Sermons tagged with Surrender

Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this November. Whenever I'm supposed to come up without a bumper video, the video that we played between the last song and the sermon is called a bumper video. Whenever I'm supposed to come up during a prayer and there's not a bumper video, I'm always terrified that I'm standing on the stage at the wrong time. There was a time at my old church where I was the host. I had Haley's job. They paid me for it. She does it for free. And I was in the front row, and I thought that the guy gave me the nod. You know, just this is it after this. And I was like, okay. So I come up, and he's standing back looking at me, and he goes, and he just strums the next song and goes, and I literally just walked up and looked at him in horror and then walked off the other side of the stage and sat down over there. And that was a congregation of like 700 people and they were all laughing at me. And I deserved it. That's germane to nothing. I'm just inviting you into the fear that I still fear, feel when I'm standing right here as Aaron is praying. Thank you to Kyle, our student pastor, who stepped in for me last week and did a phenomenal job as he continued on with the series. I appreciate that, man. We are in a series called The Songs We Sing, looking at some of the songs that we sing as a congregation, finding them in Scripture, allowing Scripture to imbue them with a greater meaning for us. And it's been really, really fun to move through this series, hear you guys responding, hear you guys singing, know that these things are connecting and that these songs can have deeper meaning for us. I continue to believe and emphasize that getting together and singing together on a Sunday morning as a body of believers is the most important thing that we do on Sunday mornings together. So I'm glad that we're continuing to do that. This week, we're looking at a song called The Battle Belongs. Next week, I'm preaching on a Christmas song, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, kind of to transition us into the Christmas season. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you guys next week. But this week, as I said, we're focused on a song called The Battle Belongs. It's one that we've sung around here for a while. You probably know it, but in case you don't, I'm just going to read you the chorus. This will not be on the screen, so you'll just be forced to pay attention to me. But the chorus goes like this. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees with my hands lifted high. Did you guys think I was going to sing this to you? No way. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. In every fear I lay at your feet, I'll sing through the night. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. This song comes directly out of, I think, two stories in the Old Testament. Now, as we sing this song, there's songs about you guiding me through the shadow and through the valley. That comes from Psalm 23. There's words about his ways being higher than our ways. That comes from Romans 11, that if God is for us, who can be against us? That comes from Romans 8. So there's different lyrics in the song that come from different places in scripture, but the heart of the song itself comes from two fantastic stories in the Old Testament. Now, if you spent any time at all at Grace, you know that I love my Old Testament. I love my Old Testament stories. It's a really, it tends to be a more entertaining read than the New Testament once you get past Acts, right? So I love the narrative stories of the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, the one I'm going to focus on primarily today is in 2 Chronicles chapter 20. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. 2 Chronicles can be hard for some of us to find because maybe we don't have a lot of experience there. It's in the first third of the Bible. There's a lot of pages in 1 and 2 Chronicles, so you're bound to find it if you thumb through a little bit. If you see kings, you're gaining on it. And if you see Ezra or Nehemiah, you've gone too far. All right. So Chronicles chapter 20. And in Chronicles chapter 20, there's a guy who's the king named Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat is the king of Judah. By this point in history, the kingdom has split. After David, we have Solomon. And after Solomon is the king, we have Rehoboam. Rehoboam was a cruddy king. He was a jerk. He was a dummy. And so Jeroboam took the northern kingdoms referred to for the rest of the Old Testament typically as Israel. And Rehoboam kept the southern kingdom typically referred to as Judah. For the rest of the lines of those kings and those stories are told in 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The northern tribes of Israel had no good kings. They all did what was right in their own eyes. They all betrayed God. Southern Israel, depending on who you talk to, Judah had between three and five good kings. As I kind of dug into the research, in my opinion, they had three good kings. We're going to talk about two of them this morning. One of them was Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat, 2 Chronicles chapter 20, receives word that the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Ammonites and the Meubites, I don't know how to say the last one, Meubites, were gathering together to attack him. Clearly, they felt like they had seen a weakness and they were ready to exploit it. Now, Judah is not a geopolitical player. They're just trying to carve out their place in the world. They're by no means a superpower. They're not scaring anyone. And so these three tribes assemble against him and decide now's the time we're going to strike. We're going to come in and we're going to conquer Judah. We're going to conquer Jerusalem and overthrow Jehoshaphat. And so word of this planned attack and the three tribes uniting against Jehoshaphat gets back to him., these three tribes have amassed against you. They're coming in to take over. They probably have the advantage. What do you want to do? His very first reaction is he was afraid. After he processes the fact that he's afraid, what should I do? He prays. He prays and he assembles all of Judah. Everyone from the different towns, the different tribes in Judah, come to Jerusalem, fast with me. Implicit in fasting is praying. Pray with me. Let's seek the face of the Lord and what we should do. So that's what they did. All the people of Judah gathered in Jerusalem. And they got on their hands and their knees and they cried out to God and they said, what do we do? God, what do we do here? We're going to be attacked. What should we do? And so they respond in prayer. And God answers them in this way on down the passage, verses 15 through 18. And he said, We say the battle belongs to the Lord. That's where it comes from. It's from the high priest reassuring Jehoshaphat, don't worry about it. Do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This battle's not yours anyways. This battle belongs to God. Verse 16. And here's the scene. Jehoshaphat gets word that the Moabites, Ammonites, and the Miites are coming to attack them and overthrow them. He's scared. He prays. He gathers the people of Judah to pray with him. Father, what would you have us do here? At the end of the prayer, the high priest says, the Lord has directed me. And you're supposed to do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This is not your battle. This is God's. Go out and align yourself for battle. And the instructions that follow are, lead with the Levites and let them sing worship. Lead with worship and lead with praise. And that's what they did. He fell on his face. He praised God with all the people. And it's important that we understand that worship isn't just singing. Worship can be praying. Worship can be a posture. Worship is living a life of sacrifice. Worship has a large definition. And so he falls on his face. If you're hearing these instructions, he falls on his face with the rest of Judah and they pray to God. And then the next morning they get up. They're not fearful. They go out to the battle lines. They put in front of them the worship pastors, which has to be the worst possible idea, right? Like if we needed to defend grace, would you want Aaron and Greg to do it? Or would you want people with like military experience? I'm just asking the question. I don't think you would want me to do it, but they're not the tops on the list is all I'm saying. But they put the skinny jeans and the beards out in front. This is who we're going to lead with. By the way, all these jokes, none of this is my insight. These are all Aaron's jokes. I'm stealing them. This is a sermon he's done before, this part of it. So I'm authorized to use these things. I mean, just so we're all clear about how tough I am, I raked for like 45 minutes last week. My arm was sore for a day, and I got a blister on one of my fingies, even though I was wearing gloves. All right, so that's what we're dealing with here. But they put the worship leaders out in front, and they praise God. And as they praise God, God incites a riot in the camp of the three different tribes. They conquer each other, and they walk away dismayed. God's army doesn't have to fire a single arrow or throw a single spear. The battle is won because it belongs to the Lord. There's another wonderful example of this, and I believe it's referenced in the chorus when it says, everything I lay at your feet. And I think the most descriptive example of this is in 2 Kings chapter 19. It's a story of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was another one of the good kings of Jerusalem, or yeah, of Jerusalem and of Judah. And what's going on here is that Hezekiah receives word that the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, is sweeping through the Middle East and is storming towards Jerusalem intent on conquering it. And this isn't three random roving tribes that happen to exist around you, Moab and Amman. It's not those places. This is Assyria, the precursor to the Persian empire. This is Sennacherib, a name that strikes fear in everyone that hears it. This is a big deal. And Sennacherib on his way deploys basically propaganda in Jerusalem. It's a letter that he sends that he writes to the people of Jerusalem that says, hey, you're going to want to get out of Dodge because I'm coming to wreck shop. And if you're still there when I get there, you and your family's going to die, just so you know. And someone takes that letter and they hand it to Hezekiah. And this