Sermons tagged with Spirit

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, know the Lord, because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. And then in verse 33, this is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.

Morning, everyone. My name is Tom Sartorius. I'm one of the elders and partners here at Grace, and this morning's reading is from Psalm 120. I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, O Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues. What will he do to you, Tom. You may have noticed Tom using a church Bible for that. We do not require elders to own their own Bibles, but we're hopeful that Tom will be able to acquire one in the coming months. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, this morning is the second part of our series called Ascent. Last week, Erin Winston, our children's pastor and pastor extraordinaire, opened the series up for us. And she kind of explained a little bit what it was, why we're doing it, where it's from. But as she was doing that, there was a little bit of sound issues. It was really nobody's fault, but no one was paying attention. No one heard what she said. So just to reorient us in this series, it is, this is one that's been a long time coming. I've kind of shared with you guys before. Sometimes we'll have series that we know we want to do. We know they'll be good for the church. We know we want to expose you guys to that thought process or information, but it just, it sometimes takes two, three, four years to work it into the calendar just right. And so we're all excited to finally be able to do this series. It is based on the Psalms of Ascent, which are Psalms 120 to 134. And what I didn't even know, I knew offhand that these existed, but I didn't really learn about them entirely until I read a book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson called Along Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a phenomenal book. If you get nothing else from this series, I hope you'll write down the name of that book and that you'll read it. It's a movement through all 15 of the Psalms of Ascent with some commentary before and after, and it will serve you. I just tell you, it will serve you better in your spiritual journey to read that than to listen to me preach about it for the next several weeks. I hope that I can do it justice, and I hope that it can focus our attention on the right things, but Eugene Peterson, to me, he's one of my favorite Christians that's ever lived. I think back in 2021, maybe, I read his autobiography just called Pastor about his story as a life in his life being a pastor, and it's one of the most personally impactful books I've ever read. So I'm really excited to expose you guys to what is probably his greatest work, a long obedience in the same direction. And these Psalms of Ascent are called the Psalms of Ascent because typically when you're going to Jerusalem, you're ascending, you're going up a mountain. No matter where you're coming from, Jerusalem's highly elevated compared to the rest of the country of Israel, give or take. And so usually when you're ascending, you're ascending to Jerusalem. So these are psalms that families were supposed to go through as they approached the city on pilgrimage. There's also a specific place in Jerusalem, the Temple stairs, I believe, where you were to pause when you arrived. You were to pause on the first step and sing this first psalm and pray over it as a family. Take the second step, do the second psalm. There's 15 psalms and 15 steps that aligned in this way. And overarching this entire series is this idea of pilgrimage, of a long obedience in the same direction, of the perseverance required by the Christian life, an acknowledgement that the Christian life is not simply a decision one day to accept Christ as our Savior and allow God to be the Lord of our life, but it is a daily decision that we renew. The Christian life is a long, steady obedience in the same direction. And so that idea serves as an umbrella over everything we talk about, that this implication that the Christian life is long and it is difficult, and we are pilgrims on a journey. This morning, we take the first step of that journey. The first psalm is Psalm 120, and that is a psalm of repentance. And when I think about repentance, I kind of think about it like this. Have you ever been in a space, your office, kids' room, kids' playroom, your kitchen, wherever it is, and you just look around and there's so much junk everywhere, you go, I can't live like this. This is disgusting. I have to clean this before I can do another thing. Have you ever had that impulse? If you have never had that impulse, you should clean your home this afternoon. Some of us would freak out. Some of you have that impulse so much that you will secretly clean your sister's house or your mom's house. You'll secretly go behind people and just clean at their place because you just want it to be nice for them. It's funny. I wrote this sermon a couple of weeks ago, but Jen took the kids. Lily's on fall break. Lily's my eight-year-old daughter. So she took Lily and John down to Jen's sister's house so the kids could play together and go to zoos and all the things that little kids do. And so I've been home alone since Thursday. And when I got up this morning, took a shower, went downstairs, got my Bible, got my notes, and went to go through the sermon. I go through the sermon on Sunday mornings just to make sure I'm familiar with it. And I went to go through the sermon. I'm standing in the kitchen, and I was like, I can't live like this. I can't do this. It just had four days of bachelor junk sitting around, you know? And I was like, I got to whirlwind clean this thing. So after I was able to clean the living room and the kitchen, I was able to get to work. But I don't know if you can relate to that, but I think most of us can. This idea where you just look around and you go, this is a mess. This is disgusting. I can't live like this. I have to do something about it right away before I can take another step. This, to me, is the heart of the beginning of repentance. Now, repentance gives a bad rap. We don't like to think about repentance. That one's hard. That's when we have to be hard on ourselves. We have to make better choices. We have to change things. Repentance is tough, and it might be uncomfortable to bring it up, but it's absolutely essential, and I hope that after this morning, that many of us can think about it perhaps in a different way and even seek to make it a habit. But along the lines of repentance being the first part of it, just kind of being disgusted with what's going on as we look around our life, Eugene Peterson says it like this, a person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. So a person before knowing Jesus has to look around at their life and be so disgusted with the way things are going, with the current state of affairs, with what's happening on their inside life and in their