Sermons tagged with Prayer

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. This week we remember the dreams God gave Joseph as a teenage boy. The promises that one day his family would bow down to him. Joseph's life has seen remarkable twists and turns since those fateful dreams. But now we will finally watch them come to fruition as the story of Joseph arrives at its hopeful conclusion. Joseph will finally see that he was right to believe being here. Thank you for joining us online, if that's what you're doing. Thank you to Doug Bergeson last week for carrying the torch and doing such a great job on that idea about the land between promise and fulfillment. The only correction I would make if you were here last week is that he said that I assigned him only one verse out of the whole story. That's not true. It was just part of a sentence. It wasn't even a whole sentence in the verse. That's all he got was just that fragment there, but he really did a bang-up job with it. And this week, we pick the story back up. And I've said the whole time that this is a, it's one big, long seven-week sermon. We're driving and have been driving to what we want to talk about next week as we reflect on God's sovereignty in the overarching story of Joseph. So this week, we're going to move through the last part of the narrative together. It's a lot to cover. There's a lot of ground to cover and a lot of story. So this is the least sermon-y sermon of all seven of these sermons, okay? Because we're really just going to spend a lot of time in listening to the story, moving through the story, connecting to the nuances of it. And then we're going to end in a place that left me weeping on a bench outside of Starbucks. I'll explain that to you in a minute. And hopefully it will encourage us to, and then we'll be ready to come next week and reflect on these last six weeks and everything that God did as he wrote the story of Joseph and the profound impact it had on everybody around him. So last week, you'll remember that Joseph was left languishing in prison for two years. He interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. He told the cupbearer, you're going to be reinstated. He told the baker, you're going to be executed. And those things came true. And he asked the cupbearer to remember him to Pharaoh when he got out of there. And the cupbearer forgot about Joseph. And so he was in prison for two full years after that. And that's what we talked about last week was that two-year wait between promise and fulfillment, which is really a much longer wait between promise and fulfillment. Because when we pick up the story this week, we'll learn that he's 30 years old, which means it's been 13 years since he had those dreams that we talked about in the second week and in the video that we watched just here before the sermon. So we pick the story up in Genesis chapter 41 with Joseph still in prison. The cupbearer is out. He's free. He's forgotten about Joseph. Two years later, Pharaoh starts having some dreams. Pharaoh starts having some dreams and he can't figure out what they mean. He's assembled all the magicians. He's assembled all the philosophers, all the priests of Egypt. He's brought them to the palace. He shared with them his dreams and no one can interpret any of them. And he said, is there anyone who can tell me what this means? He felt that they had profound meaning. And the cup bearer, the light bulb goes off. He's like, oh yeah, I know a guy. I got a guy who can do this. And he tells Pharaoh about the Hebrew in prison who can interpret dreams. And so Pharaoh says, let's go, bring him here. I'm going to do some loose paraphrasing during the storytelling, okay? But it's in the Bible, I promise. Chapters 41 through 45 is what we're going to cover today. He says, well, bring him to me. Let's just, let's try it. Worst case scenario, I'll just throw him back in jail, right? So he brings Joseph to him and Joseph comes up and they shave his head and they get him all ready to be presentable to Pharaoh. And he goes in and Pharaoh addresses him. And he says this to him in Genesis 41. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, I've had a dream and there is no one who can, I've been having dreams that no one can interpret. I hear that you can interpret dreams. And Joseph's response to me is pretty remarkable. He says, it's not me. Interpretations belong to God. And this is by no means the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I did not make this point. So this is parenthetical to the sermon. I'm going to step over here. I'm not preaching about the thing I'm preaching about anymore. I'm just making this point and then I'll move back. After years of proficiency, Joseph still doesn't claim interpretation as a skill. After years of being good at this thing, he still doesn't claim it as a skill. And it makes me think to myself, what are the things that I feel like I'm good at or gifted at or gifted to do? And how long have I been doing those things? So long that now I forget that God has gifted me to do some things and it's not my skill that I developed. It's not my thing that I do. If you would believe that I have an ability to communicate, I forget that that ability is not a skill that I have. That's something that God gave me. It is his gift to allow me to communicate, and that gift can be taken away at any time God wishes. It is not my skill. And it makes me wonder about us, after years of proficiency at closing the deal, at charming the right people, at having the right amount of empathy, at having good insight, at being able to give good and wise advice, after years of proficiency at being discerning, at being professionally effective, how many of us have begun to think of those things as our own skills and not gifts from God? I won't belabor it. I just thought it worth pointing out and questioning. So Joseph says, yeah, go ahead. Tell me your dream, and I'll do the best I can to listen to God and to interpret it. So Pharaoh shares his dreams with Joseph. He had two dreams. He says, in this dream, I see seven fat plump cows coming out of the Nile. Now, for those of you who are not Egyptian geography experts, the Nile is the heartbeat of life in Egypt. It's the river around which the whole civilization is built. So he says, I saw seven plump cows come out of the Nile and they began to feed on the grass right there on the banks of the river. But then after that, I saw seven skinny, starving, impoverished cows come out and they ate the fat, healthy cows. And then I woke up. And then I went back to sleep. And when I went back to sleep, there was seven stalks of wheat, big and strong and healthy. And after those came up and came to fruition, there was seven stalks of unhealthy wheat, of dried and shriveled wheat that it says, the Bible says, was blighted by the east wind, which sounds really bad. And those unhealthy stalks of wheat ate the healthy stalks of wheat. And Pharaoh says, what does that mean? And Joseph tells him, he said, here's the deal. Here's what's going to happen. In Egypt, there's going to be seven years of plenty. You're going to see your crops flourish like they never have before, and it's going to be great. But immediately following those seven years of plenty, there's going to be famine. There's going to be famine for seven years. And so you need to get ready for it. And he says, Pharaoh, and I thought this was an incredible detail. He says, the doubling up of the dream, the fact that you had the same dream in two different ways, the doubling up of the dream means that it is fixed by God and it will happen. Now, if you've been paying attention this whole series, where does your mind just go? It should have gone to week two when Joseph had his dreams as a boy, as a 17-year-old kid, when he has one dream that his brothers are going to bow down to him, and then he has another dream with stalks of wheat where his family is going to be bowing down to him. The first one is his brothers with the stalks of wheat. The second one is the sun and the moon and the stars are bowing down to him. So somehow, somehow Joseph, if he says this to Pharaoh because of the doubling up of the dreams, this is a fixed thing that God will bring about. If he says that to Pharaoh 13 years later, you can rest assured that somehow, some way, through 13 years of turmoil, Joseph had clung to the belief that because God gave him those dreams and because they were double dreams, that those were still going to come about. I would have long ago left those be. I would have long ago thought that's not true. That's not going to happen. I would have let go of those things. But I can't help but believe that because Joseph told Pharaoh that the doubling up means that it's fixed by God and it will happen, that Joseph believed the same thing about his dreams. He still clung to that faith and to that hope. I don't know how. And so Pharaoh responds. He believes Joseph. Everyone there is awed by what Joseph says and does. And Pharaoh says, what do we do? And Joseph says, you need to find a guy, man. You need somebody in charge of this. You need a secretary of agriculture. You need someone who watches all the fields and all of the empire, who can be in charge of gathering it. And for the next seven years, you need to store one fifth of the grain that you harvest in this country. And then when we enter the seven years of famine, we'll be able to sell off that grain to the surrounding nations. We'll be able to feed ourselves. We will thrive and we'll get rich while everyone around us suffers. And Pharaoh's like, this is a great plan. Let's do this. So then he talks with his advisors. Who do we think should do this? And he looks at Joseph and he's like, you seem smart. Why don't you do this? And so in an instant, Joseph, once again, goes from being brought low in prison to being brought high. Except this time, he's the second most powerful man in the world. And that's not an exaggeration. Egypt is the most powerful nation in the world. It's the superpower. And Pharaoh says to Joseph, you're in charge. And he looks at all of his other servants and all of his generals. Whatever he says to do, you do it. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get through this. He has the wisdom to lead us through this. And he bestows on Joseph a house and wealth. And he even gives him a daughter that he can get married to. And so Joseph is risen to prominence and he's pulled out of obscurity yet again. And here's God's favor on him and interpreting the dreams. And he's raised to second in command over all of Egypt. And not only that, but he's given the daughter of a priest named Potipharah, which sounds like a girl's name, but it's not. It's a boy's name. So he has a daughter and his daughter marries Joseph. And with the daughter, Joseph has two sons. And the Bible, the narrative pauses to tell us about the two sons and to tell us what Joseph chose to name them. And I think it's significant enough for us to pause and take a look at that too. If you pick up the story in Genesis 41, verse 51, it says, Joseph called the name of the It's pretty profound faith to move through Joseph's story, to finally be blessed with a family and with children that we're sure he always longed for, and to immediately name them Manasseh and Ephraim, which means my hardship is done, and then God has made me fruitful in the land of affliction. He turns and he gives praise to God. Look at the favor that rests on my life. Look at the joy that I get to experience right now. Look at the way that God has worked. And his story comes full circle. And he's the favored son. And then he's the slave. And then he's elevated to Potiphar's house. And then he's falsely accused and thrown in prison. And then he's elevated in prison. And then he's elevated to Potiphar's house and then he's falsely accused and thrown in prison. And then he's forgotten, he's elevated in prison and then he's forgotten about it. And now he's elevated finally into Pharaoh's house, second in command over all of Egypt, second most powerful man on the planet. And he turns and prays to God. And he says, look at how my story has come full circle. And he gives praise to God in what he names his sons as reminders of his journey. And the story could end right here. Joseph exists in prominence. He sees them through the famine. He incurs wealth. He sees them in the years of plenty. He incurs wealth and sees them through the years of famine. And if this story were just about Joseph, this would be a perfectly fine place to end it. His brothers, even by now, figuratively, everyone is bowing down to him. You could even make an argument that those dreams have come true. And this would be a fitting and satisfying end to the story of Joseph. And he and his wife and his sons lived happily ever after as he oversaw Egypt for the rest of his days. But the story's not just about Joseph. And God's plan was never just for Joseph. And so there's more to the story. If you flip the page to the next chapter, chapter 42, the narrative takes you back up to Canaan, where Joseph's family was. His father, Jacob, also called Israel, and his 11 brothers. And Jacob looks at the oldest son, Reuben, and he says, hey, we're hungry. We don't have anything to eat. We're in a famine. I heard Egypt has some grain. Load up the boys, go down there, buy some grain and come back. And so they go down there. They head out, 10 sons of Jacob, but Jacob doesn't allow Benjamin to go. You remember, if you've been following along, that Benjamin is the son of Rachel. Rachel is Jacob's favored wife. This is a good reason why you shouldn't have two wives. Because then one's going to be the favorite. It's going to be a real bummer for everybody. There's some terrible family dynamics going on in Jacob's house. You'll see more in a second. It's remarkable. But Jacob got tricked into marrying Leah, who apparently had weak eyes. And this is bad in the Old Testament. We don't want to marry all you girls wearing glasses. Sorry, you're out of luck. He married Leah, and Leah immediately had many sons for Jacob. But he didn't really love Leah. He loved Rachel. And it took Rachel a long time to get pregnant, which is something that comes up in the Bible over and over again. And then Rachel had two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. And Joseph, as far as Jacob knew, was dead. So all he's got left is Benjamin. He's the youngest of the sons as well. So he's got a special place in his father's heart. So he tells Reuben, take your brothers, go down there. You're not taking Benjamin. He's staying with me. And Reuben says, okay, sounds good, pops. And they go down. They go down to Egypt to buy the grain and they get their passport stamped. They receive like the visa for whatever they need to do. They go through all the paperwork and they end up in the office of, wouldn't you know it, Joseph. That's who you have to talk to. And when they came in to where he would receive people, he recognized them immediately, but they didn't recognize him. He looked like Egyptian royalty. He didn't look like a nomad from the hills of Israel. So they didn't recognize him at all. And they say, we're 12 brothers. We're here. We need to get some grain to go back to our dad who's up in Canaan, a little bit north of here. We'd love to buy some off of you if that pleases you, master. And Joseph treats them in a way, and I'll just say this up front. At this point in the story, Joseph starts doing some things to me that just feel like, why did he do that? Like, why did he behave like that? Why did he treat them this way? Even if you understand what he's trying to get at, which is ultimately to see his brother and to see his father, it seems odd that he would choose this course of action. And I did a little bit of research and read about it. Why do people think that Joseph acted in this way? And the bottom line is people have some ideas, but they were flimsy to me. So I'll just say, I don't know why Joseph acts this way, but this is the story, and so this is what we're going to tell. And so Joseph begins to treat his brothers roughly, the Bible says. And he begins to accuse them, you're spies. You're not seven brothers who came down here innocently to buy grain. You're spies, and you came to see the nakedness of the land. You're going to try to attack us. You're going to try to manipulate the situation. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. We promise that's not us. That's not what we're doing. We're just, we're 12 humble brothers. We've lost one brother. There's one other brother who our dad loves and he's back home and it's just us 10 dudes. And we're just here to try to get some grain and go back home. We, we, we mean nothing by it. We would not seek to do that to you. And, and Joseph continues to press them. No, you're lying. You're spies. And they go back and forth. And Joseph says, okay, I'll tell you what. We're going to see if you're telling the truth. You're going to go home and you're going to fetch this younger brother that you say you have. And you're going to bring him back to me. And if you can bring him back to me, then I'll trust you and believe you. And we can continue to do business. If you can't bring him back to me and you show up here again, I'm going to kill you because I know that you're spies. And just to make sure that you're going to go get him and come back, one of you is going to stay here as my prisoner until they come back. You're going to leave him as a deposit on the life of your other brother and of yourselves. And so they talk amongst themselves and they decide that Simeon was going to be the one to stay behind. Simeon was clearly the second least favorite brother. That would have been a tough conversation. He's going to stay behind and be thrown in jail. And the rest of the brothers are going to go back and get Benjamin. So that's what they do. Simeon hands himself over and the brothers pack up and they head home. Before they headed home, Joseph went to his steward and he said, take all the money that they paid us for the grain and put it back in their grain satchels. We don't want their money. And the steward says, all right, so he does that. So on the way home, the brothers discover that their money has been returned. They open up the grain to look at it, probably just to stare at it and look at the grain and we did a great job. But then they see the money in there and they're freaked out. Oh no, that guy, that master, they don't know it's Joseph, but Joseph is going to think that we stole this money. We're in a heap of