Sermons tagged with Love

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. I don't think you guys got the memo. It's Memorial Day weekend. You're supposed to be like at the beach and stuff, and here you are. So this is fantastic. I'm super encouraged by our Memorial Day crew. Just for the record, to throw this out here before I get launched into the sermon, if you are ever here while a staff member falls off the stage, the appropriate response is laughter. Don't feel bad about that. Don't feel like you have to wait and see if we're all right. Even if it's Aaron, you just laugh, all right? That's funny. And if you had fallen off the stage, that would be the best. That would be amazing. Actually, they're all rooting for me. Now they're all like, they're not even going to pay attention. They're just going to root for me like to fall off the stage. I'm going to stay right here. This is the third part in our series called The Forgotten God. For the unindoctrinated, for those that may not be as familiar with Christian theology, we believe that the Bible teaches that our God exists as a trinity or the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And the idea is we talk a lot about God the Father. We pray to him. We hear about him. He's all over the Bible. We talk a lot about God the Son in the form of Jesus. We see Jesus a lot. We just did a whole series on his life for 12 weeks. But sometimes we forget about the Spirit. We know he's there, but we don't familiarize ourselves with him or his roles or his influence in our lives. Last week, we said we've been talking about that what the Spirit does is he continues Jesus's ministry both through us and to us. This week, we're going to look at how he continues Jesus's ministry to us and the roles that he plays in our life. Last week, we looked at his continuation of Jesus's ministry through us and the spiritual gifts. And I brought up that there was two spiritual gifts that are often misunderstood, tongues and prophecy. And I promised that I would write up a little something to help you understand it if you're curious about my stance, not our stance, my stance on those gifts. So that's actually typed up and printed out and on the information table if you want to grab one on your way out. To the five of you that read it, I hope that it's good. They'll be there as long as there are copies, so for eight months. This week, I want us to look at the roles of the Spirit. How does the Spirit continue Jesus's ministry to us? And when I say Jesus's ministry to us, one of the things that Jesus was doing with the disciples is he was showing them how to become more like God in character, more like him in character and in disposition and in love and in heart. And so now the Holy Spirit does that in us as well. We're taught that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment or a guarantee on our salvation. So we believe that if you are a believer, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then you have the gift of the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit does certain things for you. I saw one author, he listed out 50 things that the Holy Spirit does. We're one service now, so I've got extra time. So number your paper, one through 50. No, I'm just messing around. I'm going to do five, but there's more than what we're doing this morning, right? But the Holy Spirit plays roles for us. And as I was thinking about how do we understand who the Holy Spirit is for us and what he does for us and how he helps us, as Jesus talked about, I was reminded of this clip of the 92 Olympics in Barcelona. This is, we're going to watch in just a second, this is my favorite Olympic moment of all time. Number two, for those interested, is Carrie Strug in the 96 Olympics when she does the vault with her sprained ankle. But this is my favorite one of all time. I watched this as an 11-year-old boy, and even in the moment, I thought, my goodness, something really neat is happening here. And I thought it was a really good picture of who the Holy Spirit is for us. So I wanted us to take a second here at the onset and take a look at this video. Storbritannia Terima kasih telah menonton! That's his dad. Terima kasih telah menonton I'm going to make a small tree with a small tree. Stenbergsforskning I love that clip, man. It's great. First of all, I mean, if you're blessed to have a good dad, like, that's what they do. And so now as a dad, like, I understand that even more. But every time I watch that clip, I cry. I get a little misty. And so I was in my office this week trying to find the right version of it on YouTube. And so I was watching it, and it finishes, and I'm in my office crying by myself. And then I start laughing at myself for crying by myself. And so if you'd have walked into my office at that moment, I would have looked absolutely hysterical. Like, you probably just would have slowly shut the door like, Nate's lost it. This is terrible. And going on with your day. But I love that clip because dude's running. He's trained for the Olympics. He's poured his life into it. And he tears his hamstring, right? And I can appreciate the heart of the dude that says, no, forget this. I'm finishing this thing. And he gets up and he goes and he's going to finish this thing. And then here comes his dad fighting off people. And I love, you guys giggle both times, I love when some other guy comes over and tries to help. He's like, get away from us. Get out of here. I've got this. I'm taking care of him. I love that. And I think it's a good picture of who the Holy Spirit is for us. And I think about us that we can all relate to that sprinter. That sprinter's name is Derek. I think in our life we've all felt like Derek. When we didn't know what to do or where to go, we felt like we were all alone, that we were just limping through life, trying to get this thing figured out. And darn it if we couldn't just use a hand. I sat with somebody this week. We have the young girl Molly that sometimes plays the violin for us. Her father passed away this week far too early. That's a heartbreaking thing. And I was sitting with somebody from our church this week as we took them lunch. And we were talking about, his name was Mac. We were talking about Mac passing. And she just brought up that there's just been a lot of people in the last couple years in her life who have passed away. She knows a lot of widows who are widows far too early. And she kind of broke down. She said, I don't understand. It's been really hard for me. I don't know how to make sense of this. I believe in my God, but I don't know why these things happen. She felt like Derek. And sometimes that moment is deep and it's grievous and it's intense and we just don't know what to do. We feel like him. We're all alone. Other times we just kind of look around and we're like, gosh, I've been carrying this weight for a long time. Goodness, it's felt like it's been all on my shoulders to lead this family, to lead this business, to decide on my career, to raise this child, to be in this relationship. Sometimes it just feels like it's all on us and that we're just limping through life. And if we're being really honest, we just wish sometimes we could have a hand. And this is true even of the toughest sons of guns in here. Because some of us are wired in such a way that you never ask for help. You never need anything from anybody. You're quick to help other people, but if other people offer to help you, no, I'm good. I'm fine. And I know that mentality. But let me tell you something. Even the toughest, most independent people in here, you have moments in your life, if you're being honest, where you feel like Derek, and you could really use a hand. That's why I think Jesus' words in John 16 should comfort us so much. And let me just say, if you're sitting here going, I've never felt like Derek, boy, you need to feel like him more than anybody in this room. And I think that's why Jesus' words bring us so much comfort. We started the series with this verse in John chapter 16 where Jesus says, it's better for you that I leave so that you can receive the comforter. And we talked about that's an absurd statement because wouldn't it be great to have Jesus right next to us all the time? But Jesus says it's better that I'm not here because if I don't leave, you can't receive the comforter. And we just talked about how can that statement possibly be true. But this week, I want us to actually look at a different portion of the verse. So come back to it, but zero in on a differentper, and that's capitalized, and some of your Bibles may say Comforter, will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And this is going to be important later. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. I say that these should be words of comfort to us because of what that word helper means. The word helper or comforter in your Bible, and I don't do this a lot because normally I think it's pastors just showing off, but in this point I do think it's important. The original word there is parakletos. parakletos, which literally means to come alongside. And that's the word that Jesus uses to describe the Spirit. It's all through the book of John. It's alternately translated as advocate, helper, comforter, or teacher. It can mean all those different things, but sometimes we see it helper, sometimes we see it comforter. But what he's saying is, if I don't leave you, then the one who's going to come alongside you will not come. And that's why I say that clip was a good picture of who the Holy Spirit is, because what did that father do? He came alongside his son, and he helped him through the race. And this is the picture of what the Holy Spirit does for us. When he rushes into our life, he comes alongside us, he fights his way to us, he picks us up, and he stays beside us through life. He is our ever-present helper. And so it should bring us great comfort. And as I was doing the research on this sermon, I realized that there's a lot of different roles that the Holy Spirit plays. There's a lot of different things that he does for us. I said that one author listed as many as 50. But what I realized as I looked at this is, wait a second, Jesus calls him the comforter. Jesus calls him the helper. So the Holy Spirit's role is to help us. The Holy Spirit's role is to come alongside us. That's his big umbrella role. And then underneath that umbrella, sometimes he takes on different shapes or different forms, depending on what we might need most. And the Scripture kind of tells us or shows us the different forms that he takes on for us. So we're going to talk about the roles of the Spirit, but his role is to help us. And that role looks differently depending on different seasons of life and different wiring. So one of the first ones I want us to look at is that sometimes he's the comforter. Sometimes the role that that takes on is that the Holy Spirit is the comforter. And this is easy to see that when we're grieving, the Holy Spirit is there and he is with us. And the Bible says that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. We know that when we are grieving and when we are hurting that the Lord is near to us. But to be honest with you, this was a hard one for me to relate to. I've not walked through a lot of tragedy in my life. There's not been many times where I was so broken and so grieved, maybe once that I can think of, where I felt like I needed to run to God. But I also felt like the role of comforter in our life is more prevalent than that. The other thing I know about myself is that I'm kind of emotionally broken. Like I don't really like feel emotions to the same degree that other people do. Like I'm a little bit weird in that way. And one time I was really sad about something and I called Jen and told her I was down. And her response was, Nate, those are feelings. And I said, well, you can keep these. These are terrible. I don't like feeling this way. I don't get down a lot. I probably should. I just don't get affected by much. I get grumpy about things, but I don't get sad about things where I feel like I need comfort. I don't feel like my life calls for a lot of comfort. So I actually went to some people on staff. I went to Aaron, our children's pastor, and I went to Steve, our worship pastor, and I said, hey, when you hear that the Holy Spirit is your comforter, how do you relate to that? How does that strike you? What does that mean to you? And they both gave me the same answer, and I thought it was a great one. They said, when I think of the comfort of the Spirit, I think of peace. And I thought that's so true. And often the comfort that the Holy Spirit offers comes in the form of peace. Often the comfort that he gives us is not patting us on the back and saying, hey, it's going to be okay, or giving us the plan like, hey, I'm going to comfort you by showing you exactly how it's going to work out. Sometimes that's not it. Sometimes it's just the peace that he offers us. I got to participate in the funeral that happened on Friday for Mac McElroy. And I peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. That peace of God is delivered to us through the Holy Spirit. And the comfort comes in the form of, I think, the Holy Spirit getting near us, putting his arm around us, and saying, I know that you don't know how this is going to work out, but I do. And saying, I know that you don't know what you need to do in this situation, but I know. I know that this doesn't make sense to you right now. I know that you can't make heads or tails of this. I know that it feels like a loving God wouldn't allow this to happen. I know that this feels confusing and it doesn't fit into your theology. I understand that. But I understand it. It makes sense to me. I know that you don't know how this is going to be okay or how life will ever be okay, but I think the Holy Spirit, as he comforts us, whispers into our ear, but I know how it's going to be okay. And I know how this is going to work out. And the Holy Spirit is what enables people, those Christians, to face the unknown