Sermons tagged with Prayer

It's good to see everybody. Thank you for being here on this February Sunday. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. And we are in the second part of our series going through the book of Colossians. It is creatively titled Colossians. This week, we're going to look at a passage. And when I outlined the series, I had intended to talk about the idea of a suffering apostle, that to be a Christian, that to be all in, as we kind of put it in front of ourselves a few weeks ago, to really be pursuing God and serving the Lord and building his kingdom, means at times and ways to suffer, and I had planned on talking about that. But one of my favorite parts of being a pastor that gets to teach week to week to a church is, as we go through a book like Colossians, I know that we're not going to cover everything in the book of Colossians. I know another pastor recently did a series in Colossians, and he spent 12 weeks in the book. I could probably spend 16 weeks in the book and there would be enough there to generate sermons. I don't know that you'd want to hear all 16 of them, but there's enough there, right? So I know that when we do a four-part series in the book of Colossians that we are not going to cover everything. So my job as the pastor is to read a portion of scripture and ask, God, what do you have for grace here? What seems most relevant here? What do our people need to hear from your word? And so as I began to review the passage for this week, there was something else, not suffering that jumped off the page to me, but something else entirely that I wanted to put in front of you this morning because I found it most appropriate for grace and who we are. To get there, I want to talk about this idea. The idea of the American mythology of the cowboy. As Americans, we love a good cowboy. Now, I't mean the Dallas Cowboys, because as the rest of America, we hate them, okay? That's just standard policy. It's a good thing to do. If you love them, you love them. If you don't, you really don't. But I'm talking about like old school cowboys, John Wayne cowboys. We are a nation of cowboys. We love that mythology, the idea that one person could pick themselves up by their bootstraps, can make things happen, could pursue the American dream by hard work, by sweat, and by dedication, with no one's help, with no hand-me-downs, doing the best that they can with what they were given. They figure out a way to accomplish the American dream for their life, right? We love cowboy heroes. This week, Tom Brady just retired. If you don't know who Tom Brady is, God bless you. If you do know who he is, he's literally, he's easily, and this is hard for me to admit, I'm a Peyton Manning guy. He's the greatest quarterback that's ever lived. He's probably the greatest American professional athlete that's ever lived. And we love the mythology of the great quarterback, the guy that gets up early. He's at the facility before everybody. He leaves after everybody else. He's going through drills in the offseason. He's taking his health and his care and his strategy uniquely different than everybody else. It's kind of this lone ranger of look at this guy go and how he's achieved all of this greatness. We like the cowboy mythology and our business people. We love the stories of Bezos and of Gates and of Steve Jobs. These guys that in their basement built up this thing. They did it by themselves, by their bootstraps, on their own, no help from anybody, and now they are titans of industry. We love it in our politicians. Our last president, part of the mythology that made the people love him, love him even more, was this idea that he came up, he got a loan from his dad, and that was it, and it was small, and then he comes up and he builds his empire, and this is why, one of the reasons why those those that love him love him. In America, we love the mythology of a good cowboy, right? And I would argue, I would argue that cowboys, they build great countries. We did good. America, you could stack us up with any of the empires of history's past. I've told you before, I'm kind of a, I wouldn't call myself a student of history. That feels self-aggrandizing. I have an interest in it, and I know some things that sometimes show up on trivia night. That's about it. But I do like history, and if you wanted to make a Mount Rushmore of worldwide empires, America would absolutely be on there, and part of the reason, I believe this is this cowboy ethos and ethics. So I'm not here to demonize it. However, I would also say that cowboys build great countries, but terrible churches. Cowboys build great countries. That ethic works for building countries and for building success and for building businesses and for taking personal responsibility and the mythology of the individual and the hardworking person that outworks everyone else and that figures it out without any hand-me-downs, without any help, just totally independently. They did it. That ethic works in a lot of things, but it does not work in church. That ethic builds terrible churches, and it builds insecure and immature Christians. And I bring this up because I think as believers, I'm talking about big C church. I'm talking about Christian culture, I'm not talking about grace specifically yet. But I think as believers, we allow that American cowboy mentality to seep into the way that we understand spirituality and spiritual maturity in our relationship with Jesus. That this is a pick ourselves up by our bootstraps ordeal. This is an individual thing. This is my task is to accomplish spiritual maturity without anybody's help, without any hand-me-downs, without anybody else getting all up in my business. I'll handle my thing. My politics and my faith are private. I don't talk about those with other people. My spirituality is between me and God, and your spirituality is between you and God. I'm not going to get into that. I'm not going to address it with them. I'm not going to ask them about that. That's not my business. That's their business. And somebody tries to address that with you. That's not your business. This is my business. And we put up walls. I've seen this happen over the decades in church, where our American cowboy mentality begins to creep into the way that we understand faith and spiritual maturity, which is a terrible thing since it runs so very contrary to what we find in Scripture. This cowboy mentality of spirituality runs so very contrary to what we find in Scripture, and I could go down myriad examples, and I'll give you some more later, but that's the reason that I'm talking about this this morning, is that as I read the passage for this week, it leapt off the page to me and I thought, it's grace, man, we've got to talk about this. Because you will not find anywhere in scripture a John Wayne Christian. You will not find anywhere in scripture an encouragement to go it alone. You will not find any phrases like pick yourself up by your bootstraps, do not seek help out from others, do not seek hand-me-downs. You will not find that in Scripture. What you will find in Scripture is the assumption that our faith is always communal and conjoined. Here's what I mean. If you have a Bible, you can turn with me to Colossians chapter 1. I'm going to begin to read in verse 24 for a bit of context and simply to honor the text without just plucking verses out of it. But you'll given to me for you to make the word of God fully known. The mystery hidden for all ages and generations, but now revealed to the saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of his mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. So if we pause right there, last week, we looked at the soaring picture that Paul painted of Christ. This week, we see where he continues the thought by talking about this mystery of the gospel. And the mystery of the gospel is that that Jesus that we described last week, that is the apex of all of human history and the apex of all of human hope, is actually offered not just to the Jewish people, as we see in the Old Testament, but to all the world, to the Jew and Gentile alike, that God's grace is available to everyone energy that he powerfully works within me. As I read this week, approaching it with the idea of suffering in mind, I couldn't get past this verse. How Paul writes that we are warning everyone and teaching everyone that we, meaning me and you, the church, Paul and the church in Colossae, me and first part of it, I'll say because it's worth saying and then I'll move on. This is not the point of the sermon, but I do want to point this out. I've been a part of churches before, and I've been a part of ministries before, where it was the goal of the church to bring people to the point of salvation. And that salvation was somehow this finish line. That we go out into the community, we find the people who don't know Jesus, we talk to our non-believing co-workers, our non-believing family members and friends, we witness to them, we evangelize them, we share Christ with them, and then one day, gloriously, miraculously, they accept Christ. And that is a good and wonderful thing, and we ought to celebrate that. And I am ardently praying that in 2022, as ministry begins back anew and we start to move church again and things hopefully start to feel back to normal, that we see more salvations happening through the ministry of grace and through what God is doing at grace. I want to see more people come to faith. But when someone comes to faith, that's not a finish line, that's a starting gate. And then we continue to walk with them to maturity. So that one day in eternity, when we die and when they die, when we pass on and they pass on, we present them to Christ as a brother and sister, and they are mature in Christ. They have matured in their walk with Christ. And so Paul says the goal isn't just conversion, it's maturation. Another word, Bible word for it is sanctification, meaning becoming more like Christ in character. But the thing that I really want to draw out of there is how he says that we may present everyone. Not me, not I, not the leader of the church, but that we might be invested in everyone's spiritual growth, in everyone's maturation, that we might press into that together, that we might take ownership of the spiritual growth of those around us. And this, again, runs incredibly contrary to our American ethic. It just does. I kind of thought of it this way this week. America says, I am not my brother's keeper. And God says, it's a loose paraphrase, the heck you're not. That's kind of the Nate version of scripture. I don't know how God talks to you. That's how he talks to me. America says, I'm not my brother's keeper. America says that's their business. I see them sliding away from church. I see them disengaging in small group. I see them prioritizing things differently in their life. I see them developing him or her developing habits that are not healthy. I see them depending on substances more than I think is good. I see them kind of retreating into their hobbies more than I think is healthy for their marriage. I don't see them talking about spiritual things very much at all. And our American ethic and our sensibilities say that's their issue, that's their thing, and that's not my problem. I'll let them deal with it. And then when we get really fancy about it, here's what we say. I'll pray for them. I hope that in your prayers, God spurs you to talk to them. Or we say this, this is another fancy way of saying, not my problem, that's not my place. I'm not my brother's keeper. If someone wants to fall away from engagement in spiritual things, that's their issue, that's not my issue. And God says, the heck, it's not your issue. Paul's desire is that we may present everyone as spiritually mature. James actually writes about this too. I was reminded of this verse this week in weep and mourn with those who mourn. He writes that we are to share our burdens with one another. He writes that we are to carry each other's hardships for one another, that we are to celebrate with one another. Nowhere in the Bible will you find the ethic of, that's not my place, that's not my problem, that's not my role. But in the Bible, what you will find is Christian brothers and sisters taking ownership of the spiritual growth of those around them. I think of it this way, more pointedly. If you know me well, then you know that one of the things I value most highly in my life is friendship. I love my friends. And I have been blessed with wonderful friends from childhood that I still talk to on a daily basis. And God in his goodness has blessed me with people in this church that I consider true, true friends. And I know, I know that I seem prickly and grumpy and curmudgeonly. I am those things. That's not an act. I'm not playing around. Those things are true of me. But if I love you, I love you. And it wouldn't take me too long to start talking about my friends and the blessings that they are for me to be brought to tears at how much I love them and how deeply grateful I am for them. But my ethic of friendship is this. If you're my friend, then your marriage and the health of your marriage is my responsibility too. If you're my friend, then the quality of your fatherhood is my responsibility too. If you're my friend, then how well you disciple your children and show them Jesus, that's my responsibility too. If you're my friend, then I want deeply for your children to grow up in a home that loves Jesus and sees him at the center. I want deeply for you to be a good father. I want deeply for you to be a good mother. I want deeply for you to be a good spouse. I want deeply for you to walk with God. If you are my friend, then it is my divine directive to take ownership