is Hezekiah's response in verse 14. Verse 19. The propaganda letter is brought to King Hezekiah. Hezekiah knows. If Sennacherib wants Jerusalem, he's going to take it. They have as much chance of defending Jerusalem from Sennacherib as my daughter Lily has defending her Reese's peanut butter cups at Halloween from me. I'm going to win that fight. And so what does Hezekiah do? He doesn't do what you think he should do. What he should do is assemble the generals right away. Assemble the quartermaster right away. Assemble the treasurer right away. Whoever's in charge of agriculture, how we're going to feed the people, get them in the room. He needs to assemble the cabinet right away. How do we defend Jerusalem? Someone start boiling some oil. I saw that on Netflix one time. That seems to be a thing you should do when you're defending the city. Get everybody together and let's come up with a plan to repel the Assyrian army. That's what we need to do. That's not what he does. He takes the letter. He goes to the temple. He lays it down at the feet of the Lord, and he prays. And he says, God, this is an affront to you. What would you have us do? His first response is to pray. And similarly to Jehoshaphat, God directs Hezekiah, don't do anything. Don't fire an arrow. Just watch, and I'll win. And the next morning, he incites a riot in the camp of the Assyrians. They rout each other, and they walk back to Assyria licking their wounds. God's armies didn't have to fire an arrow. Because they're good kings, Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah responded in prayer to everything that came their way. And so, of course, when I read these stories and I reflect on them, and I think about these were put here over a thousand years ago for us today. What is it that I should take from them? I think there's myriad applications here. But the biggest one to me is to simply ask, is this what I do? Is this what we do? When I encounter a situation that gives me pause, is my reflexive response to pray? When I'm fearful, like Jehoshaphat was, is my first response to go and pray, or is my first response to go and plan? I don't know about you, but when I'm in a stressful situation, when I feel disappointed or when I feel overwhelmed or when I feel like there's a big task in front of me, the very first thing I do is come up with a plan that I believe in. As soon as I have a plan that I can work, I feel very comforted in life. So the first thing I do in stress is I sit down, I think it through, I make a plan, and then I begin to work the plan. The problem is, prayer didn't precede that plan. It didn't follow that plan. It's just my plan. And I'm not, certainly didn't bring anybody here to make you feel bad about your prayer life. So I'll let you join in judging me about mine. And if it applies to you, fine. But when I read these passages, I can't help but ask myself, how much of my parenthood is prayerless and just reflexive? How much of my marriage and my love for Jen is prayerless and just a representation of my effort? How much of my career? How much of my interactions with others? How many of my important, maybe even difficult conversations? How many small groups in Bible studies have I led prayerlessly just going into them on my own? Is it my reflex in times of stress, in times of trepidation, in times of challenge, in times of fear, in times of uncertainty? Is my reflex to pray or is it to plan? Is it to seek the face of the Lord? Or is it to call a friend? How much in your life, this is where I'll put it on you, how much in your life, in your coming and in your going, as you enter into situations, as you face new situations, when you get phone calls, as you respond, how much in your life do you stop and you pause and you lay down at the foot of God and you say, God, I need you here. I'm not big enough for this. How much of that do you do and how much of it do you just take on yourself and charge right ahead without ever once stopping to pause and pray? I've joked often, and I will do it one day, that one day I'm going to give a sermon on reading the Bible. And I'm going to come out. I'm going to say, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You should read your Bible more. Let's pray. I'm going to do that one day. Because I genuinely think that when I come out here and I tell a group full of Christians who in your heart love and seek out God's word, when I say, hey guys, we should read the Bible more often, that the Holy Spirit can take it from there. He doesn't need me to talk for 29 and a half more minutes to make that an effective message. I'm probably just going to mess it up. That's enough for the Holy Spirit to go and work. And similarly, this morning is simply that. Hey guys, pray more. Pray more reflexively. Pray more regularly. And grain it into yourselves. Let the Holy Spirit work it into your psyche. Pray more. Because here's what happens when we pray more. I was reflecting as I was preparing. If we can be more like Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, if we can be people who respond in prayer and not panic or plans, what can happen for us? Because remember, everything that God tells us to do, he tells us to do because it's best for us. So why is it best for us to stop at every moment, every day, and pray multiple times a day? Why is it better for us to pray and consider more? Here's what I think. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Not for nothing. That's the greatest alliterative sentence I've ever written in my life. I'm going to graduate now as a pastor. I've reached the mountaintop, I think. Prayer provides us with perspective. It puts things in their proper focus. I have a son, John, he's two and a half, and he's in that season where every time we go up the stairs, it's an adventure, right? And you always ask him when you're about to go up the stairs, you don't want to upset his delicate sensibilities. Johnny, do you want to hold my hand? You want to do it yourself? And he usually says, I do it myself. Okay. And so he uses the wall and the railings and different things, and he takes the steps one at a time. And I'm right behind him. If he falls, I'm going to catch him. It's going to be okay. But he likes to say, I do it myself. And then I let him do it himself. Listen, every time we go into a situation or circumstance or a scenario, and we do it prayerlessly, what we've just done is we've looked at God and we've said, I do it myself. Do you need help with your career? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. Do you need help in your marriage? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. I can hold your hand. I can guide you through this. I can show you the way. No, it's good. I'll do it myself. This big goal in your life, I'll do it myself. Reconciling a relationship, I'll do it myself. Raising your children, I'll do it myself. Every time we enter into anything prayerlessly, we are saying to God, I'll do it myself. Thanks. When we don't pray, we make ourselves too big and God too small. When we don't pray, when we don't pray about whatever it is, about a health issue, about a relationship, about a career, about parenthood, about our marriage, about trying to transition into being adult parents of adult kids, and that relationship is different, and I don't really know what to do with my hands anymore. I just need to know I need to give them some space. When we approach that prayerlessly, we make God too big and ourselves too small. We forget who we are and who he is. But I want us to actually acknowledge and admit that that any time we approach anything, whether it's just a small sales meeting, a regular business meeting in our place of work, a board meeting or an elder meeting, when we approach a small group, when we approach a delicate conversation with our spouse or with our kids, when we sit at our desk or wherever it is we sit on Monday morning and think about the week ahead, when we do any of those things prayerlessly, we make ourselves far too big and God far too small. And we say to him, I've got this. I'll do it myself. God in his goodness climbs those stairs right behind us, but he's willing to hold our hand and walk us up there if we'll reach for him in prayer. So not only does prayer give us perspective, but prayer puts everything in its proper place, right? Because when we pray, here's what we admit, whether we consciously acknowledge this or not. God is in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. When we pray, that's what we acknowledge. God's in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. God's the creator of the universe. I'm not the creator of the universe. He's in charge. I am not. And this situation is in his hands and better off for it. When I think about this, that prayer puts us in our proper place, I'm reminded of Genesis 1. Genesis 1.1. God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I love to ask the question, why does the Bible begin that way? I don't think it just begins that way because that's where the story begins. I think it begins that way because it sets up the fundamental relationship throughout all of Bible and all of life. God is the creator. We are the creation. This is it. All sin in our life is getting confused about that relationship. That's all it is. God is the Lord. I am not. God is the creator. I am the created. All sin in our life is when we choose to ignore that and say, no, no, no, I'm more important than him. That's it. And so what prayer does is put us in our proper place. What prayer does for us in a humble, quiet way is what God had to do for Job in a bombastic way in Job chapter 38. When Job's tired of life, he's tired of suffering and goes to God and he's like, hey man, you owe me some answers. And so in Job 38 and on, God gives Job those answers, but they're not the ones he wants. He says, Job, you've forgotten your place, pal. You don't know who you are and who I am. You've forgotten. And then Paul reiterates this in Romans 11, when he says, who can understand the mind of God? His ways are higher than our ways. And so when we humble ourselves in prayer, particularly when we bow on our knees if we can, it puts everything in its proper place. You are God. I am not. You're in charge. I'm reliant on you. The situation is bigger than me. It is not bigger than you. I know that you know my kids better than I could ever know them. I know you love them more than I could ever love them. So I'm trusting them with you. Tell me what my part is and I'll do it. Often your part is to hang back and sing worship music and let God do the dirty work. I know that you know my wife better than I'll ever know her and that you love her more than I can ever love her. So can you just show me what my part is in loving her? Can you just help me with that? God, I know that my career, for whatever reason, is important to you. I don't know why it's important to you. I don't know what the end game of it is. I don't know what you would have me to learn or gain there, but I know that it matters to you where I work, who I work for, and how I carry myself in the workplace. I know that matters to you, God. So I'm going to trust you with it and walk in the steps that you would lay out for me. When we pray, it gives us the proper perspective and it puts everything in its proper place. And then, when everything's in its proper place, prayer gives us peace. It offers us peace. I love that in worship, sometimes the Holy Spirit does things like this. In worship, Aaron referenced Philippians 4, 8. Finally, brothers, whatsoever things are true, noble, of good report, honorable, godly, trustworthy, think upon these things. And he was right. That verse is preceded by two verses that tell us what we should do in times of worry. Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and supplication, and with thanksgiving, present your request to God, and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. So Paul writes in Philippians, don't be anxious for anything, which for most dudes, it's like, okay. And for most women, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm anxious about you saying that. Be anxious for nothing. But in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And what will happen when in everything we present our request to God, when in everything we pray, when in every circumstance we reflectively fall on our feet and say, God, what would you have us do? What happens when for everything we present our petitions to God and we have the proper perspective with that thing and who God is and we put ourselves in our proper place and we put God in his proper place and we put the situation in its proper place, then what happens is we are given the peace of God that passes all understanding and he guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. Prayerful people are able to walk in a peace that no one else can understand. Why? Because that peace is guarded by God. Because they walk in an understanding that God's got this and I don't and it's okay. The people in your life who pray the most are probably the most peaceful. They have the hardest feathers to ruffle. Now some of my friends are the most anxious and the most prayerful. Those things go hand in hand for them. But at least they've learned to reflexively pray. But when we are people of prayer and we're assured of perspective and place, we can't help but feel peace that follows that. I remember very vividly coming to Grace in April of 2017. And when I got here, I made this point before, I will not belabor it. Things were comically bad. We were going to shut the, if they didn't hire a senior pastor in April, they weren't making it out of May, no doubt about it. And no one who was here at that time would argue that. And I remember getting here and finding out more about how dire it was and going, whoa, well, this is career suicide because no one is going to look at the resume of a guy who's been a senior pastor exactly one time and ran it into the ground in six weeks. That's lifelong small group pastor territory. And then when I get old, they make me care pastor. That's what that is. But in prayer, I honestly, like I wasn't nervous. I wasn't worried. I didn't even really care because it was out of my hands. I knew that God loved this place. I knew that God cares about me and he cares about the people who call this place home. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is where God wanted me to be. And so I literally thought back in April of 2017, well, God, you brought me here on purpose. I know you did. It was either to grow it or to kill it. Either way, it's what you want. Let's ride. Let's see what happens. Now, we still don't know that he didn't bring me here to kill it, but so far, it's been to grow. So far, he's walked alongside us, and he's shown up again and again. Whenever we sing that song, Evidence, those are the kinds of things I think about. When we put things in their proper perspective, and we put ourselves in our place through prayer, we can be given the peace of God through prayer. And once we are walking in the peace of God through prayer, when we reflexively go to pray, we can pray with the proper perspective. It gives us the right perspective from which to pray. Because if I want to kneel down and pray for my children, John and Lily, I need to first acknowledge, God, you know them better than I'll ever know them. You see their entire future laid out in front of them. I don't know what they're going to do today. Hopefully, shut up, because we have a seven-hour drive. But I don't know what they're going to do today. You know what they're going to do in 30 years. I don't know how to best love their little hearts and souls. You knit them together. You know them intimately. So it inclines me with that admission to say, God, how would you have me pray for my children? God, what should my heart for Lily be? God, how can I best pray for John? And so when we walk in prayer, it inclines us towards his wisdom and we begin to blanket our prayers with this question of what is wise to pray. Not reflexively, what do I want to pray? What do I feel like praying? What do I want most in the moment? But God, because I know that you know this situation, you know me, you know the other people, you know everything happening, you know them intimately, because I that you know way more than I do about all the things what God is wise to pray. And that question begins to mature our prayers. When I pray for Sunday mornings, I never ever pray that the sermon would be good. I've never once prayed that I would do well. I think that's the wrong perspective. I pray and I write it every week to the elders. Every week to the elders I send out, let's all on these days, let's pray for this thing together. And Sunday has never changed. The prayer for Sunday is always, would the service be exactly what God wants it to be? Good, bad, or ugly, would what happens in here be what God wants to happen in here? When I pray for the band, when we have our pre-service meeting at 915, and sometimes I'm asked to pray over that, I always pray, God, would you help us to care about the things that you care about and not care about the things that you don't care about? Which is code speak for, if the host messes up, but it doesn't detract from the spiritual point of the service, who cares? If the basis starts with the wrong note, don't get bent out of shape about it. God doesn't care about it. You shouldn't either. Let's pursue the throne and praise God together. God, help us to care about what you care about and not care about what you don't care about. The more we walk in prayer, the more we keep the perspective in place right, the more peace we experience. And in that peace, we begin to pray wise prayers. God, how can I pray in accordance with your will about this? So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to invite Aaron and the band, Greg, back up. Back up. And instead of me finishing my sermon on prayer in prayer, I'm going to invite you to a time of prayer. I'm pretty certain if you're a thinking person that at some point during this sermon as I've talked about, hey, in this situation do you respond in prayer? Have you offered that up to prayer? Have you been trying to do this prayerlessly or with your own plans? I would be willing to bet that God has brought something to mind for you. That there's something or someone or some things in your life that probably do need some prayer. And maybe you haven't given them the prayer that they need. Maybe there are things you've been praying for very regularly for a long time, but you just want to lift them up again. So I'm going to step off the stage, and I'm going to give us all some time to pray. Lift those things up to God. Your children, your spouse, your loved ones, the family you'll see this Thanksgiving, that career thing that's just been eating at you, the bills that you don't know how you're going to pay, the health issues of you and your loved one that are just driving you nuts. Whatever it might be that God's brought to mind, take a few minutes and pray for that. And as you pray, Aaron's going to sing over us a little bit, and then at some point he'll invite us to stand. And we'll close out singing The Battle Belongs. And we'll let that be our battle cry that reminds us that our very first reaction, our very first reflex, no matter what's happening in our life, should be to go to God in prayer. Let's pray together, silently.

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.

All right, well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Now's not a good time. I'm busy. Happy Mother's Day for those to whom it applies. As we were singing that last song, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. I think that's an excellent song for Mother's Day. I think about my wife, who's an incredible mother. I think about the mom that I got to grow up with. I think about the kids that we have and share together and see God's evidence, the evidence of God's goodness all over my life. And hopefully for Mother's Day, that's something that you get to reminisce and think about too. Hopefully you have a great mom. Hopefully you've gotten to experience being a mom if that's something that you want to experience. But I also know that for others, Mother's Day is hard. We had a lot of hard Mother's Days when we wanted the gift of children and we didn't have it yet. And so I always like to just acknowledge that and pray in gratitude for good moms, for good memories, for the blessing of motherhood, but also pray for strengthening for those for whom Mother's Day is difficult for myriad reasons. So if you'll join me in prayer, I'll pray, and then we'll dive into the sermon. Father, we're grateful for good moms, moms that love us,oms that love us enough to get on to us, to keep after us, to not give in. Moms who wake up in the night with us. Moms who are always there, who leave notes in our lunches and who pray with us every morning. We thank you for moms that we've seen read your word and seek you diligently. We thank you for moms who raised us to help see you. And God, we thank you for the gift of motherhood and parenthood. And those of us who have children, God, are so grateful