with certainty and with peace. One of the greatest blessings of my life has been the privilege of watching my grandma, my mama, walk to death with perfect peace. She was diagnosed in February a couple years ago with ovarian cancer. It was advanced stage, and she said, you know, I've lived a long life. I'm pretty good. My husband's in heaven. My kids don't need, like, my support on a day-to-day basis, so I can pray for them. I can pray for them from heaven, so I'm just going to refuse treatment and live out the last couple months of my life in peace. And she walked. I had coffee with her every other week and talked to her about it. And she walked to death with perfect peace and no fear. You know how she did that? The Holy Spirit whispering in her ear, Linda, I know that you don't know how this is gonna work, but I do, and I've got you. So sometimes the Holy Spirit helps us by taking on the form of a comforter. Sometimes he's the illuminator. This may be the most important role of the Spirit. Sometimes the Holy Spirit is the illuminator. It tells us in 1 Corinthians 2, I've got it there on your notes, verses 13 to 14. Paul writes this, and we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Okay. What this means is, if we want to understand spiritual things at all, it is the Holy Spirit that enables us to understand those things. Do you understand that the Holy Spirit is the activator of your faith? That if you would call yourself a Christian, that in the days and weeks and years before you were a Christian, you were wandering around, the Bible says, blind, unable to see the truth. And the only way you can see the truth that it takes to become a believer is for the Holy Spirit to illuminate that truth in your life, to do the work in your heart so that you'll be turned on to the things of God. None of us comes to faith because we sit down and intellectually pursue faith. We come to faith because the Holy Spirit, in whatever way he works, illuminates for us our need for God. That's how we come to faith. None of us has faith without the Spirit. And then as we walk through life and we seek to understand spiritual things, the Holy Spirit explains them to us. He directs our paths in such a way that spiritual things make sense to us that beforehand they couldn't. That's why I truly believe if you're not a believer and you're trying to come to grips with Christianity, but the deal for you is I have to understand everything about what I'm getting into to be able to take the step of faith to be a Christian. You never will, because the Holy Spirit has to act in our life to bring that about for us. I think it even works like this. The Holy Spirit, part of his role is to illuminate God's Word. I have notes in my Bible where I was reading a passage, and I went, gosh, I don't understand what that means. And I wrote down and dated it. Father, please show me what this means. Spirit, please help me with this one. I don't understand this. And I wrote it down and I dated it and I just made it a prayer. And I can tell you that there's been a couple of times when I come back through my Bible, I'm reading it again, and I read a passage and there's a note off to the side of it that just says, Lord, please help me. And I go, oh, I understand what that means now. Because the Holy Spirit was good in answering the prayers and showing us what Scripture means. I would just tell you this. If you're having a hard time understanding some things about God, if you're having a hard time understanding some things about theology, if you're having a hard time understanding some of the things that you may read in Scripture sometimes, have you prayed to the Spirit and asked Him to illuminate for you what it means? Have you asked Him to show you? I would challenge you to pray that prayer and see what happens because sometimes the Spirit is the illuminator and he shows us spiritual truths. Sometimes he's our leader. Sometimes he shows us where to go and what to do next. I love the moment in that video when Derek is limping down. He's limping down the track, and his father fights his way to him, and he grabs him, right? And Derek at first looks at him. If you go back and you watch it again, he looks at him with some apprehension. He thinks it's another guy in a suit who's trying to help him, and he kind of looks at him like, no, get away from me. But then he realizes who it is. And when he realizes who it is, he breaks down crying because he realizes it's not all on him anymore. And he turns and he buries his face in his dad. And at that moment when he's burying his face in his dad, he's still moving down the track, but he's no longer looking where he's going. And that's a picture of what the Holy Spirit does for us. His dad has his eyes down the track. His dad hasn't. His dad says, you don't need to worry about where we're going. You don't need to worry about where we're stepping. You don't need to worry about staying in your lane or avoiding all these camera people or crossing the finish line. You don't need to worry about any of that. I got you. I will take you across. And all of his concerns and all of his worries went straight into just focusing on his dad and the comfort that his dad offered. And sometimes this is what we need to do with the Spirit more than anything, is just bury our face in Him, focus our eyes on Christ, focus our eyes on God, and allow the Spirit to lead us into the decisions that we need to make. Because sometimes we don't know what to do. Do I take the job? Do I not take the job? Do I put my resume out there? Do I not? Do I stay in Raleigh? Do I move somewhere else? Do I go to this church? Do I go to that church? We have a dynamic in a relationship that's hard and sticky and if we address it, it's going to blow it up and it's going be really difficult to talk about it, and maybe it's best just to let it lie. What do I do? Do I stick my face in the wood chipper, or do I step back and hope it works out? How do I discipline my kid? What do I say in this particular instance? How do I handle this situation? Oftentimes, we're in a place in life where we could go this way or that way, and we're not sure what to do. I was in a conversation with somebody in my family a while back, and she was in a very stressful situation, and a lot of things had fallen on her that were not typically her responsibilities. And she was really struggling with it and having a hard time with it and was ill-equipped to handle it. It was really very stressful for her. And I spent some time on the phone with her. And I tried to lovingly tell her, hey, where you're at right now in life, the things that are being thrust onto you are too much for you. They're too big for you. You're not wired to handle these things. So you don't need to continue to feel encumbered with all the decisions around the situation because you have a couple of people around you who are smart and who are level-headed and who are thinking clearly and who are capable of helping you carry that burden. So the only decision that you need to make is to trust the people around you who love you enough to make those decisions for you. How does that sound? And she said, that sounds pretty good. I think I can do that. Some of y'all came in here this morning and this is what you need to hear. You have the weight of the world on your shoulders. You have been leading the company or the family or the dynamic or the department or whatever it is, and it has felt all on you for a long time. And you're trying to decide between this and that and what's the best way and what do we do. The only thing you need to do is turn and bury your face in the Spirit and trust His leadership and trust His guidance and say, listen, God, I'm just going to focus on you and you just take me where we need to go. Sometimes the Spirit helps us by leading us. Sometimes the Spirit is the convictor. This is what Jesus says in John, that the helper is going to come and his role is going to be to convict the world of sin. And I feel like this gets a bad rap. This idea of conviction kind of gets, especially now in our culture, it really gets a bad rap, right? We are so touchy about telling anybody that they're wrong about anything. We could hear, man, this guy, he murdered his wife. And some of us would go like, I'm sure he had his reasons. Like we equivocate everything. We won't judge anything at all. We're so scared of it because we don't want anybody to feel bad about anything that they may have done, God forbid. And so when we hear that the Holy Spirit is the convictor, we kind of immediately be like, I'm not into that. Because we feel like that the Holy Spirit is the voice in our head that's shaming us for our sin. The one that's getting on to us when we look in the mirror and we say, look at you. Look at who you are. If everybody knew what you know about yourself, they would not be your friends anymore. She would not be your wife anymore. He would not be your husband anymore. They would not respect you as a parent anymore. And some of us sometimes think that the Holy Spirit is that voice in our head that's shaming us into obedience. But I really feel like that's not how the Holy Spirit works. Have you ever had, I feel like the Holy Spirit works like this. Go with me. I know this is kind of a leap, but just hang with me. Have you ever had those days when you overeat? I never have. I'm assuming that you guys have. But those days when you overeat. Gosh, I've had so many lately. The other day, this happened. This was Thursday night. Thursday was a really busy day. I got up. I had something early, so I left before Lily woke up. I had the whole day. I saw her really quick for like a minute in the afternoon. I snuck up on her at a park and said, hey. And then I went back to work. And then I had meetings that went until like 8.30 at night. And so I was trying desperately to wrap up the meeting and rush home so that I could hug Lily before she went to bed. That's what I was trying to do all day. And I get there and I walk into the room. It's right before she goes to bed. The lights are down. Jen's sitting on the bed. And she says, Daddy. And I'm like, oh, this is the best. And so I hug her, and then I decided to push my luck. I said, can Daddy snuggle with you for a minute? And she said, no, I want Mom to. Dang it. Which is, that's Lily. I mean, she loves her Mama. And so we kind of negotiated. I'm like, well, maybe mom can do it for a little bit and then daddy can. And she goes, okay. I'm like, all right, good. So long story short, I tried to lay down next to her and snuggle with her for a minute, and she just bawled hysterically. The way that any of you would react if the same thing were happening in your life. She just bawled hysterically, right? And Jen's kind of looking at me, and now I realize I'm the selfish 38-year-old jerk that's making this poor girl cry because I want her time and this is really not good fathering. So I relent and I get up. And I'm not messing around. My feelings were legitimately hurt. I was sad when I walked down the stairs. And so I drove to cookout and I ate my feelings. I did. We had decided that week we were on a diet. We were going to be strict. And I had been good that week. I really had. And then I walked down those stairs and I was like, forget this. So I get in the car, I go to cookout, double cheeseburger, onions, mayonnaise, mustard, onion rings, chicken quesadilla, Coke. All of it. All of it. I wasn't even, stop it. You've done it too. I get back to the house. I ate the cheeseburger and like two onion rings and I was like, I'm full. But I am not a quitter. So I finished it. And I'm sitting there, right? And like ten minutes after I'm done, I do not feel good. I'm having some serious indigestion. And what's the indigestion telling me? Hey, pal, that probably wasn't a good choice. That's the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the voice that talks back to you in the mirror after you overeat that says, look at you, you man, it stinks that it's getting hot. It's bathing suit season and you are not ready. Like that's not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the indigestion that you feel that says, hey, that decision that you just made, that's not what's best for you. The Holy Spirit is the heavy breathing at the top of the stairs that lets you know like maybe a walk would be good sometimes. That's the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the voice trying to shame us into submission. He is looking to love us into health. He's the voice that whispers in our ear, hey, that thing that you're doing with your life, that's not what's best for you. When you feel bad after you overeat, that's the Creator whispering to you going, you were not designed to eat cookout. When we sin and we mess up and we feel this voice in our head telling us, you were not designed to do that. That's the Holy Spirit. That's the conviction of the Holy Spirit. The conviction of the Holy Spirit never induces shame because our shame hung with Jesus on the cross. He took that from you so that you don't have to feel it. But it is a voice telling you, hey, that thing that you're doing in your life, that's not what's best for you. The conviction of the Holy Spirit loves us to health. And for some of us this morning, he's been whispering to us for a while. And we should listen. I like to say that you win every argument you ever get into with God. The Holy Spirit can whisper to you and say, hey, that's not good for you. And you can go, yeah, it is. I think it's fine. And he'll go, okay. You do not want to win that argument. Listen to him. Listen to him. And I think it's important that we understand that the Holy Spirit is never seeking to shame us in this conviction. He's only seeking to love us because it plays into the last role I want to cover today. Sometimes he's the identifier. Sometimes the Holy Spirit identifies us for who we are. Romans 8 tells us that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are, get this, children of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs to God and co-heirs to