outside life. And be so disgusted with it that they go how we do in a mess. This is disgusting. I can't live like this. I have to do something about it. That moment has to come, has to precipitate genuine repentance. So he says, and I think as a Christian, because most of us in the room are Christians, as a Christian, we can think about it this way. We have to be so disgusted with the areas of our life that we have not yet relinquished to God. Because we've given our lives to God, right? But we've all got these little pockets where we know God probably doesn't want this habit in our life. He probably doesn't want this attitude. He probably doesn't want this pattern. He probably doesn't want this in my life. But I'm a Christian, and I'm good, and I'm pretty squared away. So I'm just going to keep this. This is under the lordship of God. Yes, this is my Christian life. This is my personal life. It's under the lordship of me. I'm going to continue to run things here. And Eugene says, until we get disgusted with how this feels, we will never convert it over to the Lordship of God in our life and take a step towards the Christian path. So one of the objects this morning is to help us think about our sin and look at the things that we have in our life in certain ways that make us miserable and make us disgusted and cause us to wake up in the morning going, who am I? Or cause us to finish an argument with our spouse and think, what was that all about? Or after we lose our mind on our kids, we go, what in the world, where did that come from? Or after we just go through a day thinking everyone's annoying or everyone's a moron or everyone's an idiot, and then we get home and we're like, is this really, do I want to be this angry? In those moments, we should reflect and become upset at the mess around us that our sin is making. David did it like this in the Psalm. Tom just read it for us. It starts off doing exactly this. I call on the Lord in And I think that's great. It's a great way to start off repentance. Last week, Aaron preached about, when I struggle, where does my help come from? Does it come from the mountains? Does it come from the altars on the mountains that serve me in different ways, that allow escapes and outs in different ways? And the psalmist says, no, lift your eyes up to God. Your help comes from God, creator of heaven and earth. So this repentance starts out in the exact right way. He looks to God in his distress. It's the song we just sang, God, I need you. We look to God in our distress. Run to the Father, fall into grace. So in his distress, he looks to God, which is the right way to start in repentance. Very first thing, I can't do this. I'm not going to white knuckle my way out of this sin or out of this attitude or out of this way of life. I need your help, God. And then he laments his sin. He laments his lying lips and his hypocrisy. He laments who he is and who he has become because of where he is and who he's surrounded himself with. He reaches a place of disgust with his sin, and so he cries out to God in his distress. And as I wrote this sermon, it occurred to me that for this to make sense, we can't just exist in the hypothetical and talk about vague sins that we deal with, you deal with, David dealt with, I dealt with, you know, whatever. We would need a specific example, and that example could only come from me. So I'm going to share with you more about my personal life than I want to. Don't get nervous. It's not any bad. Because I think we need to actually walk through a sin together to help us get this idea. Somebody did this for me, and it's what helped me understand the idea. So a couple, two, three months ago, Jen and I were finishing up the day, and Jen's my wife, and we got in a little spat, just a little normal marriage tiff, you know, not a huge deal. And we don't really do a lot of those. We're not fighters. Fighting with Jen's like kicking a puppy. So you can't really do anything there. You just feel terrible and shut up. You're right. I'm sorry. So we don't do a lot of anger and frustration in the house. We really don't. But we were frustrated with each other this night. And I honestly don't remember what it was about or what brought it on. I think it was probably just our typical disagreement, which is she's annoyed at me with something and I'm annoyed at her for having the audacity to be annoyed with me. And so then we butt heads. And towards the end of the conversation, I hit her with this one. This is a classic marriage argument. I don't know if you've used it before. I would not recommend if you don't mean it. But I hit it with, you know, lately I haven't even felt like you've liked me very much, which is kind of the emotional jujitsu of, do you see how all this is your fault? Because you haven't been being kind to me. You haven't been being the wife that I deserve. How do you expect me to do the things you want me to do when you don't even like me? It didn't land and we went to bed. And that whole night I was tossing and turning because I realized that the whole disagreement, I was reflecting on the last couple weeks, months of my life. And I realized that the whole disagreement was my fault because of some bad patterns in my life. And I knew that I needed to confess. I knew that I needed to apologize. And so I couldn't sleep. I'm just waiting for her to wake up so I can pounce on her with apologies and love, right? I just, I need this to be right, and I need her to know that I know it's my fault. And so I get up, I make us coffee. That's the peace offering, coffee on the nightstand. And when she wakes up, I said, hey, listen, I'm super sorry. She said, okay, tell me more. I said, the argument that we had last night was 100% my fault. She goes, what makes you think that? And I said, I just realized that all I've wanted from anyone in my life for the past couple of months is just to leave me alone. I've just been living selfishly. I just feel pulled in every direction. And all I want from anyone all the time is just leave me alone. And I said, that's a really cruddy way to be a father. It's a really cruddy way to be a husband. And by the way, I'm really sorry. It takes some special kind of chutzpah to accuse you of not liking me when I've been acting wholly unlikable for the last two months. My bad. And she laughed, and she said, I'm glad you know. And then we were good. We were good. But that tossing and turning all night, being concerned with the disagreement, wanting to get to the bottom of what was going on and motivating there. That was the process that the Holy Spirit used to bring me to a point of disgust with myself. Because what a terrible thing it is to go through life, especially as a father, a husband, and a pastor, and all you want is for people to leave you alone? Dude, you've made some bad choices. You have misaligned your life with what you need to do if that's really what you want is to be left alone. And so that's not an option. So I had to come to a place of disgust