trouble. So then they get all worried and stressed out about that. They eventually get home. Dad says, how's it go? And they told Jacob everything that happened. The guy down there spoke roughly to us. He accused us of being spies. It was really pretty difficult. It was stressful there for some minutes, but he sent us home. Simeon's down there. He's in jail. We got to take Benjamin back to this guy. This guy wants to see Benjamin for some reason to believe us that we're not spies. And then we can get Simeon out of jail and we can come back and we can be one big happy family again. And oh, by the way, for some reason we found the money in our sacks of grain and we don't know what to do about it. We think we might be in trouble when we get back there anyways. And Jacob gets ticked at him. Jacob says, why did you tell that man that you have a brother? What'd you do that for? And they're like, what'd you want from us? How were we supposed to know that he was going to ask us to come back and get our brother? And so they go back and forth about it. They say, dad, let us take Benjamin. We'll go back down. We'll get Simeon. Everything will be straightened out. We'll come back. We'll have the food that we need. It'll be good. And Joseph or Jacob says, no, absolutely not. Can't do it. And Reuben, the, comes up with this idea. He says, listen, I swear on the life of my sons, I will go and I will get Benjamin for you. And if I don't come back with Benjamin, you can kill my two boys, which is one heck of a promise from a dad. And then can you imagine being a grandfather that's like, deal. Yeah, I've always found those two annoying anyway. They're my least favorite grandsons. But even at that, with that kind of guarantee, Jacob says, no, absolutely not. We're not discussing it. And so we turn to chapter 43. In chapter 43, they're hungry again. They're out of grain. And Jacob says, boys, it's time to go back to Egypt and get the grain. And Judah says, I mean, okay, dad, but we got to take Benjamin with us. Nope, can't take Benjamin. They go back and forth about it. Judah swears on his life. Dad, we need this. We've got to go do it. We can't show up without him. We'll bring you back Simeon. And Jacob is angry. And he says, you boys have already cost me the life of my son Joseph. And now I've also lost Simeon. And you want to heap this grief upon me. You're going to lose Benjamin too. And when you do, it's going to kill me. And you're going to have to carry my gray beard down to Sheol, which is what they explained the afterlife to be at that time. But Judah gets him to relent and they take Benjamin and they go back down to Egypt. But before they go, Jacob knew the art of the deal a little bit and he sent them with a bunch of gifts and all the finest things from the land. He sent them with double the money to pay for the first grain and then buy another thing of grain to kind of grease the skids a little bit to keep this guy happy down in Egypt. And so the boys go. They get back to Egypt, and they find Joseph's steward and Joseph says, oh, or the steward says, oh, it's good to have you back. Joseph would actually like to have a meal with you guys. And they're like, oh no, he's gonna kill us. He's bringing us to his house. He's gonna put us to death. He's not gonna believe us. He's gonna take our money and that's the end of us. And they're really nervous and they even told the steward, listen, we hope that he's not mad. We found money in our sacks on the way back. We didn't take it. We don't know how it got there. We've brought double here to pay for the grain that we took the first time. And the steward actually responds to them and says, the Lord your God put that money in those sacks himself. I have received the payment for what you took. You're good. And so maybe they could begin to sense that something was up with us. So the next day they go into Joseph's house. Now they're in his personal chambers, personal house. And they're having a meal with him. And as Joseph goes to prepare for the meal, he looks and he sees his brother Benjamin, but Benjamin still doesn't recognize him. And so Joseph continues to play dumb. And he looks and he says, is that your youngest brother? Have you brought him with you? And they said, yeah, this is our youngest brother Benjamin. And scripture tells us that Joseph was so moved with warmth, it says, that he had to go back to his chambers and weep for a little bit and compose himself before he could come back out. And when all the food was served, everybody received a great portion, but Benjamin got five times the portion of everyone else. And they had this big feast and they were merry. And Joseph began to press on them a little bit. He said, you mentioned a father, an old man back where you're from. Is he still alive? And they said, yes, he's old, but he's alive and he's longing to see his son Benjamin again. So we need to get on the road. And Joseph says, okay, you guys can go ahead. And when they go ahead, he tells the steward, put the money back in their sacks again. And this time I want you to take my silver cup and I want you to put it in the youngest one's bag. I want you to put it in Benjamin's bag. So the steward does as he's asked. The next day, the brothers leave. And after they had been gone for a little while, Joseph again gets his steward and he says, I want you to chase them down. I want you to find that cup and I want you to accuse them of theft and bring them back. I want you to arrest the one who stole it. The steward's like, all right. I wonder how many times the steward had to do things like this for Joseph. Like, was this weird or was this just normal? Anyways, he tracks the brothers down and he comes to the brothers and he says, what have you done? We have given you nothing but good and you repay us with evil. And they're like, what are you talking about? And the steward says, one of you stole something that belongs to Joseph. And they said, go through our bags, arrest whoever did it. And so it was discovered that it was in Benjamin's bag and the brothers are beside themselves. This is the very thing that cannot happen. So the steward arrests Benjamin, brings him back to Joseph's house and the brothers pack up and they go back to Joseph's house because they got to figure this out. And in chapter 44, you see this impassioned plea from Judah who goes to Joseph. And he says, he says, please understand, we didn't do this on purpose. We are simple shepherds and farmers. We are just trying to get this grain back to our family. I know you think we stole this cup. We didn't. And I know that you think it was Benjamin that stole it. He didn't. And please, I'm begging you, if you keep Benjamin here and we have to go home and tell that old man that you asked about that his son Benjamin is in prison and is probably dead. He is going to die on the spot. His life is intertwined with the life of Benjamin. And he is too old and he loves him too much. And his heart cannot bear the news that he would have lost his son because he's already lost his brother. And that broke his father's heart. And he can't take it again. So please, Lord, take me and put me in prison and let Benjamin go home. And it was at this point that Joseph was so moved that he just broke down. And we pick up the story in chapter 45 and I want to read to you what it says because I think it's so powerful. And he wept aloud so that the Egyptians heard it and the household of Pharaoh heard it. And Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph. Is my father still alive? But his brothers could not answer him for they were dismayed at his presence. So Joseph said to his brothers, come near to me, please. And they came near. And he said, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And listen. God sent me here, but sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh and Lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. We're going to remember those verses next week. He tells his brothers, don't feel bad. Because earlier in the story, when he was first accusing them of being spies, Reuben muttered to his brothers, you guys understand that this is punishment for what we did to our brother Joseph, right? We reap what we sow. Now we're finally getting punished for that terrible thing that we did. And Joseph heard them and he understood them because he didn't need an interpreter. And so here, as they reconcile and he reveals himself to them, he's saying, don't worry, don't carry guilt about that. What you intended for evil, God worked for good. What you thought was gonna be terrible for me, God was working the whole time. You think you sent me to slavery in Egypt? You didn't. That was God pulling the trigger. It's the same realization that Jacob had. It's been God pulling the strings all along. And then the scripture says that they hugged and they kissed each other and they wept. And then they sat and they talked about all the things. I don't know that there's a conversation in all the Bible I would rather get to hear than to sit in that room and listen to Joseph and his brothers catch up and tell all the stories about all the things in Canaan and for them to hear all the things that happened to Joseph over the years. What a sweet, sweet reunion that must have been. And what a picture of the incredible