Christ. So the Holy Spirit's role is to identify you for who you are. And I think that this, to me, as you become a Christian, is maybe the most persistently needed voice and role of the Spirit that we have. Because I'm convinced that most of us, when we think about standing face to face with God, feel far more like an indentured servant than we do a loved child, right? I feel like most of us just assume, think about the way that you pray, think about the way that you worship, think about the self-talk that you feel when you even try to do spiritual things. Don't most of us in this room just assume God's disappointed in us? Don't we just assume that if we were gonna be face-to-face with God, that his first primary emotion towards us would be disappointment? We think God's love is for everybody else, God's forgiveness is for everybody else, but not me, I know better. I've been in church for a long time. I know better than what I have done. Doesn't everybody in this room feel like, if you've been a believer for any time, don't you feel like, if you're being honest, gosh, I should be so much further along in my spiritual walk than I am. God has to be disappointed in how little ground I've covered in these last 10, 20, 30 years. Don't we feel like that? Like we're somehow God's indentured servants and we owe him. We need to get better and that his primary emotion towards us is disappointment. To that voice, the Holy Spirit whispers in our ear, you're not an indentured servant. God is not ashamed of you. He is your father, and you are his daughter, or his son, and he loves you, and he is proud of you. When that dad rushed onto the track and grabbed Derek, the sprinter, and picked him up, did you read anything on his lips about him being disappointed for not properly stretching before the race? No, he just picked him up and he said, I'm here. I'll help you. I feel like we have this picture of God that's gonna be disappointed in us for not stretching or eating right the day of race, when all God wants to do is rush into our life and pick us up and help us. What I want you to see is that God's primary emotion towards you is not disappointment. It's delighted love. And the Holy Spirit's role in your life is to identify you as an adopted son or daughter of the King and to constantly remind you God loves you. God delights in you. God is proud of you. And some of you just said in your head, God's not proud of me. Yes, he is. He's proud of you. Some of you just said he doesn't delight in me. Yes, he does. He delights in you. He loves you. He's proud of you. You're his children. And the Holy Spirit's role is to remind you that the Creator God looks down on you and smiles and takes delight. Those of you who have children, you know that your primary emotion towards them is not disappointment or frustration. It's love. Why would we think our perfect heavenly Father is any different than that? So sometimes the Holy Spirit serves us as the identifier. I would ask you this question. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, which good on you for being church at a holiday weekend and not even signing up for the whole deal yet. But if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, don't you want that? Don't you want the helper? Aren't you tired of running the race on your own? Aren't you tired of it all being on you? Aren't you ready to let the helper come alongside you and serve you in whatever capacity you need? For those of you who are a believer, I want to encourage you today to lean into the roles of the Holy Spirit in your life. I don't know which one that we covered today resonates most deeply with you. But when I pray in a second, you might spend some time praying and ask God to just help you lean into that part of his spirit. You might ask God to help you trust him as your comforter and as your helper. You might ask him to lead you and to show you. You might ask him to remind you. All you need this morning is a reminder that you are a beloved son or daughter of the King. I don't know which role resonates with you most, but the encouragement this morning is to lean into it and allow the Holy Spirit to be in your life who he is and to do in your life what he's come to do. And let's embrace this idea that it's better for us to have the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit continues to bring you closer to God and draw you into the Father by coming alongside you and being your helper as you move through life. All right, let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for your spirit. Thank you for how he helps, how he comforts, how he illuminates and leads. We even thank you for the gentle conviction of the spirit. We thank you that he identifies us for who we are. God, I pray that we would leave, those of us who are believers, knowing that we are adopted children that you love. God, if there's anybody here who walked in this morning not knowing you, I pray that they would be your child before they leave. Let us give proper weight and value to your spirit and his ministry in our lives, God. Give us the faith to lean into him and to trust him. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Welcome to Grace. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. To the moms, happy Mother's Day. We want to acknowledge you. So to the expectant moms, congratulations and hope. And to the new moms, congratulations and hope. And to the experienced moms, we are grateful to you. And to the young moms, we empathize with you. And to the hopeful moms, we pray for you and with you. And to the grieving moms we empathize with you and to the hopeful moms we pray for you and with you and to the grieving moms we offer you our condolences and our shoulders as well. So to all the moms represented in the room, we love you and we are grateful for you. As we launch into this new series called The Forgotten God, I wanted to start where Jesus starts in John chapter 16. We've been doing a series in John since February all through the spring, and so as we free up from that and launch into a series on the Holy Spirit, I thought it appropriate to go to John. So turn in your Bibles to John chapter 16, okay? And in that, in John chapter 16 and verse 7, we find this, what I think to be, an absurd statement. One of these statements that when you hear it, your first reaction is, that's not true. There's no way that's possibly true. Moms have said one of these things, okay? A lot of moms in the rooms, maybe not modern millennial moms because we have different ways now, but when I was a kid and I got in trouble, I got the belt. Before I got the belt, what did my mom tell me? This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. I would always think, I'll trade you. If that's your concern, we can swap, like, you don't have to experience that pain. Let me save you from that, right? Like, when you're a kid and you hear that, you don't believe it. Like, that's not true. That's ridiculous. There's no way that's true. But then as you grow older, you realize that really is a true statement. I heard one of these absurd statements this week. I was so grateful that somebody in my small group gave me an example. I have somebody in my small group. I do a younger person's small group, young people, no kids. A guy named Connor. He is one of my current favorite humans. He's one of the most enthusiastic people. He does the announcements for us sometimes. He's going off to Colorado soon to be a medic out there for the summer. So anyways, I can say this, and he can't defend himself for a couple of months. He's at my house, and he and I got to talking about our love for sushi. I like sushi, and he likes sushi. And I'm like, oh, well, you got to tell me, like, what's the place? Like, where's the good place around here? We found one we like. We haven't found one we love. Where's the place around here? And he was like, actually, the best sushi. You want to know where it is? I'm like, yes, please. I want to know where it is. He goes, when I go home to Boone, North Carolina, and I stopped him right there. Get out of here. Don't tell me that the best sushi is in Boone. The sushi hub of the East Coast is in Boone, North Carolina. I'm sure it is, Connor. And he's like, no, no, no. And he keeps telling me how great it is. And I keep telling him how redneck he is, that the best sushi he can find is in Boone, North Carolina. And now listen, I didn't believe him at all. It felt absurd to me. And I don't know what's broken in me that I feel the need to correct him right away. And I can't just accept like, oh, that's good sushi. Like that's my fault. Okay. I'm a gross person for that. But when he said it, I just couldn't accept that that could possibly be true. Right? And maybe it is. Maybe it's delicious sushi. I don't know. But in John chapter 16, Jesus makes a statement that when he says it had to be, to me, patently absurd. We would respond to that like, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you, or that the best sushi in the eastern coast is found in Boone, North Carolina. Like, that's how we would respond to this, I think. This is what Jesus says. I want us to see it together. And a little bit of context for this verse, what's going on here. John chapters 13 through 17 represent a portion of scripture that's referred to as the farewell discourse. They're at the last supper. They've been doing Jesus and the disciples are eating dinner together. It's the last night they're going to spend together. They've been doing life together for three years. Jesus has been pouring into them, teaching them, showing them how to be disciples and how to do ministry. And he just kind of does this download of important information on them at the end of his life. And in the middle of this, in chapter 16, Jesus is talking to them about the fact that he's going to go away. I'm not going to be here all the time. I'm going to leave you, which is a bummer for the disciples because they're expecting to be with Jesus for the rest of their life. But he's telling them and trying to get them ready for, I'm going to go away, like I'm going to die. I'm not going to always be here. And then this translation, the ESV calls the Holy Spirit the helper, but some translations call him the comforter. So the point of this verse is Jesus is saying, guys, I got to go away, but it's better for you. It's to your advantage that I actually go from you, that you don't have my physical presence with you, because if I don't go, you'll never receive the helper or you'll never receive the comforter, is what he's telling you. And this is how Jesus chooses to introduce the Holy Spirit to the disciples and really to us. And we're calling this series, as Jesus refers to him here as the helper, and we begin to talk about the Holy Spirit, we're calling this series The Forgotten God, because in a lot of ways, that's really what the Holy Spirit is. If you're a Christian, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then you believe in a triune God, a God that is three parts, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. They are all God. They are all part of God. I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. I went to undergrad for theology. I got a master's degree in theology. I've been in ministry for 10 years. I've read books on it. And all I can say is, I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. But I know that it exists. I know that it's a thing. I know the Bible talks about it and that all three parts are equal, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we in our churches, large swaths of the church, kind of forget about the Holy Spirit. We talk a lot about God the Father. We pray to Him. We worship Him. We sing songs to Him. We talk a lot about God the Son. We preach about Him. We spend 12 weeks going through the stories about Him. But the Spirit, sometimes we sing to the Spirit. Sometimes we refer to the Spirit maybe without knowing it. The video that we watched before I came up here talking about your presence is welcome here, that's represented by the Spirit. Maybe we don't know that. But very often, particularly in conservative church circles, we forget about the Holy Spirit. Now, I have theories on this. I think that we're afraid of what we don't understand. And if we don't understand something, that we tend to just avoid it. We can kind of understand the idea of a son. We can kind of understand the idea of a father. And so those parts of God, we can kind of grasp a little bit, and we see them a little bit more in Scripture than we see the Spirit. But the Spirit is unknown. The Bible describes it as the wind. You don't know when it's going to come or go. We're told that the Spirit is in us, that you are the temple. As a believer, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that you actually have God in you, which is a really difficult thing to understand or to grasp. You're told that the Holy Spirit empowers you in ways that we're going to explore in this series. And it's, if we're honest, confusing and sometimes intimidating. And I think because of that, it makes us uncomfortable and we tend to avoid the things that we don't understand that make us uncomfortable. And so sometimes we forget the Spirit. But Jesus introduces the Spirit by making what I think is kind of an absurd statement on its face. And so what I want to do today is ask about this statement, how can Jesus' claim be true? How can Jesus' claim be true? How can that possibly be true, that it's actually better for the disciples and better for us to not have the physical presence of Jesus with us, but instead have the Holy Spirit or the helper or the comforter? How can that possibly be true? As we answer that, we're going to draw two conclusions today that each launch their own question. If that's true, then what about this? And if that's true, then what about this? And then those two answers should spark in us a natural question. And those three questions are going to make up the rest of the series. So I'll tell you, at the beginning, you're not going to walk home with the big