better comfort than the dozens, if not hundreds of people, including me, all along the process who had hugged her tearfully and said, I'm so very sorry. Because if you haven't walked that path, that's great. I'm glad that you're sorry. I know you are. I appreciate that. I received that. But you don't know. So when someone who has walked that path of grief, who's been through that divorce, who's been through that dejection or disappointment, who has experienced that loss, can look you in the eye and say, I'm so very sorry. It carries a different weight. And so it occurs to me that one of the things that makes us blessed when we mourn is because when we get to the other side of that mourning and we are comforted and we have all that we need and we move through it and our heart and our soul heal in whatever way they can, that we will also get to be the hands and feet of Jesus as God himself comforts his hurting children down the road. So you could almost say, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted and comfort. That in the midst of your mourning, it is cold solace. But the reality is for the rest of your life, you will be able to offer empathy and tears that will mean more to people because of the path you've walked than any other empathy and tears they might get. The hardest thing I've ever walked through from a mourning perspective is our miscarriage. The first time we got pregnant, the time before Lily, we miscarried. And before that, as a pastor, and I'm also just ridiculously pragmatic and stupid sometimes, as a pastor, when I would hear that couples had miscarried, my honest, dumb thought was, oh, well, that's too bad. They'll have another one. Which is just mind-numbing, but I was also in my 20s. I just hadn't experienced enough life to know that that's not what a miscarriage means. It's the loss of a dream. It's the loss of hope fulfilled. It's incredibly devastating to walk through that. Particularly if you've tried really, really hard to get pregnant. Particularly if it's not your first one. And in some ways I'm glad that we have walked through that because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt it has made me a better pastor for couples who are walking through that as well. And I would never again cheapen that grief by trying to move past it and look ahead. But I can hug them and look them in the eye and know their pain and say, I'm so sorry. And so in that small way, through our grief, God allows Jen and I to be blessings to others when the time comes. And so part of the blessing of mourning is knowing that in this cycle of weeping and laughing, when other people enter into a mourning phase, we can walk with them and be used by God to bring them comfort. And here's what's really interesting about the comfort that he brings us when we are hurting. When he brings a person along, when a song shows up in an unexpected place, when we are scrolling and we just happen to see something that touches us, whatever it might be, whatever that temporal comfort is that he gives us, that temporal comfort is intended to point us to our eternal comfort. This comfort that God offers us as we hurt is temporary. It's a salve. It's a balm. It's a band-aid. It helps our scarred souls, but it does not fully heal us. It is a temporal comfort intended to point us to and remind us of the eternal comfort that we cling to. As I was preparing this sermon, I sat down with Jen and I just said, listen, you've been through profound grief and I feel like I have not. What do I say? What do I talk about? I actually pitched a couple of ideas. I said, here's what I was thinking about saying. And she looked at me and she was like, those are not helpful to me. All right, cool. Well, then what should I say? And she shared this verse with me and told me that this is something that sustained her and continues to sustain her. And I think that there is tremendous power to this idea. And honestly, she said, it's that Hebrews verse that talks about hope being our anchor. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a good verse. Googling off to the side. Which verse is this? It's one that had not stuck out to me before, but it is now one that I will never forget. But it says this in Hebrews chapter 6 I want us to hold on to is this idea that this hope anchors us. It anchors us. And one of the things that she kind of pointed out to me is that that cycle of mourning, that cycle of weeping and laughing, of mourning and celebration, of times of plenty and times of little, That's inevitable. Those things are artificial. Life ebbs and flows around us. But the thing that keeps her anchored, that keeps her steady, that keeps her pointed at God is the hope that she clings to. Whether life would seek to buoy you in exuberance or drown you in sorrow. There is an anchor that holds us there in the middle, and that anchor is our hope in Jesus. That's what our hope is placed in. The anchor is the hope, and the hope is placed in Jesus. In Jesus doing what? In Jesus doing what he says he's going to do. I say all the time that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And the way that I always say it, and it's particularly applicable this morning, is that he's going to come back one day and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. In the midst of our mourning, and for that matter, in the midst of our celebrations, the comfort that we have in each scenario reminds us of the eternal comfort that Jesus has promised us. That one day he's coming back. And one day he's going to break the cycle. There's not going to be any more weeping and laughing. There's only going to be laughing. What God's promise is and what our hope is, is that one morning there will be no more mourning. There will be a day that breaks at some point in the future. We don't know when and we don't know how