of the things in your life that matter most. If I don't speak into those things, if I don't take ownership of your marriage and of your spiritual health and of your parenting and of the things that God cares about in your life, then I don't love you. And it is a dereliction of my duty. And I just, to have friends in our life that we watch slide into things that are not good for them, that are not healthy for them, that we don't go and rescue them from, that we don't go save a brother or sister in wandering, that we just watch them slide and we quietly pray or we quietly hope. To do that isn't respectful of them. It's not kind of them. It's not respecting them. To do that, to watch a slide like that is cowardly and irresponsible. It is not loving. We are called to take ownership of the spiritual health of the people that God places in our life. We are called to care deeply about that and to prize the success of their spiritual health with the success of our spiritual health, to see them walk hand in hand. It is sad to me that the ethic, this cowboy ethic is so prevalent in our culture that we allow it to infuse the way we think about the spirituality of those that are closest to us. And I'm putting this in front of you as grace this morning because one of the things I've loved since the beginning of being here is the fact that grace is a church of deep friendships. Grace is a church of good and deep connections. That's what makes us us. That's what makes us special. In a world, literally, in a world, in a church culture where big box churches are taking over the world and little churches exist less and less, that's what keeps us here. It's not the worship and it's not the preaching. It's the relationships. It's the friendships. It's the relational foundation that this church is built upon. And I want to put in front of you this morning as a church full of deep and rich friendships, that within those friendships that you have, you bear a divine responsibility for the spiritual health of those around you. It is not your deal. It is not their deal and your deal. It is not between them and God and between you and God. It is between us and God to speak into the spiritual health of our friends. And so I want to lean into that this morning, this idea that we press together so that we might present everyone as spiritually mature. Sometimes, just to be honest with you, those things get relegated to the pastor. You know, this is going on in so-and-so's life. Pastor should probably talk to them about that. Why don't you talk to them about it? You've got a better relationship with them than I do. Don't be a chicken. The spiritual maturity of our children is not Aaron's responsibility. It is her responsibility to work in concert with our parents who are working in concert with their small groups and their friends. We all bear the burden of the spiritual maturity of our children. The spiritual maturity of your teenagers does not rest on Kyle, nor does the spiritual maturity of the church in general rest on Nate. No, it is a burden that we all share. I'm not preaching to you as a responsibility of a pastor this morning. I'm preaching to you the responsibilities of Christian brothers and sisters in genuine friendship. That the spiritual maturity of those around us is something that we ought to take ownership of. And here's the thing. When we do that, when we take ownership of others, they take ownership of us. When we begin to speak into the spiritual health of others, they feel a license, a good and healthy and right and righteous license to begin to take ownership in us. When I sit with a friend and I say, how are things with your wife? They feel that it's okay to return the question, how are things with Jen? How's your patience with your kids? They ask me that in return. When we begin to take ownership of those around us, they begin to take ownership of us as well. And that is a good and healthy thing. And in that way, we all help one another keep life between the ditches and pursuing God the way that we should. But I don't want to belabor that point because I really want to get to these last two because this is where the rubber meets the road. If you're with me and you're willing to accept the biblical responsibility that the spiritual health and maturity of those around us is our divine responsibility, that we ought to want to present everyone as spiritually mature before Christ, if you're willing to accept that mantle with me, then the question becomes, okay, I'm with you. How do we do that at grace? What does it practically look like to begin to step into my friend's life in this way? So I would share two things with you. The first would be this. Through prayerful, loving, friendly, empathetic, humble confrontation. I included all those words on purpose. I left them blank on your notes on purpose. I want you to go through the tedium of writing them. They're all important. It's not through confrontation. That's for jerks. All right? And some of you, some of you are like my sweet wife, Jen, and you're like, I don't want anything to do with any confrontation at all. I'd like everyone just to do what they're supposed to so that I don't have to do that because that makes me super uncomfortable. And I get that. Some of you are like me. And you're like, oh, this is great. I'm making a list. I'm having so-and-so to lunch, and this person, Nate gave me permission. I'm going to tell them they are screwed up. Some of you are going to come up to me and be like, listen, I can't think of any of my friends that need help, but if you'll point me in the direction of some people in the church, I'd love to. Which I got some things you could say to Kyle. That guy's been off the rails lately. We do this through loving, prayerful, humble, friendly, empathetic confrontation. If there are things happening in the lives of the people around you that are not good for them, then we check all those boxes before we march in there and we say something. So that when we say it, it's said in the right spirit. When this is done well, it can change a friendship, it can change a dynamic, and it can change a life. This happened to me recently. I have a good buddy at the church who's much, much older than me and only a little bit wiser, which is, you know, that's on him. And we hang out and we get beers and we do whatever and, you know, we talk about church stuff sometime and one afternoon he invited me out to beers. I'm like, you know, all right, that sounds good. And we're sitting there talking and he hits me with this. He says, Nate, you know, I've seen in you, you have this tact towards anger. You get frustrated pretty easily. And you can kind of flare up. And I don't know where he's coming from. I don't deal with that. That's not true at all. He was dead right. And he just said, listen, man, I do too. You don't want to go down that path. Your kids are going to remember that. My kids are grown. They remember it. You don't want your kids having those memories. That he saw me, that he loved me, and that he called me out. And because we're friends, because he loves me, because he wants my marriage to be the best that can, because he wants me to be the best father that I can, because he's rooting for me in my role, I didn't for one second feel a tone of accusation or condescension. I felt empathy and love and support. And it changed the way that I want to be a husband. It changed the way that I want to be a father. It was prayerful and empathetic and friendly and kind, and it mattered. And we need to have more of those conversations. And sometimes when I say prayerful, I mean prayerful. I have, and still am, I have prayed for as long as a year and a half or two for an opening to address something with a friend of mine. God, I see this in them. God, I know this is not good. God, I know it's not good for their marriage. Will you, with your spirit, please provide an opportunity to talk about this, and I will. Give me your patience to not need it, as we call it in my house, and just storm in there and make stuff happen. Give me your patience to see it. And then give me your grace and your empathy to address it when you've prepared their heart to hear it. So sometimes these conversations happen after years of prayer and patience and sensitivity and God working in their heart what he needs to work. But we need to have more of these conversations. And when we do, it joins us together the way that Ecclesiastes talks about how a three-fold cord cannot be quickly broken. It weaves and binds our lives together when we have conversations like this. So we need to have more of those. And we need to invite more of those. Which brings me to the next thing that we do in response to this. We obey this, we respond to this by encouraging and taking next steps. By taking and encouraging next steps. Now here's what I mean. One of the things that I'm going to very intentionally try to put in front of us more regularly as a church is the idea of next steps. Every church wants to make disciples. Every church talks about discipleship. The way that we define it is at grace, a disciple of God, is to identify and take your next step of obedience. We believe that this is how Jesus discipled the disciples, that he simply told them the next thing he wanted them to do. Go here and teach. Go here and cast out. Go here and pray. Sit with me and listen. He just told them the next thing he wanted them to do to be obedient to God and thus furthering their spiritual maturity and education. And so at Grace, we define discipleship as people, a disciple of Christ is someone who is actively identifying and taking their next step of obedience. And so if you want to be a disciple of Christ here, the thing that I would ask you is, what's your next step of obedience? What has God placed in front of you? Is it having a quiet time? We always say that there's no greater habit than anyone in their life could develop than that of waking up every morning and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. Is that your next step of obedience? Is your next step of obedience to stop staying up so late so that you can get up early? Is your next step of obedience to run? Is your next step of obedience to be prayerful about being more gentle with the people around you? Is it to take steps to remove stress from your life so that you can be more present and peaceful with your family? Is it to have a hard conversation that you know you need to have? What is God putting in front of you as your next step of obedience? And then to make disciples is to simply come alongside someone and help them identify and take their step of obedience. And that way we can all disciple each other. We don't have to be a guru on a hill that people come sit at our feet and we dispense our life wisdom onto them. We can simply help those around us, our friends, that's where we begin, identify and take their next steps of obedience. So one of the things that I want to be true of everyone who calls grace home is this, and this is a thing that I want to intentionally weave into what we do on a very regular basis. If you call grace home, I want this to be true of you. That there is someone in your life who is not your spouse, that's important, who knows and has permission to encourage you to take your next step of obedience. I want there to be someone in your life, someone, you pick who, who knows what your next step of obedience is and has your permission to encourage you to take it. It's simple as that. It could be in your small group. Small group leaders, if this makes sense to implement in your small group, do it. In my Tuesday morning group, that's one of the things that we do. It's a men's group. We go around every week. We go, what's your next step? How's it going? And then we get into Bible study. So maybe it happens in small group. Maybe your small group is big and you can pull over a couple of friends that are close and you say, hey, will you be my person who knows my thing? Can I be your person who knows your step of obedience? But I wanted to put this in front of us this morning because I believe that God gives us these life-giving friendships and he gives them specifically here at Grace. Not just for the purpose of joyful weekends and fun times and laughter and making joy better and making sadness more muted. Those are good reasons that we have friendships, but he also gives them to us because as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Your role in your friendships is to see your friends presented to Christ as mature believers. And if we are not actively engaged in that part of our role, then we are short shrifting our friends, the people who we love so much. And I wanted to put in front of Grace that you have those friendships because God wants you to spur one another on towards Him. And if it's not a part of your friendships, it needs to be. And the way that we can do this is through prayerful, humble, empathetic, considerate, thoughtful confrontation and through having someone in all of our lives who knows our next step and has permission to encourage us to take it. If we will do those things, I think that we can be a church that doesn't just exist as a group of friends, but exists as a group of people who collectively take on the responsibility to present one another mature to Christ in eternity. Let's pray that God would make that a reality here. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for how you love us and for expressing that love through the friendships that you give us. God, I pray that we would all have good and true friends that we can trust with things. If there's anyone here who lacks for that, God, I pray that you would provide it. I pray that you would show them a path. God, if there are folks here who are not connected, I pray that they would have the courage to get connected and to begin to experience these life-giving relationships. God, for those of us who have been blessed with those, may we use those as tools to point us towards you. Make us responsible, loving friends who take ownership of the spiritual health of those around us. God, make grace a church that takes very seriously Paul's example of desiring to present everyone to you as mature believers. Give us the courage to take whatever next step we need to take as a result of this morning and bless the conversations that flow out of it. In Jesus' name, amen.