to-do list today or with the thing that's really going to change your thinking. The take-home from today is to continue to attend and learn about the rest of the roles of the Spirit. Today is a setup for the series as we learn about the Holy Spirit. Now here's why I think that this is an absurd statement on its face. I would have expected Peter. Peter was the one, he was the ready, fire, aim guy. He was the one that spoke before he thought. He just said whatever he felt. That was Peter. I would have expected Peter when Jesus said, it is actually better for you that I go. I would have expected him to interrupt Jesus like I interrupted Connor about the boon sushi, right? Come on, that can't possibly be true. That can't be right. Because think about this. The more I thought about this, the more I felt it was, it had to be difficult for the disciples to accept what Jesus is saying. If you're a believer, if you call Jesus your Savior, how much different would your life be if Jesus were physically present next to you all day, every day, like he was for the disciples? They woke up next to that dude in the same room as that dude, at least in the same house. They spent every day with him. He would go off and pray for a little while, but he would always come back and find him. His physical presence, he was ever present. He was there all the time. If you're a Christian, how much different would your life be if Jesus were right there next to you all the time? Think about that. Can you imagine yourself in a situation where maybe you didn't know what to say? You're talking to your kid, and they ask you a really hard question. You're like, gosh, I don't know. You're in a Bible study and somebody asks a question. You're with a friend. You're just getting a beer or a coffee and they ask a question that's really difficult to answer. What do I do about my marriage? I feel broken down about this and you don't know the right thing to say. What do we do about our child and you don't know the right thing to say? What if Jesus were right there next to you and you could look at him and be like, oh Jesus, what do you think? What should I say? What if you could do that? What if when you're reading the Bible, if you've ever tried to read the Bible, it can be difficult to understand sometimes. And for a lot of us, that's why we don't read it more is because we read it and we're like, gosh, I kind of understand nine words in this book. And then we just kind of put it down and we move on to the next thing. We don't really get what it's talking about. What if when we read the Bible, we could be like, Jesus, I do not understand this part. Can you come here for a second and show me this? That'd be amazing. There's this scene in Luke. Luke's the only one that records it. When Jesus comes back from the dead, he's resurrected, there's these two guys walking on a road to a town called Emmaus, and Jesus appears to them. And they don't know who he is. He's just a dude walking next to them. And it says that Jesus began to explain to them all of the scriptures, which to them was the Old Testament, and how it related to him. Listen, that's the greatest Bible study of all time. If you said, Nate, you can go to any moment in history, it's not hyperbole to say, I very well may go to that moment and be like, can I just walk with Jesus to a mass? I would love to hear him explain how the Old Testament points to him. I would love to just listen to Jesus as he taught about the Bible. Can you imagine? And what if he was right there next to you? Anytime you read it, you'd be like, hey, I don't understand this part. Can you help? What if when you were looking for a church, he could come to church with you? And halfway through the sermon, you could be like, you like this guy? Yeah, me neither. We'll keep looking. But what if he could just tell you? What if he could tell you like, no, he's no good, but man, they need you. Like, stick around. Wouldn't it be great to know for sure? What if he didn't know what to do or a decision to make? Do I take the promotion? Do I take the job? Or do I turn it down? Do I look for a new job? Do I go back to work? What if you could just look at Jesus and be like, what do I do? How about this? You think you'd sin less? Like maybe by a small amount? Are you kidding me? Of course. You'd start to cut somebody off in traffic and Jesus would be in the passenger seat and you'd kind of look at him and be like, you're right. Not that big of a deal, I guess. You created all of this. I guess it's okay. Imagine how much kinder, more gracious you would be. Maybe not you, but me. It would change things. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you came to church for mom. Thank you. I'll try to go fast. But just imagine if there is. If there is a God and he was personified in Jesus and he created the universe and he were right next to you, how much that would change things for you. What if you were hurting, and life was really hard, and you could just turn and lean into him, and just say, Jesus, this one's tough. Can you just be with me for a second? And he offers perfect peace. That's what the disciples had. You understand? That's what they had every day. And then Jesus says, you know what? It's better for you that you don't have that anymore. So the only possible thing we can ask is, how in the world is that true? It's what we wrote down on our paper. How can that claim be true? How is that possible? And so what we're going to do today is try to offer the best answer we can to that question and then understand that that's going to spark more questions that we're going to spend the rest of the series answering. To answer that question of how can it possibly be true that Jesus, that it's better for Jesus to go when we receive the Spirit and we no longer have the physical presence of Jesus in our lives, what I want to do, and you didn't see this one coming, is turn to 2 Kings 2 in the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and make sure that I'm not making this story up. But it's about two guys who I think are the two most underrated people in all the Bible. Elijah and Elisha. They're amazing. Now, some Christians don't know that those are two different people. I've actually talked to people about that. I don't want to belittle you for that. I just think it's funny because we get it confused sometimes. And very few people know which one came first and which one did what. So I'm going to help you out here. This is just an aside. I thought about having Steve make a slide for this, but I thought it's probably a misuse of my authority in the church to text him on a Friday to do work on his off day for a joke slide. So I just didn't do it. All right. But I wanted to do the alphabet and then show you where they landed in the alphabet. Elijah has a J in it, which comes before an S. Elisha. All right. So that's how we remember it. Elijah comes before Elisha because J comes before S. And now listen, offer me grace. I've rehearsed my sermons before I do them, and you guys think I'm doing them off the cuff. I'm not. I've practiced this. And then every time I do it, I get them confused as I'm telling the story. So just give me grace and don't make fun of me, okay? You get up here and you do it, all right? It's hard. But we have Elisha and Elijah, and they are two of the most underrated people in the Bible. I think because they don't have a book named after them or something, but they're remarkable. Their faith is amazing. Elijah was this incredible man of God. Do you know that one time somebody died? A widow's son dies, and Elijah knew the widow. And somebody comes to him and tells him, hey, so-and-so's son has died. Do you know what Elijah's response was? God, why didn't you tell me? How come I'm finding out like this? Can you imagine being that close to God, where he's your personal Twitter feed, where something happens out in the world and you find out about it in some other way and you're like, God, what's the deal, man? How come you didn't tell me? That's how close he was to God. He was in a showdown with 450 prophets of Baal. And in this passage where he brings fire down from heaven from God to light up a soaking wet stack of wood in front of all of these prophets, we have the most sarcastic passage in Scripture, which makes me feel great. That it's there and it's okay. He is being a jerk to these prophets of Baal. And I'm like, get him, buddy. He raises a child from the dead. He's fed by ravens and by angels. He warns the evil king of Israel, if you don't get right, I'm going to bring a drought. And the king didn't get right, so he prayed. And there was a drought for three years. And then when the drought was lifted, he won a foot race against a chariot across the country to go tell somebody about it, carried by the Holy Spirit. Elijah was amazing. And he had this disciple, a guy that was following him named Elisha. And Elisha had spent a good portion of Elijah's ministry with him, watching him. And Elijah had the respect of all of Israel and all the other prophets and all the other religious people in the country. And Elisha was his heir apparent. He was the one being trained to take over the ministry of Elijah when he moved on, very much like the disciples were being trained by Jesus to take over his ministry once he moved on. And it got to the end of Elijah's life. And they actually knew that this was the day that he was going to die. I don't know how they knew that, but they did. And so they go to a town, they walk to a town together. And when they get there, the prophets in that town come up to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, yeah, I don't want to talk about it. And they kind of interact there and they go to another place. And it's the same interaction. And then they end up on the banks of the Jordan River. And there's 50 prophets there. And they come to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, I know, I don't want to talk about it. So they go to the Jordan River. They're trying to get alone so that they can talk. They walk over the Jordan River. Listen to this. This is ridiculous. There's a river in the way. They want to be over there. So what's Elijah do? He takes off his cloak, he rolls it up, and he hits the water, and then the waters part, and they walk across. I don't know of any other miracle of convenience in the Bible but this one, where he's like, God, these are new sandals. I don't want to get them wet. Thanks. And then they walk across the river. They get to the other side, and it says that they're walking and talking together. And Elijah says, before I go, is there anything else I can do for you? Is there anything you want? Is there anything you need? And Elisha says, I want a double portion of the Spirit that is on you. See, Elisha recognized that Elijah had performed all these miracles and did all these great things, but they were not by his own power. They were by the power of the Spirit of God resting on him. They were by the Holy Spirit. And this is the same way, incidentally, that Jesus performed his miracles and lived his life. Everything that he did, the casting out demons, raising Lazarus from the dead, healing the sick, feeding the poor, everything that he did was through the power of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that the disciples were going to be given access to, the same one that we are told we have. It was through the power of the Spirit. And Elisha recognized this power. So when Elijah said, what is it that you want? He said, give me a double portion of the Spirit that's on you. I want to be able to continue to do the ministry that you do. And Elijah's response is, you've asked for a very difficult thing. He says, I'll tell you what, soon I'm going to go up to heaven. And if you see me while I do it, then you'll receive a double portion of my spirit. So they continue to walk and talk. And in this amazing scene, a fiery chariot comes down from heaven, being pulled by fiery horses, and separates Elijah and Elisha. And catches Elijah and sweeps him up in a whirlwind, it says, up to heaven. You understand that Elijah wasn't made to experience death? It's just him and Enoch, one of the guys in the Bible who have never experienced death, those two. He was so righteous, loved God so much, so close to him, God didn't want him to have to experience it. So he sends a fiery chariot down to grab him and take him back up to heaven in a whirlwind. And as he's going back up to heaven, his cloak falls off of him and wafts back down to the ground where it lands on Elisha. And it was a symbolic transfer of the spirit that was on Elijah to the spirit of Elisha to empower him to continue the ministry of Elijah. And I've always loved that story. I've always thought it was amazing. I love the Old Testament. I love the stories and the narratives in the Old Testament. But it wasn't until I was going through the book of John in the fall, getting ready for the series in the spring, where I read this in chapter 16 and I went, oh my goodness. That story in 2 Kings chapter 2 is not there just for what happens in 2 Kings 2. You understand? It's a picture of Jesus transferring his spirit to the disciples. Elijah goes up to heaven still alive. Jesus ascends up to heaven still alive. A portion of his spirit descends onto Elisha so he can continue the ministry that Elijah has prepared him for. And this is what happens to the disciples. After Jesus dies and is resurrected in the beginning of Acts, we see Jesus go up into heaven and he tells them to wait on the gift of the spirit, the same gift that Elisha waited for. It transfers onto them in the form of flaming tongues. They receive the Spirit and they go out and they do ministry. That's the gift of the Spirit. And so one of the reasons that it's better for Jesus to go is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. You see? That's what he's doing with the disciples. That's what he was doing with us. The Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. And that's the gifts of the Spirit. We're going to talk about those next week, what