where it shook me so much that I could actually stop and let the Holy Spirit help me see where I had been selfish and confess that to my wife. So first I had to confess it to God at four in the morning and then I had to confess it to at seven in the morning. Because I got to this place of disgust where I looked at my life and I said, I can't live like this anymore. I have to clean it up. Right? But if we're going to truly repent of a sin, after we confess, we have to consider. Once we confess our sin, yes, this is in me. Yes, this is wrong. Yes, I have this habit, this pattern, this attitude. Yes, I've been making exceptions for myself in this way. I confess my sin. After that, we must consider the consequences of our sin. David says it this way, Psalm 123-4. I don't know what burning coals of a broom brush are, but I don't want them. I'd like to not find out experientially. He says, he stops and he considers. What will happen if I continue in this pattern? What will happen if I continue to be surrounded by lying tongues and deceitful lips and I continue to have lying tongues and deceitful lips? Well, what will happen in this instance is that God is going to allow warriors to come in and punish us on his behalf. The consequences of this sin are grave. And so it's good for me to sit and face those consequences and look at the reality that my sin could bring about. For me, in different times and ages and places throughout the church, the threat of divine punishment has served the church well to get us to make better decisions in our life. But for me, that's never worked super great. For me, I have to think about the actual literal results of my sin if it goes unchecked. And so to consider your sin is to think through the impact that it's having on the people around you. So in that season of selfishness in my life, which was just a season. I've only been selfish about two or three months out of my life. Everywhere else is super giving. So how about in that heightened activity of selfishness in my life in that particular season? I did the exercise the next day in the office. I sat down, I had my quiet time, and I made myself go through the exercise of how can this sin hurt the people around me? And the first thing that was brought to mind was Lily, my eight-year-old daughter. And I immediately just felt terrible because I've noticed this with other people's kids before I had kids. And now that I have kids, I see that it's absolutely true. When there's a little kid, three is like the height of cute. Three is super cute. One, two, three, it's all great. Four is pretty great. Five, all right, most of the time. But eventually, somewhere around five, six years old, it's like, all right, you're just an annoying little kid now. You've transitioned. You've got a goofy-looking smile. You do dumb stuff. You're always saying, look at me, when you do some regular thing that every kid in the world can do. Like, look at me, dad. Yeah, I mean, you jumped. That's really great. You know, like, every kid gets to this annoying phase until they're cool again. Like, they're, I don't know, 23. And part of what was requiring energy from me was to engage with Lily, to laugh at her jokes, to watch her dance, to give her the attention that she wants from her dad. But my selfishness, and this is hard to say, my selfishness was penalizing her for being eight. Not bad, not unreasonable, not demanding, not selfish. My own junk, as her dad, was penalizing my daughter for simply being eight. What does it communicate to her if I'm annoyed with her at every turn? It teaches her that she's fundamentally annoying. What an awful thing for a father to do to a daughter. It taught John similar lessons. When I didn't want to do trucks or have the dinosaurs fight again, or listen, I'm so bad at engaging in imaginative play. You be the dad. Oh, jeez, I am the dad, and he doesn't want to play. But by not doing those things, what I teach him is I don't want to be with him. I don't want to indulge him. I don't want to. I just want, I'm going to be selfish, and I'm going to do my thing. You do your thing, John. I distance myself from him. And then worse than that, the way that it hurts Jen is because she sees me annoyed with the load and the burden of the family, because she's sweet and because she's selfless, she takes on more of it. She tries to protect me by protecting me from the kids, and she takes on a bigger burden in the home. And that engenders in her resentment for always having to pick up my slack because I'm always in a grumpy mood because I always want to be left alone. It's completely unacceptable. And then you think about how it makes the staff feel at church when my door is constantly closed and I never want to talk to anybody and I go quick into meetings and out of meetings and I'm not available because I just want to be left alone. The ripples of this are terrible for a husband and a father and a pastor. But it's an important step in the process of repentance to think through the consequences of your sin if it goes unchecked. The question, after we realize our sin, after we've come to a place of disgust and we've said, I've got to clean this up, as we begin to clean, the question we should all learn to ask about our sin, we need to do the mental exercise to help with the disgust. The question we should learn to ask is, who am I hurting with my sin and how am I hurting them? Who am I hurting with my sin and how am I hurting them? I don't know what your sin is. I genuinely hope by now that you've been thinking along with me. That when I talked about the idea of confessing sins, that maybe you started to go through your mind and what the wake of your last few weeks have looked like or months. And I hope that you started to kind of go, I wonder what I need to confess. I wonder where my messes are. I wonder where the pockets of my life are that I haven't surrendered to the Lordship of God and I'm still ruling the roost there. And maybe those are the things that are actually making me miserable or anxious or whatever sometimes. I hope that you've begun to do that exercise. And I hope that as I was walking through the consequences of my sin with the people that I love the most, that you were starting to spin forward and think about the consequences of your sin with the people you love the most. Maybe it's selfishness like me. Maybe there's a secret habit or addiction that you're fostering. Maybe there's an attitude that you're maintaining. I'll tell you this, if you can't think of one, if you're sitting there going, gosh, I don't know what I need to confess or repent of, this is tricky. Well, then yours is pride. So that's easy to figure out. And if you still don't know what it is, ask your wife. She knows. She'll tell you. Ask your sister. Ask your best friend. Hey, I need to think about confession and repentance, but I don't really know what I'm doing wrong. I promise you they do. They'll help you out. But I hope that you've been doing that math and thinking along with