It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This feels like a danged reunion after not seeing you guys for three full weeks. Three weeks ago, I showed up and I said, hey church, let's kind of get our button gear about church a little bit. And then God gave us two weeks off just to see if we would really mean it. So here you are. These are the ones. This is great. I have been so thrilled to get to preach to you guys again this week. I'll mention it later, but I got sick in the middle of the week and thought I had COVID. I do not. Three COVID tests later, I'm certain of it. But I had to call Kyle on Thursday and be like, I don't think God wants me to preach in 2022 like at all, because you might have to go this week. But I got lucky. It was just strep. So here I am. Before I dive into it, it's just strep. You take antibiotics, you're good the next day, nobody cares. And what do you want it about a sore throat for? So it's just strep. It's great. Before I dive into that, I wanted to remind you guys after the service today is Discover Grace. It's a class with me, which, who could turn that down, for about an extra hour where I just tell you more about who Grace is, who we are, what makes us tick, why we do the things that we do. If you want to join the church, become a partner, we have partners here, not members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. And we're looking for folks to contribute to what God is doing here as we band together and build God's kingdom through Grace Raleigh. So if you'd like to participate in that, just stay in this room. It'll be immediately following the service, which means if you're here and you're not going to be a part of Discover Grace, get the heck out of here, man. We've got things to do. No, congregate in the lobby or outside if you can stand it, but we're going to try to get started in here so that those folks who participate with kids can get their kids and get them home for lunch. The other thing is that I've been touting now for three weeks. I don't even know if it's worth the wait. It's a special announcement that I have for you guys. Just something I wanted to share with the church. Two years ago, February of 2020, when we were naive babies and didn't know what pandemics were, we did a campaign series called Grace is Going Home. And I kind of put in front of you as the church that at that time for 20 years, now for 22 years, Grace has never had its own permanent home. We were founded in 2000 and have always rented our space and kind of moved from space to space. And we've kind of been a church of wanderers and wonderers, wondering when we would find our home. And we believed in 2020, at the beginning of it, that God was moving us to find and step out in faith and pledge towards a permanent home. And you guys as a church pledged $1.5 million, which I was blown away by. And at no point did I expect that to actually come in, but it was a very nice gesture that we made there at the beginning of the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit and remember the bottom fell out and everything's the worst and nobody knows if we're going to have any money or we're just going to be trading Bitcoin for the rest of our lives. And it was a little perilous there. And so we just made a decision as a notary board, we're not going to mention it. We're not going to ask people for it. We're not going to send out letters and say, hey, here's what you owe. Here's what you pledged. If you could kind of honor that, like we didn't do any of that stuff. We just kind of mentioned it a little bit. And then at the end of years, we would say, hey, if you want to give more, because sometimes people do that at the end of years, you can give towards the campaign. And so the announcement is that as of the end of 2021, the end of December 2021, we have $1.5 million available to us right now to go get whatever land or building we need to get. I never, never thought that was possible. I can remember being in elder meetings and we said, how much should the campaign be? And I said, I think our goal should be 1.25. That felt high. I was expecting about a million to come in because that's what experts say will happen. But I'm the one that has to drive the train on this thing or so I thought like a dummy.'s the Holy Spirit doing all the work, and he didn't really have to do anything except get out of the way. And the elders were like, let's do 1.5. And I'm like, you're stupid. You're dumb. It's easy for you to say that because you don't have to stand up here and ask people for it. Why don't we just do 2 million? Let's see what happens. We should have. We should have done that. But we did 1.5. I never thought it would come in. Then we hit the pandemic. Never thought it would come in. Our campaign is not even supposed to be done until the end of February. We have two more months. Well, one more month on this now. But I told the elders going into the end of 2021, listen, whatever we get at the end of 2021, let's just take that from God. That's what we need. He's going to provide for us what we need to build where and when he wants us to build. And so after 2021, we're done talking about it. We're done asking for it. There's still some pledges out there that are lingering that I'm sure will come in. I have heard, and I know that there are some of you who will give, but you're waiting until we identify the land or the property. That's okay. I understand that. So I expect more to come in to that end once we find where we're going to go. But guys, we're done. We did it. Campaign's over. We got what we need. Now we just wait for God's direction on land and where to go. And that could be a minute, just being honest with you. That probably won't be this year. Okay. We've had a team of good, sharp people, the best people in the church at this particular thing, looking for commercial real estate for us. They have not stopped looking for the duration of the pandemic and all the stuff, all the office buildings and churches and stuff that we thought was going to come available because of the pandemic, that ain't happening. Ain't nothing out there. So we're looking and we'll see, but we're happy to wait until God makes it clear that we're supposed to move. But the thing I'm most proud of about this is this. We did this the right way. We raised this money as a church with, listen to me, no discernible strategy at all. We didn't have a dumb thermometer in the lobby. We didn't send out trinkets in the mail. We didn't keep you guys updated on, hey, we're at third base now. Let's make that final stretch. No, we didn't do any of that dumb crap. We just prayed. And we just believed that God, if this matters to you, you'll make it happen. And guess what? It mattered to him. This place matters to him. I like to say that God likes grace. I don't know why he does. He just does. He likes this place. And he's going to take care of us. And I'm very proud of the course that we charted through it as a church and the way that you guys responded to it. And I will say this too, the course that we charted is not at all a testament to my leadership. It's a testament to the leadership of your elders. Because when we started this journey, I was all about doing it the way the consultants say you need to do it. I was 100% behind sectioning off the givers in the church, me going and meeting with the people who had the highest capacity to give, doing a silent campaign before the campaign, and doing it the professional way that you're supposed to do it. I was all about that. And I took that to the elders, and the elders gave me really strong pushback. That's not right. That's not a good fit for grace. That wouldn't go over well here. I wouldn't do that. And I like, listen, I'll just tell you guys in the elder meeting, sometimes we get a little pointed. We will, um, we will say direct things to one another. And there was some direct things said in those meetings. And I pushed pretty hard. I believe I may have told one of the elders to go frolic in the forest with the animals if that's how they thought we were going to do it. It's possible that I said that. But through the elders' pushback, the Holy Spirit worked in my heart too, and I became convicted that the way we needed to do it is to just let him do his work. And so I am so grateful to our elders for charting the course for grace. That was the right course and the God honoring course. I am proud of our partners for honoring God with your pledges. And I am just overwhelmed with God's goodness to us and how he brought us to accomplish that goal with no strategy in a pandemic when at times there was zero people or 40 people a week even using the building that we're pledging to build. It's pretty cool. So let's pray and thank God for that and then we'll dive into this series. Father, you are so good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for caring about us. Thank you for pursuing us. Thank you for reminding us, God, in myriad ways that you love us, that you care about this place, that what happens at Grace matters to you. God, I just pray that when the right spot becomes available, that you, through your spirit, make it abundantly clear to every person involved that that's exactly where you want us to be. And Lord, I just pray that we would be patient for you to move there just like you moved in this campaign. We trust you with all of our hopes and our dreams and our future, and we pray that what we hope and want for grace is exactly what you hope and want for grace. May your will be done here. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. Our new series is called Colossians. It's creatively titled after the book that we're going to study. If you have a Bible, you can go ahead and open there. It's towards the middle of the New Testament. It's just a short four chapter book. So maybe a little tricky to find, but hopefully you'll find it and read along with it on the reading plan and those things. I'm going to confess something to you about this series because I think it's actually kind of funny and informative for how I kind of arrived at some conclusions this week. But when you plan a, when you plan series, when we plan series as a staff, we kind of, we'll approach a season, the January to Easter or Mother's Day or whatever. And we'll kind of look at that season and we'll think, okay, what are the series that we want to do in here? And there's always one or two that I know I definitely want to do. And so you take the series that you really want to do and you put those where they need to be. And then you kind of see what your time blocks are and what you have space to do otherwise. And so I knew I wanted to start out the beginning of the year with this series called Consumed. And I knew that I wanted to share with you guys what was on my heart about our need for being consumed by church. And then the others were going to be consumed by community and consumed by making disciples. I didn't get a chance to get to that, but we'll get to those topics in the spring. And then we were able to do a response to what does it look like to be consumed by the church. That was on video that we did, I think, last week. So if you haven't seen that, I'd love for you to watch that one. So we knew we wanted to take January. We wanted to do consumed. And then I'm not going to get into too many details about it, but we've got a Lent series coming up that I think is going to be eight total weeks, maybe seven. I'm not quite sure. I forget. But I'm very excited about that and all the things that we're going to be doing. And we've known since Lent of last year that we wanted to really hammer home Lent and focus on that as a church this year. So you can go, everyone's going to be challenged to fast from something. You can go ahead and begin to prayerfully consider what that might be for you if that's something you want to participate in. So I'm very excited about that Lent series. And so we knew where we needed to place that. And that left us with four weeks here in February to do another series. So I'm looking at the staff. I'm like, okay, we got four weeks. We need a series. What do you want to do? So I've been listening in the fall. I was listening to the book of Colossians with John every morning. I'd get him up. I'd feed him his bottle, and I'd turn Colossians on on my Bible app and then just read Colossians to both of us. It's four chapters. We've got four weeks. How's that sound? Everybody's like, yep, sounds great. Colossians is a good book. Cool, let's go. And then we started jokingly referring to this as the filler series, the series in between the two ones that we actually care about. And we would never tell you that because every series is important, but that's how we were joking about this particular series. Even the graphic, Carly sent it to me and I think the graphic looks really good. Carly didn't love it. She was like, here it is. I know this isn't a big deal series. So what do you think? I'm like, that looks great. That's fine with me. I think it looks really, really good. So even to that, we're focused on Lent, right? So