those are and why we have them. But this is what he was doing for the disciples. He had trained them for three years to prepare them to lead the church that he was going to leave behind, to lead the kingdom that he was going to establish here on earth. And they needed to be empowered. They needed to know what to say when they didn't know what to say. They needed to be able to cast out demons and perform miracles. They needed to be able to lead in ways that they were incapable of leading. They needed wisdom that they did not have. They needed to understand scriptures in ways that they did not understand it. So Jesus leaves behind the Spirit, just as Elijah did for Elisha, so that the disciples could continue the ministry of Jesus. And 2,000 years later, you sit here in a church. And at Grace, if you're a member here, we don't call you a member. We call you a partner. And we call you a partner because we believe that the church is an active organization whose job it is to advance forward the kingdom of God. And we're not looking for members to be a part of the club here. We're looking for partners to help us advance it. We believe that there's a job to be done and that God has assigned a portion of that job to Grace Raleigh, and we want to be faithful to the job that he's asked us to do. Furthermore, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, the only reason that God doesn't nab you right up to heaven as soon as you accept him and deliver you into eternal bliss is so that you can stay here and build his kingdom and bring as many people possible with you on your way to heaven. The same reason he left the disciples behind, because we have work to do. So he leaves us his spirit to dwell in us, to continue his work through us. You see? And the Bible says that you have it. Ephesians tells us that if you're a believer, that you have received the spirit as a down payment or a guarantee on your salvation. Romans 8 tells us that the Spirit secures your salvation. He sanctifies you in the process of salvation, and he delivers you into that salvation in eternity. He's active in your life. So the first reason that it's better for Jesus to go is because when he does, we receive the Spirit that empowers us to continue the ministry that he's left behind for us. But that's not the only reason. It's not just outwardly focused. The other reason that it's better to have the Spirit is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry to us. It doesn't just continue Jesus' ministry through us, it continues Jesus' ministry to us. This is the roles of the Spirit. And here's the amazing thing that I realized. As I was thinking through all the advantages of having Jesus physically present in our life, being able to ask Him any of those questions, can you explain the Bible to me? Can you comfort me? Can you help me understand this? Can you show me what to say? What I realized is Scripture pointedly describes the Holy Spirit in those ways. You know what one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is that we're going to talk about more? He's the illuminator. We can't understand the Bible without him active in our lives. We cannot. He explains this to us. We say it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus and go, what does this mean? We can. We said it would be great. He's called the comforter. We said it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus when we hurt and say, Jesus, I hurt. We can. He's the spirit. His name is paraclete, which means to come alongside, to walk through life with you, to help you, to advocate for you. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who could interpret our prayers for us and say what we really mean to God? We do, it's the Spirit. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who will show us what to say when we don't know what to say? We do, it's the Spirit. All the reasons that it would be great to have Jesus physically present in our life are true of the Spirit. We said if Jesus were with us, wouldn't we sin less? The Spirit is with us all the time, and one of his roles is to convict us when we've wandered outside of God's will. All the reasons that we would prefer to have the presence of Jesus in our life are fulfilled in the Spirit. So it's better that Jesus gives us the Spirit because now we don't have to go to a physical presence of Jesus because if he's next to you down the street, then he's not next to me. And I gotta either go to you or get him to come to me. But the Holy Spirit's with us all the time. And he continues Jesus' ministry through us by empowering us and he continues Jesus' ministry to us by fulfilling the roles of Jesus in our life personally. And all of this, so we're going to talk about that in the third week, the roles of the Spirit. The last week, we're going to tackle this question that if you're thinking with me, you should be asking, how do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? How do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I'm told that God is with me. I'm told that God is in me. I'm told that God can help me speak in tongues when I need to do that. I'm told that He can do the miraculous, that he empowers me for his ministry. I'm told that I can turn to him and ask him to understand scripture at any time. I'm told that he comforts me. I'm told that he guides me. I'm told that he's right there and that he empowers me. I'm actually told that when he's in my life, the chains of sin are broken. I'm set free and I can live a new life without sin. That's what the Bible teaches. But I think one of the reasons that the Spirit to us sometimes is the forgotten God is because our experience with the Spirit doesn't always line up with what we've learned about the Spirit. And so how do we synthesize these things? And can I tell you something? You want to know why that one's last? Because I don't know yet. I don't know what I'm going to tell you. If you've been a believer for a long time and you have ideas, send them to me. Truly, this is going to be a group effort. But I felt like it was dishonest and disingenuine to do a series without analyzing that question that's been in my life for so long too. So I'll warn you in advance, the answer won't be complete, but it'll be the best that we can do. And it's a question that we have to answer as we talk about the Holy Spirit. So that's the series. How can it possibly be true that it's better for us that we don't have the physical presence of Jesus? Well, because he's with us all the time everywhere now through the Spirit. He empowers us to continue his ministry through us, and he continues Jesus's ministry to us. And then that begs the question, then how come what I know about the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit? So for the next three weeks, we're going to tackle those three issues and hopefully leave here knowing a little bit more about the Spirit, acknowledging Him a little bit more, inviting Him and His presence and His influence into our life and seeing that played out a little bit more. So I'm going to pray for you through this series that you will see the Spirit living and active and influencing in your life in ways that you never have before simply because you're paying attention to Him and you're praying along with me that you would see His influence. I'm going to pray, but before I do, I want to remind you at the information table we, we have books called The Forgotten God, written by a guy named Francis Chan, all about the Holy Spirit. I found that book to be incredibly helpful, more helpful than anything I'm going to say to you for the next three weeks. So if you really want to dive into this, you can read that book. They're $10. There's a jar there in front of it. You can put the money in there if you want to steal a book from the church to go ahead. That's your deal. I don't really care. But they're $10 if you want, but take a book and read it while we're going through the series. All right, I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue in our service. Father, we love you. Your spirit is welcome in our lives. We're sorry that we don't always understand it. We're sorry that we don't always welcome the spirit. We're sorry that we don't always understand the spirit. God, I'm sorry that I don't always seek to engage the spirit. I pray that as we move through this series together that we would be less intimidated and more in awe and wonder. God, may no part of you be forgotten by us. May we feel the influence of you and see the guiding of you through your spirit in our day-to-day lives even this week. In our parenting, in our work, in our hearts, in our conversations, in our going in and coming out. May we see the influence of the Spirit as you guide us in those things, Lord. It's in your Son's name that we ask these things. Amen.

All right, well, good morning. It's good to see all of you. I know those lights hit you, they're bright, goodness gracious. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here, and it's so good to see you. Thanks for being here for the second service and for the last part of our series in John. When we started the series in February, this is, I think, 12 weeks, so it's been one of our longer ones, but I hope that you've enjoyed it. I hope, and my prayer for you has been that you now, as we leave the series, feel a little bit closer to Jesus than you did when we started, that you know him better than you did when we started. I know that there are some themes from the book of John that I will probably always remember that stuck out to me as we went through it as a church this time around. I hope that you can relate to that. Originally, when we had planned the series, we wanted to end it on Easter. At the end on Easter Sunday, that'd be the resurrection story. That's the end of the story of Jesus. Boom, we're done. It's a nice, clean, tidy ending. But as I was studying the book, there's a story in John that's unique to the book of John. It's not in the other gospels, Matthew, Mark, or Luke. It's just in John almost as an addendum. And it's the restoration of Peter. And it's to me one of the most hopeful, life-giving, inspiring, restorative messages and stories that we find from the life of Jesus. And so I thought if it's good enough to be an addendum for John, then it's good enough to be an addendum for grace. And so we came back one extra week in John to look at this story of the restoration of Peter. To appreciate the story, we need to understand what goes into this moment. Eventually, we're going to get to John chapter 21. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and we're going to be at the end of that chapter. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. If you don't like that option, there's a free one on your phone just seconds away. All right. To understand the story at the end of John, we need to understand who Peter was and what's going on in that story. Peter was kind of the de facto leader of the disciples. Many people think he was probably the oldest disciple. He was, some believe, the only one with a wife when they were called. He was a little bit further on in life than the rest of the disciples were. Peter was one of these guys that would always talk first and think later. He was a ready, fire, aim kind of guy. He's my people. I understand Peter, right? When Jesus walks on the water, what does Peter do? He jumps out of the boat. Well, shoot, I'm doing this too, right? Peter always just said things with confidence and everybody around him was like, well, I guess that's right. Jen asked me, my wife asked me sometimes, like, how do you say things with so much confidence? Like, how do you know that to be true? And I'm like, I don't. I'm just saying it. And people seem to go along with things. That's Peter, man. I can relate to him. He just always the first to answer, always the first to have the idea, always out front, kind of regardless of consequences. One of my favorite stories to kind of illustrate the character of Peter, one day Jesus decides, he gathers the disciples together and he says, hey, you guys, I'm going to wash your feet today. Which is like, that's the lowest of the low job. That's like the summer intern as the servant job. That's what you do. And so Peter, responding with some pomposity, with some piety, says, no, Jesus, never. I can never let you wash my feet. I will never let that happen. And Jesus looks at him and he says, okay, Peter, but unless I wash your feet, you cannot enter into the kingdom of God. And then Peter immediately does a 180. Well, then don't stop at my feet. Wash my head and my hands as well. Like that's Peter, okay? And so at the Last Supper, right before Jesus is arrested and tried and crucified, the last time they spend some good time together, Jesus looks at Peter, the leader of the disciples, and he tells him, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter's response is what you would expect Peter's response to be. Never, Lord. I would never deny you. I would not do that. And Jesus says, you're going to. And Peter says, this is a loose paraphrase, agree to disagree, which you never want to agree to disagree with Jesus. You're not in a good spot when that's what you choose. So they leave. Jesus goes and he prays. He brings Peter to pray with them, but Peter falls asleep. John falls asleep. James falls asleep. And then Jesus gets arrested, and he's taken off to the courtyard of the high priest, a guy named Caiaphas. And three weeks ago, we talked about this in the crucifixion story. It was in the courtyard of Caiaphas where Jesus is put on trial, and there were two disciples that actually followed him there. The rest of the disciples dispersed. They ran away. They started worrying about their own necks, and so they ran away to hide so that they wouldn't get arrested too. They figured if they're arresting Jesus, then they're coming for us next, right? And so they all dispersed except for two disciples, Peter and another unnamed disciple, make it to the courtyard of Caiaphas' house. And it's in this courtyard that Jesus