that you've given us that gift. And so we pray that we would be the mom and the dad to them that we need to be. God, also lift up those for whom holidays like this are difficult. Maybe it's difficult because their mom's not here anymore, and that's hard. Maybe it's difficult because they want to be a mom and they're not. And that's hard. Maybe it's difficult, God, because we thought we were going to be a mom and then we weren't. So, Lord, I pray just for special strength, protection, grace, and peace onto those folks. And that, God, those of us who feel blessed by today would see you as the author of that blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. So this is part five of our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at different stories and instances in the Bible where we see these emotional flare-ups, these blow-ups and these blow-outs, and kind of just ask, what can we learn from that? Because this blowing up is a very part, it's a part of the human existence. It's something that we all experience. And so earlier in the series, we talked about, I talked about Peter cutting off the ear of one of the soldiers in the garden, and I kind of compared that to when we lash out at people. We just get angry, and we lash out, we're cutting off ears, and we should try to cut off less ears. And we talked about what can we do when we feel like lashing out. And so I thought it would be good to look at the other end of that and say, what do we do when we're the one whose ear just got cut off? What do we do when someone lashes out at us? So the question for today is, what should you do when someone blows up on you? When you are on the receiving end of unwarranted anger, of unjust frustration, of unfair lashing out, what should you do when someone blows up on you? And I thought that this would be appropriate for Mother's Day because what is being a mom if not getting blown up at eight times a day because you had the audacity to suggest that now might be a good time to brush your hair or not wear Crocs with a church dress or not get out of bed at 630 to make Mother's Day breakfast. Not that any of those things happen in our home, but with your children who are less good than ours, I'm sure that they blow up at you. And I can only imagine, you know, right now we've got a seven-year-old daughter. John is two. He doesn't really know how to blow up at anybody. He just clenches his fist really tight and you can just hear, he screams and you can just see this visceral anger coming from him, which is great. And, but Lily knows how to blow up. She's seven, but they're seven-year-old blowups, you know, like they're not, they don't really sting a little. I bet the 17-year-old blowups are rough. I bet those, I'm not looking forward to those. And then something tells me that the older your children get, the worse those instances become. And I also know that on the other end of the spectrum, I've talked with enough people, with aging parents, that sometimes as parents get older and older, their filter is just used up. It's just used up. They don't have a new one. There's no replacement. You can't get one from Amazon. It's just gunked up and they've tossed it aside. And they can say things that aren't so nice sometimes. And that's tough. It's tough when someone blows up on you. It's tough to be on the receiving end of unfair anger. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to pick up my dad at the airport. And I was at the airport and just kind of started to, I was near the terminal, so the traffic kind of starts to funnel in and slow down and whatever. And this cab, like a literal taxi cab, I don't even know, like, what are you guys even doing anymore? Like, who's using cabs? And not, why does it even exist in Raleigh? I don't understand this. It's like, it's like, it's like seeing the yellow pages on your front door or something. Like, didn't we, didn't we cover this? Anyways, cab comes blowing past me, swerves into my lane, like, and, and, and like slams on his brakes. Like he's mad at me. And I'm like, what in the world's going on with this guy? I have no idea. I did not see him anywhere in my rear view. I was not aware. I didn't even think that I had changed lanes recently. He just decided he was mad at me. He gets in front of me and I'm like, whatever. So I, I actually, I didn't even need to be in that lane and he was now going slow to mess with me. So I, I I just went around him like I got to go to the second terminal, buddy. And I look over, and he is aggressively hanging the bird at me. And I don't know how you do that non-aggressively, but this was aggressive. Shaking his fist, yelling things. I literally, like honestly, I'm on the stage, okay? I'm preaching to people. So before God, I have no clue, no clue what I did that upset this guy. And so I just kind of looked at him and went, and kept driving. I don't know. I wasn't mad, but he was really mad at me. So what do we do when someone gets really angry with us and we don't deserve it? We didn't do anything. We don't know what to do. How do we act in those moments? How does God want us to act? And what's really cool is not even how does God want us to act just so that we behave well, but how can we act in those moments that will actually draw people, the people who are angry and the people who can see that anger, that will actually draw them closer to our Father. What can we do in those situations when someone blows up on us? When I was thinking about that, there's one story that comes to mind in the Bible. To me, it's the best blow-up story in the whole Bible. It's one of the biggest ones. I can't think of many others that are like it, if any at all. But it's in 1 Samuel. We see the first part of it in chapter 18, and then I'm going to point us to chapter 19. So Saul is the king of Israel. He's the first king of Israel, but there's this kid named David who's been anointed as the next king of Israel. Normally, Saul's son Jonathan would take the throne from him, but God has used the prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king of Israel. And then after getting anointed, David does this really annoying thing where he goes down in the valley and he kills a giant that everybody else in the whole country was afraid of, including Saul, and he does it without Saul's armor. And so Saul's a little ticked at him. And then he puts David in his army, and there's this song. This is the English translation of the song. Maybe it sounds better in the original Hebrew. I don't know. It's a pretty dumb song, if you ask me. But it was, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has slayed his tens of thousands. I don't know what the melody is on that. Maybe I should get Roburg to help me out. That seemed to work for you. But I don't, that was the song, right? So there's some jealousy there between Saul and David. And so Saul was a man that was given to what we would probably identify as anxiety or depression, bouts of despair and anger. And one of the only things that could calm him was David coming to the palace and playing the harp for Saul. That would calm him down. And so David's doing that one day, and Saul is just seized with anger and throws his spear at David to try to kill him two times. David dodges both of them and then gets out of there. Then after that, Jonathan, who was David's closest friend in the world, goes to Saul, his dad, and he's like, dude, this is a paraphrase. He says, dude, what are you doing? What's the problem here, man? This guy, he loves you. He serves you. He's a good servant. He's faithful. He's a good leader of men on the battlefield. He's there to play the harp when you need him to. I'm not mad at him. I'm happy that he's going to be my king. You don't need to be mad at him for me. Just like knock it off with David, with hating David. Can you do that for me? And Saul says, yes, I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Which just as an aside, if you ever in your life have to promise to stop trying to kill someone, you just need to take a look in the mirror. That's all. I'm not going to make a bunch of points about that, but that's a sentence that no one should say. I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Then we pick up the story in 1 Samuel 19. Turns out Saul's a liar. He just really liked trying to kill David. So here we go. Then a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and he sat in his house with his spear in his hand, and David was playing the lyre. And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul so that he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and escaped that night. Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, If you do not escape with spear two times, leaves, gets invited back to the palace, goes back to the palace. He's playing the lyre again to try to soothe Saul. And Saul, for a third time, throws a spear at David. David eludes it and gets out of there. Which, as an aside, I'd just like to point out, this is one of the fundamental differences between David and I. I have a one-spear-throw policy. If you throw your spear at me one time in anyone's house, I'm leaving that house, and I'm not going to trust you around spears again. David has a three-spear policy, much more gracious than I am. So he eludes it for the third time. He leaves. McCall is actually Saul's daughter that was given to David in marriage, and she helps him escape. Later on, we see this poignant scene where David and Jonathan meet in a field, and Jonathan tells David, you're going to have to go until my dad dies. He's never going to stop wanting to kill you, so you got to go. So David, for I think about this 20 year period goes and he just lives in the wilderness with a band of some of his soldiers. And they just elude Saul at various times. Saul chases David through the wilderness, trying to capture him and kill him. And there's actually two really poignant scenes in the wilderness where David has a chance to kill Saul and he doesn't. There's one where they're in the En Gedi, the caves on the edge of the En Gedi plain, which is in the southern part of Israel, close to the Dead Sea. And Saul's army must have been close because David and his men were hiding in a cave. And Saul, now at my house, when someone says they have to go to the bathroom, we say, do you have to go to the bathroom or the bathroom bathroom? Saul had to go to the bathroom bathroom. So he goes into a cave to take care of business. While he's in there, just so happens, that's where David and his guys are. And David's guys are giving David the eyes like, dude, you could totally kill him