sovereignty of God as he wove those things together to bring that day about. Shortly after this, word gets out to Pharaoh and the palace that those men who keep coming back here for grain, those are actually Joseph's long lost brothers and Pharaoh's overjoyed. And he goes to Joseph and he says, bring your family here. Go get your father, bring the whole clan down here. I'm gonna give you the land of Goshen. It's this really fertile, good, vibrant land. Your family can live there. They can have it. No one's going to mess with them. We'll give them the protection of the sovereign nation of Egypt. Go get your dad. And he gives them wagons and he gives them riches to go back. It's basically, he says, here's a bunch of U-Hauls. Go load up everybody and bring them back here. And so the brothers go, and they're overjoyed. And they get back to Jacob, and they tell him the good news. They say, your son Joseph, he's alive, and he's second in command over all of Egypt. And it says that Jacob was numb, and he couldn't process the news. And so they brought him near and they repeated to him, Joseph is alive and he's waiting for us to come and see him. And it says that Jacob looked out and he saw all the wagons and all the riches and all the gifts, and he believed his son. And he said some incredibly profound words in response to all of this. At the end of his life, after all the striving and all the stress and all the worrying and all the wondering, he looks out to the news that his son is alive and that he will see him again. And he says this, and Israel says in Genesis 45, 28, it is enough. My son Joseph is still alive and I will go see him before I die. And this week, for just a weird set of reasons, I was doing my sermon prep on a bench outside of Starbucks at North Hills, and I read the whole story to get a sense of it. And when I got to this phrase, when I got to Jacob at the end of it, looking out after his whole life of striving, and he could see God's provision, and he understood the story, and he understood the plan, he said, it is enough. And I wept. I put my head in my hands like a crazy person in public and I just cried on the bench. Because it's enough. Because how remarkable is it for Jacob to have gone through everything that he went through? All the ups and all the downs and all the hopes and all the dreams and all the strivings and all the realizations and all the healthy times of faith and all the impoverished times of faith, all the arid times and all of the fruitful times. All of the striving and wondering about his sons and the grief that he had gone through and lamenting the loss of Joseph and probably wishing he'd have done things differently and all the stress about sending Benjamin down and how is my family going to survive in the midst of a famine and all the worries that a man would have carried with him throughout his entire life as he went through all of those griefs and all of those trials and to arrive at the end of it and look at the blessings of God and see how he wrote the story and say, it is enough. And I didn't just weep for Jacob. I wept for us too. Because there's coming a time in all of our lives when we will collectively say, it is enough. It's good. If you're struggling with infertility, there's coming a time when you will say it is enough. We struggle. And I look at John and Lily, and it's enough. If your marriage is going through lean years, and it's a struggle, and it's hard, but you trust God with it, there will be a day where you say, it is enough. All the struggles and all the trials of raising kids and hoping that they turn out right and running the business and working out the things and all the things that stress us and keep us up at night. All the things that keep us worried. All the financial situations and should we move or should we should we do this, or how do we handle this situation, or our kid has crippling anxiety, and we don't know what to do, or I've struggled with depression, and I don't know what to do, all the things that stress us out over all the years, God is in heaven, and he is sovereign, and he loves you, and he has a plan for you, and there will be a day coming in this life or the next where you say, it is enough. And there will be all these little it is enoughs all along the way. Where you look at your situation, you look at your life and you go, this is good. I understand God's plan now. It is enough. But there's one big one coming at the end of time, which is what the whole next series in Revelation is about, where Jesus returns and makes the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and we say together, collectively, it is enough. And this is so beautiful, because it's the hope that we cling to. It's the one that won't put us to shame. It's the ardent and fervent belief that keeps me clinging to what I do and keeps me believing in church and keeps me believing in faith and keeps me believing in Jesus that one day, even with all the stuff that doesn't make sense, right? Even with all the human suffering, even with early diagnosis that don't make sense to us, even with losses that don't seem fair, even with all the things that we go through that just don't make any sense to us and we can't fathom that God would let that happen. What we'll know is that one day we will be in heaven before God and his throne and we will see Jesus face to face. And on that day, in that place, we will say, it was always enough. And this is enough. That's the promise of faith. That if you believe in Jesus, one day you'll say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is enough. Let's pray. Father, you're enough. You're everything that we need. Father, I know that you have a plan for us. I know that you didn't stop weaving stories together when you wrote Joseph's. You didn't stop making plans for your children when the Bible was finished. But you still do those things today. So Father, I pray that for those who are in a time of plenty, that as good and blessings abound, that they would look around and be grateful at your provision. God, for those who are in lean times, who are in uncertain times, would they cling to the truth that you have a plan and that that plan is enough, that plan is good. God, for those of us walking through hard times, will you just give us the strength to cling to you? To have a faith that surpasses understanding? Will you help us to trust in you, God? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week, even though Joseph was sold into slavery, we saw that he chose to trust God and honor Him in his service to his new master, Potiphar's wife, attention that eventually forced Joseph to make a decision to run from temptation, even though running ultimately landed him in an Egyptian jail. A prisoner once again, we wonder together, will Joseph still choose to believe in his God and that in the end, he has a plan? Well, good morning. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that after the service if you're not afraid of me. Thank you also for joining us online and to the people in the back right of the room, there's other rows. So you guys don't, you don't all have to sit there every week. Just, I'm just throwing that out there. There's other places if you're also not afraid of those. This is the fourth part in our series where we're moving through the life of Joseph in the Old Testament. We find the life of Joseph in basically the back third of the book of Genesis, the very first book in the Bible. And I've said from the beginning a couple of things. First of all, that the story of Joseph to me is one of the most sweeping and stunning portrayals of the sovereignty of God that I think we find in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. I love the story of Joseph. And because it's a big, long story that points to the sovereignty of God, we are approaching this series not as seven individual sermons, but as one big long seven week sermon. So we stop and we make points along the way that are applicable to us and that help the text come alive to us. But really we're driving to the end of this narrative and the end of the series as we get to week seven and hopefully see the story in a light that maybe we haven't thought of it before. Because it's one big long sermon, and I've said that from the beginning, this week in particular highlights that. So I would tell you if you're watching online or listening online and it's not Sunday morning right now and you haven't heard week one, this would be a good place to pause and go listen to week one and then come back and listen to this. Now I know that it's ambitious of me to assume that you're willing to listen to 60 minutes of Nate in one week, but if you are, then it would be worth it to listen to week one before you consume this. If you haven't heard week one and you're just, this is fresh for you, don't worry, I'm going to bring you along, but it's going to resonate more if you really drill down into the life of Jacob like we did in the first week. So that's just an upfront for you. I'm going to assume a couple things of your knowledge of Jacob when we get to his portion of the sermon today. But like we said last week, Joseph is accused of sexual harassment in Potiphar's house and is subsequently thrown in jail. Potiphar's wife kept trying to seduce Joseph. Joseph