was put on trial, that he was falsely accused, that they told lies about him. The one person who's ever existed who deserved this treatment least was getting this treatment. They were blindfolding him and punching him and saying, who hit you, Jesus? You're a prophet. Prophesy about who hit you. And then Jewish tradition says that they were ripping out his beard. So he's beaten up and he's in a moment where he is incredibly loved. This is a man that Jesus has followed every day for three years. He loves this man. He cares for nothing on earth more than this man, and now he's watching him suffer in this way. And Peter's around a campfire as this is happening. And when he gets there, the Bible says there's a servant girl who looks at him and says, hey, don't you know him? Aren't you like in his little group? And Peter says, no, I've never met the man. That's one. A little while later, somebody else says the same thing. Hey, haven't I seen you with him before? Peter says, no, I don't know what we're talking about. I've never met the man. That's twice. And then the Bible says about an hour after that, someone really begins to press him. Hey, aren't you from Galilee? I can tell by your accent, you have to know that man. And Peter gets emphatic. No, I swear I've never met him. And then it says that this is actually, there's this passage in Luke. That's to to me, one of the most intense passages in Scripture. It's something that you may have read before, but we kind of gloss over it. But look at what it says in Luke. Chapter 22, verse 60, it says, But Peter said, Man, I do not know what you are talking about. That's the third time. And immediately while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. And then verse 61, and the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? The time when Jesus most needed people around him who loved him. You are his leading disciple and you just denied him three times because you're scared. And his bloody face turns and looks you dead in the eye. Peter remembered the saying of the Lord how he said to him, before the rooster crows you'll deny me three times. And he went out and he wept bitterly. Can you imagine how Peter must have felt? He had betrayed his Jesus. He had let him down. He had denied him. He had told Jesus over and over again, you can count on me. For three years, Jesus had been prepping him and training him and grooming him to take over the church, to step into his ministry. He was to see Jesus and to help lead the church after Jesus' death. And in the moment when he most needed him, he betrayed him and he let him down. And Jesus turned and looked at Peter. You cannot imagine that eye contact. It says he went away and he wept bitterly. I love this story because I so identify with Peter. And to me, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, then you can identify with him too. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, then the good news is that you don't have to feel bad about any of this. You can just take it all in and watch us as we squirm and feel bad. But if you're a believer, then you know this feeling too. If you're a believer, then you know what it is to feel like you've betrayed Jesus, don't you? Has there ever been a time in your life, maybe in a corporate setting, maybe around some clients, maybe with some new friends that you've made, maybe with some old buddies where you kind of fall back into who you used to be, where you took that part of your identity, your Christianity, and you kind of tucked it away back here and kind of didn't wear it on your sleeve for that week or for that night or for that season because you didn't really want them to know who you were associated with? Have you ever in your life tucked away your identity as a believer because you were kind of ashamed and embarrassed if people were to find out that that's who you were because you had not been acting that way? Can I just tell you? I hope that you don't get too disappointed in me for this, but I've been doing ministry for about 20 years. There have definitely been times in my life when because of how I had been acting or what I had been saying or doing or whatever it was, I kind of tucked away my identity as a pastor. I didn't really want to share it with the group of people that I was with. So when Peter betrays Jesus and denies knowing him, I can relate. When we get this sense of betrayal, I've let my Jesus down. To be a Christian is to be familiar with that. I think we've all had different times and different seasons where we feel like we've let Jesus down a little bit. Maybe we've told him. Maybe we've been moved in worship. Maybe we've been moved by a sermon, probably at another church, and we decided that what we were going to do, we were going to start a new discipline. We were going to start a new thing. We had been moved to conviction. And we say, yes, Jesus, I'm going to get up and I'm going to read the Bible. I'm going to get up early. I'm going to make time for you. I'm going to spend time in prayer. I'm going to spend time in your word. That's going to be a discipline in my life. And so we get up and we start to read it. We're following along, but maybe we don't really understand it. We don't hear the angels audibly sing. And so we think we must be doing it wrong. Or we wake up and we kind of do the drop and flop. Like, Jesus, you just show me what you want me to read. And it turns out that because Psalms is in the middle and it's the longest book in the Bible, that God wants us to read Psalms like a lot. So we just, we read that, right? And we don't really know what's going on or what's happening. And for whatever reason, we fall away from that discipline. And then we've told Jesus for however many times, this is going to be a part of my life. And then we fail. And we betray him and we let him down. Or we tell him that we're going to start to give. We understand that believers should give generously, that we should be conduits of God's generosity to us, that we're stewards of the resources that he gives us, and that we should be generous to those that we think Jesus would want to help and serve. And we commit to do this, but things come up and then we don't, and we fall away from that discipline or from that commitment. And we hesitate to even make the commitment again because we messed up the last time, and we don't have much reason to believe that we're going to do better the next time. Right? Or we have things in our life that we don't want there. And so we tell Jesus, I'm done with that. I'm drawing the line in the sand. I'm not going to do that thing again. I'm moved. I'm convicted. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for who I am. I don't want that to be a part of my life. I don't want that to be a part of who I am. Jesus, I'm done with that. I'm moving on by the power of your spirit. Please allow me to be done with that thing. And we move away from that thing. And then three days later or weeks later or maybe months later, we fall back into the thing. So I wonder this morning, have you ever felt like you've betrayed Jesus? Can you relate to Peter? Aren't you glad that in the moment of the height of your betrayal, Jesus isn't looking you in the eye? I think we can all relate to Peter in this moment. The good news is that it gets better. But I think that we can all relate to this idea of letting Jesus down, of betraying him and feeling what Peter must have felt when God looked at him and he went away and he wept bitterly. Which, by the way, when you're confronted with your sin, that's the appropriate response to go away and to weep bitterly. That's a good and right response. And I don't believe that God would steal that response from Peter. I don't think that God would go to him and say, hey, you don't need to do that. I think that's the good and right response when we realize who we are. But he goes away and he weeps bitterly. And then we pick up this story in John chapter 21. In John chapter 21, Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's appeared to the disciples a couple of times, and then in John chapter 21, he appears to them while they're fishing. And it's interesting to me that they're fishing. Because if you think back, my Bible scholars in the room, you know the answer to this. At the beginning of Jesus' ministry, when he's calling the disciples, and he goes to this guy named Simon, son of John, and he renames him Peter, and he says, come and be my disciple. What was Peter doing? He was fishing. For three years while he followed Jesus, what did he not do anymore? Fish. Why? He had a new job. His new job was to follow Jesus. His new job was to be in ministry. His new job was to do what Jesus did, to go around telling people about Jesus, to cast out demons and to perform miracles and to teach the people of Israel about the Messiah that was now here. That was his new job. And so for three years, he hadn't done his old job. He walked away from that because that wasn't him anymore. But after Jesus dies and Peter is walking around with this shame because he let his Jesus down, what does he do? He goes back to his old job. He disqualifies himself. Peter should have been leading the church. Peter should have been gathering the disciples together and saying, hey, this isn't over. Jesus has risen from the dead. We need to continue to serve him. We need to continue to build his kingdom. We have a purpose. We're not done, guys. But instead, what does he do? He gets back in the boat. What I want us to see is that Peter allowed his shame to shrink his vision of what Jesus wanted him to do. He allowed his shame, he allowed what he had done and how badly he felt for it to shrink his vision about what Jesus wanted him to do. Jesus had purposed him and prepared him and groomed him to lead his church. It's what Jesus wanted him to do. It's why he was working with him for three years, why he was putting up with all of his Peter-isms so that he could lead the church. And Peter, because he felt bad, because he felt shame, he walked away from that. He disqualified himself, which in all honesty is the exact same thing that we would do. Would you look at Peter after he betrayed Jesus at the height of his need and go, yep, you're still the guy. You should still lead the church. Would you still want that guy to be in charge of everybody? Would you still want that guy leading the council of the disciples like he is in Acts along with James? Is that what you would still want? Wouldn't you think that Peter would need to enter into some sort of probationary period? Okay, you're good, Peter, but we're just going to keep our eye on you for a minute. Wouldn't you do what Peter did? Wouldn't you step away and kind of slink away quietly and be like, I'm so sorry that I messed up. I understand. I don't even expect you to reinstate me anymore. I'm just going to fish and I'm going to love on you the best I can. Wouldn't you expect that of Peter? Doesn't that seem like the fair human reaction? Don't we do that to ourselves? When we mess up and we know who we are, we know where we come from and we know the we bring into every room, and we know the things that are hiding in the corners and the shadows of our life. When we know those things, don't we do what Peter did and disqualify ourselves? Don't we allow our shame to shrink our vision for who we are and what God created us to do? Can I just tell you that I think the Bible teaches that every one of you who are believers were created, and the non-believers too, we're just waiting for you to get on board. You were created with a purpose and with a set of gifts, with the sole intention of building God's church. With the sole intention of going to heaven one day and on your way there bringing as many people with you as you possibly can. That's the only reason you're alive. It's the only reason you walk on the face of the earth. The Christian life is a progressive revelation of just how true that is. Hopefully you realize now it's more true than you did five years ago and hopefully more than 10 years ago. The only reason you're here, the only reason that Jesus doesn't snatch you into heaven the instant you are saved is to leave you here so that you can bring as many people with you as possible on the way. And I believe that God has imbued each of you with a set of gifts. I believe that God has uniquely prepared you in your life through the circumstances that you have walked through to be effective at reaching other people. And I believe that God has a big vision and a big plan for how he wants to use you in his kingdom. I believe those of you who have jobs that you are the pastors of those teams. That God has put you there to be a light in the dark places, to encourage the other light that is there and to cast light on those who might not know him yet. That simply by watching you, they may give glory to the Father who is in heaven. Those verses are all over scripture. But what do we do? We know our past. We know who we are. And so we allow our shame to shrink our vision of who Jesus created us to be. We excuse those things away. If I said that, I would never be believed. They're going to think I'm a hypocrite. Maybe we want to start a devotional with our kids at the house. Maybe we just want to start exposing our children to Scripture in the home, but then we have that thought, yeah, buddy, but you don't even read the Bible every day on your own, you hypocrite. Well, start then, and then start the Bible study, man. God has these things that I believe He wants us to do, that He's purposed us to do, but we back off of them because of our shame, because we know who we are. And then we just exist in these little holes. God, I'm not going to do that thing. I'm just going to be a fisherman. I'm just going to work in sales. I'm just going to work in accounting. I'm just going to have my job. I'm just going to do my thing. I'm going to go to church and be a good Christian. But that work that you have to do in the kingdom, that's for other people who haven't messed up. And listen, if that's true, if the only people who get