me. But even as we confess and consider our sin, that's still not repentance. Repentance requires this last step. After we confess and consider, we must commence. After we confess our sin, we consider its consequences. We must commence. We must step. We must move. David are going to be if the sin goes unchecked. And he chooses to commence and take a step and go, I can't be here anymore. I have to move. I have to move away from what the world offers and towards what God offers. This whole Psalm follows the prescription that Eugene Peterson laid out at the beginning when he said that we have to be thoroughly disgusted with things the way they are before we can take a step towards God. It is not lost on me that in this sacred portion of the solemn book of Psalms, in these songs of ascent that were written by David for every generation of worshiper that would ever follow him to go through them every year in their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That a Jewish person would know these Psalms as well as a lifelong Christian knows the Christmas story out of Luke 2. And the angels appeared over the shepherds giving watch of the flock by night. It's all very familiar stuff for us. To the Jewish person, these Psalms of Ascent were just as familiar. You heard them every year. You heard your granddad give them, and then you heard your dad give them, and then you gave them. They were part of their life. An absolutely crucial spiritual linchpin in the life of a Hebrew in ancient Israel. And it is not lost on me that something of that great of import was started intentionally with repentance. He could have picked any topic. He could have started anywhere he wanted. He could have talked about the greatness of God. He could have talked about our need for God. He could have talked about the glory of God. He could have talked about loving our family. He could have talked about joy. He could have talked about all these things, but he starts with repentance. And I think it's so important because the first step of every journey towards God is always repentance. The first step of every journey towards God is always, always, always genuine repentance. To confess, to consider, and then to commence, to move. The most clear example of repentance in the Bible that I see is found in the book of Acts in chapter 2. Jesus has died. He rose again on Easter. He spent 40 days ministering to the people in and around Jerusalem, specifically the disciples. He ascended up into heaven. And then he told the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to come. And they waited for 40 more days. And then at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came. And when the Holy Spirit came, Peter goes out on the balcony and he preaches to thousands of people in and around the Jerusalem area. And these are the same people who were a part of the mobs 80 days ago who crucified Christ. And he goes out there and he tells them who that Jesus was that they crucified. And they said, we believe. What do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. The very first step he asks them to take in their Christian journey is to repent. And it's to repent. This is a fundamental repentance of all Christianity, I believe. What are they to repent of? I believe that specifically what they needed to repent of in this instance is repent of who you thought Jesus was before I told you the truth about him. That's the fundamental repentance of Christianity. And if you're here today and you're not a Christian because you came with a spouse or you're just checking it out or you're considering or whatever. If you are going to become a believer, the Bible urges you to make this fundamental repentance of Christianity, which is whoever I thought Jesus was before I came in here today, I now agree with who he says he is. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God who came to take away the sins of the world. He did what he said he did. He died on the cross to make a path for us to heaven and reclaim creation. And he's coming back again to get us. Revelation 19, crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh to rescue creation back to its maker. That's what it is to be a Christian. And so the fundamental repentance of Christianity is to repent, move away from, confess, consider, and commence away from who we thought Jesus was and move towards who he is. And in this way, all repentance is saying some version of no to the lies of the world and what it offers and to our little kingdoms and fiefdoms in our own lives. And moving towards, as we confess that sin, we consider the consequences and then we commence our movement towards God in this pilgrimage of a long obedience in the same direction. Confession is fundamentally, or repentance is fundamentally a rejection of the world and an acceptance of God. And you know, in September, September 10th, I opened up a series called The Traits of Grace. And I said, this sermon is going to be, I think, the most important sermon I've delivered in several years at Grace. And I rolled out for you discipleship pathways. And I encouraged us to be step takers, people who take our next step of obedience, kind of like being on a pilgrimage. I said that everybody has in front of them a step of obedience that they need to take. And I want to encourage you to take yours. And I challenged us on September 10th. Listen, the most important thing we can do over the next few years is not build a building, is not grow the church, is to allow God to grow us in our depth spiritually. I challenged you to begin to take your spiritual growth personally, to begin to prioritize it, to begin to prioritize personal holiness. And now here we are at the onset of another series. And God has brought this theme back around of repentance and confession and a beginning of a move towards him. So I'm inviting you as we move through this series together, as we reflect on the one that we just had and what it asks of us, on this journey towards God with grace. And if you want to do that, if you want to take your spiritual health seriously, then that journey begins with the step of repentance. So what I'm going to do, instead of closing us out in prayer, is I'm going to let Aaron continue to pray. And I'm going to invite you to respond to what you've just heard in a time of your own prayer. If you're not sure what to confess, if you're not sure where to start, ask that God would open your eyes and let you see. Where are the attitudes and actions and habits in my life that don't need to be there that are actually causing me misery that I might not recognize? Ask God to make you disgusted with the pockets of sin in your life. And then in prayer, consider how that sin could hurt the people that you love the most if it goes unchecked. And then in prayer, if you feel so led, begin to take steps towards God in that area. And let's have a time of repentance together this morning as we take our first step on this journey towards God in the Psalms of Ascent.