long we have to wait, but there will be a day that breaks. And when that day breaks, the only mourning that's left is the next day. There will be no more mourning with the children of God. And one of the great solaces we have is that if our grief is related to loss, the loss of a loved one, if they know Jesus, they are experiencing that mourning already. And so in the midst of the ebbs and flows of life, when our soul aches, we can hold on to that anchor of hope that reminds us of who Jesus is and what he came to do. That reminds us that Jesus promises us in Revelation 19 that he's gonna come back and on his thigh is gonna be written righteous and true and he's gonna conquer death and sin once and for all and there will be no more mourning. Revelation 21, I love to remind you of it. There is coming a day where God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things, the things that bring you grief, the things that scar your soul, the things that make your heart ache, that make you wonder if you can go another day. Those things will never happen again because they will have passed away. That is the promise of Jesus and that is the hope that anchors our souls as we go through the ebbs and flows of life. And as Christians, that is our greatest hope. That is our greatest encouragement. That is what we cling to. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes that I share every Easter. I believe it's Pope John Paul II who says, we do not give way to despair for we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. Because Jesus died and rose again on the third day and conquered sin and death and promises us a day, promises us a morning where there will be no more mourning, we believe that he will come again and do what he says he's going to do. And so what we can say for sure, when we find ourselves in the depths of despair, when we find our friends drowning in sorrow, is that we can whisper into their ear, hang on, cling to the hope that one day things like this will not happen anymore and that one day you will be healed and that one day, because of the hope that Jesus gives us, you will be reunited, you will be restored, you will be made right. So how is it that Jesus can say, blessed are those who mourn? Because he knew what he was going to do. And he knew that one day he would take away all of that mourning and make sure that for eternity we exist in joy and laughter. And so we cling to that hope in Christ. Let's pray. Father, I just pray for those right now who hurt. Those of us who are walking through a season of mourning and hurt and grief. I pray that they would feel your presence. That they would feel your love. That they would feel your comfort, that your church would serve them well. God, I pray for those who are in seasons of joy and celebration. Would we honor you well in those? Would we use those seasons to comfort others when we can? Thank you for the hope that you give us in Jesus. God, if there's anyone here today who doesn't know you, who hasn't yet professed a belief in your son, who hasn't yet claimed that future that you promised, I pray that they would. Even right now as we pray and sing and finish up, stir our souls and our hearts to you. Bring comfort to those who need it. Give the rest of us eyes to see that need. And give us the strength as we need it to cling to that anchor of hope. That one day you're going to come get us. And you're going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. In Jesus' name, amen.

I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

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

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

I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life, all over my life. I see promises in fulfillment. All over my life. All over my life. Help me remember when I'm weak. Fear may come, but fear will lead. You lead my heart to victory. You are my strength, and you always will be. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. All over my life. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life, all over my life. See the cross, the empty grave, the evidence of your goodness. Jesus. I see your promises in fulfillment all over my life, all over my life, yeah. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life. Yeah, you're all around us. So why should I fear? The evidence is here. Why should I fear? Oh, the evidence is here. I searched the world, but it couldn't fill me. Melted deep rays, treasures of fame were never enough. Then you came along and put me back together. And every desire is now satisfied here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you. There's nothing better than you. Oh, there's nothing, nothing is better than you. Come on, tell them. To show you my weakness My failures and flaws Lord, you've seen them all And you still call me friend Cause the God of the mountains Is the God of the valleys There's not a place Your mercy and grace won't find me again. Oh Come on. Tell them now. Come on, choir. Oh, there's nothing better than you. Nothing. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. You're the only one who can. Somebody give a praise in this house. I don't think we're finished yet. Come on. Come on, one more can. You're the only one who can. You're the only one who can. Jesus, you're the only one. Come on, give Him one more shout of praise. When all I see is the battle, you see my victory. When all I see is the mountain, you see a mountain moon. And as I walk through the shadow, your love surrounds me. There's nothing to fear now, for I am safe with you. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees, with my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs for you. Thank you, God. God, you see the end to tell. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees. With my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs to you. And every fear I lay at your feet. I'll sing through the night. Oh God, the power of our God. You shine in the shadow. You win every battle. Nothing can stand against the power of our God. In all mighty fortunes, you go before us. Nothing can stand against the power of our God We wanted to let you know that our mission here at Grace is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. One of the best ways to communicate with us here at Grace is through our connection cards. If you would like to speak to a pastor at Grace, if you have any prayer requests for our prayer team and our elders, or if you're not receiving our Grace Vine weekly emails, this would be a great way to fill it out and let us know. If you're watching with us online, you can click the link below and submit the connection card there. Or if you're here with us at Grace, the connection card is in the seat back pocket in front of you. Just be sure to drop it on your way out in the box next to the doors. Thanks so much for joining us this morning and we hope that this service is a blessing to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here at Grace Raleigh. I'd like to ask you to stand. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace, and it's great having people here in the room. It's great having people at home joining in with us. I thought that this morning we could start off with the scripture of John 3.16, that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Come all you sinners Come find his mercy Come to the table He will satisfy Taste of his goodness Find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us. Whoever believes in Him will live forever. bring all your failures bring your addictions come lay them down at the foot of the cross Jesus is waiting there with hope in our hearts For God so loved the world praise god praise god from whom all blessings Praise Him, praise Him For the wonders of His love For God so loved the world that He gave us His one and only Son to save The power of hell forever defeated Now it is well, I'm walking in freedom Oh God so loved, God so loved the world Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Come lay them down at the foot of the cross. Jesus is waiting. God so loved the world. Amen. God sent his son. They called him Jesus. He came to love, heal, and forgive. He lived and died. To buy my pardon. An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. he lives all fear is gone because i know he holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives And then one day I'll cross that river I'll fight my spine No war with me And then as death Gives way to victory I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know He lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone Because I know He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives. And life is worth the living just because He lives. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all can have a seat for a moment. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It is fabulous to see your smiling faces in here. And welcome to those of you that have joined us online. It is a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning, Welcome to the world for this beautiful sunny weather because in two weeks, the mission committee will be here to gather all of the goodies that you choose to bring. So if you go to Grace Raleigh's events page, you will find a list of things that the mission committee is looking for for the Interfaith Food Shuttle. You will buy those. And then on either that Friday or either that, I'm sorry, that Saturday or that Sunday, you can drive through. The hours are listed on the screen. You can drive through. They will come out to your car. They will pick it up. They will bring it inside, and they will take care of it. So all you have to do is go to the grocery. And I guess these days you could even have it delivered to your house. So that is fabulous. And speaking of driving by and dropping off, if you are the parent of a 6th grader through 12th grader, today is the day you get to drive by and push them out of the car. Woo-hoo! We are so excited to announce that Grace Students is back up and running live and in person. Kyle will be here tonight in all of his fun. And we have the cool thing happening too that he's live streaming the service. So if for some reason your 6th through 12th grader can't be in the building tonight, no problem. Email Kyle, kyle at graceralee.org. And he has all the information and the links that you need to be able to be attached to the live stream and join in that way. They're now going to start into a routine of being in person one week, meeting online together the next week in person, and you get the idea. But email Kyle for any information that you guys might need. So thank you again for coming, for being a part of Grace Raleigh thisbbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody here. This is as full as the church has been since last February. That's crazy. Man, you guys, apparently, we've been going through Ecclesiastes. Y'all love depression and hopelessness. So thanks for showing up to that. You're like, I got to get out of the house now. Maybe that's what I needed to do the whole time, which is make you really, really sad. So you had to come see people. This is great. If you're still joining us at home, we're so grateful for that. This is the third part in our series called Vapor, where we're moving through the book of Ecclesiastes. We've said the whole time that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. And what's really fun is that this is the joyful sermon. This is the one, this is the good news. This is the one where we celebrate. We only did two songs up front because we want to end praising God together, and he gave us