wouldn't have it. Eventually in this scene, she grabs a hold of him. There's no one else around and he chooses to run away. And we spent a lot of time last week on what it means to run away from our temptations. He runs away and he leaves behind his outer garment because she had a hold on it and it was the only way for him to get away. And then she lets out a cry and she falsely accuses him of accosting her. When Potiphar hears this story, the master of the house, he's enraged and he has Joseph thrown in jail, which is a good place to acknowledge this idea that just because we're obeying God doesn't mean our life is going to immediately go better. Joseph chose obedience, and his life immediately got worse, circumstantially. So simply choosing to walk in obedience sometimes makes our life more difficult. Obedience is a long-term decision. It's not a short-term decision. But Joseph chose obedience. He chose to honor his God, and it lands him in jail. He gets thrown into like the royal jail where the prisoners of Pharaoh are thrown in as well. This becomes important a little bit later in the story and in this week's sermon. But he gets thrown in that jail. And when he's in the jail, he's again, Joseph has these patterns in his life where he has these dreams, right, early on that his brothers are going to bow down to him and his father and mother are going to bow down to him. And then he's sold into slavery and he's brought low. And then he ends up in Potiphar's house and slowly he ascends to second in command in Potiphar's house. And he's in this unprecedentedly high place for a Hebrew person to be. And then he gets thrown in jail and he's brought low. And spoiler alert, okay, if you don't know the story, we're gonna get into the details in the future. But then eventually he gets out of prison. He's put in Pharaoh's house where he rises to prominence again. And so Joseph's life is this constant ebbing and flowing of being brought high and then being brought low. And in these low moments being faced with the decision, am I going to choose to honor God or am I going to resent him because he's disappointed me in some way, because he's allowed these things to happen to me? And so as he's thrown in jail again, he chooses to honor God, he chooses to obey him, and his life gets harder. And again, he's faced with, do I honor God or do I do my own thing? And this is what we're told in the text at the end of Genesis 39, beginning in verse 21, which in the ancient world was kind of employee-employer relationship. And it's understandable to see that someone could rise to prominence there, but you don't really expect someone to climb up the ranks in jail, right? So much so that they're now entrusted with everything, that whatever prisoners, whatever task the jailer gave Joseph, he didn't worry about it. Joseph had total integrity. I'm sure there were systems that he could have taken advantage of. I'm sure there were things that he could have gotten away with, but his integrity wouldn't allow him to do it. And so he garnered more and more trust, even within the prison system in Egypt, which to me is remarkable. And often when we think of the story of Joseph, I know that I do this and you might as well, and maybe this is one of the things you're picking up on as we move throughout the story together, that it seems like at every turn Joseph chooses to honor God. So then in turn, God continues to honor Joseph. But one of the things that stands out to me in the text is every time I read it, every time I get to the next portion of the story where he's brought low again, what you'll notice is that God's favor always precedes Joseph's behavior. This passage starts out, but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. So it's not that Joseph went to jail and then in his uncertainty and disillusionment, he says, you know what? I'm just going to choose to trust and obey God. And then God is there with the favor. It's important that we understand that Joseph's obedience was a response to God's favor. God's favor is not a response to Joseph's obedience. Do you see? We don't win God's favor. We don't win God's blessings by how we behave. One of the things I said in week one at the end of it is that God's commitment to his promises are not contingent upon our behavior. That works both ways. We don't lose God's promises with bad behavior, nor do we gain them, we see in Joseph's life, with good behavior. They're simply there. God's favor simply rests on us. God's love and concern for us simply rests on us. God has a plan for us and a way that he wants to use us and things that he's gifted us to do and people that he's placed in our life. And the spirit works in our hearts in mysterious ways. And he does all that despite our behavior. So we can't look at the life of Joseph and teach, look, if you honor God, God honors you. That's not the lesson. Because at every turn, God's favor precedes Joseph's behavior. So God's favor simply rested on Joseph's life. Which is why, as I was trying to plan to preach this, when we wrote the series out, when I wrote the series out months ago, this week was gonna be a lesson on obeying God where we are. Wherever you are, serve God. And I think that's a fine lesson, but I wasn't happy with it. And so Tuesday, I went on a walk. I've never done this before, but I left the little office complex and I walked all the way down to the end of the street where it stops in the woods and then I got scared and I came back. I went on a walk and I was just thinking and praying about this passage and what's going on in the life of Joseph, and it occurred to me something that's worth reflecting on. Joseph is brought high over and over again in his life because God has favor on him, because God has a plan for Joseph, because God has a plan for Joseph that echoes throughout the centuries, that is seen far beyond even what we're going to arrive at a place in chapter 7, it's going to be like, or in the seventh week, and we're going to go, oh my gosh, that's amazing. Look at how God was taking care of his brothers. But no, no, no. Look at how God was taking care of his people. And look at how it's a picture for what happens all time. So yes, God is showing favor to Joseph because he has a plan for him, but it's at this point worth stopping and reflecting on the life of his father, Jacob. Because listen to me, Jacob had that same favor. Remember? Jacob enjoyed the same favor that Joseph did. Jacob came from the same line. God had the same plan, was going to bring about the same things, was going to display his sovereignty in the same ways and in the same favor that Joseph had. And they didn't have it because of how they acted. They had it because God promised them something. And God keeps his promises. That's what his righteousness is. And so it occurred to me as I was thinking about the difference between Jacob and Joseph and kind of reflecting on their lives, that Jacob, his dad, was a person of strife. The father of Joseph, Jacob, was a person of strife. If you'll remember his story, at every turn he is scheming and he is planning and he is controlling and he is stressed and he is anxious about bringing about the life that he wants. He wanted his father's blessing. He wanted to be a claimant of the promises of Abraham. He wanted to be the one through whom the blessings would flow to future generations. He wanted to be the top guy. He saw the life that he wanted and he did everything that he could to bring it about. Even though, even though before he was born, God spoke to his mother and said, in you are two nations and the older will serve the younger. The younger will rule over the older. These promises were made before Jacob was ever born. God knew what his plan was and how he was going to bring it about. And yet Jacob chose to either not open his eyes to those promises or not trust those promises or not trust God's favor. And he spent his entire life scheming and planning to try to bring things about in his own life, and all it caused him was strife and stress. He wants his father's blessing, so he schemes up a way to get the birthright from his brother, and then he schemes up a way to get the blessing from his father that required him to lie to his dying father on his deathbed, which is a despicable thing to do. Then he has to flee to a family member where he's then deceived by Laban. And then he has to work for 21 years to be able to go out on his own. And on the way out, he has to lie and cheat and steal again. He's still a deplorable person. And then at the end of the narrative, we see him, he's going to be reunited with his brother Esau, who is coming for him. And he schemes again on how to mitigate the anger and the wrath of his brother Esau so that maybe he won't get murdered by him. And we see throughout his whole life this striving and this anxiety and this stress and this sense of control and scheming and how can I bring about the things that I want? And then at the end of his life, or at the end of the story, about halfway through his life, he wrestles all night with someone that I said humbly is possibly Jesus. But we can disagree on that and it's fine. And Jesus renames him Israel. And he says, you have striven with man and with God. And Jacob realizes that he's seen the face of God. And in that