right now. And David realizes this. But he says, shame on me if I harm the head of the Lord's anointed. So he takes his knife and he cuts off an edge of the robe and Saul leaves. And once he's a little ways off, within shouting distance at least, David feels terrible that he even did what he did. And he goes out and he gets Saul attention, and he shows him the robe. And Saul feels so bad about the grace and forgiveness that David shows him that he decides, I think I'm going to be done killing David for a while. And he goes back to the palace. It wasn't long before he started hunting for David again. This time, David and a guy named Abishai snuck into the tent at night, and Saul's laying on the ground asleep with all of his men around him asleep as well. And Abishai looks at David, and he says, let me strike him with the spear. It will only take once. It will not take twice, which is a really, like, it's one of the cool lines. Like, I only need to do it once, man. I won't need two on this one. I'll get him. And David says, no, shame on me if I touch the Lord's anointed. And then in a battle between some of David's forces and some of Saul's forces, Saul ends up being killed. And the person who takes Saul's life, David actually takes their life for being willing to do that to the Lord's anointed. So what we see from David is that although Saul blew up on him, had completely unjust, unfair, unwarranted anger at David, David always, his whole life took the high road. His whole life honored Saul. Never once did he raise to meet Saul where he was. And so if we're going to ask, what should we do when someone blows up on us, when we are the object of unwarranted anger and frustration, I think we can look to this example of the life of David and see what he did, and we can mimic those things in our own life. And what's really helpful about this is I think that there are three really important New Testament passages, verses or passages, because some of them are two verses. I think there are three really important New Testament passages that honestly, every Christian, if you're here and you call yourself a believer, you should have these memorized. You should be able to say these off the top of your head. These should be things that show up in your life that you think of often enough so regularly that you can quote them. You might not know where they're from. You might not know how to find them. You might have to type them into Google to figure out the reference like I did this week, but you should know them. You should know what to type into Google. And so I want to look at three verses that display three behaviors that David displayed in this story about his interaction with Saul. So let's look at three things that were true of David and try to make those true of us. The first thing we see in this story is that David was slow to anger. He was slow to anger. And I know he was slow to anger because David could have, by all accounts, by all accounts, he was a better warrior than Saul. By every measure, he was superior to Saul. When Saul is in his house and potentially drunk and throwing spears at him, David could have very easily taken that spear out of the wall and gotten his vengeance on Saul right there. Now, you might say, well, he couldn't do that. There's guards. He could have been killed. Yeah, maybe, but what we know is that he didn't raise up in red-hot anger and do what some of us would do if somebody tried to hurt us. He kept his cool. He was slow to anger, which is really not the typical response in the human experience, right? That's why James writes this verse to remind us to do it. In James 1, 19 and 20, he says, does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. This is one that we should know. This is one that we should have memorized. This is one that we should remind ourselves of, particularly when someone is blowing up at us. Because human nature is not to stay calm and stay down here. Human nature is to rise and meet the anger with anger, isn't it? You guys who are married know this. You know this. You've had those fights, those days, where you look at each other and you're just mad at each other. You're just mad. And finally, one of you goes, what are you mad about? What are you even upset for? And the other one says, I don't know. You're mad at me, and I don't know why you're mad, so I'm mad at you. Well, I don't know why you're mad. So I'm mad at you. And then you kind of go back and forth. You're like, what was the first thing that made us mad? And nobody knows. And like, can we just agree to just kind of set the arms down and slowly back away from this one? Are we done here? We're like, yeah, we're done here. But that's typical in human interaction to meet anger with anger. I remember years ago, very early on in our marriage, Jen and I were at each other's throats about something. I don't remember what. But as we were talking about it, she gets really upset. She storms up the stairs, slams our bedroom door. Now, what did I do? Did I, because of my maturity and wisdom, think to myself, she's probably overreacting, but I'm going to let her stay up there and simmer because we don't want to say words in anger. And, you know, I'm sure that she'll kind of calm down. She'll realize maybe that was a little bit too much, and she'll come and apologize and tell me I'm right. That's probably what I need to do. No, I did not do that. I did not do that. Instead, I thought, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to tell her that she does not need to be slamming doors in our house. So I go upstairs, and I open that door, and I start getting on to her for the way that she's expressing her anger. And she, again, I don't want to talk to you right now, and leaves the room and goes into the guest room and slams that door. Now listen. Here's what I know. I don't know what we were fighting about. But if I make that sweet woman act like that, it's my fault. I was wrong. I don't know what we were fighting about. I know I was wrong. That's what I know. Now when she went into the second room and shut that door, did I leave her be? No. Because I wanted to poke it. So I walk up to the guest bedroom and I open that door. And I said, you know, I can open this door too. I can open all the doors. I don't know what happened after that. Things just kind of went red, I guess. It was just a blur. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's mad at us. Oh, I'm going to get mad at you. Some cab driver hangs you the bird, you're like, hey man, forget you. You know, like whatever. Your kid snaps at you, you've had a stressful day, you meet them there and you snap at them. Your spouse, your co-worker, your parent. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's angry with us, we raise to meet that anger. Well, James tells us, don't do that. Don't do that. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. It's important to be quick to listen and slow to speak too, because in those moments when we're frustrated, we have things that we want to say. But if we'll calm down and listen, we'll probably learn new information that may change what we want to say, that may help us be slower to anger. So when someone's angry with us, wisdom says, I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to listen, and I will not meet anger with anger. This is what David does. The second thing that David does is David was quick to forgive. He was slow to listen and quick to forgive. He moves to forgiveness very, very quickly. We see no evidence whatsoever in any of the texts that David was ever angry with Saul or that David could not forgive Saul ever through the rest of his life. We see David offer Saul quick forgiveness, which is right in line with what Jesus teaches Peter in Matthew chapter 18. When it says that Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that should I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to as many times as you need to. Forgive again, forgive again, forgive again, forgive again. And it feels pretty generous for Peter to ask that. How many times, when my brother commits the same offense against me, how many times should I forgive him? Up to seven, which makes sense. Your friend comes over to your house, he gets too rowdy, he breaks your new TV. You forgive him that one time. How many more times should I forgive him? Seven? That's a lot of breaking TVs. And Jesus says, no, as many times as you need to forgive them, forgive them. The way that I think about it is, as many times as we hope God forgives us, forgive other people that many times. When someone offends us, when someone lashes out at us, when we are the object of someone's unfair anger and unfair frustration, we should as quickly as we can move to forgive that person. Because holding that grudge is only going to hurt us. It's not going to hurt them. Now, I will also say this. Last year at Lent, during the Lent season, I did a sermon on forgiveness. And I basically just preached to you from the perspective of my good friend, whose husband was having an affair on her, and she had to really learn what forgiveness looked like because they had five kids, and that was really, really tough. And one of the things that she said that was super helpful, if you're a person who's struggling with forgiveness or wants a more robust explanation of forgiveness and what it looks like, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to that sermon. But one of the things she said that I found very helpful and others have commented to me too that was very helpful is forgiving someone does not mean that you have to trust them again. And so I would say this to you. If the person who is blowing up at you is making a habit of that, if they do it regularly, if it's not just a one-off that you can ascribe to a set of circumstances that are no longer true, but you have someone in your life who's blowing up at you again and again and again, you should be slow to anger in those situations, and you should be quick to find a path to forgiveness in those situations. But let me tell you what David did not do. He did not go back into Saul's palace again. He did not make himself vulnerable to a spear the fourth time. He did not trust Saul again. Did he forgive him? Yes. Did he honor him? Yes. Did he give him grace? Absolutely. But did he put himself back in that home? No. No. If you have someone in your life who is habitually blowing up at you, it is perfectly good and wise to remove yourself from that situation until something changes and you feel like you can trust that that's not going to keep happening. As we talk about what do we do