sunshine to do this. So it seems that the weather is matching the rhythm of the series, and I think that that's fantastic. In the first week, we started out and we talked about this idea of a hevel or vapor or smoke, and we concluded that Solomon would argue that a vast majority of Americans are wasting their life, right? Which means a vast majority of us are probably investing our life pursuing things that ultimately we can't grab onto or vapor or smoke. They're here one day and they're gone the next. And so that really left us with this question at the end of that week, is there a worthwhile investment of our lives? And if you have notes, you see that at the top of your notes. I think that's been a question that's been lingering in the series. Is there really a worthwhile investment of my life or is it all just a waste of time? Is everyone here just, we're all just chasing vapor? And I think that there's a good answer to that question, but last week we answered it a little bit, but we stumbled into another harsh reality. The harsh reality that even if we pursue wisdom with our life, even if we're obedient, the godliest of the godly, that does not insulate us from pain. Our godliness doesn't protect us from grief, right? And so what we learned by looking at that beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy. There's a time for grieving and there's a time for healing and there's a time to be hurt. There's a time to live and there's a time to die. Like we saw that passage. And what we learned is that pain is not punitive. God's not tightening the screws on us to punish us. Pain is the result of a fallen world, right? And that the harsh reality that Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes is that no matter what we do, we're going to hurt. No matter how godly we are, there will be seasons of mourning in our life. And so that leaves us, I think, with another really difficult question. Can I ever hope for true happiness? Can I ever, on this side of eternity, grasp onto something that isn't Hevel or vapor or smoke? Can I grasp onto a joy that is immutable and unchangeable, that is resistant to circumstances in life, that even as the storms come, I can still find myself in seasons of joyfulness and contentment? Is it even possible to do those things? And I think those are the two big questions that we bring into this week. Is it possible to pursue anything that really matters? And is it possible to grab onto anything that looks like actual true contentment and joy? And the answer to those questions, I think, is yes. And Solomon answers those questions multiple times in Ecclesiastes. I think in four separate passages, he addresses those with the exact same answer. Four different times, he gives this answer, and I love this answer. I think there's so much bound up in his choice to answer the questions in this way. But like I said, he says it in four separate times. I'm going to read you two of them so that you can get a sense. They're in your notes. If you have them, they'll be on the screen if you're following along at home. But here's what he writes in Ecclesiastes, Solomon repeats this idea. That at the end of the day, what's left for us to do is enjoy our toil, enjoy our food and drink, and honor our God. The end of the book, he ends. The end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. We talked about that last week. And it's important that as we look through what I think is kind of this formula for contentment, that we understand that when he's talking about eating and drinking, when we see eating and drinking in the Bible, that is almost always a reference to a communal activity. Eating and drinking is inherently communal. The Bible rarely talks about eating for sustenance, right? It rarely talks about food as this way to be healthy. It always talks about food and bread and gathering around a table as a form of community. And so when he says that there's nothing for man to do except to find joy in what he does and to eat and to drink. What he means is when we look around the table, when we have our meals, if we love the people who are around us, that's good. That's a gift from God. We go out to eat, we're eating with our friends, and we look around and we have genuine affection, we enjoy these people. That's a gift from God. When you look around your table and you have family there and you love that family. Now listen, we're all parts of families. We know that love isn't just sing song and fairy tales all the time. Sometimes it's hard, but at the end of the day, if you know that I love you and you love me, then that's a gift from God. And so when he's talking about food and drink, he's really referencing community. And then when he talks about toil, enjoying your toil, I have a men's group that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6.30. Anybody can join us if you want to. Just email me. Well, the more the merrier there. And we were talking about this word toil. And to a room full of men, it means career, right? It means work. It means what's your job? But Solomon uses that word a lot more broadly than that in Ecclesiastes. And the word toil really doesn't refer to your job or your career as much as it refers to the activities that you have set aside for that day, the productivity of that day, whatever it is you're going to do. Because we have some men in the group who are retired. If it's only about work, career, then they have no shot at happiness, right? They better get back to it. But really, it's broader than that. It really means, Toyo, what do you have set for yourself today? What productivity are you going to engage in today? And then in this verse, he says that we should do good. And he defines doing good as honoring God with our life, fearing God and keeping his commandments. And it's with these understandings that I kind