All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

Good morning, Grace. How are we, Jay? Everybody good? Good, good. Off to a great start. I'm really excited. Thanks, Jacob, my man. Nate, as Nate mentioned earlier, my name is Aaron. I am one of the pastors out here, and I'm excited to be talking with you today. We've been in a series called 27. We started it last summer and continuing it this summer, and essentially we're just taking a book, pulling a theme or the overall theme of the letter, and talking about it on Sunday morning. This week, we're talking about... Not that one. We're talking about Galatians. So gotcha, right? But we're talking about the book of Galatians. And if I can be honest, like a couple of weeks ago when I started writing this, I got a little bit nervous because last year in the summer, I used the book of Colossians. And as I was preparing this message, I was like, man, there's some very similar tones that Paul is using in both of these letters. Man, I really hope they don't think I just kind of pulled last year's sermon out like he's doing this one again. Like, look at the one trick pony guy, right? But then last Sunday, Doug told us he had no clue that I did Colossians. So I'm like, I'm in the clear. So this was really the easiest sermon I've ever prepared because I did take last year's and I just did a find and replace with Galatians and Colossians. And you guys won't even know it. So that's not true. I am excited to be talking with us about Galatians today. Again, not Ephesians. To kind of get our minds moving in that direction. Some of you know a little bit about my story. But in case you don't, I grew up in the church. I wasn't a Christian at all. My father was a pastor. And if you've ever heard the saying that pastors' kids are the worst, it's true. Just not on Sundays, right? So that's one of the things I learned very early on is that people are looking at my behavior. Like there was an added weight to looking the part, right? Because it seemed like there was people, um, they would assess not just how good I was, but how good of a parent my father was based on how good of a boy I was. And so I learned Monday through Saturday, I can do whatever because I don't hang out in Christian circles on Sunday, Christian circle be good. And so that's what I was. I learned how to say the right things and do the right things. There was all this extra emphasis just on the way that I behaved. But when I did give my life to Jesus, I was maybe 19 or 20 years old. I was a night auditor in a hotel. I was an assistant high school basketball coaching going to school full time. And I can remember as a night auditor, you work about one hour a week. If I ever got fired from the church, I would go be a night auditor because you work one hour a night and the rest of the time just hide from the camera and nap and you were okay. But no, I remember whenever I would open my Bible, my prayer every single time was, God, help me forget everything that I learned about you as a child growing up, and you teach me who you are from your word. I wouldn't be able to articulate to you then why, or I had no clue what the, that was my, that may have been a very bad thing to pray. I have no clue, but what I knew was there was a difference in what I was feeling in that moment and what I felt as a child growing up. There was a very big difference in the unconditional love that I was currently sitting in, the unconditional love that I felt, the total and complete forgiveness that I felt that I had received from God, and the love that I felt growing up. Like the love that I felt growing up very much had to be earned. It had to be good enough. I had to do the right thing. I had to look the right way and say the right things. Otherwise, that love, it was kind of like God was just dangling it and ready to take it away at any point in time. And it didn't take long in my adulthood, or I guess if you can call 20 adult, in my almost formed brain, like it didn't take long before I started to question. I started to question my salvation. And it was always because, man, I messed up again. Does God still love me? It didn't take long before I started chasing good enough. And it's exhausting. And it didn't take long before I just wrestled with this idea of Christianity and who I'm supposed to be and I'm not good enough, I can't measure up, and just this weight, everything that I experienced as a kid suddenly kind of came back and even still today have struggles with it. Maybe you've experienced that. Maybe you've had the thought and this feeling of not being good enough. Like you just have to be better. Like it's this over-emphasis on the rules and this idea of if you don't do this, then you're really not this. God doesn't love you. God doesn't care for you. God is mad at you. It's almost like when you mess up, you feel like Jesus is stepping back in heaven and saying, hey, God, listen, I didn't know he was going to do that, right? Like, I knew all this other stuff, but that's surprise. And every decision, every action, every mistake has eternal consequences on the other side of it. Every bit of that is as a result of being exposed to legalism as a child. We all have been impacted by legalism on some level. Now, we could sit down and probably share story after story of hurt that has came from the church. Church hurt. And even if we didn't realize, and if we started to dig a little bit, what we would probably uncover is some type of legalism being at the root of all of that. Like everyone has this idea and this overemphasis, we've been exposed to this overemphasis on the rules and the regulations of Christianity. Even if someone who hasn't been in the church, hasn't grown up in the church, someone who doesn't go to church now, if you ask them, hey, what is a Christian? The majority of them will tell you some variation of, it's got something to do with Jesus, but then there's rules that you kind of have to follow throughout your life. How many times as a kid, like don't raise your hand, but how many times as a kid, maybe you thought this same thing, right? Like, hey, church is good. Christianity is good. I want to do that. I want to be involved in that, but I'm going to do it when I'm older, right? Because right now, I just want to kind of enjoy my life. I want to have fun. I