this week I dive into research on our filler series. I'm like, okay, God, what do you got for us in Colossians? And I just couldn't help but chuckle, even just 30 minutes into research and reading and praying, at just how very relevant and necessary this book is for us, at how very rich and good I think it's going to be for us. I'm so excited about what I get to preach to you this morning that I'm a little bit emotional about it. I'm afraid I'm going to cry at times that don't make any sense, so I'm going to try to keep it together. But I'm really excited to share with you this message of Colossians. I think Colossians is tucked away in the New Testament and is typically relegated to Bible studies sometimes. And that we don't really study it very often. And we might not even be super familiar with what it is and what its message is. And the more I have gotten into it, the more I thought, gosh, this is going to be so good for grace right now. So God in his goodness, and maybe in those mornings when I randomly landed on Colossians, the Holy Spirit was preparing my heart for the series that he knew he wanted us to do in February that is anything but a filler series. But one of the things that first tipped me off that this would be a good series for Grace right now is the background on the church in Colossae. Paul didn't start this church. Somebody else was running this church. Paul was actually in prison and he got a letter from the person who was running this church. And the letter basically said, hey, Paul, we're doing great. Our folks love God. Our folks are all in. Our folks are full of faith. They're standing up to persecution. Like we've got a really good spirit here. And I thought that feels like grace to me. We're doing a good job. The reaction to, hey, let's be all in was so good and was so encouraging. And it made me so proud in our campaign. It made me so proud. I feel like we're doing pretty good. I feel like we've got a good spirit here. I feel like we've got a good thing going. But the leader of the church told Paul, but they're facing tremendous pressure that I'd like you to speak to. And the pressure was essentially to fold into old ways of legalism or to transition into new ways of liberalism. So there was forces being exerted on them from outside the walls of the church and sometimes from within the walls of the church to recede back into legalistic Judaism, where your spirituality is measured by your ability to follow the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more spotless your life is, the more spiritual you are, the more God loves you. That's how we gain favor with God and respect for man. There's legalism following the rules well. Or this slide to liberalism. Actually, none of those rules really matter. They're not important. Those were never actually meant to be rules. Do whatever you want, no matter what, and God loves and accepts you all the time. Which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism, since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts you all the time, which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts us all the time, but it's doing away with any sort of standards that we need to hold in our life and just embracing every ideology that comes along. And I thought, well, that's pretty similar to grace too. Frankly, that's really similar to any church, particularly in the Southern United States. Every church in the Southern United States right now faces that tension from within and without. There are some people that want to drag us back to legalism, right? My parents grew up in Southern Baptist churches where all the skirts had to be below the knees, where you weren't allowed to be seen at the theater, where you weren't allowed to go dancing or play cards or gamble or any of that stuff. And I don't go dancing, and I don't play cards because those are boring, but I gamble sometimes because that's fun. We don't do that stuff anymore. But every now and again, there's a part of us that wants to go back to that familiar legalism, that we've got to follow the rules better. We have to decide. We have to draw lines in the sand. This is a sin and you can't do that and you can do this. And we want to put up barriers around our behavior and define people's spirituality by how well they follow the rules. That's a comfortable, natural place for the human instinct to go. And if we don't watch it, some of us will always slide towards legalism. In the same way, we're in a culture now that's trying to tell us that none of those rules really matter. All the trains get off at the same station. Everything's really the same. It's you have your faith and we have our faith and yada, yada, yada. We don't really need all those standards. There's a push on the church to let go of some of our tenants so that we can be more acceptable to our culture. And so like the Colossians, we are a church that's doing good, that loves God, that has a heart of faith, but exists under some pressure to go liberal or to go legal. And so Paul writes to encourage the church in Colossians. And in his encouragement to the church in Colossae, I think we can find a lot of encouragement to this church here in Raleigh. And so the question becomes, well, if Paul is writing them to then encourage them in their faith, how does he do it? What does he write to them? What's the first thing he points to, to encourage them in their faith? And I thought about, well, if it were me, if I wanted to encourage our church or any church, or if I'm Paul and I was trying to encourage that church, how would I do it? How would you do it? Would you like me do it strategically? I would probably want to talk to the leader of that church. What's going on? What kind of things are they facing? The legalistic crowd. What kind of rules are they really caring about? The liberal crowd. Where are they coming from? What's their ideology? What are they trying to do? And I would have wanted to directly address those arguments. Like an attorney, let's just break this thing down. Let's address all their arguments. Let's build out a nice rebuttal here so to give them a good foundation to stand on. Let's do this thing strategically, right? Well, Paul didn't do it strategically. Paul did it very simply. And it's so simple and it's so pure and it's so powerful that it convicts me that maybe as a pastor, I don't do this enough for you guys. But Paul didn't choose to encourage them strategically. He didn't choose to figure out where they were and kind of read the tea leaves and try to hit them right where their heart was. He just did it very simply. Paul encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus, plain and simple. He encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus. And when I say this, what I mean is he begins in chapter one, verses one through 14 are really kind of this preamble. He says, hey, you know, I think my God, every time I remember you, I think of you in my prayers. This is what I pray for you. The prayer in Colossians looks very similar to other prayers and the other letters that he's written to the church that are basically, hey, I just want you to know God more than anything else. I want you to know God, grateful for your faith, grateful for your testimony from your church. And then he gets into how he wants to encourage them. And this is what he writes. And this is verses 15 through 23. I'm going to stop a couple of times and talk about some things, but keep your Bibles open. I think this passage is worth reading. It's such a sweeping and stunning portrayal of Jesus. And you know, it's funny that I've come back to this because a few years ago in the spring, we did a series in Hebrews. And I said that Hebrews had the most incredible description of Christ in the Bible. And I preached it to you guys. And I got an email from Brandon Reese right over here, who was in the men's group. And he said, that's a great picture. There's an equal one to it in my mind in Colossians. And so now here we are two years later, and now we're talking about that depiction of Jesus in Colossians. And I want you to read it with me, and we'll kind of digest it together. This is what Paul writes, beginning in verse 15. I'm going to take a break there. I want you to understand what's going on here. What Paul is saying is Jesus was present at creation. He's agreeing with the gospel of John that says, through him all things were made and without him nothing was made. He was present at creation. All of creation hinges upon him. All of his existence now rests upon him. He is saying that all things belong to him, that he is the reconciliation. And if you read this, what you really find is that this is what Paul is saying, that all, everyone who's ever lived has held Christ, whether you realize it or not, as the epicenter of your history and the epicenter of your hope. Which means for every person who has ever lived, all of your understanding of your past hinges on Christ and all of your hope for your future hinges on Christ. That's what that means. Even if you go all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first thing they learn is that God created them. How did he create them? Well, according to Genesis 1 and John 1 and Colossians 1, he created them through his word, Jesus. He created them through his son. So Adam and Eve, with a brief two-day history they had, looked back to the creation of the earth with the hope that it was Jesus who actually did it. Their history hinged upon Jesus. And then when they sinned and they fell and suddenly they need reconciliation and forgiveness, their future hope for that reconciliation and forgiveness without them knowing it hinged upon Jesus. And then over the course of the Old Testament, God begins to shed some light on exactly what that future hope is going to be on the Messiah. And we see whispers in Jeremiah and Isaiah and in the prophets as they kind of shed more light on who this Messiah is going to be and what this hinge of history is going to come to do. And then Jesus shows up in the gospels and he personifies God's goodness and loveliness. And we'll talk about that in a second. And he lives a perfect life and he dies on the cross for our sins. And so all of history to that point culminates in the death of Christ as he fulfills his divine nature to do that for us. And then we move forward into the church era. And now as people who exist in 2022, we look back on the death and the burial and the resurrection of Christ as a hinge of history. All of our history is contingent upon him. And then we look forward to, as we preached in the fall, revelations, when Jesus comes down in Revelation 18 and 19 to come back and rescue his church and to take us back up to heaven with us. He is the hope of our future. So for every person who has ever lived, Jesus is the epicenter of your history and he is the epicenter of your hope. Jesus is the confluence of heaven coming down onto earth and earth experiencing heaven. He is the nexus of the spiritual world meeting the physical world. Jesus sits in the middle of everything. Everything. There is nothing without him. Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we admit it or not, whether we comprehend it or not, Jesus sits at the hinge of all history, of all creation, of all love, of all majesty. And that's the picture that Paul is painting to the church in Colossae and to us is this grandeur of Jesus. And he doesn't stop there. I love this next sentence. I think it's verse 19. For in him, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. We'll pause there again. Much of what I'm about to say comes from this book that Kyle recommended to the staff called Gentle and Lowly. And I can't recommend it to you highly enough if you're a reader. If you're not a reader, become one. It's good. And read Gentle and Lowly. But I love that phrase in verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. What does that mean? This is a clumsy explanation, but it's the best that I can do. I can only try to size it up like this. Do a little mental exercise with me. And just picture in your mind, I don't know how you're gonna do it, just figure it out. Picture in your mind how much you think God loves you. Just how much you think he loves you. And try to wrap your head around that for a second. How much grace do you think God has for you? Wrap your head around that for a second. Grace for your humanity and for who you are and loving you despite of your faults. How much mercy does God have for you? Willingness to look over times you've slighted him or things that you've done. How much compassion does God have for you in your sin and in your hardships? Wrap your head around those things. And then let me tell you this. It's more than that. It's more than that. And now wrap your head around that new reality. But it's more than you can fathom. It's more than that. Wrap your head around that new reality, and guess what? It's more than that. Wrap your head around that reality, and it's more than that, and it keeps going. We cannot comprehend the love and the grace and the mercy and the compassion and the goodness that God holds in his heart for us. It is beyond human comprehension, and I am convinced that the whole Christian life is an exercise in expounding our understanding of how much God loves us and has mercy for us us and then realizing that's not nearly enough to capture how he loves us. And that overwhelming love, that overwhelming goodness, that overwhelming grace and compassion that we cannot fathom is personified, listen to me, is personified in the person of Jesus. That's what it means when it says the fullness of God, all of his grace, all of his mercy, all of his compassion, all of his love was pleased to rest on the person