moment, he realizes all the striving that I've been doing to bring things about in my life were things that God was going to make happen anyways. If I'll just get out of the way and let him do it. And so what we see in Jacob and Joseph is two men upon whom the favor of the Lord rested. Two men with whom God had made plans, to whom God had made promises, who he had gifted, who he had blessed, and who he loved dearly, and he cared about what happened in their lives. But the contrast is that while Jacob was a person of strife, that Joseph was a person of peace. Jacob was a person of strife. Joseph was a person of peace. When you read the narrative about Jacob, you see stress and anxiety and control and worry and all these things leaping off the page and scheming and lying and manipulating and kind of being a jerk. And when I read the story of Joseph, I don't see any of that springing off the page to me. When I read the story of Joseph, I see remarkable peace and humility. I see a man that's never shaken in his faith. I see a man that seems to not worry too much about his circumstances. I see a man who humbly chooses to serve God at every turn in his life. If you continue to read down through chapter 40, and we'll talk about this in just a minute, there's two prisoners in the prison with Joseph, a baker and a cup bearer. And they go to him and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you can interpret dreams. Will you tell us what they mean? And Joseph, instead of puffing himself up, says, aren't interpretations of dreams, don't those belong to the Lord? Sure, I'll listen to what you have to say, but listen, it's not me doing this. At every point, he gives the credit to God. Last week, we talked about the temptation with Potiphar's wife. And she comes to him and she tries to entice him and get him to commit sin with her. And what's his response? I've been blessed in so many ways. How could I possibly sin against my God in this way? He's humble. He's obedient. He gives God the credit. A few chapters over, we're going to see that he's brought to Pharaoh. Pharaoh's had a couple dreams and he says, I've heard you're good at interpreting dreams. Let me tell you about my dreams. And in front of Pharaoh, where he could take credit again, he could say, I'm the guy. He says, don't dreams belong to the Lord? You can tell me your dreams. Let's see what he says. With Joseph, we see this profound peace. We see this profound joy that exists through his whole life, that runs like a stream through his whole life. No matter the ebbs and the flows, as he's brought high and he's brought low, we see this stream of joy and peace that runs through the life of Joseph. And it absolutely relates to the song that we sang a few minutes ago, that we're going to have joy and we're going to sing whether we're brought high to the mountain or low to the valley. And we see this displayed in the life of Joseph. That he's this person of incredible joy who in every moment simply chooses to trust God and honor God in the moment. And know that even though I don't know how this is going to work out, it will. God loves me and cares about me. So I'm going to control the things that I can control and I'm going to love him the best I can now. And this point, I was actually, I got done with the walk and I came back and I talked to Kyle. He was sitting in his office and I was all excited. Listen to what I just thought about. I think this is really fun. And I was telling him about it. And he made this point, and I think it's a great one. That Jacob's striving prohibited his joy. If the same favor rested on both of them, if God's sovereignty rested on both of them, if God had plans for both of them that he was going to bring about regardless of their behavior, then Kyle's point was the same joy was available to them the whole time. That if you can put yourself in the place of Jacob and imagine the relief that he felt when he realized, oh my gosh, I've been striving with God my whole life and I don't have to try so hard. If you can imagine the joy and relief that he felt when he met his brother who didn't want to murder him, who actually wanted to forgive him. If you can imagine how relieving and joy-filled those days were for Jacob, the disappointing thing is that joy was available to him for his entire life. And he lived half of his life without the joy of the Lord because his striving and his control and his anxiety and his worry and his scheming blinded him to the peace of the Father and prohibited him from experiencing the joy of the Father. And you contrast that with Joseph, who saw it the whole time, whose peaceful nature, whose trust in God, whose belief that God would come through, allowed him to be joyful and calm and peaceful in the moment, no matter what happened. And what you see, really, as you juxtapose their two lives and acknowledge that the same favor rested on both, is you see what it really means to trust God. I'm not talking about believing in God. Believing is an intellectual exercise. Are there enough facts in my head that I can willing to put my faith behind God? That's an intellectual exercise. And actually, every time we see the word belief in the Bible, in the original text, it means trust. And to trust is to rely on something fully, knowing that it will hold me up. There's belief mixed in there, but trust is really an action. And the difference between Joseph and Jacob is that Joseph trusted God and Jacob didn't. He may have believed in God, but Joseph trusted him. Because Joseph trusted God, he was a person of peace. Because Joseph trusted God, there was a river of joy that flowed through his life, irrespective of the circumstances that surrounded it. Because Jacob did not trust God, he merely at times when it was for him, chose to believe God. He was a person of strife, arrested with anxiety and worry and scheming and stress. And so where the rubber meets the road here for us this morning is for us to reflect on this question. Are you Jacob or are you Joseph? In your life, in the things that matter to you most, are you Jacob? Are you a person of strife? Or are you Joseph, a person of trusting peace? When I think about this for me, I think about grace. When the pandemic started and we can't meet in person anymore, and I lead an organization that it kind of matters whether or not we meet in person. That's a pretty big part of what we do. I got really worried. And I became Jacob. And I schemed and I stressed and I controlled. Who's coming? How do we reach out to them? How do we make our online product better? How do we keep people engaged? We just had this great campaign. We had a ton of people coming. How do I keep 330 people coming online every week? This is so challenging. I haven't talked to so-and-so in a couple of weeks. Are they gone? And then the other people would, I would talk to so-and-so and they said, yeah, I saw so-and-so this week. And I would go, do they still go to Grace? Do I need to call them? And every day I would just think about Grace. How do we hold it together? How do I keep this church where it is? And I made myself feel like, without realizing it, that it was all on me. And I Jacobed the heck out of that situation. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, it made me miserable. I didn't realize it. It made me miserable. And poor Jen, it made me grumpy at the house. She put up with some stuff. It was not good. And somewhere around four months ago, I wouldn't have used this language at the time, but somewhere around four months ago, I became Joseph about grace. And I finally realized, you know what? God loves this church. I don't know why. I don't know why he does. He just does. He loves us. And if you've been here for any number of years, you've seen him see us through time and again. God loves this place. And if he loves this place, he has a plan for this place. And if he has a plan for this place, he's going to execute it regardless of what I do. So I can keep trying to Jacob the situation and fix it and figure out what we need to do and stress out about it all the time. Or I can be Joseph. I can trust that God cares about this place and has a plan for this place that he's going to bring about regardless of my behavior. So the best possible thing I can do is to rest easy in the sovereignty of God, to choose to trust him with the church and simply humbly obey Jesus whenever the opportunity for obedience is presented to me and quit worrying about the things that I can't control. And it brought peace. Parents, with your children, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Do you stress out about who they are and how they behave and how we can augment this behavior so they don't embarrass us in public? Do we stress out about where they're going to go to college, if they're college, what kind of decisions that they're making? Do we stress out about every little thing and be a helicopter parent and stress and scheme and worry and control and be anxious? Or are we Joseph? Do we trust and acknowledge that, you know what? God loves my kid way more than I ever could. And because God loves them, he has a plan for them. And he has a design for them. And he has promises for them. And the best thing I can possibly do for my child is to step out of the way and be Joseph and try to