of arrive at this conclusion of kind of Solomon's equation for contented joy and apex happiness. And I really do think it's this. People you love plus tasks you enjoy plus honoring God equals apex happiness. Listen to me. If when you eat, if as you move through your day, you look around and the people in your life bring you joy, and when you wake up, you're looking forward to the things that you're going to do in that day. Maybe not everything, but the point of the day brings you joy. And you're honoring God with your life. If those things are true of you, then I want you to know this morning, you are apex happy. It doesn't get better than that. Sometimes our problem is just that we can't see it. But I'm telling you, man, if you wake up every day and you get to have breakfast with your family or you go out to lunch with some people at work that you enjoy or you look forward to seeing some friends at small group or something like that, if you look around at your community and you're surrounded by people you love and you look at your days and God has given you something to put your hand to that you enjoy, that gives you a sense of purpose, that helps you become who he's created you to be and use your gifts and abilities to point people to Jesus as you move throughout your days, if that's what you get to do and you're honoring God as you do those things, then listen to me, you are experiencing apex happiness in your life. And I think that we get it so messed up sometimes. We do all the things that Solomon talked about in the first two chapters, and we chase all the things. We run out there and we chase all the success and all the relationships and all the money and all the fulfillment and all the pleasure and all the stuff that's out there. When really what's true is God has already given us everything we need for joy. God has already provided in our lives everything we need for joy. And listen, if you don't have those things, if you look around, you're like, I don't like any of the people in my life right now. If you don't have a fulfillment in your job, if you're not honoring God with your life, then guess what? Those things are attainable. Those things aren't out there and forever away. Those things are attainable. They're right around you. God gives us everything we need for joy within our reach. That's why I brought this chair today. This chair here is my chair from my house. This is my chair in my living room. This chair sits in the corner of our living room, and opposite me is we have a little sectional couch. There's other people who sit in this chair sometimes, but for the most part, it's me. When I sit in this chair, I get to watch dance recitals. I get to watch Lily come in with her friends, and they sing Elsa to me. And I pretend to care about Elsa. I get to watch dumb little magic tricks. We went to some restaurant and they gave her some pot with a magnet on the bottom and there's a plant that comes out of the wand and she comes in and she does the abracadabra, the whatever, and then she pulls it out and for the 37th time, I'm amazed by this magic trick, right? I sit in this chair and Jen sits on the couch and we talk about our days. We talk about what's hard and we talk about what's fun. From this chair, when someone rings the doorbell, if I angle my head just right, I can see down the hallway to the front door and I can see the little face that's there to come play with Lily. If they're all over, I can look this way out the window and I can look at them all, all the neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline that we got to get for her. In the mornings when I'm doing life right and I'm downstairs reading like I'm supposed to, at about 6.45, 7 o'clock, I can look up the stairs and see Lily up there and motion her down to come sit in my lap and tell me what she's going to do that day. When we have friends over, which I love to do, eventually we end up in our living room and we sit around and we talk and we giggle and we laugh. In the pandemic, I worked from this chair. I set up a little table right here and I do my Zoom calls and I argue with the elders and that's pure joy except for Chris Lata. I love working from that table. I can see all the things that bring me the most joy from this chair. And if I go out there chasing joy, if I go out there trying to track everything down, what am I going to do? Buy a new house for this chair These are from old David. If this church grows to 2,000 people and I get to feel what that feels like, do my conversations with my family and friends get any better from sitting in this chair? No, man. This is it. And sometimes it's not the chair, right? Sometimes it's the kitchen. Sometimes it's when I get to cook dinner and Jen sits on the stool and we talk about our days. Sometimes it's the mornings when Ruby and Lily are on the bed and I'm in the chair in the corner of that room and we're all talking, just enjoying our times. But here's what I know. I can go out there chasing whatever I want to chase. But my times of most profound joy come when I'm right there. They come when I'm around the people that I love the most. They come when I'm soaking in the blessings that God has given me. And this is what we need to pay attention to. Solomon tells us these are God's gifts to us. If people in your life that you love, who love you, they're God's gift to you. Drink them in. Hug them more. Tell them more that you care about them. Tell them more that you're grateful for them. Tell them more that they are a gift from God in your life. You have a thing to do every day that you like to put your hand to, whether it's raising kids or volunteering somewhere or spending time in your neighborhood or going to work or looking forward to seeing your friends or whatever it is. You have things that God has given you that make you