of Christ. And if you want to know how much does God love me, look at Christ crucified and answer the question for yourself. If you want to know how much mercy and compassion does God have on me, look at Jesus weeping with Mary and know that that's the compassion that he has for you. If you want to know how much grace and mercy does he have for me, look at Jesus with the adulterous woman as he defends her from the death penalty and know that that's the compassion that Jesus has for you. If you want to know how much Jesus forgives you, look at him telling Peter to forgive 70 times 7, which is as many times as is necessary, and know that that's God's forgiveness for you. If we want to know how God feels about us and how much he loves us, look at the person of Christ on whom his fullness is pleased to dwell and know that that's how much God loves us, that that's the compassion that he has for us. That that's the grace and the mercy that he offers us. That's what it means when it says that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell on him and then he finishes up this description of Christ in this way. In verse 21, He says, Why did God send the culmination of all history, the fullness of his love and compassion? Why did he send that down here? To get you. To come and get you. To reconcile you back to him so that he can experience eternity with you. Listen to me. Why does Paul choose, when he needs to encourage the Colossians to hang in there, when he needs to encourage them to stay pure in their faith, what does he do? He points them to Jesus in the stunning depiction of Christ. And why does he do that? This is why. Because Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. I don't know if you think about God's love for you in this way, but God loves you. God desires you. God chases after you. God sent his son to win you. And then he left the Holy Spirit to nip at your heels whenever you run from him so that you would turn and accept his embrace. He is coming for you. He desires you. He is yearning for you. He does not sit back and wait for you. He pursues you. So he sent Jesus to come and get you. And he left his spirit to keep the chase going until you finally give in and give up and say, God, I'm yours. Because that's what he longs for. I told you this week I had strep. On Tuesday, I began to feel a little sick, and so I realized with all the COVID junk going on, I should probably mask up in the house and try to stay away from the kids. Wednesday felt like garbage. Thursday was the worst. Literally, I never get sick ever. I've never been as sick as I was on Thursday in my adult life. But by Thursday afternoon, I got some antibiotics, so Friday I was right as rain, baby. It was great. But on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm in the house, and I'm with my kids, but I can't touch them. I'm an affectionate guy. I pick up and scoop up Lily all the time. I pick up and scoop up John all the time. I love holding my babies. And there was one night, I think it was Thursday, Jen was laying with Lily singing her songs and I was standing in Lily's doorway with my mask on just waving at Lily in the bed and she waved back at me and she said, I miss you, Daddy. And I had to go cry in my bedroom. I yearned for them. All I wanted to do is scoop them up. All I wanted to do is pick up John and eat those fat baby cheeks. Is grab Lily when she got home from school and make her tell me about her day. She doesn't do it, so I say, tell me three good things that happened. That's all I wanted to do. All I wanted to do is scoop up my kids, man. And it was like this weird quasi-torture sitting in the house looking at them and not being able to scoop them up. If that's torture for me for three days, knowing good and dang well I'm going to get over this and I'll pick them up again, what must it do to our Father in heaven to watch us and so desperately want to pick us up and to hold us and to cherish us and for us to hold him at arm's length. Because Lily waved back at me and said, I miss you. And I knew that she wanted to hug me as soon as I was able to do it again. How much more would that crush your parent heart if you waved at your kid and they said, I miss you. And they said, if God yearns for me the way that I yearn for my children, if God yearns for you and the people you love the way that you yearn for your children, the way that I yearn for mine, how much must it hurt his fatherly heart in heaven to watch his children run from him, begging them, please just stop running. Please just turn around for a dang second and let me hold on to you. I sent my son to catch you. I left the spirit to keep up the chase. How much must it hurt his father's heart to not be able to hold his babies, to not be able to embrace his children, for us to run from him and to wander off from him. When all he wants is for us to be with him. When all he wants is to hold us. When all he wants is his son or his daughter to talk to him. And tell him about our days. Y'all, God, he yearns for us. It's all over the Bible. Jesus says it like this. He says he leaves the 99 sheep that are safe to go get the one who's lost and wandering. And I think that we make such a mistake about how we view the gospel and the love of God in our life. I think that sometimes we have this attitude that God's like, you know, take it or leave it. I sent my son, he died for you. It's there if you want it. It's yours if you don't want it. You don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. I sent my son. He died for you. It's there. If you want it, it's yours. If you don't want it, you don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. Guys, take it or leave it isn't yearning. Take it or leave it is not what we see in the Bible. Take it or leave it is not what we see pouring out of scriptures and shouting at us through the book of Colossians. What we see in the Bible is a father in heaven who earnestly in his guts yearns for you, who wants you, who loves you. And now for some of us, you've never known that love. You've run from it your whole life. You've never accepted Christianity. There's things about it you can't get your head around. And so you're still running. And I'm begging you that you would let God catch you today. I'm begging you that you would let today be the day that you would embrace your heavenly Father. But there's others of us who have been caught, but after we've been caught, there's been the wandering. And in our wandering, sometimes we feel so badly for what we've done that we think God must be disappointed with us. He can't be yearning for me anymore. And so we keep ourselves at arm's length from God out of a sense of guilt or shame. And to you, I would simply ask, if God came after you when your soul was fundamentally opposed to him, why would he not continue to pursue you when your soul feels actual guilt of your sin? If God chased you down and yearned for you and pursued you before you were his child, then how much more does he still love you now that you're his child? Why would he ever stop loving you? Listen, when God forgave us, when you accepted Christ, he forgave you for all of your sins, past, present, and future. He already knew you were going to go through the season of wandering when he chose to save you. He doesn't love you any less. As a matter of fact, God's, I believe, primary emotion as he looks at you in your sin is not anger, but pity and compassion because of what you're giving up to be away from him when he just wants you close to him. Listen, if you've never known Jesus in your life, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you have doubts and you're not sure about your faith, God yearns for you and will chase you down through those doubts. He's still after you. If you are wandering away, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you're holding on to pet sins that you're not sure you want to give up yet, God is going to chase you through those sins and he will chase you down and the Holy Spirit will nip at your heels until we give in and allow him to embrace us. If you are experiencing incredible victory in your spiritual walk right now, good. God loves you and yearns for you on a deeper level than you can still ever imagine. God loves you and yearns for you deeply. And that's all that the church in Colossae needed to know to be encouraged in their faith. And so my prayer for you this morning is that you will walk out those doors knowing in your guts that God loves you more than you thought he did when you came in here. And as I thought about the best way to finish up the service this week, I was reminded of this song called Reckless Love. Because in that song, there's lines of, there's no walls he won't kick down or lies he won't tear down coming after me. There's all these things that God will do to come after us. But the part about the song I like is that it's called Reckless Love. And when it first came out, there was some kind of dumb arguments about whether or not it was really appropriate to use the word reckless because we didn't want to accuse God of being careless or thoughtless or somehow errant in his love for us. But that word reckless doesn't mean mistaken. The word reckless implies this. When you offer your love to someone, when you expose yourself, you make yourself vulnerable to them and they reject you. That hurts. You take that personally. I don't care who you are. And there's only so many times you can offer your love freely and wholeheartedly to someone and have them reject you before you start to guard yourself against it. And the love you offer isn't as much or it isn't as pure or it isn't as grand. Or even maybe you wall yourself off to it entirely because you just can't stand the pain anymore. We learn self-protection. God's recklessness is that he has no self-protection. God's recklessness is you can reject him as many times as you want to and he will never stop coming after you. It doesn't matter how many times we hurt him, he's gonna continue to come after us to get us, to claim us. And so we should sing and marvel at this reckless love. So I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna sing together, but I would invite you to experience the song however you wanna experience it. If you wanna stand and sing, stand and sing. If you wanna sit and you want the lyrics to wash over you, let them do that. If you wanna kneel at your seat and pray, pray. If you wanna come up here to the front and pray and have me kneel over you and pray with you, I'll do that too. However you wanna experience this song, you experience it that way, but I'm gonna pray, the band's gonna come up, and then we'll finish with that song together. Father, boy, you are good to us. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you pursue us. We thank you that you sent your son as the personification and embodiment of your earnest yearning for us. I simply pray, God, that we would be more certain of your love for us as we leave than we were when we showed up. God, we are your children. We are your sons and your daughters. I pray that we would let you love us like that. May we please quit trying to perform. May we please quit insisting that we get our life in some semblance of order before we come to you. May we please tear down all the roadblocks that exist between you and us and just allow ourselves to feel your overwhelming and reckless love for us. It's in your son's name on whom all of history and hope hinges that we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. If you're watching this, it's because we correctly guessed that we would not be able to have church on Sunday. So this is actually Thursday afternoon right now as I record this. That's why I'm preaching in my hat. Also, last time I preached, I preached in Crocs, so I figured to just round it out, this time I would preach in my hat. If that's okay with you guys, I didn't feel like I had time to go home and shower and do my hair. So if you can put up with a pastor and a hat, I'll do my best to share this morning's message with you on what is for me a Thursday afternoon. Before I dive into that, a couple things, by the way, of announcements that we wanted you to know about. You know, we left off asking the question, how can we be all in at Grace? Well, two ways to do that are, first of all, to join a small group. We say at Grace that if you're not in a small group, then you're simply not experiencing all that God has for you. So I hope that you'll do that. There's a link online. There's a link in the Gracevine. If you're not receiving the Gracevine, let us know. That comes out every week with all the details, all the information about what's going on with the church that you need to know. And you can go to our small groups page online, find the catalog there, and contact a leader. Or if you have questions, reach out to me, and I would love to try to guide you to whatever group might be the best fit for you. Another way to be all in is to attend the Discover Grace class that we are having next week following the service, if, Lord willing, we're able to have services. I'm going to stop assuming that we're just going to be able to meet every Sunday, but hopefully we'll meet next Sunday. I believe it's going to be January the 30th, and we'll have Discover Grace immediately following the service. That's a way for you to become a partner of grace, for you to find out more about who we are, how we tick, what makes us go as a church. There's lunch provided and childcare if you need it. So register ahead of time for that if you can, especially if you're going to need childcare, and we will take good care of you. But if you've never attended a Discover Grace, whether you're new to grace, you've been coming