when someone blows up on us, it's... I'm mostly talking about people who aren't our spouses. If it's our spouse and they do it all the time, if it's our brother or sister or friend or mom or dad and they do it all the time, that's a separate sermon. But what I would say to that separate sermon is, it's okay to not put yourself back in a situation where someone's going to blow up at you all the time, where you feel like you're just around a ticking time bomb. We should seek to forgive, but we don't have to trust and keep putting ourself in a place where that is going to happen over and over and over again until we believe that something is going to be different. The last thing David does is David was a conduit of grace. He was a conduit of grace. He was connected to God's grace. He was pouring grace out onto others. Back in the fall, I did a series called The Five Traits of Grace, the five characteristics that make us who we are, The five things that we want every partner to exhibit. And one of those things is to be a conduit of grace. To be attached to the grace of God so that the grace that we receive flows out onto others. This is the verse that I think of when I think of this. This is probably, if you're going to memorize any verse at all, if you don't know any of these, start with this one. Start with this verse. Put it on your mirror where you get dressed. Put it on your dashboard if you get angry in the car. Put it next to where your emails are if those things make you angry. Whatever sets you off, whatever stokes your fire, just put this verse so that you can see it. And it's super easy to memorize and it's super impactful. For from his fullness, John says, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God's grace that pours out on us, we have all received grace upon grace. When we think about a couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, I did a sermon about the earned wrath of God on us for placing his son on the cross and that Jesus on the cross exhausts the wrath of God for his children. When we think of the wrath that we don't have to experience because God poured it out on Jesus instead of us, that's grace. And God knew, as I said, God knew that we were going to cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. He knew that we were going to do that. He knew what you were going to do after you prayed the prayer and after you accepted Jesus as your Savior. He knew that you were going to move through that awful season of your life that you'd like to forget. He knew that and he forgave that. He knows what lies ahead and he's forgiven that. When we think about the grace that we feel every week when we come to church and we sit here and we sing the songs and we have this voice in our head that reminds us of who we are and what we've done and where we've been and that if the people here knew what I was capable of, if the people here knew what I know, then I would have to find a different church to go to. And yet God chooses me and God loves me and God blesses me and he's given me grace upon grace. When we realize that, that that God is so good to us, that that God is so patient with us, that that God will watch us go through years where we don't have quiet times, where we're not praying to him, where we're not seeking him, where everything about our Christian life is compulsory and cursory. He will watch that zombie walk through life and still try to breathe spiritual life into us at all times, calling us back to him. He is excited every time we come home. He is excited every time we utter the words, dear God, and we begin to pray. He is thrilled in his heart every time he hears your voice praise your creator. When we receive from his fullness that much grace, it is very easy to pour grace out onto others. And this is what David did. He had grace for Saul. I think he understood Saul's plight. I think he had patience for him and his depressions and his moods, even in understanding his desire for his own son to be on the throne. And one of the best pictures of grace we see, maybe in the Bible, but definitely in the life of David, is once Saul has passed away, David has ascended to the throne. Anybody who's watched the History Channel or read any books about old kings and kingdoms knows that once a king takes over, one of the first acts of orders of business is to kill everyone associated with the bloodline that preceded him so that there's no threats to his throne. And there was no one left that they knew of, but then one day somebody found a relative of Saul's. It was a nephew or a cousin or something, I can't remember which. Named Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth, it says, had a disability. And that's important because that made it more difficult for Mephibosheth to earn money and provide for himself. So he was a person who needed help. And they brought him to David, expecting David to kill him, to put him to death, to be done with the line of Saul and move on. Instead, David, learning who he was, had mercy and grace on him, made a seat at his table for him, and invited Mephibosheth to live in the palace and dine with him and be with him and considered him a family member for the rest of his life. That was how David showed grace and honor to Saul. That's the kind of grace that we're to show to others. The grace that says, I'm not saying I did this in the moment, I'm not trying to give myself credit, but the grace that says, you know what? It would be super stressful to be a cab driver. I don't know how they do it. I went to Chick-fil-A and Home Depot the other day. I was about to lose my mind, and that's like five minutes away. I don't know how they do it to be a cab driver. And you know what? I bet I did something inconsiderate that I wasn't even thinking of. So I'm going to give them them that. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. They're probably in a hurry. They probably need to get where they're going. Or, if this helps, life would be really hard to be that dumb. So I'm glad that God didn't make me that dumb. Whatever you need. We offer others grace. And I'll tell you who's the world's best at offering other people grace. It's Jen, my wife. She will do this all the time. We will be in traffic. Someone will cut me off, cause me to have to slam on the brakes. Our children are crying. We're terrified. And I'll say, my gosh, can you believe that person? And she'll say, now, Nady, because she calls me Nady. If you want to call me Nady, too, you can. It'd just be weird. She says, now, Nady, you don't know. His wife could be in the passenger seat in labor right now. And we just need, tell me I'm lying. And we just, we don't know what's going on in their life. I could be walking down the road, I promise you. I could be walking down the road and some guy could just come up to me and dog cuss me in front of my family. And then I could get out of the situation and walk down there and be like, can you believe that guy? What a jerk. And she'd be like, now, lady, you don't know what's going on in his life. His wife may have just left him and his parents may have just passed away. You don't know. That kind of grace. And when we remind ourselves of God's goodness and grace to us every day, it is easy to pour that out onto others. And I say start with that one, memorize that one, because if we're full of grace and we're offering other people grace, can't we be more quick to forgive when they mess up? Can't we remember that hurt people hurt people and just assume that they're hurting and maybe actually help them get to the bottom of their hurt rather than piling on and making them feel shame for blowing up in a way that they regret? If we're full of grace, won't we be slow to be angry? Won't we stay here longer? Because we're trying to see the best in them and we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in the situation. I think if we just abound in grace that it takes care of the rest. And then the amazing thing that happens when we do this, when someone blows up at us unfairly or unjustly, if we do what this says, when someone blows up on you, be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and abound in grace. When we do that, what are the people around you going to notice? What are your children going to pick up on? It's the easiest thing in the world to match anger for anger. It's the easiest thing in the world to lash back out. It's the easiest thing in the world to let someone say something nasty to you, say something mean to you, to have a server who's curt with you, one of those servers who acts like they don't even want to be there that day. It's perfectly human to let them walk away and then you venture frustration to the people around you. But what if you meet them with grace? What if you're slow to anger when other people would meet? What if you're quick to forgive when other people would hold on? What if you're abounding in grace when other people would abound in suspicion and doubt? Then not only have you brought that person who blew up at you a little bit closer to Jesus, not only do you bring yourself closer to Jesus, but you bring the people around you who see that and who marvel at that closer to Jesus too. Simply by being someone who, like David, is slow to anger, quick to forgive, and always abounding in grace. Let's pray. Father, would we in this way be more like David? And so be men and women after your own heart. God, when we are the subject of unfair anger, unfair frustration, when people treat us in ways that we don't deserve to be treated, would you help us to be slow to anger? Would you help us to stop and to listen? Not meet frustration with frustration? Would you help us to be quick to forgive where we can, to give us an earnest desire to find a path to that forgiveness? And God, more than those things, would you help us be people who abound in grace, who walk in this acute awareness of the grace and the love and the mercy that we have from you. Let us be people who walk in an acute awareness that from your fullness we have received grace upon grace, and let us freely and excitedly and happily give that grace to those around us, even when those around us treat us unfairly. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Jordan, it is interesting to me that you think profundity is what's required to get up on the stage when they parade me out here every week, falling woefully short of the bar. This is the third part in our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at times in Scripture where we see a blow-up or a blow-out or people with with just big overwhelming emotions because that is so much a part of our life. That is something that we experience just as we go through life. Sometimes our emotions are too big for us and they're overwhelming. And so this morning I wanted to take a look at big emotions in our prayers and what happens and how does God respond when big emotions creep into our prayers, when our prayers really become cries. And to do that, I want us to think about prayer together. It's really, when you consider it, one of the more interesting passages in the Bible, one of the more interesting interchanges that Jesus has with his disciples. They're following him around. They're watching him do ministry. And at one point, they look at Jesus and they say, hey, Jesus, will you teach us to pray? Now, this is a really interesting question coming from the disciples. And many of you have probably considered this before. The disciples knew how to pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed their whole life. They had gone to synagogue every week, maybe daily at different points in their life. I don't know. They had seen a ton of people pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed many prayers before, but there was something different, so different about the prayers of Jesus that they had to stop him and say, can you teach us to pray like you pray? Because that's different than how we pray. And Jesus responds by sharing with them the Lord's prayer. You guys probably all know it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. And so in that, Jesus gives the model of prayer to the disciples and to us in perpetuity. And if you break that down, I've always been taught prayer and I've taught prayer this way in church, in youth group, in camps, in different places, in men's groups, small group, when we talk about prayer, something that's always been really helpful for me is the acronym ACTS. And you guys have probably heard this before. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. So the way that Jesus opens up the prayer. When we pray, the first thing we should do is adore God. God, you're great. God, you're good. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. God, you are wonderful for this. God, you blow me away for that. And when we do this, it really puts us in the right posture for prayer, you know? It really reminds us who we're talking to. I had a Bible teacher in high school who was also my soccer coach, who was also my administrator because I went to a small school. And when he would pray in class, he would say, okay, everyone, let's pray, bow your heads. And we would bow our heads to pray, and he would wait 20 or 30 seconds. And so finally, I asked one day, Mr. Dawson, what are you doing? Like, that's awkward. Why do you make us just sit there in silence? What are you waiting on? Because it's almost like, does he want us to pray? Like, should we? And he told me what he was doing. He said he was taking his mind, whenever he would pause before prayer, to Isaiah chapter 6, where the throne room of God is described. And it says that God is on his throne, and the train of his robe is filling the temple with glory. And there's these six-winged angels flying around him saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And it's just so overwhelming that he cowers in a corner. And Mr. Dawson said that when, he said, when I pray, I like to take myself there to put myself in proper posture before God to remind myself when I pray, where am I going? I'm going to the throne room of God, the King of the universe, and I'm addressing the creator of the universe. That's a serious, somber thing. That's a place for humility. That's a place for penitence. This is why when we teach our children to pray, we teach them to bow their heads and close their eyes. It's a sign of reverence. It's a sign of respect for knowing who we're talking to and where we're going. It's why I encourage you as much as you can to kneel when you pray. Because it's hard to put yourself in the posture of kneeling and not feel humble, at least a little bit. And so Jesus says we should start with adoration. We should adore God. We should praise him. And then we should go to confession. What are the things, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. How have we trespassed against God? What attitudes do we bring into this day and into this prayer? What sins do we carry with us that yet remain unconfessed before the Father? What do we need to confess to God before him? And then we move into this time of thanksgiving, praising Him. God, thank you for your goodness in my life. Thank you for my family. Thank you for a church that I love. Thank you for the rain. Thank you for the day, whatever it is. It's John's second birthday today. Thank you for a great two-year-old son and for friends watching him in the nursery right now. Thank you for all of those things. We praise God for things. And then, suffocation. Then we ask for what we need. And you guys know, and you've heard this, that the tendency when we pray is to skip act and go straight to S. Skip all the other stuff and just go, dear God, I really need blank. I really need you to show up here. I really need this to work out. I'm really worried about this. It's all the I need, I need, I need. And there's a place for that in prayer. But the way that Jesus teaches us prayer, it follows this pattern of first putting ourself in the proper place and then confessing our sins, which remind us of the humility we should carry into the throne room. And then thanksgiving, let's acknowledge all the blessings God's given us in our lives before we ask him for more, and then in that proper mindset, say what we need to say. That's kind of the proper way to pray. But sometimes we pray when our emotions are too big for propriety. Sometimes we pray prayers that become cries. And the emotions that we bring into that moment are too big for acts. I've shared with you guys before that the first time Jen and I got pregnant, we miscarried. And I'm not in the business of doing comparative pain for miscarriages and who has the right to the most sorrow. But for us, the pain was particularly acute because we had been praying for a child for years. For years. We had struggled mightily. Our moms and grandmas were praying for babies. We had the church around us at the time praying that we could have a baby. We knew that's what we wanted to do. On my mama's deathbed, a few years before we got pregnant, the very last thing she did for me was direct someone to the top of her closet to get a stuffed animal that she made to give to my child when we had them. She went ahead and made it, and I think my sister finished it up for her so that we would have that to give to our first child. So when we got pregnant, we were elated. And then we went to the checkup for eight weeks, and the baby wasn't there. I don't know how long it took me to pray after that. But the first time I did pray, it wasn't Acts. The first time I prayed, it didn't look very much like our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. It looked a lot more like God. What in the world? What the heck? I would say different words if I weren't on this stage and there weren't children in the audience. That's how I felt, and that's how I prayed. What are you doing? Because we, and we're not entitled to this. None of what I'm about to say really matters, but to us it did. Jen's a school teacher. She loves kids. She's teaching in a Christian school, leading people towards you. We still have relationships with some of the kids that she taught in those days. I was a school teacher. I taught high school Bible. And then I worked at a church. We had made good choices. We were good Christian people. We had checked all the boxes. We had done all the things. And there was people who were living lives way more rebellious than us who were just tripping accidentally into family. And then we get pregnant and then you take it? No, I'm not praying acts. I'm not following the pattern for this one. There are some prayers that we pray that become cries. When we hear of the terminal diagnosis and we go to the Father and we say, really? This one? Him? Her? Why not me in your jacked up economy? Why them? There's a girl in our community. She's a young woman in our community. Just last week or two. She battled cancer for five years and came to it a week or two ago. Beautiful family, young kids. I don't know when that husband is going to pray again. When he does, those prayers will be cries. We've all prayed prayers like that. Where we're walking through what feels to us like the dark night of the soul and we don't have time or patience for propriety. We just go to our God and we are raw and we are real and we cry out, what in the world? How is this right? How does this make sense? As parents that send their kids to school in that private school in Nashville, what do those prayers sound like when they start to pray again? We've all prayed those prayers that are so big and so raw and so emotional that they become cries. And so I think it's worth it to look and see how God handles these prayers in Scripture. Because we get to see some. God in His goodness left them for us in His inspired Word. And so what I want to encourage you with today is, I know that we've all prayed those prayers. If you've never prayed those prayers, I'm so happy for you. I hope you never do, but I think you will. And what I want us to know as we look into the scripture this morning is that God is not offended by our prayers that become cries. I don't think God in his goodness and in his grace and in his mercy is offended when I look at him after the deepest pain that I've felt up to that point in my life and I go, what in the world? That's not fair. That's not right. That doesn't make sense. I don't think God gets offended by those things. I don't think he's so small that our broken hearts offend our God. And I actually think that there's grace and space for those prayers because we see them in the Bible. We actually see Jesus pray one of these prayers, a prayer that is so raw and so real and so emotional that it becomes a cry. This prayer is recorded in all four Gospels. We're going to look at the account in the Gospel of Luke chapter 22. Beginning in verse 39. And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, speaking of Jesus. And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, this scene, many of you know it, Jesus has just left the Last Supper with the disciples. He's instituted communion. He's told them, my body is going to be broken for you. My blood is going to be spilled for you. He knows what is going to happen. He knows