want to do the things that I want to do. When I'm older, a grandpa, like 35 years old or something, like that's when, I don't know what it was for you. Like me, when I was a kid, 35 was ancient. I was dumb, right? It's not ancient. But that's the thought. Like Christianity, when I settle down, when I get to this place and I wonder, I'll start following the rules and the regulations, this emphasis on behavior. When I get older, I'll do that. When I get older, I'll be a part of that. That's legalism. We've all been impacted by it. And it's not something that's new. It's something that has been around the church ever since the church started. At the very beginning, it's the reason that Paul wrote Galatians. I feel like this is falling off of my ear, but it's the reason that Paul wrote the book of Galatians. In the book of the Galatians, it's six short chapters. Paul attacks and disarms legalism. If you've ever been impacted by it, if you've ever been hurt by it, you will absolutely love this book. But when Paul comes in, he comes in hot. Look at chapter one, verse six. This is what he says. This is verse 6. And Paul's like long-winded. He uses a lot of run-ons. This is his third sentence into the letter. This is what he says. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Evidently, some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one that we preach to you, let them be under God's curse. Paul, throughout the entire book of Galatians, the only thing that he's talking about is legalism that has made its way into the churches at Galatia. And he's confronting really two false gospels that come from that. This idea of I have to be good enough, this overemphasis on the rules that I have to be good enough, or this overemphasis on the rules that, hey, I'm a Christian, I've got grace, now I can just do whatever I want and I'm all good. Paul confronts both of that. What's happening in the church in Galatia right now, these are fairly new, actually very new Christians. Christianity in itself is only about 49 to 50 years old at this point. And so Christianity came from Judaism. It came from the Jewish culture. Christianity came out of the Jews. And so the practices, the culture, the traditions have always been a part of it. Early Christians, even before Galatia, most early Christians were Jews. And then they came to know Christ. And then the Gentiles who came to Christ early, usually they became Jews first and then became Christians. And so as Christianity began to spread through the Greco-Roman world, like the leaders in the church had to answer this very difficult question. Like, what do we do with all of these non-Jews who are becoming Christians now? Do they have to first become Jews? Do they have to follow the traditions set in the Old Testament? Do they have to follow the customs? Do they have to do the things that we have been doing for years and years and years in order to first become Jews? And there were two camps that set up. The Hellenistic Jews were like, no, they don't have to do that. You can actually read about a conversation in Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, where the statement that came out of that was, we should not make it more difficult for the Gentiles to become Christians. But who is Paul is talking about in the book of Galatians is the Judaizers. And the Judaizers came in behind Paul to teach the Galatian Christians, hey, your faith has only just begun. Actually, your faith is not yet complete. Faith in Jesus is good, but now you actually have to become a Jew as well. You have to practice the Jewish customs and traditions, and you also have to become or get circumcised. Could you imagine that as an altar call, right? Like, lights come down, band comes up. Hey, if you want to give your life to Jesus, just go into this room on the right. You're going to be introduced to the 613 laws in the adjoining room in the back. That's our circumcision room. Go through there, and you are a Christian. You thought raising your hand when the pastor asked was hard? Like, no, that's a different kind of level, right? But that's what was happening. The Judaizers were coming in behind Paul and saying, hey, your faith isn't complete yet. You are not quite yet a Christian. You haven't yet attained the salvation that you're hoping for. Jesus is a start, but you also have to do this. It was Jesus plus something. It was Jesus and you have to look a certain way. Jesus and you have to live a certain way. Jesus and you have to believe additional things. Legalism is when we contribute identity as a Christian to anything other than faith in Christ alone. Jesus plus believing these things. Jesus plus living this way. Jesus plus this rule. Jesus plus this law. Jesus plus this command. This is what was happening in the church in Galatia, and it's what Paul is writing about. And if we can be honest, that doesn't sound incredibly different than the church today. Like, it's pretty mind-blowing to me that a faith that is based off of a singular event can have so many variations. It's pretty incredible to me that a faith based off the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, putting your hope and trust in this one man, can have so many different trends, so many different variations. And the thing that we have to realize is Paul wasn't writing and condemning the practices. He probably participated in a lot of the practices. What Paul was condemning was elevating the practices to the status of gospel, elevating the tradition to the status of gospel. Your faith isn't complete. Your salvation isn't complete. You need faith in Jesus and isn't that what we see today? Like you could line 10 different people up and ask them, what does it mean to be a Christian? And you're likely going to get several different answers. But not just about faith in Jesus and like what to believe, but about the way things you should do, the things you shouldn't do. This is what makes someone a Christian, or this is what makes someone a Christian. And this is what Paul was writing and correcting, was this confusion beginning to happen within the church. Like, how do you become a Christian? Well, you have to be this. And that's when you begin to see and you begin to hear statements like a Christian would never do this. A Christian could never say this. A Christian