for years, you've never done one, we would love to see you at that one. Now, when we left off, the last sermon that I did was not an easy or a fun sermon because I had to come to you and say, hey, church, I see us sliding into a direction that's not good. And I really kind of called out the whole church, but you guys are so awesome. You're so great. You're so encouraging. I'm sure there are people who didn't appreciate what I had to say the last time I was able to preach. I'm sure that's out there, but the feedback that I've gotten has been universally positive. It's been a lot of folks going, you know what? Darn it. Yeah. I was consuming the church. I reduced it to a product and I need to be all in at grace. And I think all of us to some degree or another, we're a little bit convicted when I just kind of brought up the point that I see us sliding to become consumers of the church. That in our practices and patterns, we've effectively reduced church to a product to be consumed by us when and where and how we want it. And I talked about how that's a shame and that's unhealthy because that's not Jesus's attitude towards the church. Jesus's attitude towards the church is that it is his bride. He died for us. It is his plan to reach a lost and broken world, and there's no plan B. And we talked about if we just became consumers in our marriage, how quickly would those crumble? So why do we think that as the bride of Christ that we can just consume the church and that that identity really should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. And so then I ended the sermon with a challenge of, if you're at grace, if you call this place home, if you consider yourself a partner, then be all in. Be two feet in at grace, two feet in to God's kingdom and what He is doing here. And we left it off with, okay, well, what does that mean? And so that's what this week is. I feel like this is an important part two to that sermon. As a matter of fact, if you haven't seen that sermon, I would pause this right now and go back and watch that sermon and then come back to this one later today or later in the week. Because this sermon really only makes sense if you've heard the last one. And as I thought about how to answer this question for us, what does it mean? What does it look like to be all in? I was reminded of an idea that I presented to you guys, I think it was about three years ago when we were going through the book of John together in the spring. So if this first part of this sermon, if the first half of the sermon sounds familiar to you, that's why. I've preached this idea before. But to help us understand what it means to be all in, I want us to understand this idea or this concept. It's the concept that we are all kingdom builders. We are all kingdom builders. We are all actively building a kingdom. I don't know if you've ever thought of it this way, but every single one of us has time, talents, and treasures. We have gifts and abilities, and we use and leverage those with all that we have to build a kingdom. Now, it may be a small kingdom. It may be a humble kingdom. You may feel like I'm not really doing that. I don't have big aspirations. I'm not trying to build a big, huge company. I'm not trying to climb the corporate ladder or any of those things, but we all have kingdoms, little fiefdoms that we build, whether they're of our career, of our finances, of relationships, of friendships, and they're not necessarily bad, but what I want us to see and acknowledge is that we are all building a kingdom. We are all, all of us, kingdom builders. We leverage everything that we have to build something. There's none of you who are listening, none of us who will listen in the future, none of the children that you're raising that are not kingdom builders. So the question really becomes, whose kingdom am I building? Am I building my kingdom or am I building God's kingdom? And it's through that lens that I want us to view the story of John the Baptist. If you have a Bible there at home with you, you can pull it out and turn to the book of John. We're going to look at chapter 1 and then chapter 3. John the Baptist, to give you some background on him, was a really successful minister, prophet in the ancient world. He was the cousin of Jesus. He was prophesied about as a voice crying out in the wilderness, and it was his job to make it known when the Messiah arrived. It was his job to make it known, hey, Jesus is here. That was his job that was assigned to him by God to build his kingdom. This is how you're going to do it, John. You're going to be the one who introduces my son. And so to gain the credibility to do that so that the people of Israel would actually listen when John said it, he built up a ministry. People followed him. They waited in line for hours for him to baptize him at the Jordan River. They listened to what he said. John had his own disciples. John was essentially an ancient Israel, in our terms, a very well-known and successful megachurch pastor. John would have had speaking gigs and book deals. John had built himself quite a kingdom of ministry. But we get two glimpses, actually get more than two, but two that we're going to look at this morning of how John viewed all of these things. But I wanted us to approach these verses with the knowledge that we all build kingdoms and that John had built quite the kingdom. He was very successful and good at what he did and what he was building. But let's look at how John viewed his kingdom. First, we'll pick it up in John chapter 1. And just as a reminder, John the Baptist is a different John than the Apostle John that wrote the Gospel of John. It's a lot of Johns. But let's look at John chapter 1, and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. So John is there with his disciples, and Jesus walks by, and John goes, hey, that's the guy. That's Jesus. That's the Lamb of God. And the disciples immediately leave John and go and follow Jesus. And I kept reading to the end because we learned that one of those people was the brother of Peter. And we know that he stayed with Jesus. So when I say they left John and went with Jesus, I don't mean they left John and went with Jesus for a little while and then came back to John. I mean, they left John and they went with Jesus. So what's happening here, what we see in this verse is Jesus, in this passage, Jesus shows up and he starts skimming off the top of John's ministry. He starts taking a little bit of John's kingdom. These are not just simply followers. These are disciples. These are young men that he is pouring into and training and teaching. This is his staff. And now Jesus has just taken a couple of them. So Jesus starts to take some of John's kingdom, but we get a glimpse of John's attitude about this later on in chapter 3. Look with me, chapter 3, verses 29 and 30. John says this, So he's telling his disciples, look, the bride is the church. The bridegroom is Christ. The groom is Christ. He's here. And the marriage is complete. I've done my part. I've introduced him. Now it's time for me to step aside. Now it's time for me to fade away. And he says one of the greatest lines in the Bible, he must increase and I must decrease. It's like if you were able to go up to John in the moment and say, John, Jesus has taken your kingdom, man. He's taken your stuff. He's shaving off the top of your kingdom. How do you feel about that? I believe that John's response was essentially, man, I was never building my kingdom. I was always building his kingdom. Those disciples were never mine. They were always his. This following, this ministry, this has never been my ministry. This has never been my following. This has never been my kingdom. It was always his. It was always his ministry. It was always his following. It's my job to simply point the way back to him. And now that he is here, now that I've announced his coming, now that I've handed over the keys of my little fiefdom, my little kingdom to his eternal kingdom, I'm done. I'm out. And what we see from John, and I don't think John understood it at the time, but God mercifully calls him up to heaven a lot sooner than he would have had to go. He gets arrested and beheaded by the king. And it's seen by John as a sad thing when he's arrested, he wants to be freed. But I think God was just bringing him up to heaven a little earlier because his job was done. And I think John got a very hearty, well done, good and faithful servant when he arrived. Because John understood, this isn't my kingdom. This isn't my stuff. God didn't give me the gifts and talents and abilities that he gave me so that I could amass people to look at me. He gave me any gift that he gave me so that I might be used to grow his eternal kingdom, not my temporal one. And so if you ask me, what does it look like to be all in? I would answer it this way. We are all in when we acknowledge and embody the mindset of John the Baptist. When I say, what does it look like to be all in at grace? Because I challenge this, if you're at grace, be all in, man, let's go. What does that look like? Well, it looks like acknowledging and embodying the attitude of John the Baptist, which is to say, I was never building my kingdom. This was never about me. This was always about Jesus. It was always his kingdom. And everything that I've been given by God, it was not to be used to build my own kingdom. It was to be used to build his kingdom. I remember when this light went off for me. I was in my late 20s, and I had just taken over as a youth pastor at my last church at Greystone Church. And I had only been there in a full-time capacity for a couple of weeks, and it was time to take all the kids to summer camp. And so I'm going to summer camp with these kids. I think there's about 150 kids there, and I didn't know them, and they didn't know me. And yet here we are spending a week together, and I've got to prove myself to them. I've got to win them over. I've got to be able to do ministry to them. And listen, I'm beyond this now because I'm not in student ministry anymore, but anybody in their 20s who's a student pastor who tries to tell you that there aren't times when high schoolers can be the most intimidating people on the planet, they're liars. Sometimes they can be. And we got a bunch of kids. We got a bunch of older kids. They don't know who I am. They don't know me from Adam. And they're kind of arms folded skeptical. This is our new youth pastor, huh? Let's see if he's any good. And I know I've got to win them over. And so one day, the first day of camp, it was wreck time, free time. And a bunch of the guys go and they play basketball, the hard top, the black top. And I thought, I can play basketball. I'm serviceable there. Let me just go play with them. So I go down to all the upperclassmen and just start playing ball with them. And for about two hours, we're playing basketball. I was able, I know you're not gonna believe me. Maybe they were all terrible athletes. Actually, some of them were really good athletes. One of them is playing for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays right now. But I was able to hold my own. They wanted me on their team. My team usually won the games, and so we had a good time, and suddenly I'm feeling a camaraderie with them that I didn't expect to feel so quickly. And that's when it dawned on me. It's like God whispered into my ear, because I've always considered myself to be a little bit athletic. I know now that the better word for it is probably coordinated. In my youth, I was coordinated in such a way that I was able to not embarrass myself when I engaged in athletics. I played in college. I played against actual athletes and realized I am not one of those. But I've always known that God made me just a little bit coordinated, and I've always kind of been able to make people laugh. That's just been a thing that I could rely on. And up until that moment on the basketball court with those kids from Greystone, I always just assumed that God made me athletic and funny to get people to like me. I was just thankful that he gave me those wonderful gifts. But in that moment, it was as if God whispered into my ear like, yeah, dummy, this is why I gave you the gift of coordination. This is why I've made you funny. Not to win people over to yourself, but to win them over to me. I gave them to you so that it might open doors so that you can do my work in the lives of people. Now go minister to these kids. Use those gifts, that's fine. But use them to build my kingdom, not your own kingdom. And that's the collective eye opening that I want us to have. That God has given each of us gifts and abilities. He's given each of us time, talent, and treasure. And it is our job to first open our eyes to the fact that he didn't give you your gifts to make you good at your thing so that you can build your own kingdom. He gave you those gifts. He made you funny. He made you caring. He made you smart. He designed you to be good with numbers. He gave you musical talent. He gave you the ability to make friends. He gave you the ability to write and to think and to be magnanimous. He gave you the things that he gave you so that you might get to experience the incredible privilege of being invited in to being a part of building his eternal kingdom and so that you wouldn't experience the devastation of realizing you've spent your entire life piddling around building your own kingdom that no matter how great will end. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No matter how great of a temporal kingdom we build here on earth, one day Amazon's not going to matter. As we sit here today, the Roman Empire doesn't matter anymore. The Babylonian Empire doesn't matter anymore. These great kingdoms of their day where people were actually successful in building kingdoms that we still read about today, they don't matter. Who cares? So God in his goodness invites us into the incredible privilege of building an eternal kingdom that will echo throughout eternity and matter for the rest of time. Do you understand? That's why he's given you your gifts and abilities, to leverage everything that you have, not to build your own kingdom and draw people and things into you, not to amass your own wealth, not to amass your own followers, not to build your own brand or business, but so that you would turn people to him. He gave you your gifts and abilities so that he might use you to build his kingdom. And so we come back to our question. Whose kingdom are you building? The gifts and abilities, the time and the talent and the treasure that you have, what have you been using it for? Are you using it to build your kingdom or God's kingdom? Are you using it to make your name great or his name great? And what it looks like to be all in at grace is to say, hey, you know what? I have these gifts and abilities. I have this time, talent, and treasure, whatever it is. And I want to apply that to grace in whatever way I can to see God's kingdom move forward through this church. And some of us have special giftings of time, talents, and treasures. And I want that to be acknowledged. Some of us have the special gifting of time. I think of Ron Torrance. Ron is one of our favorite people at Grace. Everybody loves Ron. If you've come to Grace here in person, he has greeted you at the door and he has learned your name and the name of your children. He is a wonderful man. And I'm told that Ron's turning 80 soon. So happy early birthday to you, Ron. I've been told that 80 is the new 70. So, I mean, live it up, pal. It's going to be great. Ron is retired. He has the gift of time. One of the things he does with that special gifting is he comes in on Fridays and he cleans the church. He vacuums the office. He takes out our trash. Do you know, and this is so humbling to me, Ron washes my mugs. If he decides that the mugs on my desk are too dirty, he'll wash them. He'll fold up a nice, neat paper towel and he'll lay them on top of the paper towel. Nice and clean for me when I come back on Monday, and every time I see it, I'm so humbled by that service. But Ron has a gifting of time, so what does he do? He gives it to the church and to other places. There's some stay-at-home moms who have volunteered their time during the week to come in and help Aaron get everything set and ready to go for children's ministry on Sunday. So if you have a special gifting of time, and I do think about stay-at-home parents who have kids who are in school, and so during the day you have this special gifting, this special season of time that has been given to you, I would encourage you and ask and implore you to ask God, God, what would you have me do with this time? You've given me this special gifting of time. Father, what would you have me do with it? This is your time. How can I use it to bring glory to your name? How can I use it to build your kingdom? How can I use it to get involved and do whatever it is you're doing, wherever it is you're doing it? See, if you have a special gifting of time in this season of your life, it's right and good to ask God, what do you want me to do with this? Why did you give me this gift? Some of us have a special gifting of talents. I think about Dylan who plays the drums. You know, God didn't give him rhythm much to his chagrin to get him chicks, right? God gave him that gift of rhythm that he might use it to usher God's children communally into praise together. And what a beautiful thing it must be for God to sit in heaven and watch Dylan use his gifts to draw other people closer to his throne. What a thrill it must be for God, our Father in heaven who created us and loves us, to have given some of us good voices so that they're beautiful to listen to. I wonder how much it pleases him in heaven to hear his children, whom he's gifted in that way, sing out to him as they lead other people into praise to him as well. It's got to be just this special joy that God experiences. If you have been given a special talent, if you've been given a musical ability, if you're exceptionally good with numbers, if you're exceptionally good at gathering people, if you are exceptionally good at something, man, God didn't give you that gift to build your kingdom. He gave you that gift because he's inviting you into being used in his kingdom. And it's worthwhile to ask God, how would you have me use this gift? You might have a special gifting of treasure. I think about some people that I know in my life, and I've talked to other guys and women like this, who are basically saying they're towards the end of their career, and they basically said, you know what, I could retire. We've hit whatever the number is that I set with my financial planner. We've hit it. I'm there. I'm good. I could retire. But, you know, I'm making more money than I've ever made, and I'm trying as little as I've ever tried, so I don't really want to shut off the faucet. You know what I mean? Listen, that's great. That's wonderful. I'm legitimately happy for you that that's your situation, but you now in that situation, you have a special gifting of treasures and resources. And I think it's worth asking yourself between you and God, God, have you given me this special gifting of resources to build my 401k and make me wealthier? Or have you given me this special gifting so that I might get to experience what it is to be a conduit of your generosity to others? Have you given me this special gifting in this season of my life, if you're married, in this season of our lives, so that you might use the treasures that you've entrusted to us to make your kingdom grow in other places. It's worth considering and asking, God, you've put me in this place where I have more than what I need. What would you have me do with this special gifting of treasures? I saw the switch go off in a friend of mine in the last couple of years, and it's been really, really cool to see. A few years ago, we had the opportunity to go over to Ethiopia and visit Addis Jamari, which is a ministry that Suzanne Ward, one of the women who goes to the church, she started it with another lady who goes to another church down the road. Her church is not as good. But they went together and they started this ministry called Addis Jamari, which ministers to orphans and families in Ethiopia. And I've been over there to see it and it's incredible what they're doing. We had the opportunity to take a trip over there a few years ago, and my buddy came with us. And he got over there and saw the ministry and saw the people, and God just touched his heart, and he was so moved by it. And he's in a great situation financially. He's in a position where he was really good at his job, and so he was able to retire early. And then he takes consulting gigs on the side whenever he feels like he wants them, and he does those, and that's a couple extra bucks, and that's great. Well, after coming back from Ethiopia and experiencing God touching his heart in that way, he had the John the Baptist epiphany, and he said, wait, I can get these consulting gigs that I don't need. I don't need that money, but Addis Jamari does. And so now the dude takes consulting gigs, makes the money, and then turns around and he gives it to Addis Jamari so that they can build God's kingdom in Ethiopia. And to me, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing when God's children open up their eyes and see that everything that God has given me is to be used for his glory and his name and his kingdom, not my own. And I know plenty of people who would be listening to this sermon thinking, you know what? I don't have any special giftings of any of those. I am as average as average gets. I would say to you, if that's how you feel, that's fine. But someone else who used to say that to me was my mama, my grandmother on my mom's side. She always felt like she was in the background. She always felt like other people were more gifted than her. She always felt like she didn't matter very much and that her voice shouldn't really be considered very much. She spent her life quietly serving in the background and would have sat in the sermon and felt like, I don't have any gifts or abilities to offer to anybody. But when I preached her funeral, there were 500 people there. Do you know why? Because she loved them well. Because her gift, her ability, was to be an encourager, was to love and to support and to be consistent. Things that might feel so plain and mundane to us and things that felt very unspecial to her. But God used her in so many lives and in so many ways that when she passed away, 500 people showed up to honor her. So even if you think that you don't have much to offer, if you offer it to God, he will double and triple and quadruple whatever impact you think you might be able to make. So as we finish, I would simply finish with this question. What's my next step? What's the next thing for you to do? Do you want to email me and say, Nate, dude, I'm all in. What can I do? Do you want to email one of the staff members and say, I'm all in. I want to help you. Kyle, I want to see the youth group grow. I'm in, what can I do? How can I help? How can we build God's kingdom there? Do you have some musical ability? You need to stick your hand up and go, you know what? I can actually sing. You know what? I can actually play and I've been scared or hesitant, but I think that God's given me this ability so I can use it for him. So I want to do that. Do you have a gifting of time that you can offer? But I think everybody's got a next step. Everybody's got a thing they can do to say, you know what? I'm all in. I'm all in at grace. And listen, it's not about grace. It's about God's kingdom. That's why I shared the Addis Jamari story because he's building God's kingdom outside the walls of grace, and that's wonderful. I'm not trying to get you to invest yourself in grace. I'm trying to get you to invest yourself in God's kingdom wherever he is building it. And also saying that if you believe that God is building his kingdom here, then yes, ply your hand here. Leverage everything that you have here. Leverage your time, your talents, and your treasures here at Grace that we might see God's kingdom advance. But as we think about that, I wanted to put it in very simple terms. And maybe you can talk about this with whoever you're watching this sermon with if that's what's happening. If there's people around you. But I would ask you to prayerfully consider if I'm going to be all in at grace, what's my next step? What's the next thing that God wants me to do to be obedient to what I've just heard? Let's pray. Father, you're good. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for gifting us. I pray that each of us would see that you have gifted and purposed us to be used by you. That we might experience the thrill of building your eternal kingdom. That we might avoid the devastation of spending a life building a kingdom that will ultimately fade away. God, I pray that you would give us courage to take the next step that you're placing on our heart. God, I pray that your Holy Spirit would make that very clear. If there's anybody listening to this prayer and they're thinking, God, I really don't know what to do. I just give them ears to hear your spirit as he whispers into their ears what it is they want, they need to do. Because I know that you will guide us and direct us and show us where to apply our hand. God, be with us as we enter 2022. I pray that you would do amazing things here at Grace. We ask that you would build your kingdom here, God. And we are grateful that we get to be a part of it. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