productive, that let you feel like you are living out His intended will for you? That's His gift for you. That work, that toil, that's His gift. It's designed for you. And then if we honor God, His invitation to honor Him is His gift to us because He knows that when we live a life honoring Him, we live a life of fewer regrets. We live a life of deeper gratitude. We live a life with a deeper desire for Jesus if we'll just revel in his gifts. This helps me make sense of the Honduran children I saw at one time. For years of my life, I would go down to Honduras with some regularity to take teams down to visit a pastor named Israel Gonzalez. Israel is one of my heroes. The things that he's done for the kingdom are unbelievable. And he is based in a city in central Honduras called, called, uh, Swatopeke. He and his wife have set up a free clinic there. He has a church there. And then from that church, what they do is they organize these goodwill parties and they bring teams down and you get together hot dogs and little tchotchke gifts and you go up into the hillsides. There's mountains surrounding Ciguatapeque and you go up into the mountainside and you go to these villages and he throws these goodwill parties and he hopes that by doing this, these villages that are deeply Catholic, but Catholic in such a way that shuts them off to faith rather than turns them on to faith. And so they're lost communities. And he goes and he throws these parties, and by throwing these goodwill parties, they invite him into the community to plant a church. He's planted 14 churches that way, last I checked. And I would go on these parties. And you go up into these mountains surrounding Suwatopec into a village. And that's not derogatory. It's literally a village. Homes are built of mud and wood, makeshift roofs, one or two rooms, literally dirt poor. I've had the opportunity in my life to be in a fair amount of other countries and to see poverty on multiple continents. Honduras is just about the worst. But yet when we would go there, we would get out and there would always be these children there. And these children would have the biggest, goofiest grins on their face ever. They were so joyful, and they would laugh, and they would play, and they were happy to see you, and it never got wiped off of their face. And I always wondered, kid, how can you be so happy? Don't you know you don't have a Barbie house? Don't you know you don't have a PlayStation? Don't you know your soccer ball stinks? Those kids had it figured out, man. They had people around them who loved them. They had things to do each day that they looked forward to. And they hadn't lived enough life to carry the weight of what it is to not honor God with our choices. They were walking in apex happiness. And I carry all my American wealth down there and privilege, and I look at them and I'm jealous. Because they figured out something that we haven't. And I just think that there is this profound truth that everything that we need is right there within our grasp. We don't have to run around out there chasing vapor and Hevel. God has given us these gifts already. And in that truth, in that truth that everything we need for joy is within our grasp? We answer those two questions we started with. Is there a pursuit that's actually worth investing my life in? Yes. The people you love, the tasks that give you purpose, and honoring God. You want to live a life that matters? You want to get to the end of it and wonder if it's all vapor? Or not have to wonder that? Then invest your life in the people that you love and the tasks that God has ordained for you. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that we should do good works, that we should walk in them. Walk in those good works that God intended you for and honor God with the choices that you make. Those are worthwhile pursuits. You will get to the end of your life if you pursue those things and know that it was a life well lived. And he actually doubles down on this idea of pursuing relationships with other people. I don't have a lot of time to spend here on it, but again, this is a passage that I can't just skip over as we go through the book of Ecclesiastes. He doubles down on this idea of having more folks in our life when he writes this has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon doesn't take a lot of time to tell you to invest in a lot of things in Ecclesiastes. If you've been reading along with us, he doesn't tell you to do a lot of stuff there. He just kind of tells you, hey, this stuff's a waste of time. You should honor God. And then he tells you how we got to that conclusion. But here he stops and makes sure you understand the value of having people in your life who love you, who you love in return. And he sets up life as this struggle, this fight, because it is a struggle and a fight to choose to honor God with our lives. It is a struggle and a fight to keep our marriages healthy. It is a struggle and a fight to direct our kids in the right way, to love our families well, to share our faith, to be evangelists in our community, and to make disciples of the people who are around us. That's hard. And Solomon says, if you try to do this alone, woe to you when you fall and you have no one to pick you up. Woe to you when addiction creeps in and there's no one you can tell. Woe to you when doubts creep into your faith and there's no one you can talk to. How hard it must be for you when your marriage gets rocky and there's no one to fight for it. If there's two, he says, you've got a fighting chance. If there's three, that's not quickly broken. We need people in our lives to fight for us. We need to fight for the people in our lives. It seems to be a big value to us. That will help us ensure that we always have people to eat and drink with that we love and enjoy. So I thought