could never believe these things. A Christian could never be a part of these things. I have been in a place before, and I heard, I wasn't serving a church, but it was an area that I was at, and I heard pastors start to teach, hey, listen, if you want to be a good Christian, it has to be the King James Version. If you're reading anything other than the King James Version, you're a bad Christian. How ludicrous is that? Elevating something like that to the status of gospel. It's not that those things and those ideas and those beliefs may be wrong, but that is not what defines someone as a Christian. That's not what makes you a Christian. We have these ideas. You could never be a Christian and be baptized without full immersion. You can never be a Christian and believe or go to these places. You can never be a Christian. And you know what we're going to experience a lot of in 2024? We're going to experience a lot of promotion of Christian politics. You can't be a Christian and vote this way. You can't be a Christian and be for these things. Somehow, at some point, politics has came in and kind of hijacked what it means to be a Christian. And we've fallen for this false dichotomy that's presented. Like Christians are over here. This is the Christian vote. Christians are over here. This is the Christian vote. And you know what's crazy? Oftentimes they're using the same scripture to argue different perspectives. But this is what it means to be a Christian. You have to be this. There's this growing group of people called the nuns. Not like the little hat ladies with the black dress, right? It's a category on the censuses to go around. There's a question on there that says religious affiliation. And there's a box that says nun. That category. There's a book, I think it's called The Nuns. I would check it out. It's a good read, but there was a lot of political scientists who went in and did a lot of research. And what they found is this growing group of people, this growing group of folks who want nothing to do with the church, are standing in that place because of political affiliation. Because Christianity is not Jesus. Christianity is not faith in Jesus. It's faith in Jesus and this political alignment. It's faith in Jesus and this political belief. I don't want anything to do with that. And that's what Paul is writing. And that's what Paul is addressing. There is this Alistair Brigg, as I was kind of preparing this message, Nate actually brought him up to me. I went back and I watched the video and he does this incredible illustration. And he says, when he gets to heaven, what he wants to do is he wants to go and find the thief on the cross. And he wants to say, he just wants to experience, hey, what was it like? Like when you, when you got to the gate, what was it like? Like, what did they they say to you? Like he didn't even know where he was. He just kind of showed up and he ended up at this gate. And then the guy came up to him, Peter or whatever you want to call him. Peter came up and he said, so can you tell me about the doctrine of justification? He's like, the what? Well, tell me what you think about the scripture. Like give me your thoughts on it. He's like, man, I don't have any idea about any of this. Okay, well, I need to go get my supervisor. So let's go get this guy. And he's like, so can you tell me exactly why you're here? And he's like, I have no clue. Except this one guy right over here, the guy on the middle cross, said that I could come. This is what Paul is correcting throughout the entire book of Galatians. It's this convoluted confusion that has crept its way in to the Christian belief. Paul is writing and he's telling them, hey, you are, you became, and you remain a Christian because of your faith in Jesus. In Galatians 1, he says this. He says, Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by believing in what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain, if it really was in vain? So I ask you again, does God give you His Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law or by believing in what you heard. Paul reminded them. Hey, you know that justification, salvation through the law is not possible. Its sole purpose is to point you towards a savior that you are in need of. And I love his reminder. He said, do you remember your faith? Like, do you remember when you came to faith? Do you remember whenever you were saved? Before you knew all the right things? Before you did all the right things? Before you lived in the right way? Do you remember who you were? Do you now have to maintain and earn that love that was freely given? He reminded them of their faith in Jesus. He reminded them that a Christian is someone who trusts in Jesus. The way we say it at Grace is that you become a Christian by believing Jesus was who he said he was. He did the things he said he would do, and he will do the things that he promised. Like, that's the faith that Paul is defending. That's the faith that Paul is arguing for. And when I first read this, like, I read the, you foolish Galatians with the exclamation point, like, still kind of get that vibe, like Paul's really going in hard. Like he's still, you fools, how could you dare? But the more that I read it, I started to hear a different tone. It's an exclamation, just like you would shout to a child running towards the middle of a busy intersection. When a fear and pleading, like you have to correct course. You can't go down this path. And in verse five, he points out, like, are you still equating God's love for you by the rightness of your life? Are you still equating God's love for you and faithfulness by the blessings around you? Are you not having the things happen to you and suddenly God doesn't love you anymore? Because that's the result, isn't it? Like, haven't you been there? Or have you been there before? It's exhausting. This pursuit and this treadmill of trying to run towards awesome enough for God to save you. This over-emphasis on the rules and the regulations of Christianity and perfect adherence towards all of those is what's necessary for God to give you the love that he gave you when you first began. And it creates, it can create this judgmentalism that comes inside us. We can become the older brother in the story of the parable or the prodigal son. Like we can see