Thank you for watching. ¶¶ Hi, I'm Leah, and I'm going to read Luke 2, 8-14. It is for Christ the Lord. Here is how you will know I am telling the truth. You will find a baby wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a manger. Suddenly, a large group of angels from heaven also appeared. They were praising God. They said, May glory be given to God the pastor here. Dalton, this is the last time we let you lead worship on Christmas Eve. You're going to leave the music stand up there like that, pal. I'll tell right back. everybody. I'm glad that you're here. Merry Christmas to you. This is really, really fun. Christmas Eve service is my favorite service of the year. Every year, I love the energy. I love the singing. If you have children in the room today, do not worry. My sermon is intentionally short and simple. I would call it a message, okay? So it's going to be quick, and that's by design, because I think Christmas Eve, the singing together and all the things that go along with it should really steal the show in the service that we have together. And I'm thrilled that we get to be in person this year. Since last year, we had to do it over video. I was in Atlanta when we had our Christmas Eve service, watching it on the computer. So this is way better, and I'm very glad that everyone is here. As we've been going through December, working towards this Christmas Eve service, we've been doing a series called Renewed Wonder. And in each of the sermons in the series, we've been looking at the Christmas story through the lens, through the eyes of different people involved in the Christmas story. So we've looked at it through the eyes of the shepherds and through the eyes of Mary, and we've looked at it through the eyes of the angels and through Herod and through the wise men. And so today for the Christmas Eve message, I wanted us to take a minute to look week, I was reminded of a story, a poignant memory in my life. I was 21, 22 years old. This was in 2003. I think it was for my 21st birthday. My dad said, hey, for your birthday, I want to get you tickets to any sporting event you want to go to. What sporting event do you want to go to? And I'm like, this is fantastic. And at the time, my biggest interest was women's field hockey. And so we went, no, I'm just messing around. I said, I'd really love to go to a national championship football game. And he said, all right, we can make that happen. So we got tickets to go to the national championship football game. This particular year happened to be in Tempe, Arizona. It was the 2003 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. So we got to go. We took my best friend and his dad. They came along and we went to the Grand Canyon, made a whole weekend out of it. I think the Cheesecake Factory was involved, so you know it was fancy. And then we go to the game. And the game was the game between Miami and Ohio State that went into double overtime. And it's one of the best national championship games ever. And I got to be there. And there was some really, really cool moments during this game. And there was several moments, in fact, and I didn't have a dog in the fight. I don't like Miami. I don't like Ohio State. I don't care. I'm just there for fun. But there were several moments where each fan base thought their team had won the game and were national champions forever, right? And so that crowd goes nuts. And then they find out it was a pass interference, or it gets called back, or that was a fumble, or he actually landed out of bounds, or whatever it was. And then they kind of get deflated. And then a few minutes later, Ohio State thinks they win. And then they find out, no, you didn't. They broke the rules there too. And so it just kept going back and forth into double overtime. And I'm sitting there and I wish I could remember. I tried for the life of me to remember, but I can't remember the specific moment. I can't remember what happened. But something incredible happened, unbelievable. And the whole stadium's going nuts. And I'm thinking to myself, I can't believe I get to be here to see this. This is so cool. And I turn around to kind of share this moment with my dad. My dad had to sit behind us. I don't like to sit on the same row as him. So he had to sit behind us. And I turned around to kind of share this moment with my dad. And you would have thought that there was no one else in the stadium but me, because he was staring right at me, grinning from ear to ear. And it was like in that moment that there was no one else in the stadium. And it dawned on me in real time, his joy is in watching me enjoy his gift. I'm thrilled that all of this is happening and he's thrilled that he's the reason that I'm there while it's happening. And to turn around and see my dad grinning from ear to ear, finding his greatest joy in my enjoyment of his gift, to me is a good picture of how God the Father must have felt when he gave us his good and perfect gift. The book of James tells us that God the Father gives good and perfect gifts from above. And then Matthew tells us that if our earthly fathers know how to give us good gifts, how much better does our heavenly Father know how to give good gifts? And Jesus, we are told, is the good and perfect gift. We hear it over and over in this season that Jesus is the greatest gift of all. And so what must it have been like to be God the Father watching Simeon in the temple experience the joy of meeting the Messiah and seeing Mary and Joseph experience the joy of having the Messiah and bringing life to him and seeing the shepherds respond to the angels and going over to the manger and this progressive revelation of who this Jesus is and what he came to do and watching his creation, who he loves so much, enjoy the gift that he gave to them so perfectly. What must his joy have been like? Well, it had to be something like what I turned around and saw on my dad's face at that football game. And I think it's important to note at Christmas that if we want to see it through the eyes of God, that his greatest joy is in our enjoyment of his gift. God's greatest joy is at our delight in the good things that he places in our life. It's in, pointedly, it's in our delight in his son, Jesus. So as we sing, God delights in these songs. As we praise, I'm going to stop talking in a minute. We're going to do Oh Holy Night. It's my favorite song ever. I love it and I can't wait to sing it. And then we're going to do Silent Night. We're going to do the candles. And if that moves us to joy, if we feel any tinge of delight there at God the Father and his gifts in our life, then he is taking enjoyment in that as well. He is delighting in us as we delight in him. His greatest joy is to watch you enjoy the gifts that he's given you. And as I was thinking about this, I was also thinking about this idea that Jesus is the greatest gift ever. And I started wondering, well, why is that the case? If someone were to ask me, why is Jesus the greatest gift, how would I explain it? And I think that I would explain it like this, that Jesus is the greatest gift because he gives us everything that we want and need before we even realize that we want and need it. He provides for us everything that we want and need before we even realize that we want and need it. 2,000 years before any of us existed, he died on the cross for our sins before any of us ever knew that our sins would require a death. He does things for us without us even knowing his goodness, without us even having a full revelation of what he's actually doing in our lives. And to know Jesus and to accept the gift of Jesus is to see him get better and better and to have this kind of progressive revelation at how good Jesus actually is and how perfect of a gift he actually was. I think it kind of works like this check that I received a couple Christmases back. A few Christmases ago, it was in December and I think there was a men's Bible study or something. And then afterwards, one of the guys handed me a card, an envelope with a card inside of it, which is typical for people to do for their pastor. If you're here and you haven't done that for your pastor. But that happens from time to time, right? And so he hands me a card. I'm like, okay, great, thanks. And I go back to my office. And then at some point that morning, I open it up and there's a nice message. Merry Christmas to you and your family and blah, blah, blah. And all the stuff that you say. And then there's a check. And I'm like, this is great. They didn't have to write us a check. That's too, too kind. So I open it up. And there's a two and some zeros. And I'm like, they gave us a check for $200? That's too much. I mean, I'm going to accept it, but that's too much. And then I look and I'm like, oh, yo, there's more zeros here. Oh, oh, this is a check for $20,000 to the church. That's the part of the story I don't like. I wish it was for me. But I'm like, oh my gosh, this is a check for 20 grand. This isn't $200. The longer I looked at it, the better it got. That's how Jesus is. The longer we look at him, the longer we experience him, the more we learn about him, the more layers we peel off, the better he gets. Because he provides for us everything that we want and need before we even realize that's what he's doing. Here's how that works. If I could talk to you, we could just sit down and I could say, hey, what do you want out of life? We would all have different answers and say different things and have different ways of phrasing the same small group of ideas, right? If I could sit with someone who's just starting out their career and say, hey, what do you want in life? You would probably tell me there's other, you want family, you want wealth, you want whatever, but you would probably at some point or another land at success. I'd like to be successful. And if you really think about that, why do you want to be successful? Well, if you get to the heart of the matter, you probably want to be successful. I know that this is true for me because I want to prove myself. Because you want to accomplish and you want to perform and you want to be validated and you want to move up and you want to get to the end of your career and the end of your life and look back and be proud of who you are and what you did. You want your career and the people around you to say, you're enough, you're good, you did it. When we chase success, when we prioritize success, if we're being really honest with ourself, a root of that is we just, we want people to tell us we're good enough. And do you know that Jesus tells you over and over again in scripture and in worship and in circumstances that you're enough, that he loves you. And he says, hey, you don't have to perform for me. You don't have to do anything for me. You don't have to close a sale for me. You don't have to be excellent for me. You don't have to overcome for me. You don't have to do anything at all. I love you. You're enough. You can quit trying so hard. And when we learn to rest easy in that, we have what we've wanted all along, which is this validation for the creator of the universe to tell us that we're enough. Maybe we want wealth. Maybe we just want a little bit more money. I don't know what your idea of wealth is. We have different ideas of it. I'm not saying that necessarily you want a level of wealth where you have a yacht off of Fiji. I mean, maybe you do. Maybe that's your goal, and that's great. But maybe you just want enough to do whatever it is you want to do. But if one of the things we want from life is wealth, you know what's really behind that desire is a desire for a sense of security and safety, and I'm going to be okay. There's no greater security than Jesus. There's no greater security than resting easy in the sovereignty of God and knowing that Jesus has paid the price for your sins and there is nothing that can happen to you that he does not ordain. There's no greater security than Christ. Maybe we want a good marriage. We want to be loved. I just want to have a good family. Do you know that the thing that makes a marriage the healthiest is in a marriage when you are fully seen and fully known? All your nooks and crannies, all the bad parts, all the good parts, you are fully seen and exposed to your partner and yet still fully loved. That's what good marriage is. Do you know who sees you fully? Everything about you more than any human can ever see? Christ. He knows you deeply and he loves you. That validating love is found in him. You could give me anything that you wanted out of life and I promise you I could walk you through and show you that's actually found in Jesus. You may not realize that yet, but that's actually found in Jesus. So the longer we gaze at Jesus, the more zeros show up on that check and the better we realize he is. That's what we want. What about the things that we need that we may not realize just yet? I believe that we were created, that there is a longing in our souls for eternity. We're told that God wrote eternity on our hearts. We know that this life, there is something that tells us as we go through life and we see all the things we see, that this life isn't all that there is. We know that intuitively in our souls and our guts. We know it. And we yearn for eternity. And Jesus secures us that eternity. In our guts we know that we were created. And in our souls we long for harmony with this creator God. It's a thing that's designed into each one of us to long for harmony with our creator God, and Jesus provides that harmony. Our souls, and we know this now, and the stress and the strife of 2020 and 2021, our souls long for rest. They need it. We need a place to lay down. Jesus won us that rest with his death. The more we gaze at Jesus, the better he gets. The more we understand about Jesus, the more joy we can take in the gift that we received. So as we look to see Christmas through the eyes of the Father, let us acknowledge that his joy is found in our enjoyment of his good and perfect gift. And his good and perfect gift is good and perfect because it provides for us, Jesus provides for us, everything we could ever possibly want or need even before we know we want or need it. So my invitation to you at Christmas and my prayer for you is to simply accept this gift that God offers. If you've never accepted this gift, if you've never accepted Jesus, I pray that this is the season that you'll do that. If you have accepted Christ, I pray that in this season you will have a progressive revelation and just keep seeing more and more zeros and understand more and more about who Jesus is and what he does and how he provides for you all the things that you want or need, even before you know you want or need them. And in that way, let's take joy in the gift that the Father has given us this Christmas. I'm going to pray, and we're going to sing O Holy Night together. Father, thanks so much for who you are, for how you love us, for how good you are to us. Thank you for your good and perfect gift. Thank you for Jesus. God, if there are people here who don't know you, I pray that they would want to. God, if there are people here who have maybe held you at arm's length for whatever reason, I pray that you would help us see that you really are what we've been clawing for this whole time. God, let us receive you into our lives more and more. Let us gaze at your son more and more. Let us be overwhelmed by the layers of goodness that are revealed in his presence. And this Christmas, God, let us find joy in your good gifts so that you might delight in us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.