it was worth pointing out Solomon's emphasis on this. The other question that remained from the previous weeks is, can I ever hope for true happiness? Yes. Yes, because here's the thing. If the bad things in Ecclesiastes 3 are true, then so are the good ones. Last week, I read the passage and I said, listen, pain is coming for all of us. It's going to hurt. We're going to mourn. We're going to grieve. No one gets to dodge that based on our godliness. It's going to happen to all of us. We will walk through hard times, but here's the reality. If that's true, then the flip side is true. If the bad things are true, then God says we will walk through seasons where we experience the good things. Look at the good things. There is a time to be born, to plant, to heal, to build up, to laugh, to dance, to gather things together, to embrace, to keep, to sow, to speak. A time for love and a time for peace. If we're going to have to walk through hard times, there's going to be good ones too. And I just think that the blessing from Ecclesiastes is this. It hits us with some hard realities. It's stark. It's unflinching. Hey, most of us are wasting our lives. And no matter what you do to invest it well, you're going to hurt. Those are hard truths. But I've said the whole time that if we can accept them on the other side is this joy that is waiting for us. And this is the joy. The joy is, yes, there's big things going on that we can't control. But in the midst of all that stuff that we can't control, God gives us these gifts, these moments of joy, these pockets to lean into where we celebrate him, where we're grateful for him, and we acknowledge those things as gifts. And I just think that if we accept the difficult realities from this book, then we can start to look for these little pockets of joy in our life, and they will bring us such more fulfillment than if we just move through them waiting to get to the next thing. At our house, we do a thing called Breakfast Sammy Saturday, all right? I like a good breakfast sandwich. I know it's hard to tell by looking at me, but I like a good, I put butter down, I toast the bread, I do the eggs, I do some bacon, do some cheese on there, and then I put it all together on the blackstone, cut it in half, and the good egg bleeds out onto it. It's all the goodness, and then you dip your sandwich in there. It's the best. I love breakfast Sammy Saturdays. You guys are not enthusiastic enough about this. You need breakfast Sammy Saturdays in your life. Well, I'll just let you guys sign up. Come over to the house. I'll make them for you. We love it. But it's just kind of a thing that I do. I like it. I make one for Jen and Lily, and they kind of eat half of theirs. I'm more excited about it than anybody else. But then one day, Lily brought this home from preschool, and it made me cry right on the spot. That's breakfast Sammy Saturday. She drew my griddle. She put food on it. Apparently, I make pizza there. And she brought it home to me. Now, the thing about this is, it was an assignment at preschool. She was told, just make whatever you want. It's an art project. And she made breakfast Sammy Saturday. And she brought it home to me. And she said, look, Daddy. And she told me what it was. I started crying right there on the spot. I got these big old alligator tears in my eyes looking at Jen. What a cool thing. And sure, life's going to be hard. She's going to be a teenager. She's five now, so she's kind of maxed out on cuteness, and now it's just hyper sometimes. But even though I know that there's hard times ahead, even though I know she won't always appreciate things like Breakfast Sammy Saturday, I know she does now. And I know that that's a gift from my God. And I know that what Ecclesiastes says is the best thing I can possibly do is to drink deeply of that. The best thing we can possibly do is find joy in these moments that God allows. We don't know how long we'll have them. I was talking with a friend last night who's got a new infant. And he said every time he gets up with the infant in the middle of the night and holds her, that it's a privilege. Because he doesn't know when that last time's going to be. And that's the truth of it. I think that we have so many pockets of joy in our life every day. If we have people that we love, if we have something to do that we appreciate, if we're choosing to honor God with our life. And I think that because we're so busy chasing vapor, sometimes we miss these sweet little moments that can all be had right here if we're just paying enough attention. That's why I think on the other side of these realities awaits for us this profound joy. And I think that when we realize that, that when we realize that God has designed these things to bring us happiness in our life, that what's really important is if we don't believe in a God, if we're atheistic in our worldview, then that's it. The joy terminates in those moments. That's all we have. But if we are a spiritual people who believe that God designed these things and these blessings in our life to make himself evident in our life, then our joy doesn't terminate in the moment. It turns into exuberant praise. It reminds us that we have a God that designed this for us. And the other part is, and this is incredible, that the joy that we're experiencing in that moment is only a glimpse of the eternity that he's designed for us and won for us with Jesus, which is what we're going to come back and talk about next week, is how these things are glimpses to the eternity that Jesus has already won for us. So in a few minutes, the band is going to come, and we've saved two fun, exuberant songs to praise God together. And while we do that, I want to encourage you to keep those two thoughts in your head. What are the things that I can see from my chair? What are the joys that God has given me that are within my reach from places that I already have in my life? What are the things that maybe I'm missing because I'm chasing stuff that I don't need? And then let's reflect on the reality that there is coming an eternity where that's all we experience. It's no more just pockets. It's reality. And that is something for us all to celebrate. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so very good to us. You've given us so much. Lord, I pray that we would be grateful for those blessings. I pray that you would steep us in profound gratitude for the things that we have, that you would show us what we need and what we don't. God, if there is somebody here or who can hear my voice, who doesn't have people in their life that they love, God, would you bring that to them? Would you provide that community for them even here at Grace? Would you give them the courage to slip up their hand in some way, to fill out some sheet, or to send some email, or make some phone call, or some text, and help them engage with relationships that matter to them. God, if there are people who don't have something they enjoy in their days, would you give them the courage to find that? Show them how you designed them and what you created them for. God, if we are not honoring you with our lives, I pray that you would give us the courage to do that. Let us praise you exuberantly, God, for the joys that you have given us in our lives. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, Nate. Let's all stand up. guitar solo Our God, firm foundation Our rock, the only solid ground Let's lift his name. you are the only king forever you are victorious Unmatched in all your wisdom In love and justice you will reign and every knee will bow we bring our expectations our hope is anchored in your name the name of jesus Jesus you are the only king forever forevermore you are victorious We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. You are the only king forever. Mighty God, we lift you higher. You are the only king forever. Forevermore, you are the only king forever Forevermore, you are victorious. He is doing great things See what our Savior has done See how His love overcomes he has done great things. We dance in your freedom, awake and alive. Oh Jesus, our Savior, your name lifted high be faithful forever more you have done great things and I know you will do it again for your promise is yes and amen you will do great things God you do great things Oh Oh you have done great things you've done great things every captive and break every chain oh god You have done great things. You have done great things. Oh God, you guys here today. God bless. Have a great week. Thank you. Come all you weary, come all you thirsty, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Well, come all you sinners, come find His mercy. Come to the table, He will satisfy. Taste of His goodness, find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us, His one and only Son to save us. If you never believed in Him, you'll live forever. Here we go. We'll live forever. God so loved the world. Praise God. Praise God. From whom all blessings flow. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. His amazing love. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us Whoever believes in Him Will live forever Oh, the power of hell Forever defeated Now it is well I'm walking in freedom For God so loved the world. Amen. You are here, moving in our midst. I worship you. I worship you. You are here, working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are here. Working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are way maker. Miracle worker. Promise keeper. Light in the darkness. darkness my god that is who you are Jesus. Jesus I worship you. I worship you. You're mending every heart. You are here and you are mending every heart. I worship you. I worship you. You are here and you are way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light're the way maker. Yeah, sing it again. Oh, that is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. Yes, even when. Come on. You never stop. You're the way maker. Oh, that is who you are. Oh, it's who you are, my Jesus. Miracle worker. That is who you are. is above depression. His name is above loneliness. Oh, His name is above disease. His name is above cancer. His name is above every other name. That is who you are. Jesus. oh i know that is who you are When darkness tries to roll over my bones When sorrow comes to pain is all I know, oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. I am not captive to the light. I'm not afraid to leave my past behind. Oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. Oh, I'm standing. There's power in your name. Power in your name. There's power that can break off every chain. There's power that can empty out a grave. There's resurrection power that can save. is Thank you. I'm standing in your love. I count on one thing. The same God that never fails will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. The same God who's never late is working you're working Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy. My heart is heavy God that never fails. Will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. This ain't God who's never late. He's working all things out. You're working all things out. Oh, yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will. For all my days. Oh, yes, I will. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all names that nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all Thank you. The name of all names. That nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise. To glorify, glorify the name of our names. That nothing can stand against. Oh yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Come let us bow at his feet. He has done great things..