the blessings in other people's lives and be like, I'm doing better than they are. Like what's going on, God? Like why is this not happening for me? Why am I suffering in these different ways? Why am I not having these good things happen to me? Look how awesome I behaved. And the moment things start going down here, suddenly, okay, it's where prosperity gospel kind of gets its momentum from, right? Like, I have to be good enough, and then all these awesome things will begin to happen to me. I have to be good enough, and then God's love will shower down on me. I have to be all of these things. And Paul says that is foolishness and we have to correct course. Like every bit of legalism really does get its leverage by its offering of direction. Like it tells you where to go. It tells you how to live your life. It tells you the things you should and should not be a part of, which there are things that should not be a part of the Christian's life. And I don't believe, I don't believe the Judaizers were malicious. I don't believe that when they came and they were teaching the Christians in Galatia, I don't think they were trying to lead them astray. I think they were trying to lead them. There have been thousands of years of tradition, and it is all that they knew. And what Paul says as a result of legalism is exhaustion, this feeling like a rejected child instead of an adopted heir with Christ. This feeling in the sense of judgmentalism, this feeling in the sense of not good enough and we begin chasing it. That is what naturally comes from legalism. And he says, anytime that we move Christ to the periphery, anytime we make him not the main thing, that's the fruit. This is what begins to pop up in our life. But there are things that should not be a part of your life. There are things that you should pursue and there are things that you should try to do. But what you need to do is keep Christ at the center of your faith. The beginning and end of what it means to be a Christian and that moves you towards something different. In Galatians 5, I'm going to read 16 and then jump down to verse 22. Galatians 5, 16 says this. So I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. I call it mountain biking Christianity. I don't know if you've ever been mountain biking before. I did whenever I was in Georgia. Well, I was in Georgia, so it would be more hill riding than anything. But if you ever go, what they will tell you is the very first rule, other than like knowing how to ride a bike, the very first rule is you're going to have a tendency to want to look at the things you want to avoid. As you're going down the hill, you're going to want to stare at the stone. You're going to want to stare at the tree. You're going to want to stare at these things because that's how you're going to avoid them. And I learned, actually, I learned that the guy was not lying to me when he told me after I was going down the hill and I saw a rock. And so I'm like, I've got to know where I'm supposed to avoid. I've got to know what I'm supposed to kind of veer towards and all of this. So your eyes and your body move towards the very thing that you're focused on. That's the entire role. That's where it all comes from, which is the same principle in life. Like Paul says it in Romans 12, he says that you're transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's this idea that you will always move towards the direction of your most powerful thought. The thing that you're thinking, whatever you are focused on, that will be the direction that your life moves. Mountain Viking Christianity says this, that yes, there are things that you want to avoid. There are things that you need to avoid. There are things in your life that shouldn't be there. What you need to focus on is the path. Is the journey that you're going on that the Holy Spirit is leading you towards. Keeping Christ at the center. Not moving him towards the periphery. What starts to happen is love develops. It's a fruit of the gospel. Patience starts to form. It's a fruit of the gospel. Kindness, gentleness, self-control. Like these things start to develop in your world, not in order to attain salvation, not in order to attain God's love, God's forgiveness, God's freedom, but as a result from it. It says that the spirit and the flesh are at work against one another. And any time we move what should be avoided, we move what should be in the periphery to the center, our body, our life will move towards those things. And what develops is exhaustion, fatigue, judgmentalism. But if we can stay focused in Christ, do you want a check mark? Do you want to know the marker along the way? Are you moving down the path? Are you growing in those things? Are you growing in love? Are you growing in peace? Are you growing in patience? Are you growing in kindness? Are you growing in self-control? Like if you want a marker that you're moving in the right direction, it's not by an overemphasis on the rules and regulations. Those kind of take care of themselves when you're focusing on becoming who Christ has created you to be, walking and riding in the path that he has called you to walk on. Paul's entire letter to the Galatians is simply a reminder that a Christian is from a life of faith defined itself by a life of love. Are you moving down that path? Are you moving towards greater patience? What's popping up in your life? The band is going to come here in one second and we're going to sing the song Living Hope. It's simply a reminder and a focus that we were separated and it's only through the saving work of Jesus. It's keeping Christ the path. We pray for us. God, thank you so much. Thank you for your love, your grace, and your kindness. We thank you for all that you've done in us and through us because of the grace that we've received in Jesus. And Father, we just ask you as it's going to be a natural tendency. Legalism isn't a new thing that's happening and the effects of it have been felt for thousands of years, God. And we just ask you to point us toward the path you're asking us to follow with the grace of your spirit, and even if it means reminding ourselves of the gospel we came to know daily, Lord, help us to do that. Help us to live the life you have asked us to live by trusting in Jesus. We need you. We thank you. In Jesus' name. Amen.