Sermons tagged with Standards

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is the second part of our series called The Songs We Sing. Last week, we opened up and we did Graves in the Gardens. I gave you kind of a background of worship, and I started to, it's kind of trickled into me some good feedback that you guys are excited about this series, looking forward to it, looking forward to seeing what we've been singing in the Bible, what we will be singing in the Bible. And so I am thrilled to be going through this series with you because like I said, it's one that I've been wanting to do for a while. And last week when I got done preaching and we sang together, I was so encouraged at the voices being lifted up. And this morning we'll have the same opportunity. I'm going to preach about the song that we just sang because it's pulled straight out of Psalm chapter 8. And then we'll sing it again, knowing it better, having a better understanding of what it means in a full-throated, open-hearted way. And then we'll sing some other songs that are really special to us. And then we'll go into our week. So I'm feeling really good about this Sunday. And I just feel like it's worth saying sometimes that I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for my church. I'm so grateful for the love and the community that we experience here, for the handshakes and hugs and laughter and the lobby for the stories of the team coming back from Mexico I'm just grateful for y'all I'm grateful to be here and I'm excited to teach to you out of the book of Psalms this morning now to do a series focused on worship and to not have at least one morning out of the book of Psalms would be sacrilegious. It would be absolutely awful because Psalms is the hymn book of the Old Testament. It is the hymn book of the Hebrew people. It is intended to be sung. A vast majority of the Psalms are intended to be sung. And sometimes there's even instructions about it at the beginning of eight. You don't have to look there yet, but the very first thing it says is to the choir master, according to the Giddeth, nobody knows what that is, a Psalm of David, but they think it's a certain tune to which it's supposed to be sung. So David is even giving this to the choir master. I wrote this to praise our God. Let's sing it to this tune. Let's sing it together. A vast majority of the Psalms were written with the intention of God's body of believers singing them his words back to him, which I think is remarkable. And Psalms is a remarkable book. It sits in the dead center of our Bible. It's the longest book in the Bible with 150 chapters. It's divided into five separate books within the book of Psalms. It has the longest chapter in the Bible in Psalm 119, which comes in at, I believe, 176 verses. It's a super long chapter of the Bible because it's a beautiful Hebrew poem. There's 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, and each stanza, every line begins with that letter of the alphabet as the psalmist moves through. It's the one thing in the Bible that really makes me want to learn original Hebrew so I could hear that psalm read and sung in the original language in which it was intended because I've got a feeling that it is beautiful. I'll just wait until I get to heaven. I'm not actually going to do the work to learn Hebrew. That seems super hard. The seminary I chose, I chose it so I didn't have to learn original languages, so I'm not about to reverse course now, you know? But it's the longest book with the longest chapter, and it's filled with songs. And they're not all praise songs. They're divided up in different ways depending on who you ask and who's doing the dividing. You can find some people that divide them into five different types of Psalms, some as many as 20 and everything in between. But just a few examples of the types of Psalms that you can find in your Bible as you read through Psalms. And shame on me, I realize I haven't done a series in Psalms in the six and a half years I've been here. Shame on me for that. So I am promising you that coming up, we will do a series in Psalms at some point. But if you want to know some of the divisions of the book of Psalms, the different types that we have, there's Psalms of praise. Obviously, there's royal Psalms, Psalms of lament. And we're actually going to talk about those next week. I'm so grateful that our Bible has Psalms of lament, expressions of sadness and grief. There's what's called imprecatory psalms or psalms that are prayed and sung to seek vengeance over our enemies. David had a lot of reason to sing those. You probably don't. You probably don't have many enemies that you should sing imprecatory songs over, but they're in there. Psalms of enthronement and then psalms of pilgrimage. And I think these psalms of pilgrimage are really interesting. And I want to actually point you towards a book for my people who are readers. There's this book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson. Eugene Peterson is the pastor that faithfully translated the message to make scriptures a little bit more approachable for people who have never encountered them before. I read his biography last year, and I think it was an autobiography, a memoir, and it was one of the more moving books I've read in a long time. I was really, really touched by the heart of Eugene Peterson. And probably his most famous book is a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. And A Long Obedience in the Same Direction actually moves through what's called the Psalms of Ascent, this group of pilgrimage psalms And I've wanted to, that may be the Psalm series that we do. I'm either going to do it as a series as we walk through the book together, or I'm going to do it as like a Wednesday night course where those that want to come and we move through it together. But if you're a reader, I would highly encourage you to go grab or write down or put in your Goodreads, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. But in the book of Psalms, we have all these different categories. We have all these different verses. And one of the things we see that I think is remarkable is that a majority of them are written by David. They're not all written by David. There's some authors that are just referred to as the sons of Asaph. And Asaph was, I believe, the choir master, the worship leader. And then these are his sons that he has passed this responsibility down to. And they've written their own Psalms in there. But one of the remarkable things about the book of Psalms is to see the heart of David just kind of filleted open on the table for you. And I love that God in his goodness includes the Psalms to offset the other stories of David. Because if you read the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, you can also see the stories in 1st Kings but more of details of the story are in 1st and 2nd Samuel and if you read the story of David you see this traditionally masculine macho guy who's fighting and killing and he kills Goliath and he fights lions and bears with his bare hands which you know who hasn't and then there's a song about him him. David has killed his tens of thousands. Saul has killed his thousands. It's just like, yeah, spear-throwing, meat-eating dude. And then you open Psalms, and here's a guy that's brokenhearted. Here's a guy that's highly emotional, highly vulnerable, who displays his tears and his lament and his repentance and his hopes and his fears and his deepest prayers for all of time to see. And the juxtaposition of Psalms and 1 and 2 Samuel kind of brings together this vision of what we can be as people and how multifaceted we can be. So I'm grateful that Psalms reads almost like a prayer journal of David at times. But to me, the most remarkable thing about the book of Psalms is that when we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. When we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. And you can sing the Psalms. Write this down if you want to, if you want something else to listen to. There's this, I don't know, I guess they're just a duet, a duo, I don't know the rules, a band, Shane and Shane. And they have an album called Psalms, where they have set the Psalms to music, and it's one of my favorites. I love it. I've loved it for years and years. You can go find it. It's on Spotify. It's on all the things. And you can sing the Psalms. I would highly recommend it. When we sing the Psalms, understand this, we are joining in to an ancient chorus of all the saints. I spoke last week about how when we worship, when we praise, when we sing out, that we join our brothers and sisters in Christ in unity. It unifies us according to the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. When we sing together, it unifies us in this remarkable way. When we walk in Republican and Democrat, we walk in 80 and 20. We walk in stressed and not stressed, successful and not successful in a season of plenty and a season of need. And we lay all of those things down and we praise our God together and it unifies us. And I've just, I just got to tell you, I shared this with the band and the tech team before the service. But this is just a, just such a good picture of how it unifies us. if I don't say it I might die a little on the inside. So I'm just gonna have to Yesterday I was at the funeral for a friend of mine's wife 40 years old perfectly healthy Went on a girl's trip Heart heart attack, died in the bathroom. No other explanation. Incredibly sad thing. Two kids, sixth grader, third grader. So I drive down, I go to the funeral, and the husband's name, my buddy's name is Jeff. There's about 750 people in the room. And in between speakers, they put up a slideshow of Jodi and her family. And they started playing under that slideshow a song called Gratitude. We've sang it here a couple of times. It's going to be the last song that we sing this morning. They started playing Gratitude. And when that song started, Jeff, the husband who lost his wife a week ago, stood up and raised his hands in worship. And so, if you're at a funeral and the husband of the deceased woman stands up and raises his hands, you stand up and you raise your hands. So 750 people stand up and raise their hands to this song too. And then they spontaneously started singing it. And I'm six hours away from my church family, with my old church family, singing a song with myriad other church families, with our hands raised, choosing to praise in a moment of grief, and it just unifies you in a way that nothing else can. It was a remarkable moment. And when we sing it this morning, we join them and their praises to a God in spite of grief. We join Jeff in our prayers for him. We join the other congregations that sing that too. So when we sing the Psalms, we join into the ancient chorus of all the saints. Do you understand? When we sing in a few minutes, Psalm 8, back to God, we are singing it with David. We are singing it with the generations of David and Solomon and the faithful generations of Jeroboam and Rehoboam. We're singing it with Hezekiah and King Asa. We are singing it with the faithful generations, with the remnant that gets taken to Babylon. We are singing these psalms with Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. We are singing these psalms with the Maccabees who lit the menorah in Roman oppression. We are singing these psalms with the generations that cried out in the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Matthew We are singing these songs with Jesus himself and with the disciples And with the early churches that met in the basements in Rome when we sing the Psalms We are joining with the underground churches in China and in Lebanon and in Istanbul, singing God's songs back to him. One of my favorite quotes about the Psalms is by Charles Spurgeon, and I'll tell you why he deserves to be the one who writes this in a second. Also, I'm just going to compose myself. We've got a long way to go here. This is premature. I can't afford this. I only have one tissue. Jen's laughing at me the hardest, she knows. It's been an emotional weekend. Back off. All right. Spurgeon writes this, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. I love that. The book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. That when we sing Psalms, we are mounted on wings of eagles and we soar in the presence of God. Now let me tell you why Spurgeon has a right to write that sentence and should rightly be pointed out in any sermon on Psalms. If you don't know who Charles Haddon Spurgeon is, he was a preacher. He was loud. He had combed back hair and a beard and a belly, and he suffered from gout, and he liked to drink whiskey. So, just saying, he was called. He was and is called the Prince of Preachers. He holds the world record for preaching to the most people in one space at one time without a microphone and being heard. One time he was preaching in an auditorium. This is in the late 1800s in London. He was preaching in an auditorium, going through what he wanted to say, and some janitor in a hallway that he couldn't see bowed on his knees right there and accepted Jesus listening to Charles go through his sermon. It's an amazing story. The volume of work of Charles Spurgeon is unbelievable. The amount of books that he wrote. You can look up any of his sermons online, and they're long, wordy, lengthy sermons. And it was said of him that people would come from all over the world to hear him preach, and what they would say is, yeah, the sermon's great, but you need to listen to the man pray. He was known all over the world. He wrote tons of books. He ran a seminary out of his church. He wrote books for the seminarians that I have, that I refer to regularly, that still help me and my approach to pastoring and preaching and all the things. But his whole life, he worked on one book that became a three-volume set called The Treasury of David. It's a commentary on the book of Psalms. And he carried it with him wherever he went. He worked on it for decades. He would work on it for a bit. He'd put it back down, he'd pick it back up. You better believe that I've got the treasury of David in my office. And that every time I preach out of a psalm, that's the first place I go. If you're someone who appreciates materials like that, go get it. It's not like super expensive. Find it on Amazon with a cheesy cover. And he writes in the intro to his magnum opus, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. The book of Psalms is worthy of our study and it's worthy of our singing. And we ought to acknowledge when we're singing it back to God because when we do, we join into that ancient chorus of all the saints through all the decades. Now this morning, we're going to be in Psalm chapter 8. So if you have a Bible with you, I would encourage you to turn there. And I'm going to say this this morning. I don't try to get you to do a lot of stuff because I want it to matter when I ask you to do something. So I intentionally don't try to put pressure on you to do things. I just want you to be a good Christian adult and do what you want to do and do as the Spirit moves you. But I'm going to encourage us as a church to begin to bring our Bibles to church for Sunday mornings. Some of you like to read through apps. That's fine. Read your app. Bring it. Have your phone out. I'm giving you permission to have your phone out in church. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not scrolling something that you shouldn't be scrolling during a church service. And if you are someone who likes to read the Bible on your phone, that's fine to have it out. Just make sure that the screen is visible to the people next to you, okay? So that they can smack you if you're cheating and you're checking a score or something. But let's be people who bring our Bible to church. Because here's what I want for you. I want you to sit, and I want you to have your Bible open. And when something strikes you, I want you to be able to write a note. When you see a verse that you like, that you want to remember, I want you to be able to highlight it. I want your Bibles to serve you as kind of these spiritual journals where when you flip through them, you see where you've been. You know that God's spoken to you there before. When you go to different places, you have notes on the sides and you have dates and you have prayers so that as you flip through your Bible years from now, you see times when God was faithful. I can't tell you how many passages I have written beside them. What does this mean? God help me understand. And then I'll hear sermon on it, or I'll hear somebody teach about it. I'll read a book on it, and I'll turn to that passage, and I'll go, oh, I think I understand this now. Thank you, God, for your faithfulness. I want to encourage you to bring your Bible to church. Open it up. Make notes about what I'm saying or what God is saying to you. And then let me just tell you this. If things get boring, as they often do, you can start flipping through your Bible like you're source checking me or you're just interested in something. And then you look double spiritual. The people in your row are going to be like, yo, they're cross-referencing Nate. That's, look at, look at them. That's super spiritual. So just bring it, man. We'll probably make you an elder if you start doing that stuff. And you're just doing it because you're bored. It's so many benefits. Let's start bringing our Bibles if we don't already. But right now, what I want you to do is grab the Bible. If you don't have one, grab the one in front of you and let's read Psalm 8 together. It's only nine verses and I thought it would be well worth it to spend some time reading it together this morning. Find Psalm 8. It says this. When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Verse 9, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. What a wonderful, declarative psalm of praise. This is the psalm that we sing from. This is the psalm that when I'm done talking, we will sing from again. And as we look through it and we go through it together and see what it has to offer, I think there's such depth of wisdom and goodness here. I love the way that the psalm starts. Verse 1, if you look at it in your Bibles, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. What I love about this, and this is a point that Spurgeon made, not me. What I love about this is the inadequacy of that declaration. This is a psalm that is clearly meant to glorify the majesty of God, that is clearly meant to frame him up among the stars, that is clearly meant to swoop us up and to carry us away into a reverent awe of the majesty of God. This is a big deal psalm. This needs to resound through the generations. And so we would expect some honorifics to go along with the Lord's name, wouldn't we? We would expect some more adjectives to be there. How majestic and all of your grandeur and the worthiness of your ways and whatever else. We would expect it to be this grand entrance as we open this declaration about God. And yet it's not that. It's this humble, oh Lord, our Lord. That's the best David could muster. Oh Lord, our Lord. It feels so inadequate for the moment, but that's why it's so good. Because to start a majestic psalm that way, so humbly, is to confess without even having to say it out loud, my words are inadequate for your greatness, oh God. What else could David say but oh Lord, our Lord? What else is fitting? What honorifics should he put there that would adequately capture who our creator God is? There's nothing worthy enough of writing. So he just humbly puts, oh Lord, our Lord. And so when we sing those words in a few minutes, when we say, oh Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name, we are admitting in that song and in that declaration and with our voices and in our hearts that we are inadequate to adequately title God's glory and goodness. We are inadequate to adequately express and explain and capture who he is. And so we surrender to the simple, humble, oh Lord, our Lord. How majestic is your name. It's such a good beginning of the psalm to start it with humility and with simplicity as we confess through our words and our spirits, our inadequacy to capture who our creator God is. Verse two, we're actually going to look at in a second. That becomes important when we start to think about how Jesus employed this psalm. But verse 3, I love, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. Psalm 8 proclaims that God has told the story of himself through his creation. The song that we are singing based out of Psalm 8 is called Tell the Story. And it talks about how creation tells the story of God and how we participate in that. When we look at creation, when we look at a sunset or a sunrise, when we're on a plane and we can look out and get that unique view of God's creation and his earth, when we hike and we see beautiful things, when we look into the heavens and we marvel at God, when we get away from the city and we can actually see the stars, when we do those things, the heavens are declaring the glory of God. They're preaching to us about the presence of God. The purpose of creation is to tell the story of the creator. And since you are his creation and you are the only one imbued with a voice and entrusted with a voice, then it is our responsibility to cry out to God in ways that the rest of creation cannot do. It is our responsibility to make sure that the rocks don't have to cry out to our God because we're going to do that because we are the part of his creation that was made to praise him. And so we do it loudly. We do it vigorously. We do it openheartedly. And I'm reminded in verse three, as it points to God's creation, kind of declaring who he is of Romans one, Paul writes about this. Paul in Romans 1 says that the Lord has revealed himself in creation so that no man is without excuse. Through the millennia, men and women and children have looked at God's creation and marveled at the creator. The sun, the moon, and the stars tell the story of our God and who he is. And then we move into verses four and following what could be a little bit of a confusing portion. Because as I read it earlier, you may have picked up on the difference. If you were following along in an NIV, if you're using one of our Bibles this morning, then you're reading an N NIV maybe you pulled up an NIV on your app or that's what you carried in this morning but what you saw is in verse 4 when it says what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him your version says them so the ESV and some other versions say him and your version and some other versions say them. And so the question becomes, why is there a difference there? Why does that matter? Why is that important? Well, the Hebrew word there can be translated either way. And so some translations choose to say them because clearly some of these verses are referring to us, to humankind. I mean, when we read it, especially verse 4, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? That's not talking about Jesus. Who is Jesus that you would care about him, that you are mindful of him? Obviously, it's not talking about Jesus. It's us. Who are we that you would care about us? And to this point, just to bring this home, I do like that verse. I'm going to pause here. We're going to get back to him and them. But I like this thought, who am I that you would care for me? Why do I matter to you? I don't know if you've ever experienced someone singling you out in a way that made you feel special. You're like, why are you paying attention to me? Years ago, a few months before I moved to Raleigh, my pastor growing up died. He had had an aortic aneurysm, survived for a few years, developed an infection, and he passed away. He was very old, though. He was about 62, I think. He was too young. And his church had grown pretty significantly, and they had started other churches. So the people who were there were in the thousands. There was so many people who wanted to pay their respects for Pastor Buddy that they had to have a visitation the night before at the church. And the line was over an hour long to talk to the family. And when I got there, I hadn't been going to that church in years. I worked at another church. I grew up with, I grew up at that church and Buddy has three kids, Gabe, Joy, and Spring. Joy's my age. Gabe's a few years older than me. But Gabe and I, we were buddies growing up. We played Goldeneye together. He was my Goldeneye buddy. I don't know if that resonates with any of you. Like four of you, they're like, yes, Goldeneye buddies. But we weren't like super tight. And I really didn't expect to talk to anybody. I was just showing up because I have a lot of respect for Buddy and I love that family. And before I could get in line, I heard Gabe call my name. And I'm like, cool, I get to skip the line, which I love doing. And I go up to Gabe, and he hugs me, and he says, it's such a funny question. He goes, dude, what are you doing? Like, you got anything going on? I'm like, I'm at your dad's visitation, man. This is what I'm doing. You know, like, I didn't say that, but I said, no, I'm not busy. And he goes, come on. And so he leaves the line, and he takes me back to a hospitality room where there's Zaxby's. I'd love to say it was Chick-fil-A. It wasn't. There's Zaxby's. And he sits down, and he just wants to talk with me. And I just remember thinking, why are you talking with me of all these people why do i why am i the one that gets your time why are you treating me like this and in that case i really do think it was because i knew him when we remember growing up we we were at the church running around together we were the ones running around in in the service after it was over before there was thousands of people going there. And I guess nobody else kind of knew the family like I did. But the whole time I'm sitting there, I just felt such privilege of why in the world do you care about talking to me right now? And I feel like that's what the author of Psalms, David, is describing. God, why do you even notice us? Why are you calling me out in a crowd? Why do we matter to you? That should not be something that's lost on us, that God sees us, that he calls our name, and he says, hey, come here, let's talk. That's a remarkable thing. And so back to the he, him, and them. There are some verses that are very clearly talking about humankind, us. But there are some verses that are very clearly talking about Jesus. Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You gave him dominion over the works of your hand. You have put all things under his feet. Clearly that's talking about Jesus. And so the question becomes in Psalm chapter 8, in verse 5, is the psalmist talking about us or Jesus? Yes. He's talking about both things. He's talking about both us and Christ. Again, because clearly there are some verses here that could not apply to Christ. Who is Christ that you should consider him? That doesn't really work out. He's part of the Trinity. So that has to be for us. But he has not put everything under our feet. He's put everything under Jesus' feet. So clearly that's for Jesus. And I'll tell you how I know that's for Jesus, because Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews also thought that it was for Jesus. If you turn to Hebrews, you'll see, I forget the chapter. I think maybe I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah, chapter 2. The author of Hebrews is comparing Jesus to the angels, saying that he's superior to the angels. To do that, he quotes Psalm 8 and uses it to point back to Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15, verses 25 through 27, this is one of the times that you could flip and check me if you're bored and you'd look super spiritual. Paul is talking about Jesus and he's telling the people this is who Jesus is. He's the one that Psalm 8 was referring to. He's the Messiah that we are waiting on. The whole earth is in subjection to him. That is who we serve. And then Jesus himself uses this psalm to prove to a group of Pharisees that he's actually Jesus. He uses it to tick them off, which, you know, I'm a fan of. But this is what he says. Matthew 21 verses 15 and 16. I cheated. I had it marked. So I got there extra fast. Jesus says this, well, this isn't Jesus yet, but he'll talk soon. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did and the children crying out in the temple, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant. Now they're indignant because for, for someone to declare Hosanna to the Son of David is to declare them the Messiah. It is to declare them God incarnate. And they were not willing to accept that about Jesus. So the children acknowledged who Jesus was before the adults were willing to acknowledge it. They were indignant. Verse 16. And they said to him, Do you hear what these are saying? Like, you need to tell them to be quiet if you have any sense. And Jesus said to them, Yes. Have you never read? Which is hilarious. Have you never read? That's like asking a Tennessee fan if they don't know that they got their tails kicked yesterday. Yes, of course they know that. Of course they do. Have you never read? It's ridiculous. Have you never read? Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise. It is a direct reference to Psalm chapter 8, where Jesus says, yeah, have you not read that Psalm? It's about me. So how can I be sure that Psalm 8 is about us and Jesus? Because Jesus told me. He uses it as a proof text to say, yeah, I am Hosanna, the son of David. And so what this means, what all this means, and I don't want you guys to miss this. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of our God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. That's what's packed into these nine verses. We declare the majesty of God. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. We declare God is grand. God is big. God is huge. We declare it along with the churches down through the centuries. We declare glory unto God. We marvel at his wonder for us. Who are we that you should pick us out of a crowd, that you should call us, that you should talk to us, that you should care about us, that you should know us, that you would want my praise. Who am I that I matter to you, God? Why in the world did you send your son for me? So we marvel at God's love as we sing. And then, and then we declared glory for the risen Savior. We shine him in glory, understanding that Psalm 8 is also a messianic psalm that talks about Jesus and declares his glory and puts him in dominion and says the world is under his feet and we are in that world so we are subservient to him. So in this psalm, as we sing it and as we move through it, we declare the glory of God. We wonder at his love for us and we declare the glory of our risen Savior all in those nine verses. And if this all doesn't stir your soul to sing, I can't help but think I must be a terrible pastor. Because as I studied this, as I prepared this morning, as I thought through this, I couldn't wait to sing with you guys. If I were you, I would want me to shut up so I could start singing. That's what I would want right now. And so I'm going to do that right before I do. I just want to show you the words we're about to sing. And I want to show you the verses that they come from. So when we sing this song together, when we, in a few minutes, join the ancient chorus of believers who have been singing this song through the centuries. When we join the churches all over the world who have been singing this song and who might even sing this song or sing from the songs this morning. I want us to know what we're singing. So let's look. The first verse, the first words, O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name. That comes directly out of verse 1. Directly out of verse 1. We're singing that right back to God. And then the words right after that in the song are your glory on display. The works of your hands show us who you are. That's verses 2 and 3. Do you see? That's verses two and three when it says the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. We're singing those words back to God. That's where they're pulled from. On down we see verse three highlighted again where it says, O Lord, our Lord, you light up our world, the sun, moon, and stars. Declare who you are. Declare who you are. And then finally, we see verse 4, and O who am I, unworthy one, that you would give your only son? Who are you to care for me? Amazing love, how can it be? That's where directly out of verse 4, we wonder and marvel at the love that God has for us, that he would notice us and care about us. And then the whole psalm declares the glory of Jesus. Anytime we sing about Jesus, who am I that you would send your only son? That's Jesus. That's who we're singing about. And then we say and we declare, tell the story. As we sing, God use me to tell your story of creation. I would remind you, all of creation was made to tell the story of God and declare praise for him. We're the only part of that creation that was given a voice to praise him. So let's use it together as we close out in these songs together. I'm going to pray and then Aaron and the band's going to come and we're going to sing together. Father, you are worthy of our praise. You are worthy of our adoration. Our words and our praise and our declarations are insufficient for you. They are inadequate for you and who you are. We admit that, God, as we look to sing to you. Lord, would you fill our lungs with praise for you? Would you fill our hearts with your grace and your goodness and your love that we might pour it back out to you? Would what we experience as we sing now not simply be something that makes our Sunday morning better, but will it carry us on a wave of praise into our weeks and maybe wash back up on these shores next week ready to praise again. God, fill our hearts with praise. Fill our hearts with joy. And let us do now, God, what you created us to do, to sing your praises back to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here with us this morning, especially on a holiday weekend. I always joke around about you being a better Christian if you're here on a holiday weekend, and while I do believe that is true, I also think that it's just really nice and impressive when it is a holiday weekend and you choose to make church a part of that. So that's touching for me and I think good for you on that. And good for you if you're watching online and making it a point to be with us in spirit this Sunday as well. We did it. We made it to the end of the summer. This is the last in our series for this summer called 27. We'll pick it back up next summer when we jump into Paul's letters and finish in Revelation. So this is the last one that we're going to do. We're focused on the book of Jude this morning. And as if you guys needed more evidence that my wife, Jen, is a better Christian than me, when she asked what the sermon was on this week or which one I was going to be writing for this week, I said, Jude. And she goes, what are you going to do it on? And I'm like, I don't know. It's Jude. Like, I don't know the last time I read Jude. And she was like, well, I love this verse. You should do it on this one. And I'm like, of course she knows a random verse from Jude. So that was humbling. And you'd be better off if she were your pastor. But you have to settle for me this morning until she can be convinced otherwise. When I sat down to study Jude, I saw very quickly that it was kind of a microcosm of the entire Bible, of one of the dynamics happening all through Scripture and in the way that we understand scripture. So I'm starting us off here. Jude is a perfect depiction of both the depth and approachability of the Bible. Jude is this kind of microcosm and a picture of both the depth and the approachability of the Bible. Jude in verses 5 through 19, that's 15 verses. I know that's 15 verses because I counted on my fingers to make sure that I would not be wrong when I said 15 verses. In those 15 verses, there are 18 references to other scriptures, to Old Testament scriptures, and even apocryphal writings. Within just those 15 verses in Jude, 18 references to Old Testament scriptures and apocryphal writings. Some of the quotes are from the book of Enoch. For many of you in the room this morning, you didn't even know that was a book. You didn't even know the book of Enoch exists. It's an apocryphal literature. You'll find it, I think, in the Catholic Bible, but you don't find it in the Protestant Bible. But in Jude, there's references to the book of Enoch. There's, again, 18 references and 15 verses. And so if you're looking at Jude and you're trying to understand Jude, which by the way, Jude is probably short for Judah, which was a brother, a half-brother of Jesus. So if you're trying to understand his letter to the churches, how could you possibly understand Jude without understanding those 18 references? And scholars believe that the audience that he wrote this letter to, the churches in Asia Minor, they were people of a Jewish background and had grown up with a Jewish faith. They understood these references. It was like when I would refer to you and I would say, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. You know that, John 3.16. Most of you can fill in the rest of that. These references to them were that ubiquitous and that identifiable. And so as I'm studying Jude, again, I think to myself, how in the world could we seek to understand this book if we don't have any bearing for the 18 references found in the middle part of it that make it come to life and make it understandable. And this, I feel, is a depiction, too, of the depth of Scripture. I'm 42 years old. I've spent almost my entire life studying Scripture. I grew up in a Christian home. My dad was a deacon. He was important and fancy. I went to church every time the doors were open. And this was back in the day, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. I went to the church so often that my pastor felt totally comfortable calling me out in the middle of Sunday night service and telling me to quit talking. And then I would get in big trouble. I got spankings, is what I got. I would get struck with objects when I got home for that offense. Back when we raised kids right, you know. That's right. That's right, Jeffy. Let's let it all hang out here on Labor Day Sunday. Who cares? Beat your kids, Jeff just said. Don't do that. Don't do that. Totally off the rails. Jeff, this is your fault. Shut up, Jeff. But I grew up in church. I did Awanas. I memorized all the verses. I don't know if you guys did that when you were kids, but I memorized verses every week. I memorized them for the test, and then I promptly forgot them because I was eating candy right after that and then playing games. But some of them stick because sometimes I'll start to quote a verse, and it'll be in the King's English, and I'm like, oh, that's from Awana. That's from KJV back in the day, right? I went to Christian private school. I went to Christian high school. I've had a Bible class. I went to Bible college and studied theology. I got a master's degree in more theology. I've studied the Bible my whole life. Now, not as hard as I should have all the time, or maybe ever, I don't know. Not as consistently as I would like to all the time, but far and away, for the balance of 42 years, I've studied God's Word. And I'd be the first to tell you, there are myriad 42-year-olds who know way more about this than I do. But I can also say that I've devoted a life to studying it. And here's what I know. I'm embarrassed by how little I know. I'm humbled by how much more there is in this. I feel like God's word is an ocean and I've waded into it up to my waist and been like, yeah, okay. I think I get the gist. You can spend your whole life plumbing the depths of these pages and you will never get to the bottom. You will never stop learning from it. It will never return null and void. It will never not have more layers. You will never not see more connections, and there's so much of the Bible that's really impossible to fully understand without a grasp of the rest of the Bible. You can never understand the book of Galatians if you don't understand the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. You just can't do it. It's why, it's one of the reasons I say as often as I can, it's one of the reasons that one of the traits of grace is that we are people of devotion. It's why I say that the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. Because the bottom of this is unfindable. The depths of this are unknowable. And some of you have spent your life studying it too. And you know I'm right. Your heads are nodding the most because you've done it. And it always leaves you wanting more. So there is a degree to which approaching the Bible feels a little bit like approaching Jude. You could read Jude on your own with no background and with no study, and you probably wouldn't recognize but a couple of the references, if any, in verses 5 through 19. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know that you're not getting the depths of it. And sometimes I think people get intimidated by the Bible and how deep it is and how much there is to learn because I know good and well. Not all of you grew up being exposed to scripture every day. Some of us, when I say, and you're good believers, you love Jesus, you love the word, but when I say turn to Galatians, you're like, I don't know yet where that is. I want to know, I just don't know yet. And you go to small groups and there's other in the small group, and they're not professional Christians. They don't get paid to be a Christian like I do. That's all being a pastor is, is I just went pro with my Christianity. I'm still doing the same things that you guys should all be doing. I just get paid for it. I don't know if that's right, but I do. And you're sitting there in your Bible study with the other amateur Christians, and somebody knows way more than you. Right? They just know the Bible. We have them in every small group. And maybe you think to yourself, gosh, I don't know how I will ever understand that much. It just, it can feel intimidating. But that's also why I think it's beautiful that Jude depicts the approachability of Scripture as well. Because sure, the Bible is complicated. It's challenging. It's difficult to understand. It's unmasterable. And yet, some of the messages that come from it are so simple as to make it immediately approachable. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the whole gospel. That's all of Romans compacted into a sentence or two. Right? Jesus says this new commandment I give you, go and love one another as I have loved you. That's it. That's all the law and the prophets compacted into this one commandment. I don't really understand the rest of the Bible, but I believe in Jesus and I can go love people in his name. Okay. Then you get it. And so in Jude, again, we have this depiction of the depth of scripture, but also the approachability. Because even if you don't get the references from verses 5 to 19, there's a simple message in Jude that we can all understand. Sorry, I had to crunch the ice without you guys hearing. And that's what I want to look at now, is this simple message in Jude, and we're going to spend the rest of our time on it. What is this message that Judah, the half-brother of Jesus, wanted to give us, and why did he write this short little note and it get tacked into the end of the Bible as the penultimate book? Well, I think we see the beginning of this purpose in verse 3. This is the simple message of Jude. This is why he wrote the book. And even if we have no context, we can pretty much understand what this means. In verse 3, Jude says this, Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. So here's why he wrote the book of Jude. He says that he had been eager to write to them concerning their common salvation. And so a lot of scholars believe that Jude was trying to write a letter that looked more like Romans or Hebrews, something long and formal where it kind of outlined this faith that they would share. And that's what he was eager to do, and that's what he was working on. But another matter began to press, and he thought it was so important that he put that large work on hold so he could write this short note to them. And what he wants them to do is, I wanted to talk to you about our common faith. I wanted to lay out all the things that we believe to give you some clarity. I don't have time for that now, so I'm just writing to you to urge you to contend for the faith. Why? Well, because in verses 5 through 19, what we learn is that there's false teachers. The early church, they didn't have an agreed upon Bible, an agreed upon book, agreed upon doctrines. They didn't have denominations in theology. They just had their faith and understanding in Jesus, which means that the populace in the church was very easily deceived, very easily misdirected in the wrong ways. And so the churches had false teachers that were entering into them, gaining clout, proclaiming that they knew the teachings of Jesus. And yet the morality of those teachers did not line up with the words that they were teaching. They were teaching a kind of hedonism that's clearly out of step with scripture and with God's will for his people. And so Jude was writing the churches to say, hey, you can't listen to those guys. They're trying to steer you in the wrong direction. They're wrong. You need to contend for the faith. And what's really interesting is I was thinking about it, at least this is interesting to me, is when in churches, especially in the South, you use phrases like we need to contend for the faith. That usually means go out and fight a culture war against the waves of culture that are trying to bash down and beat down the truth of Scripture. But that's nowhere in here with Jude. It's contend for the faith. Where? Well, it looks like, based on what he says, within yourself. Contend for your own faith. Fight for your true and sincere faith. Because God doesn't need culture warriors going out there fighting for the faith. Contend for it in your own heart and then guess what? You're abiding in Christ and you'll produce much fruit. Contend for it here and you will be who you need to be as we operate in culture. So I believe that Jude is telling us to contend for our faith. And the simple message of Jude then is to contend for the faith with your whole life. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And we're going to read the verses that make me think this is true here in a second. And really this is kind of a launching pad into what I'm going to preach about next week when we do our big reveal Sunday. Next week, we're going to show the plans for the new building. If it's your first Sunday with us, then you have no idea what we're talking about. But we have four acres over off of Litchford Road, and we're looking to build there. And so we're going to share the plans with the church next week. And I'm very, very excited to do that. And the message that I'm going to preach is basically this. We have to contend for the gospel with our whole life. Contending for the gospel, contending for your faith, takes everything you got, and you can't let up. And that is the simple message of Jude. It's interesting to me. Sometimes, I don't know if you guys get to see this from your perspective, but from my perspective, as I just kind of, we map out series and what we're going to teach and what we're going to cover. There's so often that God has woven things together and woven themes in week in and week out to kind of prepare our hearts for things that are coming and help our hearts respond to things that have happened. And I see him weaving things together as we approach next week as well. But I believe that's the simple message of Jude. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And I believe it because of what he says at the end. So he says, contend for the faith. Here's why. Here are the threats. Verses 5 through 19. And then he says, if you're going to contend for that faith in yourself, here's how you do it. But you, beloved, verse 20, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life and have mercy on those who doubt. So Jude says, contend for the faith. Here's what's threatening your faith. Here's what you need to protect yourself against. And then he ends with, and here's how you do it. And he gives us four things that we can do to contend for our faith. Now, here's the thing. If you're here on a holiday weekend, you didn't accidentally come to church. All right. Labor day Sunday is typically not the Sunday when non-church people decide, you know what I'm going to do on a holiday weekend? I'm going to try church. That's not normally how that goes. If you're here, chances are you are probably a church person. If you're here, if you're listening, chances are your faith matters to you or you're visiting people that drug you to church. Either way. But I'd be willing to bet that your faith matters to you. I'd be willing to bet that you are a people who want to contend for your faith. That when Jude says this, if we are believers, we lean forward and we go, yes, how? So I'm going to give you four ways that we contend for our faith directly out of scripture. But here's what I would say to you. I don't think that any of us, and maybe you will, and if you do, that's wonderful. But I don't think that any of us are going to take all four of these things, keep them in our heads and work on all four of these things this week. So here's what I'm going to ask you and challenge you to do. Pick one, one of the four things that I'm about to mention that we can do to contend for our faith. My hope and my prayer is that one of them will resonate with you, that one of them will move you, that you will lock into one of these as you move into your week. And between now and the 10th, you will turn the dial on this in your life in such a way that you are responding to the simple message in Jude and beginning to contend for the faith with your whole life. So like I said, there's four things that Jude tells us to do to contend for the faith. And the first one that we see right there at the very beginning is to strengthen your faith. When I contend for your faith, you need to strengthen your faith. This is an interesting idea to me. How do we strengthen our faith? I don't think our faith is too much different than like a muscle or a muscle group. I've joked before, and I do think it's true, that I've probably had more first days in the gym than just about anybody in history. I've had a lot of first days. Some of those first days were also my last days, and I just didn't know it yet. But I've had a lot of first days in the gym. And one of the things I like to do when I go to the gym is I like to do squats. Big muscle group. I like to do squats. I think it's important. I don't know anything about anything, but I see people in better shape than me. They do squats and like that seems smart. So I do squats, right? And I don't know how much longer my knees are going to hold out and let me like do this. I don't know how many more of those I have in me because I'm aging more like a light beer than a fine wine, but that's how it goes for me. And one of the things I notice when I go back to the gym on the first day, especially if my last day was the last day after like a lot of days and I was actually kind of like in good shape, when I put the weights on the rack and I go to do what I think is going to be a warm-up set. Okay, for those of you who don't work out a lot like me, a warm-up set is when you do a little bit less weight just to get the muscles going and then you put on the actual weight and then you do the exercise. So there's been a couple of times on my first day where I've put the weight on, you know, just like 375, 400 pounds, and I'm just doing a warm-up set. And I go down and I'm like, yeah, this ain't no warm-up set, man. I only got about four of these in me. This is the real deal. This is the real set that I'm doing right here. Because my muscles have atrophied. Because I haven't done that in a couple of, they go into atrophy and they shrink and they get weaker if we don't continue to use them. I think our faith works the same way. If we're not using our faith, living a life that requires faith, then the faith that we have, I believe, can begin to atrophy so that it's not even as strong as it once was. So Jude tells us to strengthen our faith, acknowledging that this requires a regular use of our faith. And I did not come here this morning with the intent of convicting you or making anyone feel bad, but I do just want to ask the question, when is the last time that your life required faith? When is the last time you took a step of obedience, knowing that if God doesn't come through and deliver, this is not going to go well? If we're not taking those steps, if we're not living a life of faith, then our faith is going into atrophy, and it's not being strengthened. It's being weakened. I thought back to 2015, December of 2015, Jen and I were pregnant with Lily and we were, uh, we were not wealthy people. I was an associate pastor at a church. She was a part-time office manager. Uh, we did not have a ton of money, but because Lily was due in January, we had about $5,000 set aside for medical expenses and all that stuff. That's what we figured would work and cover it. And at the beginning of December, her car, her 4Runner, started to make weird noises, and so we took it to our guy who goes to the church, a guy named Kelly. And Kelly called me one day, and after I took the car in, he said, hey, man, how you doing? I said, I'm pretty good. How you doing? I said, hey, Kelly, how are you doing? And his first words were, better than you. And I went, oh, geez, what's going on, man? And he goes, we have to replace the engine. And I said, ugh, this is terrible. How much does that cost? He said, $5,000. Which apparently is super cheap for an engine now, but back then it was not. He says, $5,000. And I'm like, well, you got to do what you have to do, I guess. So make it happen. And there goes our new baby cushion. And we're just looking at each other like, great, what do we do? And that same week, a little bit prior to that revelation, we had committed to giving a certain amount of money to the Christmas offering that year. We had talked about it, prayed about it, and there was an amount that God had laid on our heart to give. And so I went back to Jen and I'm like, I don't think we can afford to give that anymore. We just lost all of our cushions. Certainly God would understand that. But the more we talked about it, and mostly Jen thought this, I was against it. The more we talked about it, the more we thought, no, God put that on both of our hearts. He did it knowing that we would have to pay for an engine. And we should be faithful to that. We should walk in obedience. Okay. So we did. We gave the amount that we had agreed to give. The very Sunday that we gave that amount, some random person walked up to me in the lobby and just said, hey, just want to say thank you. You and your family have been such a blessing to us. And they handed me a Christmas card. And then the Christmas card was a check for the amount of money that we had given to the church that morning. And it was like God was winking at us going, I'm going to take care of you. All right, don't worry about it. Now, do you not think that my faith got stronger after that? When I took this step of faith and obedience, God, I feel like this is a thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do it. And then I watch him come through for us. That strengthened my faith. My faith got stronger. We made a decision that required God to come through in an incredible way. And he did. And so for many of us, I think it's very possible, particularly in our affluence and in our abilities to live lives that do not require faith. And so maybe what you need to take this morning is this little nudge from God to make that decision that requires some faith. To step out in obedience and trust him to come through. That's the first thing Jude tells us to do. Strengthen our faith. The next thing he tells us to do is to pray in the Spirit. I love this. Pray in the Spirit. He doesn't just say to pray. He says to pray in the Spirit. Now, why does he say to pray in the Spirit? And what does it mean to pray in the Spirit? We get an insight into this in Romans chapter 8. It's so funny to me that God laid Romans 8.28 on Aaron's heart for worship. And now just this morning I added in Romans 8.26 for the sermon because there's just so much good truth there. And God often speaks in stereo. But in Romans 8.26 it says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. Meaning the Holy Spirit hears what comes out of our mouths and then communicates to God what we really need because we are spiritual babies and we don't really know how to pray for what we actually need. I don't think it's too dissimilar from when my two and a half year old son, John, says he needs a passy. I need a passy. I want a passy. He wants a passy, but what he really means is, I'm tired. What he really means is, I want to snuggle, which, come on, I got plenty of that. He can do that whenever he wants. What it really means is, I just feel a little bit off kilter and I want to be centered and I need some peace. That's what it means. We're praying to God for passes and the Holy Spirit's like, here's what they really need. And so to me, I think if we learn to pray in the Spirit, it's praying with an awareness that the Spirit is going to translate this to God anyway. So how do I change my prayer? How do I have an awareness within my prayer to pray according to what the Spirit will ask for, to pray according to what the Spirit will translate? How do I pray according to the desires of the Spirit and the very heart of God? To begin to put that filter on our prayers. Before we just blurt out what we need and what we want and what we're hopeful for, to put on the lens of, I'm praying in the Spirit, I'm praying through the Spirit, The Spirit is going to translate this to God. What is it that he's going to translate? I think this is why Jesus teaches us to pray by starting off praying for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We need to put on this mindset when we pray of Holy Spirit, how would you have me pray for this? Which begins, I think, with praying for things that actually concern the Father. This is appropriate at the beginning of football season. I'm not entirely sure God is very interested in the outcome of football games. I could be jaded because I prayed fervently at the beginning of the Falcons Super Bowl a few years back. And he let me down, which means that he does not care about football at all, because certainly he would have come through for my Falcons if he did. It always makes me laugh at the end of a football game when the athletes and the coach want to give glory to Jesus for this victory. Because I just think like, man, you really lucked out playing that whole team of atheists over there so that God could very clearly pick a side. He had to have been against that football team. And if God really did care about football, how does LSU ever win? Like they're Cajun rednecks. It's the worst combination. And yet they're good. So God doesn't care. It's silly, but often we pray about things and God in heaven just has grace and patience for us. I wonder what the translation is when we pray that a certain team would win. I wonder if the translation is, this one's faith is weak, God. I'm working on it. And it's funny there, but there's other ways in which it applies and it matters. One of the things I've learned over the years and the way that I pray for people who are sick and maybe dying is when I have opportunities to go and pray for families over seemingly terminally ill loved ones. If the family asks me to pray for healing, I will because I think that's an honoring thing to do. So sure, I'll pray for healing. But when I pray privately for that family, I almost never pray for healing. I always pray, Father, help this family see and accept your will. Help them to be comforted by it. And help what they're about to walk through to conspire to make their faith in you stronger, not weaker. God, please don't let this path that they're walking shake their faith to a point where they question it. Would you make everything that's about to happen, whether you heal or whether you take, would you let everything conspire to make this faith stronger in this family? I could be wrong, but I think that's a more reflective prayer of what concerns the Holy Spirit. And I think if we can teach ourselves to pray in accordance with the will of the Spirit, we better acquaint ourselves with the heart of the Father. And we see a lot more answered prayer when we do it that way. So pray in the spirit to contend for your faith. The next thing we do is we walk in God's love. We walk in God's love. Now this is what we talked about last week. How do we walk in God's love? And it's actually in the verse, it actually says, keep yourselves in the love of God. So I probably, I should have said, keep yourself in God's love. How do we do that? That was last week's sermon. That's how God's weaving things together. That was first and second and third John. How do we walk in God's love? How do we walk in love for God? We obey him. Because when we obey God, we admit his expertise and that we trust in it. When we obey God, it proves that we trust him. Right? Obedience proves trust. So how do we walk in God's love? We walk in obedience to God. And some of us may have carried in the same sin and the same weight and the same thing that's entangling us. Last week when we preached a sermon on, hey, if you love God, obey him. Where are we being disobedient? Where do we need to walk in obedience? And maybe we brought that exact same disobedience into this sermon this week, into this place this week, and God is still after us. Hey, when are you going to hand that over to me and walk in obedience there? And so maybe this week is just a reminder for you that God really does care. He really does want you to let that go. And he really does want you to walk in obedience. And that's how we need to respond this morning. The last one I love, and I love that it seems to just be tacked on there, but it's such an important concept as we contend for the faith. Have mercy on doubters. There's not too many other places in Scripture where we're given instruction on how to handle doubt and doubters, but it's really interesting to me that Jude, as he's listing these other things that we would all agree with and expect to be there, walk in God's love, strengthen your faith, pray in the Spirit. Sure, we know that. We hear that kind of stuff every week and all the time. But then after that, just as importantly, have mercy on the doubters. And I love that this is in here because can I just tell you a secret about faith? If you are a thinking person, if you are an observant and thinking Christian, then doubts in your faith are unavoidable and absolutely necessary. They are essential and unavoidable parts of faith to run into places where you are experiencing doubt. And if you have never experienced doubt, you either have the strongest faith of anyone I've met, or you, I would