to do ministry and get used in God's kingdom are those who have never let Jesus down, then the church would be run by four-year-olds, man. We've got just a slight upgrade here. But that's what we do. We allow our shame and how we feel about ourselves to shrink our vision about what God wants us to do, which is why Jesus's response to Peter is so amazing. Look at what Jesus says in John chapter 21. I'm going to read you the whole conversation and then we'll talk about it a little bit. Jesus had shown up. They were fishing out on the Sea of Galilee. And that's louder than normal. They were fishing out on the Sea of Galilee. They had been out all night. They hadn't caught anything, right? And then Jesus appears on the shore after they bring the nets in. Still not catching anything. And they don't know it's Jesus. It's just some dude. And he's like, hey, cast your nets on the other side of the boat, which is ridiculous. It's almost like making fun of them. The boat's like 12 feet wide. It's not going to make a difference when they put them on the other side of the boat. But for whatever reason, they listen to the guy, they do it, and then they catch more fish than they've ever caught in their life. 30 years later, 30-plus years later, old man John still remembers that they caught exactly 153 fish that day. That wasn't a big deal to John. They pull in the fish, they go in, they have breakfast together, and then Jesus sidles up to Peter for a conversation. This is the first one-on-one conversation that they have had since Peter's betrayal. And let me just ask you before we read the conversation, what would you expect Jesus to say in that moment? What would you expect the conversation to be? Put yourself in Peter's shoes. You did that to Jesus. You've betrayed him. Put yourself in your own shoes. Take yourself to the place where you feel like you've let Jesus down the most. And right after letting him down for however many upteenth times you've done it, he comes up to you. He sidles up next to you and he puts his arm around you and you and him have a conversation. What do you expect him to say? I would expect him to go to Peter. I would expect him to come to me and say, hey, are you sorry? Right? Jesus is good. He's gracious. I don't think that we would expect Jesus to just come down hard on us. We don't know that in his character. But I think we would expect him to put his arm around us and look at Peter and go, hey, Peter, are you sorry for what you did? Isn't this what we do with our children? When Lily messes up, I've got a three-year-old daughter named Lily, when she messes up, which is more frequently lately because she's three, and apparently that's what three-year-olds do. And she hollers and she gets mad. What do I do? I pick her up and I hold her right here. I calm her down. And I say, Lily, are you sorry? And she says, yes, Daddy. I go, okay. And I put her down. I say, go tell your mom you're sorry. We forgive you. Isn't that what we do? Isn't that what we would expect Jesus to do to us? Hey, are you sorry? And then we would expect to go, yeah, I'm sorry. And we would expect to hear him say to Peter, okay, you're forgiven. Because he's Jesus and that's what he does, right? You're forgiven. That's what we would expect. But look at what happens. Verse 15, when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? Do you love me more than these fish? I see you've gone back to fishing. That's an interesting choice. I didn't know that you had a new career now. Do you love me more than these fish? Do you love me more than what you're doing? Interesting question. He said to him, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He said to him, feed my lambs. He said to him a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, tend my sheep. Verse 17, he said to him the third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, do you love me? And he said to somebody put it, you done boogered up, son. He messed up bad. He felt terrible. And he walked away from what God called him to because he felt like he had disqualified himself for messing up. And Jesus goes and he finds him. And we would expect Jesus to say, Peter, are you sorry? That's not what he says. He says, Peter, do you love me? Do I still have your heart or has this sin taken it from me? Do you love me? He says, yes, of course I love you. He says, good. Feed my sheep. This is a remarkable statement. Because in John 10, Jesus paints himself as the good shepherd. And he says that the sheep are his flock or the church or people who believe in him. His sheep are the Christians. And so the shepherd looks after the Christians. And so what he's saying is, Peter, for three years you watched me do ministry. You watched me tend to my sheep. And I told you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church. I told you that one day I won't be here. When I'mores you. He doesn't just forgive Peter. He doesn't say, are you sorry? He says, do you love me? I know you're sorry. Because if you love me, then of course you're sorry. And then we would expect him to say, okay, you're forgiven, but sit over here in this probationary period. I'll keep an eye on you for a couple years and see if we can trust you again. That's not what he does. You're forgiven. You're restored. Go and do the thing I created you to do. Go and be the person I created you to be. He says, Peter, you may have disqualified yourself. You may have shrunken back from my plans for you, but I have not. I still have plans for you. I still want you to do these things. You are reinstated. You are restored. And he does it three times. I love the symmetry of those statements. How many times did Jesus deny Peter? Three. How many times did Jesus ask Peter if he loved him? Three. It's like he's saying, Peter, without even saying the words, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. You're forgiven. Go and work. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then you're forgiven. Go and be who I created you to be. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Okay, good, because that's three times that you said that. It's three times I've forgiven you. You can say it as many more times as you want to. I'll forgive you and restore you all those times. Now go and be who I created you to be. And I believe that he says the same thing to us this morning. I believe that he asks us the same question. Do you love Jesus? Grace, do you love Jesus? However mired in sin you might be, however much shame you might bring into the room, whatever might have happened in the past, whatever habits you bring, however many times you've made a commitment that you didn't keep, listen, put all that aside and let's just ask you grace. Do you love Jesus? Then go and be who he created you to be. Go and do the thing he purposed you to do. Say, but Jesus, I've done this and this and this. I'm not qualified. I used to be an addict. I used to do this thing. I'm mired in this right now. And Jesus says, listen, listen, listen, I'm not worried about that. Do you love me? Because if you love me, it means you're sorry. And if you've shrunk away, it means that you feel shame. And Jesus says, go and be the person that I created you to be. Go and do the thing that I intended for you to do. Quit disqualifying yourself. Quit feeling the shame that is not from me. And just answer the question, do you love me? Then go and do the thing that I purposed you to do. Go and feed his sheep. Go and build his church. Go and use the gifts that he's imbued you with. Go live out the reason that he leaves you here. Go and run your race. What I want you to understand this morning is Jesus is far more concerned with what he wants you to do than what you have done. He's already taken care of what you have done. He's removed that from you as far as the east is from the west. Because of that removal, you are free and have the freedom to operate in his love. And if you love him in return, then go and do the thing that he created you to do. Go and be who he created you to be. And that's where I would leave us at the end of the series in John with that simple question. After all the 12 weeks, after everything that we've experienced, after all that we've seen of Jesus, after what we know of him and how he loved us. Do you love him? Does he have your heart? If he does, grace. Go be who he created you to be. You're not just forgiven, you're restored. Let's pray. Father, we sure do love you. You sure are good to us. God, we can't fathom this idea that you would not just forgive us, but that you would restore us. Lord, if there are folks in here who walked into the room carrying a little bit of shame, God, if we are certain that if we could see you face to face, the first thing you would express in us is disappointment. God, I pray that you would take that from us today. That we would see that we are loved, that you care about us, that we would identify with Peter, not just in his betrayal, but in his restoration, that we would feel your arms around us, that we would simply respond to that question of, do we love you? Give us the faith to believe that you forgive us. Give us the eyes to see ourselves as you do. And give us the courage and the strength to go live out and be the people that you created us to be and do great things to the folks here at Grace. It's in your son's name we pray all of these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. Happy Easter to you. My name is Nate. I'm the lead pastor here. It's great to see everybody in their bright Easter colors. My wife picked this shirt out for me. She told me that she was going to get the dry cleaning done because there was that pretty Easter colored shirt in the dry cleaning to be done. And I said, oh, which one was that? And she described it by saying, oh, it's the nice one that you got a couple of years ago. It was too big for you then. I think it'll fit you now. And as I buttoned it up this morning, I thought, dang it, if she's not right. So here I am. Listen, this is the 11th part of our series in John. We've been moving through John together. We've been timing it up to arrive at this sermon on this Sunday because this is Easter, man. This is the best day of the year. It really is. This is my favorite day of the year. This is the day where Jesus wins everything for all of eternity. This is the day when the disciples find an empty tomb, and what it means is that Jesus conquered death, and what it means is that we have a way to be reconciled with our Creator God for all of eternity. It is the victory of victories. It is absolutely, as Christians, what we claim, what we stake our hope on, and what we hold fast to no matter what. And Easter celebrates that day. So it is like the Super Bowl of Sundays to be able to preach to you on Easter. This is my third Easter that I've gotten to spend with you at Grace. And back in the fall, I knew that we were going to be going through John in the spring. And so I was reading through John in part in preparation for this series. And I arrived at a story in John chapter 20 about doubting Thomas. Some of you probably know the story. Thomas was a disciple of Jesus who, when he heard that Jesus had resurrected from the dead, he said, I don't really believe that. And then Jesus appears to him and he gives Thomas the proof that he needs to show him that he's actually Jesus and that he's actually risen from the dead. And I thought, man, what a great thing to be able to share on Easter how Jesus responds in the face of our doubts. And so that's what we prepared for, and that's what I prepared for, and that's what I had in mind as we approached Easter, and we mapped out the series, and I knew what all 12 weeks were going to be. And a couple of weeks ago, we made a video, and we showed it in here, and we said, hey, on Easter Sunday, Nate's going to preach about Doubting Thomas and how Jesus responds in the face of our doubts, and it's going to be great, and you should invite people. And that's been the plan. We even, we put it on Facebook and then Steve told me, Steve's our worship pastor, who they did great. Steve told me, hey, we boosted it on Facebook. I don't even know what that is. But I've been boosted on Facebook. I'm kind of a big deal now. I mean, some of you may even be here because we boosted it. And if you did, you're going to be bummed out because I'm not preaching what I told you I was going to preach. Last night at about 10.30, I'm not making this up, I saw a tweet of all things, and I knew that I had to do a different message. My wife is out of town. She's at home with her family, and you'll find out why in a second. And I was going to bed. I grabbed Ruby, Jen's dog that I don't like, and I went to take Ruby outside as just the final hassle of the day to let her go to the bathroom. And while I'm outside, I grab my phone. And my buddy, who I used to work with, a guy named Heath, had tweeted this out. And I saw it in the morning, but I really just kind of passed over it. But for some reason, it was at the top of my Twitter feed, and I saw it. And this is what it says. It says, Holy Saturday, silence, sadness, sorrow. At some point in our lives, we all go through a season of this day. Darkness surrounds us. Nothing is happening. Hope seems lost. Today is the best reminder that the silence of God does not equal the absence of God. Sunday's coming. And as I read that and reflected on what's going on in my own life, I knew that I could not trot out here this morning and preach to you about how Jesus responds to our doubts. Which is a shame because I had a nice alliterated point at the end. It was very pastory. It said, in the face of our doubts, Jesus responds with patience, pursuit, and provision. And I was really happy about that. Isn't that fancy? But I knew as I read that, I can't, on Easter, that because my life feels like a Saturday right now. At Grace, we're real. We're authentic. We're honest. I feel like it's part of our secret sauce. I feel like it's what makes us us. And as a pastor, it's what makes me me, that we tell the truth and we go from our gut. And I