when he gets done praying, he's going to be arrested. And he knows that when he's arrested, he's going to be tried. And after he's tried, he's going to be flogged and beaten, and he's going to be hung on a cross and left there to die and then face death and hell. He knows that. And so he brings the disciples with him, and he says, remain here while I pray. And he goes off a distance, one would assume, so that they couldn't hear him. And it is interesting that they all ended up hearing him, because there's nothing in the text to indicate that Jesus subtly knelt and clasped his hands and said, my Father who is in heaven. No, these prayers from Jesus that we see, in Luke it says he knelt. In another gospel it says that he fell with his face to the ground. And the disciples are a stone's throw away and they can hear him clearly. And then he gets so intense in his praying that sweat begins to mix with his blood, which we know is something that can actually happen in moments of incredibly intense stress in our lives. So the prayer that Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane was not, Dear God, if there's any other way, would you please point me in that? It wasn't that. It was Jesus on his face prostrate, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please, is there any other way? Is there anything else I can do? I do not want to bear this. I do not want to be on the cross and hear you and see you turn your back on me. I do not want to say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I do not want the crown of thorns in my head. I do not want the nails in my wrist. I do not want to do this, Father. Is there any other way? Please, please take this cup from me. That's a prayer becoming a cry. That's Jesus sidestepping propriety and crying out to his heavenly father. And in there, he finds what we should find when we pray like this. No matter how deep, no matter how raw, yet not my will but your will be done. Please give me the strength to accept your will. So I know that God isn't offended by those prayers because his son prays one to him in full view and vision of the disciples. And then he tells us about it in all four gospels. And that made me wonder, where else in the Bible do we have prayers that are raw and real and emotional? Where else in the Bible do we have prayers that have become cries? And of course, I went to Psalms. And I just started reading them and flipping through and finding them, these things where people are just raw. I am weary unto death. I want to die. Take my life. And I put them in your notes, Psalm 142 and Psalm 13 and Psalm 77. I think of Hannah's prayer in the temple when she's praying so earnestly and fervently for a child that Eli the priest thinks she's drunk. I think of the book of Lamentations, which is a whole book of tough, raw prayers. And I was going to kind of bounce around between those prayers, but then I was reminded of another psalm that's really dear to my heart, Psalm 88. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to turn there. I encountered Psalm 88 when I took a trip to Israel several years ago. One of the things most groups do when you go to Israel is when you're in Jerusalem, you go to Caiaphas' house. Caiaphas is the high priest that had Jesus arrested, had him tried, and had him murdered. And in the basement of Caiaphas' house is this makeshift small dungeon. And a portion of the dungeon is a cylindrical room that they would tie ropes under the shoulders of the prisoner and lower them into this pitch black, dark room. Now there's stairs that lead down, but in Caiaphas' day, in Jesus' day, that was not the case. They lower you in and they pull you up when they're ready for you. And most people believe that this is where Jesus spent the night after he got arrested, waiting on his trial before Pilate the next day. And when you go to Jerusalem, you can go down into that cell. And our guide pointed us to Psalm 88. Psalm 88 was written by the sons of Korah, we're told. But it's also believed by scholars to be a prophetic messianic psalm. And many scholars believe that this is meant to be the prayer that Jesus prays after he's arrested. If it's not the prayer that he prays after he's arrested, Jesus knew the scriptures, he knew the psalms, this could very well be a psalm that came to mind that he quoted. But when I picture Jesus arrested and alone and reading, crying these things out, it brings fresh meaning to it for me. And when we listen to it and read it, I think you'll be taken aback by how very real it is. So I'm going to read a good portion of it. Beginning in verse 11. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? And then verse 13, They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. That's a real prayer. That's not a prayer you pray in church in front of other people. That's not how we teach our kids to pray. We see accusations in this prayer. You have caused my friends and my loved ones to shun me. It is your wrath that beats against me and waves and covers me. The person crying out to God in this psalm feels the darkness closing in in such a way that they don't know if they will see the light again. My companions have become darkness, he ends with. And that's it. I am grateful to God for choosing to include in his Bible and his inspired word prayers that are that raw and that are that real. Prayers that show us that when our emotions are too big for propriety, that our God can meet us in those places and hear us. He appreciates those prayers so much so that he recorded them and fought for them and protected them down through the centuries so that we could see them too. So when we pray them, it's okay. When we need to cry out to God, we can. He's not offended by those prayers. He hears those prayers. He welcomes those prayers. And here's what else happens when we cry out to God, when our prayers become cries, when we lose all sense of propriety and we're just trying to figure it out. Here's what else happens when it's literally the dark night of our soul and the darkness is closing in around us and our life is falling apart and our children are making decisions that we don't understand and our husband is making decisions that we don't understand and everything that we thought was going to happen, this future that we had projected is not going to happen. This person that I love is not in my life anymore and I see reminders of them all the time and I don't know how I'm going to put one foot in front of the other. I don't know how I'm going to do it. When we pray those prayers, this is what happens. If we look back at Luke 22, there's a verse that I skipped. Verse 43. In the middle of his praying, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him. In the middle of Jesus crying out, Father, please don't make me do this. Please let there be another way. God says, son, you're going to have to walk that path. But he doesn't make him do it on his own. He sends an angel to strengthen Jesus in the dark night of his soul. And I can't help but believe that God will send angels to strengthen you too. When you pray those prayers, I think God sends his angels to strengthen you as well. And I don't know what those angels look like. Maybe it's a hug. Maybe it's someone's presence. Maybe it's a text or a phone call or an email. I know in our family it's cardinals. Maybe it's a southern thing, I'm not sure. But we believe that when a cardinal shows up in your view, that that's a lost loved one who's just stopping by to say hello. Just to check in on you. And so sometimes God sends cardinals just when we need them. Another big one in our family is Mallard Ducks. You know that we lost my father-in-law a couple years ago. And Mallard Ducks were really special to him. And I can't tell you all the cool places where we've just kind of looked and there's a duck there that doesn't belong there. And it's just God kind of reminding us that he loves us, that he sees our pain, that he walks with us in that pain. Maybe, for some of us, God's using this morning to strengthen you, to buoy you. I hope so. Maybe this is just what you need. My hope for all of you is that you never need this sermon and you never have to pray those prayers. But my suspicion is you have a better chance of dodging raindrops on the way back to your car in a downpour than you do of living a life without tragedy. And so I think all of us, at some point, need this sermon and this reminder that when our emotions are too big for propriety, God can hear those prayers too. And in the hearing, in those moments, he sends his angels one way or another to strengthen us. I just got done reading a book. It's actually Beth Moore's biography. I would highly recommend it. One of the best books I've read in a couple years. And in it, she was talking to someone who faced incredible tragedy. And she asked her, how is it that you have kept going through these years? And she said, God opens my eyes every morning. I have no other explanation than that. There are nights that I went to sleep and I did not want to wake up and God opens my eyes. And so I get up that day and for us today I use the breath that's in my lungs and I praise him and I go. We will all in different times and seasons and for different reasons and in different ways walk through dark nights of the soul. But when we do, we can cry out to God. And when we cry out to God, He will hear us. And when He hears us, He will send His angels to strengthen us. I'll finish with this verse from Isaiah, and then I'll pray, because it's one of my favorites. We're taught in Isaiah that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and that he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. You're big, you're good, and you're gracious, and we are broken. We need you so much, and we have no right, we have no right to pound our desk and shake our fist and demand answers from you. We have no right to do that, and yet in your goodness, from time to time, you allow it, and you hug us, and you weep with us. I lift up the people today who might have recently prayed prayers like these, and I just ask that you would strengthen them, that they would feel your presence, they would feel your goodness, they would feel your love, they would be strengthened by you. Father, buoy us and tether us to you. God, we also thank you that Jesus did drink of that cup, that he did die for us, that he did conquer death and sin and hell for us so that we don't have to. And God, we look forward to a day when we understand things just a little bit better. But in the meantime, may your presence and your love be ever enough. In Jesus' name, amen.