gently say, have not really deeply considered your faith and what it means. Doubts, wondering if all this is true anyways, are an unavoidable and completely essential part of our faith. Why do I say that? Because I know personally from experience that the faith you find on the other side of doubt is more rich and more full and more vibrant than the previous version of your faith could have ever imagined being. I walked through a profound season of doubt in my early 20s as I was finishing up Bible college and doing ministries. And then I walked through another profound season of doubt during COVID in the summer of 2020 while I was pastoring. It felt like reassembling a plane in midair. So I know that doubts in our faith are unavoidable and absolutely essential. And I know that when we do the hard work to learn and to actually answer the questions, not let the questions drive us away. I don't understand this, so I'm done with faith, but I don't understand this, so I'm gonna dig in harder. I'm gonna look from new sources. I'm gonna look new places. I'm going to ask more people. And when we find the answers that actually satisfy the doubt, what happens is we emerge with this firm foundation and this vibrant faith that's more rich and more generous than what we could have ever imagined. And what we find on the other side of doubt is that we actually love God more because he gets bigger and more mysterious and we find out we can trust him. Doubts are good, but we shouldn't stop at doubt. We should work through them and talk through them. The problem in churches with doubt is that often doubts are met with condemnation and not mercy. I shared with you guys weeks ago, and we all know that this is happening, that over the last 12 years or 20 years, 40 million people have left the church or something like that. We know the church in America is shrinking. We are now very familiar with this term deconstructing, which refers to someone who grew up evangelical Christian, who grew up with faith and as an adult walked away from it. We're familiar with that. Why is this's going on in our culture it's something that i think about a lot but one of the big reasons it's happening is because doubts in our churches tend to be met with condemnation and not mercy because our pastors and our leaders are not obedient to jude's instruction to have mercy on doubters And when people raise their hand and they go, hey, what about, or how come, or I don't understand, but how could this be true if this is also true? When people express doubts, sometimes they're met with dismissals. Sometimes they're met with condemnation. When I grew up, you felt like this person with a weak faith if you had any doubts. If you didn't understand. That the people who were in charge, the spiritual leaders, the pastors and the deacons and the elders and all those people, they were the people with the fewest doubts. They were the people with no chinks in their armor. They were the people who had all the answers and understood it the best. And so having doubts made you weak. And I think we need to have a church where having and expressing doubts actually shows some strength because you're trying to fight through those rather than bury your head in the sand. And you have a desire to enrich your faith by working through those and finding answers. So if we're going to be obedient to Jude, we need to have mercy on the doubters, understanding it's a necessary process in faith to move through those and find answers. This means, parents, we create that environment in our homes where our children are allowed to doubt, and they are allowed to ask questions, and they are allowed to wonder, and they are allowed to learn other information that causes them to question things about their faith. And they are allowed to move through that in mature ways that are helpful for them, believing that on the other side of that doubt lies a rock-solid faith. So we give them mercy when they have questions. We create environments in our homes where we can have spiritual conversations, and they don't have to agree with mom and dad about everything. And then maybe most of all, for some of us, we have mercy on ourselves. And we allow ourselves to express those doubts. We allow ourselves to express that uncertainty. We give ourselves some grace and start to seek out answers. Not being afraid of the doubt, but knowing that pushing through it and seeking answers in the doubt is going to lead to a faith that we don't have right now, but we desperately want. So we have mercy on the doubters. That's the simple message of Jude. That's how we contend for the faith. The simple message of Jude is to contend for the faith with yourself, with your whole life, with everything you got. How do we do that? We pray in the Spirit. We walk in God's love. We strengthen our faith. And we have grace and mercy on those who doubt. And we walk through this together. I don't know which one of those resonates with you. But if any of them do, I pray that you'll take it from here and you'll leave and you'll work on that this week. And contend for your faith with your whole life in accordance with the message of Jude. Let's pray. Father, you love us. We know that you do. We feel it and we see it. It's all around us all the time. God, if anybody doubts today that you love them, I pray that they would see evidence of that sometime before their head hits the pillow tonight. Lord, we thank you for the simple message of Jude and ask that we would be people who would contend for our faith, that we would contend with our whole lives and our whole heart. Lord, if we have lived lives that don't require faith, would you help us take steps of faith and watch you come through? Lord, if we need to learn to pray more in the spirit and according to your will, would you make us aware that your spirit is with us as we pray? Make us sensitive to praying according to your will. God, if there are areas of our life we know are not in accordance with your word, that we know we are walking in disobedience, would you help us to walk in obedience and therefore walk in your love? Father, if we are experiencing doubts, would you help us be brave in those? To have mercy on ourselves. And to seek out the conversations that we need to seek out. To help us arrive at a stronger, richer, more vibrant faith. Help us contend for the faith that you've given us. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. That was great, Kirk and the band. It was really good. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So if I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. And sincerely, thank you for being here on this cold holiday weekend. It's really great to look out and see faces, ones I hope will be smiling and not yawning here shortly. If you're wondering why is Nate limping around and on a stool, well, to much of your glee, I have gout again. So I know the worst part of gout, which is very painful, is not the pain. I can limp around for a couple of days and really not fuss about it very much. It's you. It's the jackals here, the hyenas that circle my pain-ridden corpse as I have to admit things like this. But that's what's going on. And I'm only telling you now because I'm referring to him as Uncle G. Uncle G's come for a visit. He's going to show up later in the story this morning. So it's important that you have this preface right now. We are in the fourth part of our series in Colossians, where we've moved through the book of Colossians together. And admittedly, it's portions of the book of Colossians. We've not moved through the whole thing. We've just kind of moved through and selected the things that seem to me most relevant to grace. And I've really enjoyed being able to do this in ways that were unexpected. I've really enjoyed this series. And so what we've been through so far is to look at this church in Colossae and acknowledge that they were a church that existed with some pressure. They were doing a good job. They were loving God well. They loved one another well. And in that way, I felt like they were similar to grace, but they're also similar to grace in the pressures that they were facing from within and from without. In the culture in which they sat, there were pressures for them to skew legalistic in their practices and in their theology. And then there was pressures for them to skew liberal in their practices and in their theology. So Paul's goal is to write them and encourage them to stay true to the true faith. And so how does he do that? Well, he does that in the opening chapter and for us week one by painting a soaring picture of Christ and who he is and focusing us on him. And then he lets us know that we are actually our brother's keeper, that the spiritual health of the people around us who we love and care about is your responsibility as one of God's children. And so we carry that together to try to bring everyone to spiritual maturity. And then last week, we talked about this idea of living as a new creation, as focusing on Christ, daily letting His love and His grace and His mercy and His compassion wash over us and so put to death in us the things that would have us behave as our old self or the bad, less healthy versions of ourself. And so this week he finishes up the letter with what's commonly referred to as the household codes. And they show up a couple different places in Pauline epistles or in Paul's writing. Okay. And so we're going to be looking at those this morning and I'm going to start start to read the passage. And immediately you're going to think to yourself, oh boy, this is a sticky one for 2022. What's he going to do? I'll tell you. But let's read together and then we will look at the meaning of the passage together. I'm picking it up in Colossians chapter 3 verse verse 18, and I'll read through the very beginning of Colossians chapter 4. Read with me, if you will. Paul writes this, For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. All right, there's a lot there and a lot of dynamics covered there. The dynamic covered between husband and wife, between father and children, and then between master and slave. And some versions have the word bond servant put there. And really that's an attempt of the editors of that particular translation to soften the original text and say, no, no, no, it didn't mean slave, it meant bond servant. And that's intellectually, okay? So as believers, we should encounter what it says in Scripture and deal with it with honesty without trying to artificially soften it. So the word there is slave, which is problematic, and we're going to refer to that in a second. But as we read this passage, and as you hear it, my anticipation is that you would expect me now to break that down. What does it mean? Wives, submit to your husbands. What you going to do, sucker? That one's pretty sticky, right? In 2022. And then we read the rest ones, and then there's the problematic things for Christians about provisions for masters and slaves and the whole deal. So what are we going to do with that? Well, the answer is we're not going to talk about that. All right. I'm going to talk about something else. Now, why am I going to talk about something else? Well, two reasons. The first one is the one that you're assuming right now, because I don't want to. I don't want to do that. That's too much work and too much effort and too much thought and too much parsing out all the words. And honestly, I don't think it's what Grace needs to hear most right now. So we're not going to camp out on gender roles in the home, okay? We're just not going to do that. Second, I think that there's a bigger theme here to these verses that is super important to us, that is very relevant to us, and that is worth camping out on. Before I just jump to that, though, I will say this to fight back just total cowardice on my part about the first verse, wives submit to your husbands, gender roles in the home, things like that. I will tell you two things, and only these two things, and I will not offer much explanation. If you want more, talk to me about it. Email me. I've never once turned down a lunch opportunity, especially if you're buying. I've never once done that. I always respond to emails. So if you want to talk more about this and these themes, I'm open for that. That's just not where I want to camp out this morning. But since we're there, I will say these two things. I will say it is my personal understanding and belief based on not just this scripture, but myriad passages, that in the structure of marriage, God has chosen to give men the tie-breaking vote. But it is also my belief based on other passages, particularly Ephesians 5, where men are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it. That men are to sacrifice everything we have for the sake of our wives, and therefore, though we have the tie-breaking vote, it is our holy responsibility to use it as little as possible so that when it is used, it can be trusted. Okay. The other thing that I will say about that on kind of the opposite end of the spectrum is we cannot just pluck that verse, wives submit to your husbands, out of context and understand it at face value. We have to put it in the context in which it rests. And the context in which it rests is in the following verses, there's a lot more provisions about how slaves are to behave and how masters are to behave towards slave than there is about family codes. So if we're going to contextualize and culturalize the instructions about masters and slaves, then we can't just do it to one part of the passage. So the whole passage is best understood with the nuance of the culture going on around it and with some good academic study, not simply plucked out of context. We cannot understand verse 18 in a way that we would not use to understand the passages that follow. That's what I'll say about those two things, or about that thing, those two things. Now, to the bigger point. There is something going on in this text that I think applies to all of us right now and is a far more relevant sermon than just how do we parse out these particular things. And to get to that point, we do need to understand the cultural context in which these things rest. These are, again, household codes, where Paul is saying, in light of the gospel, in light of Jesus and who he is, in light of the provisions that I'm giving you, in light of putting on a new self and how do we live this Christian life, how are we to organize our lives? And what we need to understand is these codes that he gives out here in these verses, these instructions, and the ones that we find in other Pauline writings, like Ephesians, are given in a Roman context. These cities are Roman cities with a Roman heritage. And those cities and those cultures are incredibly patriarchal. They are man-centered. The man of the house, the father, the patriarch of the family, is a king of his little fiefdom. Now, they're little pathetic kingdoms. I mean, there's nothing to be proud of, but he is the king. The wife is the property. She is subservient to him. Everything is built around him. Everything focuses on him. Everything exists under his direction with no question and with no questioned authority. The wife is someone that is there for use or not use, for purpose or no purpose, and she can be cast aside just as quickly as she is added into the family. The marriage covenant is a marriage contract, and he can terminate it whenever he wants. She can terminate it never. Children are accessories to the marriage. They are future heirs. They are not little people. They do not have rights. The rights that they have exist under the authority of the father, and they have no more rights than he wants to give them. Slaves, likewise, have no rights. They exist under the rule of the man of the house. They exist under the rule of the master. They have no one to appeal to. They