felt like to preach what I had planned to preach would be dishonest with you this morning because my life feels a little bit like a Saturday and I need Easter this year. I don't know if you've ever thought about the disciples' perspective on Saturday, but we've been going through Holy Week. And in Holy Week, Jesus on Palm Sunday enters into Jerusalem and sets in motion some mechanisms that are going to ultimately lead to his crucifixion. And he knows to his resurrection the following Sunday. And each day during that week over history has been given a name like Ash Wednesday or Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. And Saturday is called Holy Saturday. And I don't know if you've ever thought about Saturday from the perspective of the disciples. But the disciples were men who had walked with Jesus every day. They woke up every morning with him. They listened to him. They followed him. They loved him. They left their jobs for him. They left their lives for him. They put everything on hold for Jesus. The Bible tells us that Jesus says that foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. So they followed Jesus even though they were basically couch surfing for three years because they believed so much in what he was doing. And over the course of those three years, they came to love that man and respect that man and want to mimic and emulate that man. And they had high hopes for that man. And on Friday, it all came crashing down. On Friday, they watched that man put up on the cross and get crucified. And we talked about that last week. They watched their hopes and dreams die on that cross. And I imagine on Friday, though there was sadness, there was also shock, not really knowing what to do, trying to process what had happened. But on Saturday, the disciples are sitting in a room with the door locked because they're fearful of the authorities that they're going to come in and get them and arrest them. And so they're sitting there with the door locked in sorrow and in silence, not knowing what to do. And it feels very much like their God let them down. It feels very much like God is not present. We had hoped in him, we had believed in him, and now he's dead and we don't know what to do. And they look to each other for hope and there was none there. And what the disciples don't know is what we know is that the next day they're going to find an empty tomb and that Sunday is coming. But on Saturday, they didn't know that there was hope for Sunday. On Saturday, it's just death. And on Saturday, death wins. And on Saturday, evil wins and despair wins and sorrow wins on Saturday. Because that's where they are. And that's what they know. And Saturday is sorrowful. It's solemn. And it's silent. And as I thought about that, and thought about how much my life feels like Saturday right now, and thought about how much I need Easter right now, I thought I can in good conscience roll out there and talk about doubts tomorrow morning. My life feels like Saturday right now because three weeks ago, they found a mass on my father-in-law's pancreas. My father-in-law is a man named John. I love John a lot. I have a deep and abiding respect for John. I've said this to some people and I mean it. He has, to me, character that looks more similar to Jesus than anybody I've ever met. There are times in my life when I don't know what to do, and I think, I wonder what John would do. And I try to emulate that. Jen loves her daddy very much. They're very close. Lily calls him Papa. That's what I called my Papa. And so it's been a tough three weeks. Three weeks ago, they found a mass, and then it's just a series of appointments and different things, and you don't get the answers that you want. If you've walked through it before, you know it's painfully slow. And then yesterday, on Saturday, we find out that it's stage three. The Internet doesn't have a lot of good things to say about people with stage three pancreatic cancer. And so it's sad, and it's hard, and we're hopeful. On Monday morning, he meets with one of the best pancreatic surgeons in the world who has devoted his whole life to eradicating cancer from the pancreas. If anybody can help him, it's this guy. And so we hope in that, and we're happy about that. And I was on the phone with his wife, Terry, yesterday, telling her, listen, we don't know anything for sure yet, so we cling to hope. But it's hard. And I'm texting with Jen yesterday because she's down there with her family. How you doing? How's it going? And she just says, it's really hard. My daddy's really hurt. He's not really himself. He doesn't have any energy. And for three weeks, we've been doing a lot of praying, but we don't feel a lot of answers. And so my life feels like a Saturday. God, where are you on this one? He's a good man. It doesn't feel like it's the time. And here's the thing. You have your Saturdays too. You've walked through some Saturdays, haven't you? You've walked through some times in your life that were hard, where it felt dark, where you looked around and you said, where's Jesus here? And you didn't know where the hope was going to come from. You've sat in some Saturdays. Some of you are in them right now. And Saturdays don't all look like loss. I know since I've been here for two years, I've walked with some people. I've watched some people in the church walk through Saturdays. We've walked through the stories of miscarriages together. That's a Saturday. That Saturday's happened in my life before. There are people here who have lost spouses far too soon and walked through that Saturday. One of our very special partners lost his 58-year-old brother a couple of weeks ago out of nowhere. That's a Saturday. Our old pastor lost his son this year. That's a Saturday. Those are Saturdays. And they come in other ways too. I had breakfast with somebody on Monday of this week. And he said, man, my life has just been really hard since about December. I really need to hear from God and I can't. I don't know where he is and I don't know what's going on and I don't know how this is going to get better. It's kind of hard to cling to hope right now. And I wish that I'd had my mind wrapped around this sermon when I met with him because I could have just said, dude, it's Saturday. It's Saturday. And sometimes it's sin that brings it on, right? I was prepared. Sometimes it's not just things that happen around us. Sometimes we bring on our own Saturday, if we're honest. Sometimes our life feels so dark because of the things that we've allowed into it, because of the addictions that we walk with, because of the private shames that we hold close to us, because of the things in our life that are in the dark corners of our life that we don't want to shed light on, that feel like they're owning us and feel like they're eating our lunch. And what we really feel like is we're hopeless in this situation. And I see the freedom that other people walk in, but I don't think I'll ever walk in that. I don't think I'll ever be a whole person. I don't think I'll ever experience the happiness and the freedom that the Bible talks about because I don't believe if you were to ask me, can I overcome this sin, you would say, I don't think so. That's a Saturday. And so last night, at about 1045, I realized, I got to talk about Saturdays, man. Because here's the thing. The disciples had a Saturday too. And they got up on Sunday and they went to the tomb. Actually, it was Mary. And she was expecting to go in and find the corpse and dress the corpse of Jesus with some perfumes and some oil and maybe pray over it. And she found an empty tomb there. Jesus wasn't there. But there was an angel there who looks at her and says one of the greatest lines in the Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, for he is risen. What are you doing here, Mary? Jesus isn't here. He's alive. And she rushes back and she finds the disciples locked in that room in sorrow and silence. And she tells them and they run to the tomb to see it for themselves. Peter and John run out there. And in John's account, he makes sure to tell you, we started out neck and neck, but I dusted that old man. I beat him to the tomb. I had plenty of time to look around and get my bearings. And when they get there, they find that the tomb is empty and that Jesus has conquered death. And that's Sunday. And they realized for all of eternity, Jesus has taken the sting out of death. Jesus has given us eternal life. Jesus has beaten all the things that would seek to take us down. It's why Paul can write in Corinthians, why he can quote the Old Testament and say, oh death, where is your sting? Where are your shackles? You have no power over us anymore, death, because Jesus rose on Sunday. Because on Sunday, the tomb was empty. Because Jesus overcame it and gave us victory and gave us hope. A hope that we can cling to. A hope that Paul says in Romans 5 will not put us to shame. Jesus won eternal victory on Sunday. And the sadness that was Saturday became the joy of Sunday because Jesus has conquered the grave and conquered hell and conquered sin and death and he's delivered that victory to you for all of eternity. All you have to do is believe that he did it. And then death can't touch us anymore. And then sorrow can't touch us anymore. And I knew that I had to preach about this and I knew that I had to tell you this story and I knew that I had to tell you about Saturday going into Sunday because here's what Sunday means. You understand? Here's what Easter means. Easter reminds us every year that Jesus always comes through. He always comes through. Without Easter, the internet tells me and my family that we have a 12% chance at happiness. Easter says, I've already beaten it. You've got 100% chance of joy. Without Easter, there's no hope. But Easter tells us that Jesus always comes through, that he never fails and that he never lets us down. And here's what I know. Because of Easter, because that tomb was empty, and because Jesus conquered death and delivered eternal life to all of us, including John, here's what I know, that because of Easter, he's going to come through for John too. It may be in the form of giving him some more years. He may get to watch Lily grow up a little bit longer. It may be in the form of taking him to heaven where he will wait, but make no mistake about it, John's going to hold Lily some more. And he's going to hug Terry some more. That's the victory of Easter. That's what today means. And if you're on a Saturday, today is a reminder that Jesus always comes through. Jesus always wins. And even if you can't see how he's going to come through, I will just tell you that he will. Either in this life or the next, he's going to come through. Either now or in eternity, you place your faith in him and he's going to come through. And now I don't have a 12% chance of happiness. I have a 100% chance at joy. And so does Jen, and so does Terry, and so does her sister Lauren. Because 2,000 years ago, Jesus beat cancer. And he beat sadness, and he beat tragedy, and he beat heartache, and he beat your Saturday too. That's what Easter is. Last night, when I decided I was going to be the least prepared pastor on Easter Sunday in America, I made a pot of coffee because I was tired. And I went outside and was just thinking and drinking the coffee. And I looked up and it was cloudy, but on the other side of some clouds I could tell the moon was there. And I knew that on the other side of those clouds was the light of the moon. And I kept my eye on it, and wouldn't you know it, in a couple of minutes the clouds parted, and it was a full moon, and it was bright. And it was like this little reminder from God. It's Saturday now, and it's dark, But that's my sun shining on that moon. And in the morning, it's going to be bright. Because in the morning, it's Easter. In the morning, it's Sunday. And on Sunday, we're reminded that I always win. And it may feel like night in our lives sometimes. We may feel the darkness of Saturday in our lives sometimes. If you do, look to that moon that's reflecting the light that God created and know that whether we know it or not, whether we understand it or not, in a way that we might not be able to predict, that Sunday is coming and the sun will shine again. And 2,000 years ago, Jesus won a victory for us over all the things that would seek to darken our days. And that's what we celebrate on Easter. Pope John Paul said, we do not give way to despair. We are the Easter people. And hallelujah is our song. So no matter how dark it gets, Christians, we sing because we know that Sunday is coming. No matter how silent God seems, Christians, we listen because we know that God will speak. No matter how sad we are on Saturday, Christians, we know that Sunday is coming and Jesus always comes through. And that's why Easter is the greatest day of the year, because it reminds us that Jesus has come through for us in more ways than we can possibly imagine. So I'm gonna pray for you. And my prayer is that you have a good Easter. And my prayer is that if you're in a Saturday, that you will know that because of Easter, you can know that Sunday is coming and Jesus is gonna come through for you too. Let's pray. Father, you're good. You're good to us. More than we deserve, more generously than we deserve, you love us in ways that we don't deserve. You are good. We thank you so much for Easter. We thank you for what it means and for what it represents, for the hope that you won when you conquered sin and death, when you came roaring like a lion out of there, giving us hope for all of eternity. Father, I pray that those of us who feel like we are in a Saturday would take solace in Easter, that we would cling to the hope of Sunday, that we would cling to the hope of you. Let us believe, God, that you've won this victory already, that it's yours. Let us celebrate Easter in the hope that it brings well. Let us reflect on you as we do it. Be with those who are sorrowful, God. Let them hold on just a little longer until your light shines. We thank you for Easter. In Jesus' name, amen.