have no other authority. He literally is the king of his small kingdom. That's the way that the Roman culture and society was set up. As an aside, can you imagine the abuse and misogyny that went on in that culture, where a man is in charge with unquestioned authority of all of the people in his life. Thank God we have figured out how terrible of an idea that is. My heart breaks for the women and children that were in that culture. And all of that makes Paul's writings incredibly radical in the time that they were received. He says, husbands, treat your, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. More on top of that, in Ephesians, he says, love your wives as Christ loved the church, laying himself down for them, giving himself up for them, which is totally radical to the Roman view of wife as accessory. It's a completely different train of thought. I can't be harsh with them. I have to consider them. I have to be nice to them. I have to listen to them. Yes, man, it's called being a human. You have to do all those things. And then it says, do not provoke your children to anger, which is not something that a Roman father would ever consider. He doesn't care if he makes his kids angry. He doesn't care if they don't like him. He doesn't have to. They're just there as accessories to the marriage. And one day there'll be heirs. And one day maybe they can contribute to the wealth of the home. But right now I don't have to care about them, Which, having a nine-month-old, I understand that mentality sometimes. John likes to play a really fun game of, hey, I'm going to kind of cry all day, and you just figure out how to make me stop doing it. Fun. Let's go, buddy. But children were accessories to marriage. They had no rights. And then slaves, I don't need to explain to you how much they could be mistreated. We know the crimes over the centuries. And so for Paul to come in here and say, hey, masters of the house, you treat your slaves, paraphrase, treat them however you want, but God's watching you. And however you treat them is how he's going to treat you. However you judge them is how he's going to judge you. The mercy that you apply to them is the mercy that he will apply to you, which again is radically different than what's happening in the rest of Roman culture. So Paul is telling the church in Colossae, if you want to be believers in light of Jesus and the fact that he is now in your life, your family needs to look radically different than the families that are around you. And bigger than that, he's telling them this. He's telling them that right now, your family life, your life is centered on the man. It's centered on the father. It's centered on the husband. It's centered on the master. He needs to be decentralized, and Christ needs to become the central figure and tenant in your home around which everything revolves. And he's primarily addressing the man here because the rest of them are under no auspices that they are the focus of the home. They don't need to reorient how they expect others to treat them. They need to reorient where they put the father of the home and put Jesus in the center of that. So what's going on here is radically different than everything in the Roman home. And this is the larger theme, I believe, of the household codes that we find in Colossians and in Ephesians, which is to say this, that Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. That's the point, I think, of this passage, the larger point that is more applicable and important for us to consider this morning, that when we become believers, Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. So to these cultures, to these families that were entrenched in this patriarchic, unhealthy culture in ancient Rome, Paul says your life needs to look completely different. You need to completely reorient your family and household life around Jesus and not around the Father, not around the man. It's got to look radically different. And I actually, in those notes, I said Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives. And I don't know why I did this. I intentionally softened it a little bit when I turned in the notes on Thursday. But in thinking about it over the weekend, it's not invites, it's insists. Jesus demands that we would radically reshape our lives around him. And it's so much so that I would say that our lives after Jesus need to look a lot different than our lives before Jesus. Our lives with Jesus as Lord of our lives by necessity will look a lot different than our lives without Jesus as the Lord of our lives. And if those two versions of ourselves and our lives and our priorities look pretty similar, there's probably a problem going on there. And the problem is this. I think we often attempt to fit Jesus into our lives rather than reshaping our lives around him. We often attempt to find ways to kind of shove Jesus into our life in this predetermined shape in a way that he will fit. And we're more interested in making Jesus fit into our life than we are about reshaping our life so that Jesus takes it over. There's kind of two illustrations I would use here. The first is pretty simple, but maybe it's the one we need this morning, so I'm just going to leave it in. But it's as if we become a Christian and when we become a Christian, Jesus is going to move into our house and he's going to now live with us. He's now a part of our life. And so a lot of us probably have a guest room. And when we realize that Jesus is going to be moving in with us, we're like, well, I got to update this thing. The thread count is too low for Jesus. So we go and we get the finest Egyptian, we get 800 or more thread count for Jesus is what he needs. And we get all the best things and we make sure that there's a good charger. We don't give him the one that's chewed on or frayed. We give him the nice charger for the nightstand. And we buy, maybe we buy a new small TV and we put it over there and we hook it up to an Apple TV and the whole thing and we go ahead and we cover his Apple TV subscription because it's Jesus and he probably wants to watch Ted Lasso. And so we kind of set up everything for him, right? And we're ready. And then Jesus moves in. And he says, look at this guy, this is a nice guest room. And we're like, well, yeah, I mean, you're moving in. So we wanted to make sure it was up to your standards. And he's like, well, no, I mean, I'm taking the master. That's your room. I think some of us just prepare a nice guest room for Jesus, and then everything else stays the same. Another way to think about this, that I actually wanted to do a visual aid illustration of, and so I need to beg your forgiveness and your imagination, because I'm going to invite you to imagine this illustration with me, since I'm not able to do it. And here's why I'm asking you for your forgiveness. I was not able to do it because I had to go get some materials and prepare it, and I had a couple afternoons where I probably could have, and I just didn't. I'll do it this weekend. And then over the weekend, you know, we had a kid get sick, and some unexpected things happened, and my old buddy Uncle G came to visit, and it's not really a time to be walking around stores, and I just didn't have time to do the things that I needed to do. So I failed you as a pastor. I did not budget my time wisely, and I sit up here illustrationless. So if you'll accept that tepid apology, then I will invite you to use your imagination, because here's what I wanted to do, okay? Here's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go get like a big block of like modeling foam, if that's even a thing that exists, and get a square one, and then have a board with a big hole cut out of it, and say the foam block represents Jesus, and the board with the hole in it represents us. That's our life. And what happens is we take Jesus, the square, and we try to fit it into the circle, and it doesn't work out. And so we're faced with a choice. I can reshape Jesus according to who I think he ought to be and to what my life already is and just kind of shove it in there and make it work, or I can change my life. And what most of us do, all of us in different ways, choose to do is we choose to reshape Christ according to who we already are and just assume that he probably is too. And we remake Christ in our image and then we make him fit the life that we've already chosen to live. And there's a bunch of examples of how we do this. I'm just going to give you a couple this morning. When I was thinking about how is it that we do this, what are practical ways that we kind of reshape Jesus in our own image to make him fit into our existing life, the very first thing that occurred to me, as touchy as it is, is politics. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans, and everything in the middle. I don't know if libertarians in the middle or if it's like over here on the other side of Republicans. I don't know where that belongs, but all of the parties. I have known people who just assume that because this is my political affiliation, certainly Jesus agrees with me. Certainly because this is the most important moral value for me, it's also the most important moral value for Jesus. And sure, my party doesn't champion some of the causes the way that it talks about in Scripture, but we cover the important ones the exact same way that Jesus wants to. And so I know that my political party is the right political party. And further, the other political party, those people are not even Christians. They think they are. They're stupid. And if they went to my church, my pastor would tell them. No, I would not. I would not. I'd tell them in person, but not corporately like this. And it's funny to chuckle at, but what's really disappointing to me, and I've seen it more and more, if we don't think that this is true, is the fact that I have seen a lot more Christians change their faith than change their politics. I have seen a lot more Christians who are, they are clinging to their political party, they are clinging to their social justice paradigm, to the way that they think about cultural issues and the way that they think about political issues and then be met with places where it seems to clash with their faith and one of them has to give way way, and it's not their politics. It's not their faith, rather. They choose their politics. I've seen a lot more Christians adjust their view of who they think Jesus is according to what their certain politics should be. And I've seen very few believers, just being honest, I've seen very few believers who change their politics in light of the Jesus that they learn about. And I think that that's a big problem. Another way we do this is with our time, right? We become Christians and we see that Jesus makes certain demands of our time. Jesus says, I'd like to meet with you every morning. I'd like to meet with you every day. I'd like to meet with you in prayer. I'd like you to study me. I'd like you to get to know me. I'd like to spend some time with you. And our response is, listen, Jesus, I do too. I want to spend time with you. You seem great. But I'm sleepy, okay? So I'm not going to set that alarm. Jesus, listen, I want to spend time with you too. But it's the playoffs, all right? So I'm going to be up late. Jesus, I know that I need to prioritize church. I get it, and I'm going to. But it's football season, and I'm going to be tailgating. You know what happens at tailgates. So I'll see you during basketball season, Jesus. And he says, hey, I'd like to spend this time with you. I'd like to do these things. I'd like you to reprioritize your life. And we're like, I will, but not right now because there's other things that I'm doing. I'd love for you to connect with people in small group who can encourage you and push you towards me. Jesus, I'm gonna, but right now I'm just kind of tired. And so even though we know that he places certain demands on our time, we just decide we can't give those right now. Sometimes we reshape Jesus by hanging on to just blatant sin in our life and just excusing it away and being like, listen, I need a Jesus who accepts me as I am. I just need someone who just takes me in as I am. And listen, Jesus does love you as you are. But he also tells the adulterous woman, after he loves her as she is, to go and sin no more. He balances grace and truth. But some of us just hang on to sins that we have in our life, figuring it's not that big of a deal, and Jesus couldn't possibly mind. Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm drinking too much. I know I'm drinking. It's not healthy. I'm starting to hide it from people. This is not very good. But Jesus has bigger fish to fry, so I'm just going to hold on to this one. Yeah, maybe I regularly look at stuff I don't need to look at, but it's better than actually cheating. So I'll just hold on to this one for a little while. Maybe, and this one's personal, maybe I drive like a jerk. Maybe it's possible that I bought a nondescript Honda Accord that does not have the church sticker on the back of it so that I can continue to drive however I want and not make anyone think poorly of the church that I lead. Maybe I sometimes can drive in such a way that the pastor of a church ought not drive, but certainly Jesus has bigger fish to fry than that. And so I just hang on to it like a dummy, like it's okay to just weave through traffic with my six-year-old in the car. He says, Daddy, you drive fast. Like, yeah, no, I like driving fast. But we have these things that we just allow in our life as if Jesus doesn't call us to repentance. And I know that last week we talked about let's just focus on Christ and that will kill the nature in us that wants to sin. And that's very true. But on the same hand, we are called to repentance, to walk away from the sin that Jesus shows us in our life. And so very often we handle it casually and we just allow it in our life as we just move on. And Jesus says it has no place there. And we're like, well, this has a place in my life or you don't. So come on and make some space for it. Another easy example I think of is our sexual standards. Scripture's, I think, pretty clear. Sexual activity outside the bonds of marriage is classified by Scripture as sexual immorality. And Scripture teaches against sexual immorality. But we go, yeah, I mean, I got loud and clear. Makes total sense. Jesus, I get it. But it's 2022. Come on. We don't really still mean that, do we. And for each one of these examples, as we talk about shaping Jesus to fit our politics, just trim off a corner of the block and to fit our standards on sexuality and trim off a corner of the block, and to fit into our schedule, and for his goals to fit in with our goals, and for his priorities with my life to fit in with my priorities of my life, and just trim off portions of Christ until he became a rounded circle that was able to fit into our pre-existing life. And I think that this is what so many of us, including me, do to Christ. As we look at the rough edges, we look at the things that don't fit into how we've already organized our life and our priorities, and we say, certainly you don't mean that, and certainly you understand it can't fit. And so we change our Jesus rather than changing ourselves. When what we need to do, and I was gonna have another fresh square and another fresh board with a square hole in it, is not change who Jesus is, but fundamentally change who we are. Fundamentally reshape our lives for the standards of Christ. Not clinging to the things that we used to cling to, not prioritizing the things that we used to prioritize, but opening up our life to Jesus and saying, Jesus, what's in here that doesn't fit? Show me the parts of my life where I need to make space for you, but Lord, please don't let me insist that you reshape yourself for me to have the audacity to say, well, now I'm willing to include you in my life. And so that's the question I wanted to invite you to this morning. What is it that we have in our life that we refuse to reshape? What are the things that we are clinging to? Political thought? Sexual purity? Blatant sin in our life? Our time? Our goals? Our talents? What is it that we're claiming to where we're kind of keeping Jesus in the guest bedroom? We're kind of saying, you just stay over there. When you fit into my life, I'm gonna let you come in. When you don't, I'm gonna expect you to change. What are the places in our life where we're asking Jesus to change who he is instead of being willing to allow him to change who we are? That's what I'd like us to prayerfully consider as I close here in a second. Is to say, Jesus, where are you not fitting? And how can I change to accommodate you and quit insisting that you accommodate me? As I read through this radical reshaping of the Christian family in a Roman context, I can't help but think that the most important thing for us to draw out of this passage is our very human tendency to reshape Christ in our own image and our refusal to be reshaped in his. So this morning, let us open ourselves up in prayer to where we might need to reshape our lives around who we know Jesus to be. And let us further pray that as we pursue Jesus and know him more and learn more about him and he becomes more real to us, that different aspects of him are opened up to us that then demand that we make more space for him. And let us be generous and quick in making that space. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this morning. We thank you, God, for grace, for all that you're doing here, for what I think is a palpable sense of enthusiasm and energy as we move forward and maybe, maybe finally begin to think about what a post-pandemic world looks like and what grace might look like in that world. God, thank you for Colossians and all the truth that's found in it. I pray that we would be people who are focused on you, who radically reprioritize our life around you, God. We give you permission to reshape us in your image and we repent of trying to reshape you into ours. Give us courage and honesty and integrity this week as we examine our lives and ask where we need to make space for you. And God, when we do that, I pray that we would be met with your grace and with your peace and with your joy. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this cold February morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope everybody's got fun plans, or if you don't care about the Super Bowl at all, I hope you have a nice dinner planned for yourself. This is the third part in our series going through the book of Colossians. And this week, as we approach it, I wanted to approach the text with this kind of idea in mind. We're going to be in Colossians chapter 2 and then on through chapter 3 in some different portions of it. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. And then if you're at home, please turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. I would also call your attention to the bulletin. The bulletin looks a little bit different this week. There's no place for you to take notes. So note takers, you're going to have to get creative. Instead, I've put a prayer on the bulletin that we're going to pray at the end of the service together. You'll pray silently as I pray it aloud. And by the time we get there, hopefully the prayer makes a lot more sense and is meaningful and is something that you will carry home with you. But we'll talk more about that at the end of the service. If you're watching online, this bulletin is attached to the grace find that you should have received this week. So you can download that if you want to, or you can just email someone on staff and we'll be happy to send it over to you if you find it helpful and want to pray it throughout your week. But as we approach the text this week, I wanted to start here. I'm not sure if any of you have ever tried to eat healthy, okay? By the looks of most of us, this has been an effort at least at some portion of our life, but there have been a lot of times in my life when I have decided that I'm going to begin to eat with some wisdom. I'm going to start to eat well. I'm a person who's had a lot of day one workouts, and I've had a lot of day one diets. Okay, there's more in my future. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Not today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. This is not the day to start a diet, but tomorrow is fresh and hope springs eternal. But whenever I decide that I'm going to eat well, right? I'm going to eat responsibly, which is like a rabbit. Whenever I decide I'm going to do that, I feel like I am a person who is at war with myself. I feel like I am two separate people. I am one person who wants to eat well, and I am another person who just loves food so much that he's angered by me who wants to eat well. Because I love food. I don't know about your relationship with food. Mine is probably not healthy. If I know that I'm going to have a certain dinner that night or that we're going somewhere like a restaurant or something like that, I already know what I'm getting and I wake up thinking about it. Like I look forward to it throughout the day. That's how much I love food. For the Super Bowl tonight, we're going to have pigs in a blanket. I'm going to dip them in spicy mustard. I'm going to eat more than I should. I'm already excited about it, okay? That's just how I am about food. So when I decide that I want to eat well, it's really difficult for me. And I don't know about you, but I have certain stumbling blocks. It's pretty easy for me to eat well around the house. I kind of do a good job not snacking when I'm not supposed to. I don't drink the soda and stuff when I'm not supposed to. I drink black coffee and water, and that's pretty much it during the day. That's not very challenging. But what is challenging is when I'm trying to eat well, and my sweet wife on a Friday or Saturday will say, you want to go Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do, okay? I always want to go to Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit. That answer is never no, okay? You ask me, Nate, do you want a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. But you just had three. I don't care. You're offering me one. I want another biscuit. I like biscuits in the morning. So that's tough, all right? The other time it's tough is when I go out to eat. Because I'll go out to eat. I'll go to places that I like, and they have food there that I like. And one of the places I think of is Piper's. I go to Piper's because I meet people there for lunch with a lot of regularity. That's kind of my default spot. And they have salads, like I see them on the menu, right? They got grilled chicken and some fruit or some whatever, some balsamic whatever, less delicious thing that they have there. And I know that I need to order it. And I have girded my loins. I'm ready for this choice. And I go in there and I don't even look at the meat. I look at just the salads. I don't look at the other things. But see, here's the thing. This Piper's has one of the best Reuben's in the city. They really do. It's delicious. And that's what I want, right? I want the Reuben. And I've been thinking all day about how I shouldn't have the Reuben. And I've made the decision, I'm going to get the salad. I'm going to eat the thing that I don't want. But then it's like Satan's working against me or God's just giving me a special grace and telling me it's okay. I'm not sure which sign. And the table next to me will receive a piping hot, crispy toasted Reuben. As I'm sitting there trying to muster up the discipline to order my salad. And I look at that Reuben and I look at those fries and I look at that ketchup and the waitress says, what do you have? That! I want that Reuben. I did not want a salad. And I cave, right? So for me to be on a diet is for me to live at war with myself. I bring that up because I think that you'll know that this is true. Those of you who have been a Christian for any amount of time, to be a Christian is to be at war with yourself. To be a Christian, to be a believer, is to know the good you ought to do and yet still struggle to do it. I even think, and this is a sad reality, it should not be the case, and hopefully God can deliver us from this, and hopefully this sermon moves the needle on this a little bit, but I even think that to be a believer is to be constantly disappointed with how spiritually mature you are and how spiritually mature you think you should be by now. Because we know the good things we're supposed to do. We know the kindness we're supposed to show. We know the greed we're not supposed to have and the pride that we're supposed to iron out. And we know all the different things and our hidden sins and the stuff that we look at and whatever it is, the stuff that we consume. We know what we're not supposed to do and we know what we are supposed to do. And we try like heck to be that person, but we are a person who feels at war with ourself because there is the person within us who wants to eat right and there is the person within us who really loves a good Reuben, whatever that might be for you. And they exist at war with each other. I am convinced that to be a believer means to live in a state of tension within yourself of who you know you should be, of who you know God created you to be, of who you know God designed you to be, and yet not being able to walk in that. There's a verse that's super challenging for me where Paul tells us that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And I don't know about you, but I don't get to the end of too many days, much less weeks, where I look back on that week and I go, yeah, this week I was obedient to that verse. And if we're honest as Christians, it gets tiring to know that that's true. It gets exhausting to constantly fall short. Paul actually describes this tension in one of my favorite passages. It's one of the most human things to me that's written in the Bible, particularly by Paul in Romans chapter 7. In Romans chapter 7, Paul writes specifically about this tension in the Christian life when, in my inner being, but I see in my members another regenerated person as God has rescued my heart and claimed it and one day will whisk me up to heaven. He's given me eternal life and I'm living as a new creature that we're going to talk about more in a minute. I feel in this inner being a desire to live the righteous life that God has called me to live. And yet, also in my body, is a desire to revert back to my old self. It is a desire to revert to who I am without Jesus. It is a desire to indulge the flesh. It is a desire for the things that I used to consume that I know I don't need to consume anymore. That exists within us. And then he exclaims at the end of it, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Who will finally give me victory? How will I finally live the life that I'm supposed to live? And so that's where we arrive this morning. In Colossians, is this age-old question that all Christians face, that Francis Schaeffer, an author in the 20th century, framed up in a book entitled, How Should We Then Live? Meaning, in light of the gospel, in light of what we talked about in week one, the picture of Jesus that Paul paints for the Colossians, remember, they're facing pressure from within and without to go back to rules and aestheticism and to be legalistic and add on more rules than what is necessary so that they can live a righteous life, and then pressure from the more liberal part of their community to say none of the rules matter, how we live doesn't matter at all. You have total grace to do whatever it is you want to do. And so Paul, to that pressure, paints a picture of Christ as the apex of history and the apex of hope, as the connection point and nexus between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, how he is the creator God over everything, this majestic picture of Christ. And so the question becomes, how do we live in light of that picture? How do we live in light of the gospel? I am saved. I am a new creature. God has breathed new life into me. I am no longer a slave to sin, as Paul describes in Romans, but now I have this option to move forward with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in me and to live a life worthy of the calling that I have received. Now, how do I do it? How do I do it? That's the question that we come to in Colossians. And it should be a question that matters to each and every Christian. Father, how do I live a life worthy of the calling that I've received? How do I grow into spiritual maturity? What do I do practically? How do I live the Christian life? And it's an important question because it dictates how we pursue God. And to this question, I think we often answer it in the same way that we're trained to answer any other question in our life about how we get better at a particular thing. If you want to get better at exercising, what do you need? You need more discipline. You need to wake up. You need to do it. You need to be more disciplined in the way you pursue exercise. If you want to eat better, what do you need to do? You need to be more disciplined. You want to do better at time management. You need more discipline in time management. You want to be more focused. You want to be more productive. You want whatever it is, however it is, you want to grow and be better. What is the fundamental requirement of that pursuit of better? It's discipline. We need to do better. We need to come up with structures and systems that we follow, and I'm going to white knuckle my way to success here. And the most disciplined people within our field, they achieve the most success. The most disciplined people at the gym look the best in a t-shirt. The most disciplined people, when they go out to eat, they have the healthiest hearts. Like discipline is the root to how we accomplish success. And so, because that's true, and so very many areas of our life, even though we could philosophically talk about whether or not that's true, because we think that's true in so many areas of our life, we also just by default apply that to our spiritual life. If I want to be more godly, then I need to be more disciplined. I'm going to set up more rules, more regulations. I'm going to get up at this time. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the type of person that is defined by these things. We focus on our behavior and our self-discipline. And I think when we are faced with the question of how do I then live? How do I become the Christian that God has created and designed me to be? I think that in our culture, our default answer is to attempt to white-knuckle discipline our way to godliness. And here's what Paul says about that knee-jerk reaction that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Listen, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom and promoting self- we be the people that God asks us to be? And their response, it seems, at least initially, was white-knuckle discipline, aestheticism, following the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more God loves you. It's a very simple exchange. That's what legalism says. And so they're just going to be try-hards. They're just going to be do-betters. That's just what they're going to do. And to help them try really hard, they set up all these rules and parameters around their life. And they say, whoever can follow these rules the best is the greatest Christian. But Paul says, that's fine. Set up your rules. Have all your standards. Set the boundaries really far away from the actual boundary. He says, but all those rules and all that, the way that it looks, the way that you're living, just dotting all the T's and crossing all the I's and really, really, really having these policies in life that keep you on the straight and narrow. Paul says, yeah, those have the appearance of wisdom. And I would add in our vernacular, godliness, but they do nothing. They do nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh that is the reason for the sinning that we need the rules for. For instance, let's say that what you struggle with is pride. Okay, I'm having to make some assumptions here because I don't have the struggle, but if you do, let's say that something that you struggle with is pride and you go, you know what, God, I gotta get rid of this. I gotta be better. I'm gonna be better at being more humble. I'm gonna try to push out my pride. And so we take intentional steps. Maybe we're people who will maybe kind of fish for compliments sometime, or maybe we'll ask people what they thought about something. And really all we want them to do is tell them that we did a good job or that we're good at this or that we're good at that. And there's ways, if you're a prideful person, there are ways to go through your life and get the people in your life to affirm you. And if you are this person, you're exhausting, okay? I've exhausted others. I say that as a friend. That's not a good road to walk. But let's say that you're a prideful person, and so you need other people to affirm you all the time and the things that you're good at, but you realize in light of the gospel and in light of God's word that pride is not good, and so we need to iron this out of our life. So we go, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to ask other people for compliments. I'm not going to ask other people to affirm me. I'm not going to seek my value in other places. And then once you get really good at that and you haven't done that in a couple of weeks and you still feel good about yourself, then what do you do? Boy, I am proud of myself for not needing other people to tell me I'm good. Now we're taking pride in a new thing. What Paul says is there is this part of our flesh that is going to manifest negative things in our life, pride, greed, selfishness, lust, whatever it is. And we can put parameters around those things, but they're going to leak out somewhere. You can follow whatever rules you want to follow. You can white knuckle yourself into some good discipline. I've seen some people who can keep themselves on the straight and narrow for years, but those negative traits that exist within you, those things are going to leak out somewhere else. And I know this because I've met a lot of people who can follow the rules really well, and they're jerks. It's just their flesh leaking out in other ways. So what Paul says is we cannot white knuckle our way to godliness. Discipline, self-control, more rules, more standards. Those do not get us to spiritual maturity. Those do not put us in a place where we can live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. That's not the answer. In chapter 3, thankfully, I believe that he gives us the answer. And I think it's a refreshing one. Because when we try to get to godliness by white-knuckle discipline, just I'm going to be a try-hard, I'm going to be a do-better, what happens is not good. Because if you have ever in your life decided, yeah, I'm going to be a better Christian, and I'm going to do it by taking these steps. I'm going to do it by instilling these standards in my life. I'm going to do it by my own effort and me trying hard. And maybe we pray a prayer, God, I am never going to do this again. God, I am always going to do this moving forward. God, I swear that that will never be a part of my life again. And we make these big promises and we make these big claims. And listen, we mean them. But here's what I know about you. If you've ever promised God that you will never or that you will always, then you have failed. That's what I know about you. If we ever have promised God, I will never do blank. I will always do blank, we have failed in those promises because we can't keep those commitments, because we're broken. Because of Romans 7, the things that I do not want to do, I do, because it's part of our nature to fail in that way. And because that's true, after we make up our mind enough times that God, I'm never going to, or God, I'm always going to, and then we fail, we get to a place where either we just feel like this broken, wretched Christian, and we're thinking, God, I'll never be good enough for you. I don't think I'll ever be good enough for you. Just please let me be saved. Just please let me just hang on until I get to the end of my life. Please usher me into heaven. I know I'll never be who I'm supposed to be. I know that I can't pursue those things, but please just accept me as I am. And we kind of just live this broken down, hopeless Christian life where we feel like we're limping our way to heaven. Or worse than that, we try so hard and we fail so many times that we get so tired of trying that we can't find it within ourselves to do it anymore. And then we conclude, God, your word says that I'm a new creature. Your word says that you will help me. Your word says that you will empower me. And yet I fail over and over and over again. So I can only conclude that you don't keep your word. And then we just wander away from the faith and we give up on God because righteousness is too hard because we've only ever tried it by ourself and we've never invited God in in the way that he needs to be invited in, and our white-knuckle disciplining to try to be better and more godly to pursue the faith that we want so earnestly ends up costing us our faith. So that's not the way. We find the way in Colossians 3. And I would sum it up like this. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving, by focusing on who we are rather than how we behave. And here's what I mean. In this chapter, we're going to see this idea introduced here by Paul, but introduced in plenty of other places by Paul in the New Testament, of the old and the new. The old you and the new you. The old you is who you were without Jesus. The new you is who you are with Jesus. The old you, the Bible says, was a slave to sin. I had no choice but to do things that displeased God. I had no chance at all. But the new you infused with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit does have the chance every day when you wake up to walk that day according to the life that God has called you to. We have a chance when we wake up to live today in honoring God and actually finish the day living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day. We've got a chance. There's a new us. And the new us desperately wants to please God. And so this is what Paul says about old self and new self in Colossians chapter three. This is what he says about being versus behaving. Look at Colossians chapter three, verses five through eight first. Put to death, Paul says, therefore, what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idol rules. But here's what we need to do. We need to put to death these things, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, covetousness, anger, slander, all these things. And at first, it sounds like that's a little bit in tension with what he just said. He said, if you want to be godly, if you want to be who God created you to be, it's not about following the rules. It has an appearance of wisdom, but that's not really helping any indulgence of the flesh. And then the very next chapter over, he's saying, put to death these things, which feels like rules and standards that he's giving us, except he's not giving us behaviors. He's telling us to put things to death. Remember how I said that if you follow rules, if you're trying to break yourself of pridefulness and you put rules around your pridefulness and then it just leaks out and into another area of your life. Jesus is, Paul is acknowledging that. See, it's not about trying to follow the rules because those unhealthy things just leak into other portions of your life. It's about actually putting the pride to death. It's about actually putting greed and lust to death in your heart so that in your heart there is no place for them to dwell. And if there is no place for them to dwell, then they will not produce the behaviors that you're trying so desperately to control. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we don't need to put parameters around our old self. We need to put our old self to death. And we do this by focusing on being. How do we put those things to death? This is what Paul says in Colossians 3. I'm going to read verses 12 through 17. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, we live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? In the phrasing of Hebrews 12, verse 1, What the world do I live the life that you want me to live? I think what Jesus would say is, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Jesus, what rules should I follow in this new life that you've called me to? How do I run the race that you've set before me? Jesus says, just look at me. Just keep your eyes on Christ. This is actually in complete harmony with Romans 12 that tells us that we should run the race and that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles us by, in verse 2, focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. So how do we live the life that God calls us to live? We daily make ourselves aware of Christ's love for us. We daily make ourselves aware of what God has done for us. If we will daily reflect on the fact that Jesus in heavenly form condescended and took on flesh and lived amongst us for 33 years and put up with everything that we have to offer and continues to walk with us and continues to love us and continues to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you as an individual, leans into God's ears and says, she's good. She's with me. She loves you, Father. I died for her. If we will let that reality wash over us daily, how could we not put to death the pride that exists in us by walking in humility at the love of God that we receive? If we are struggling with anger towards other people and frustration and impatience, how is it possible to spend a portion of your day every day focusing on the reality of God's patience with you? Focusing on the reality that as many times as you've said, God, I will never, or God, I will always, and then you failed, that God has been right there to help you clean up the mess every time. How can we not grow in forgiveness of others when we constantly remind ourselves of how forgiven we are? How can we not grow in patience to others when we constantly are focused on the patience that God has to us? If we will focus on God's overwhelming grace, that he died for us while we were still sinners, that he pursues us while we run away from him, that even though we fail him over and over again, he continues to love us with a reckless love, that God loves us while we were unlovely, that God sees us fully and knows us completely and still loves us unconditionally. If we let those things wash over us every day, how could we not look at other people and be more loving and patient towards them in light of how loving and patient God is towards us? Do you understand that these things that we clothe ourself with in Colossians 12 through 17 necessarily put to death our old self that Paul tells us to rid ourself of. So if we want to get rid of malice, what do we do? We focus on Christ. If we want to get rid of pride, do we put parameters around our pride? No, we focus on Jesus and who he is and realize that we have no right to our pride. If we want to be more gracious people, what do we do? We focus on Jesus' grace to us. Say, Jesus, how in the world do I live the life that you call me to live? Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And Jesus says, focus on me. Focus on me. So I would tell you, if you are a Christian who lives at war with yourself, you do not have a discipline issue, you have a focus issue. If you are someone who struggles with greed, you don't have a greed issue. You have a focus issue. If we try to be more godly and more pleasing to him by focusing on the behaviors that we need to do better, we will fail over and over and over again. But if we can put our focus on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith and let his grace and goodness and mercy and love wash over us daily, then those things will necessarily put to death the very root of the behaviors that we do not like. So again, if we are struggling in our walk with God, we do not have a discipline issue. We do not have a sin issue. We have a focus issue. We need to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We need to pursue him more with more urgency. We need to let the truths of how he loves us wash over us more. And those will necessarily put to death the elements of our character that we do not like, that produce the behaviors that we do not want to do. You can think of it this way. Our old self cannot survive where our new self thrives. Our problem is we have a new self and we have an old self and we feed them both the same amount of food. We give in to them both equally. And so they both just exist in this tension and if we ever want to put to death our old self, then our new self has to thrive. And our new self thrives by clothing ourselves in the characteristics of Christ and we clothe ourselves in those characteristics by focusing him and daily letting his goodness wash over us. So it's very simple. How should we then live? How do we get to the end of a single day? Living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day? By focusing our eyes on Jesus on that day. By looking at him that day. And letting everything else fade away and take care of itself. Because it's that simple, and because that's what we need to do, I wrote a prayer for us as a church. In a few minutes, I'm going to read it and pray it over us as a church and invite you to read it along with me. If you find it helpful, I would love to invite you to put this prayer somewhere where you can see it, where this is a thing that you will pray daily. Put it on your desk, or in your car, or on your mirror. If this is helpful to you, I would encourage you to pray this every day until it's not helpful to you, until the principles of this prayer are so ingrained in you that it is part of your daily prayer. But if we want to live a life as Christians that we are called to live, then I am convinced that this needs to be a fundamental prayer that we focus on very regularly. Not necessarily the words that I've chosen here, but the ethos and the attitude and the posture that's presented in this prayer and the acknowledgments of the truths that are in this prayer that are from Colossians chapter three and other portions of scripture as we seek to live the life that God calls us to live. So I'm gonna pray this over us and invite you to pray it along with me. Father, I know I am your child and that in you I am a new creation. Though I know this, I struggle to believe it. Because I struggle to believe, I struggle to walk as you would have me walk. So Father, help me learn to walk in this new self. As I put on the new self, I ask that you would help me see others through your eyes and so clothe me in your compassion. Help me regard others as your beloved children as you clothe me in your kindness. Remind me of the way you love me when I am unlovely in order that I might humbly love others in the way I am loved. Remind me today, Father, of who I am in you. As you clothe me in these things, let them put to death in me the remnants of my old self. Let your humility drive out my impatience, my anger, and my pride. Let your compassion and kindness suffocate my jealous and selfish heart. Let the way you see me overshadow and obscure the way I see myself. Help's name, Father. Amen.