simply obey Jesus in the moment when the moments present themselves. But to be people of peace about our children. About your career, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Are you constantly trying to scheme and align yourselves with the right people and form the right relationships and do the right thing and impress the right person by putting that right time stamp on the email early in the morning or late at night? Are we constantly trying to figure out how to advance ourself in our career? Or are we Joseph? I know that God loves me. And I know that he cares deeply about who I work around and what I do and my witness for him as I work with my coworkers. And so I know that if I work hard and honor him, that he's going to do with my career whatever it is he needs to do. Many in our church are facing retirement. We've recently retired. We're thinking about it. Are you Jacob about that or are you Joseph? Are you trying to control every aspect of it and think through it and plan it all out and map it out and know exactly what's going to happen or can you acknowledge, you know what, I think God loves me and he cares deeply about what I do in the rest of the years of my life. And he's going to direct me to the right place if I trust him with him. In our relationships, in our marriages that we might be trying to save, in broken relationships with friends or with family, are we Jacob or are we Joseph? Are we people of strife or are we people of peace? Are we people who are trying to arrest control from God or are we people who trust God enough to give him control? And if you are a person who's answering over and over again, gosh, I'm Jacob. I'm Jacob and I want the peace that you're talking about, but I don't know how to get it. What do I do? I would simply tell you that our peace is found in Jesus. This is why I think Paul writes in Philippians 4, 6, and 7, be anxious for nothing, but in everything with prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in who? In Christ Jesus. If you're anxious, if you're controlling, if you're worried, if you're not trusting God with things, what does Paul tell you to do in the letter to the Philippians? He tells you, And you know how he's going to do that? By giving you more Jesus. By pointing you towards Christ. Hebrews writes the same thing. Run the race that's set before you. How? By focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. Jesus says the same thing in John 15. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the other things. Don't worry about all the scheming. Don't worry about everything else that I'm going to do in your life. You focus on me. You abide in me. And I'll abide in you. And because of that, everything's going to work out. You're going to bear much fruit. If we want to be like Joseph, and we want to walk away from being like Jacob, then we need to acknowledge that our peace is found in Jesus. And our anxiety and our desire for control should be a reminder to us that we simply need more Jesus. That we simply need to follow him harder. That we simply need to press into him more. That we simply need to let go of something more. If you want to test this, trust him with something that's stressing you out in your life right now. Just this last week, I had a conversation with a couple in the church that I knew was going to be a hard conversation. And I had been stressed out about it for a while. The conversation happened the day after I stumbled on this lesson and this comparison of person of peace, person of strife. And I thought, all right, I'm gonna preach to myself here. Normally, when I go into a difficult conversation or a meeting, I have thought through, Jen will tell you, I have thought through every scenario. I've had every conversation in my head already. I hate being unprepared. I like to have thought through what's gonna happen so that I don't respond emotionally. I respond reasonably. I like to know that there's nothing that's going to happen that I'm not expecting. But for this one, I just chose to be Joseph. And I said, God, I know you love me. I know you love them. I know the results of this conversation matter to you. And that was good. And I went into the conversation trying to honor God with what we talked about, and so did they. And we would all tell you, the results of this conversation were far better than any of us thought they would be going into it. And the Holy Spirit was present with us that night, and he met with us that night. If this is a difficult concept for you, pick one thing that's stressing you out in your life and hand it to Jesus and watch him come through. Because here's what happens when we're people of peace and people of strife. Strife and peace permeate. Strife and peace, they bleed out onto other people. They act like my four-month-old son, John, right now. John permeates, man. He is a drool monster. Like, he wakes up. First of all, he's just drooling like crazy. I don't know what's going on in there. Jen picked him up in the living room the other day and was holding him up and smiling at him. And I saw what she couldn't, which was a bead of spit glimmering in the sunlight through the window that landed square on her forehead, and I died laughing. That is John. I did not even get her a towel. I was laughing too hard. Not only that, not only does he drool constantly, the kid wakes up, and the only thing he cares about in life is how much of his hand fits into his mouth. That's the only thing that matters to him. Nothing else. He doesn't care about a single thing else. It's just how much of this can I jam in here? And it's all he does. And it gets his hand all slobbery. So he'll wipe it on your face or he'll grab you. You'll pick him up. I picked him up yesterday. I picked him up when I was holding him and put him down and my forearm was wet from his leg, from drool that had run down and somehow his legs are really chubby. They had gotten in places and just to touch John is to have drool on you. It just is. I don't know how it happens. It just permeates. Strife and joy work the same way. When you're a person of strife and stress, it permeates, man. It bleeds. It gets on everybody around you. It gets on your spouse and it changes their days. It gets on your kids, it changes their days. It gets on your coworkers, it gets on your friends. Strife bleeds and permeates and has ripples on everyone around you. And so does peace, particularly in a world of so much strife. Normally, when people of strife are around each other, their stress starts amping everyone up, right? We kind of get into a frenzy. You're complaining about this, and I'm complaining about this, and life stinks together, and then we get all worked up about everything. But to be a person of peace that actually calms those waves of strife, well that has a calming effect on everyone around us too. To be a person of trust and for people to see this trust that Joseph had, regardless of circumstances, well that begins to bleed on other people too. So I thought it worth it to pause at this point in the story and acknowledge this idea that the same favor rests on these two men. The difference in their life is how they receive that favor. Jacob's striving made him blind to it. Joseph's trust helped him to see it. And it gave him peace and joy for his whole life that it took Jacob 40 years to experience. And so in our lives and in our situations, which ones do we want to be? Now, as Joseph is in jail, eventually Pharaoh gets angry with his cupbearer and his baker, and he throws them in jail too. And they're under the care of Joseph. While they're there, they have some dreams. And they go to Joseph and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you're a good, good at interpreting dreams. Can you tell us what they mean? And Joseph again says that I'm not good at it. God is, but let's see what you got. And they tell Joseph his dreams. I'm not, their dreams. I'm not going to detail those for you. Those are in the text and you can read them if you like. I hope you will. But they say, these are our dreams. What do they mean? And he looks at the cupbearer and he's like, great news. You, here's what's going to happen. In three days, Pharaoh is going to call you back to service and you're going to serve him. And he's going to restore you to your former position. You're going to go out of prison, back to your former life. Everything's going to be good. And the cupbearer is like, that's great. What's mine mean? And Joseph's like, not as good of news. You're going to get called out of here in three days as well, but when Pharaoh calls you out of here, he's going to hang you, and you're going to die in three days. And as they're leaving, Joseph looks at the cupbearer, and he says, don't forget me. When you go, and Pharaoh restores you, remember me, that I might get out of this pit. I know I'm doing great here in jail. I don't love it. So remember me to Pharaoh that I might get out of here as well. And chapter 39 ends with the somber news that everything that Joseph said would happen did happen, except the cupbearer forgot about him. And we're going to pick up the story next week and spend the whole week on the very first sentence in the next chapter. And it may just be the best part of this whole seven-week series. So I hope that you can come for it, and I hope that we'll get to see you for the hootenanny. Let me pray, and we'll carry on next week. Father, thank you for the way that you speak to us out of Scripture. Thank you for the way that you speak to us through circumstances. Lord, I just pray that... I pray that we would be sensitive to those things. God, give us ears to hear. We know, we know and we've seen over and over again that the same spirit that speaks to Joseph, that spoke to Jacob, that speaks to me, speaks to us. So God, speak to grace and move in grace and press on the hearts of grace for what you would have us do and where you would have us go. Give us the faith to trust you even when we can't fully see the results of that trust yet. Give us the peace that comes from trusting you. Let us this week, those of us who are Jacobs, experience just a taste of the joy that comes when we trust you with a stressful situation and watch you come through in the way that only you can. Father, help us to trust you in all things, to acknowledge that you care about the details of our life even more than we do, and that you have a plan for us that is better than any we could ever come up with. Help us to walk in trust of you, and in turn, walk in peace and influence the people around us. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week we heard about Jacob and collectively wondered why God would choose to bless someone who at times acted so very ungodly. We were comforted to learn that God blessed Jacob because he had promised him that he would, and our God always keeps his promises, no matter our behavior. This week, we will see God make a promise to Joseph in the form of a dream, but immediately be forced to wonder if and how God will actually keep his promise. In the end, Joseph will be compelled to decide if he trusts God and trusts that despite uncertain circumstances, he has a plan. Well, good morning, church. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for being here today. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, my name is Nate, and I would love to get to do that after the service. If you're checking us out online, thank you so much for doing that, and we'd love to see you here whenever you get the chance. Emil, those were the best announcements you've ever done. Thank you for that. Those were fantastic. This is the second part in our series called He Has a Plan, where we're going through the life of Joseph together. And so just as a reminder, it's a seven-week series, and the way that I'm looking at it and thinking about it as I write the sermons and think about how to weave them together is with the license that this is one big, long, seven-week sermon. Again, these sermons are not designed to stand alone by themselves and make the traditional point that you go home with thinking about, but rather each as a setup for the next as we follow the narrative of Joseph's life through scripture. And we're going to be spending a lot of time each week in the narrative, in learning the story, and thinking through what it would be like to walk through the story. Because I believe that honors the text. I believe that honors God's word that people have given their life to, have died for, have preserved through the years. And there's a reason that the author of Genesis recorded these stories. There's a reason that they choose the details that they do. And so we honor those stories and we honor the text and we honor our God by taking our time and going through the stories, not necessarily mining for things that can matter to us right now, primarily, but really as a vehicle to learn about God and his story as it's revealed in the stories of the Bible. So we're going to sink into them as we move through these next now six weeks. Last week, as you were reminded on our video there, that we started in the life of Jacob, Joseph's dad, whose name was later changed to Israel. And we picked up some important dynamics there, too, that are very relevant to the story this morning. The first is those promises that were made to Abraham that Jacob wanted to attach himself to. Abraham is Jacob's grandfather, Joseph's great-grandfather, and Jacob wanted to attach himself to those promises. And we're going to see those come up again today. And then we also learned, and this becomes very important, that Jacob had two wives. He married first Leah. He got tricked into marrying Leah by his uncle Laban, which is a really dirty trick. I mean, that's up there in terrible things to do to somebody, marry off a daughter that they're not interested in and then be like, well, you're stuck with her now. How must that have made Leah felt? And then he married the one that he really loved seven years later, Rachel. And what we didn't talk about last time that's worth mentioning now is that Leah was able to begin to produce male offspring with no problem at all, which was a huge deal in the ancient world. That's what you wanted was male offspring. And so Leah was able to do that with great efficacy. She had a bunch of kids, seven or eight boys. But Rachel really struggled to produce a male offspring. And it was years and years that went by of the struggle for her, which is a struggle that we see often in the Bible. Which is why I do very much think that God is near and cares deeply about those people, particularly those women who struggle to have the children that they want so desperately. That theme comes up again and again in the Bible, and Rachel is a part of that theme. But we see her eventually have a son, and his name is Joseph. Joseph is the firstborn son of the wife that Jacob really deeply loved. So we finished the narrative last week. Jacob had just encountered his brother Esau, and then he was moving into the land of Canaan, the land that was promised to his grandfather Abraham, and kind of setting up life and finally able to live the life that he had always wanted to lay hold of. And that's kind of where we pick up the story. So we turn over a couple of chapters, and we're in Genesis chapter 37, which is where we're going to be all morning this morning, if you have a Bible and you want to turn there. And we pick up the story when Joseph is 17 years old and they're living in the land of Canaan, what we now know as Israel. I'm going to begin reading in verse 2 and then verse 3 and 4 will appear on your screen. But this is where we pick up the story. Joseph, being 17 years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives, and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph more. Israel is Jacob. Remember when Jacob had the encounter with, we think, potentially Christ, his name would change to Israel. So now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. So there's a lot going on in the family dynamics there in those verses. But what we see is that Joseph, like I said, is the favored son. He's the firstborn son of Rachel, but he's got a lot of brothers. Joseph has 11 brothers, 12 sons in all, and they would become the 12 tribes of Israel when they move into that land later on in the time of Moses and Joshua. But right now they're just 12 individual dudes, and Joseph is younger than most of his brothers. The oldest, Reuben, was likely in his early to mid-30s by the time Joseph is 17 years old. So the dynamic is the patriarch of the family, Jacob, has two wives, and each wife has a servant that he uses as a concubine that each bear him some sons, but he's got a bunch of sons. But his first son from Rachel is the one that he loves the most. He's got another son from Rachel named Benjamin, and it's important that we remember that name because in week six and seven, we're going to encounter Benjamin again, and this is going to matter. But Joseph is his favorite son because that's from his favorite wife. Now, how do you think that made Joseph's brothers feel? These guys who are grown men, who are grown adults, and they're doing the hard work of the flocks. Jacob's not, he's not working with the herds anymore. He's not doing any of the stuff to generate the wealth. It's his sons that are doing it. And he's made it very clear to his sons that work the hardest that you are not my favorite, that Joseph is my favorite. This was, it's easy to say, a very unhealthy family and family dynamic. In the midst of this, Joseph is a 17-year-old, is out with the herds and his brothers. And this was a nomadic people. So Jacob was kind of the central hub. His camp was kind of the central hub. And then his herds were out in the countryside all around them. You could travel for a day before you would get to his sons and the flocks that they were tending. So they're pretty dispersed. And so Joseph comes back to his dad, Jacob, and he gives him a bad report of his brothers. Reuben doesn't know what he's doing. If Tally can't shear sheep worth a darn, they're terrible at this. They're selling them for peanuts. It's a bad operation out there. And he goes back and he tells on his brothers. And while he's back there telling on his brothers, his dad gives him the famous coat of many colors that we've probably all heard of before. And we might wonder, what's it matter that it was a multicolored coat? And I could get into all the stuff about how expensive it was to dye materials and what colors things normally were. And they were monochromatic and very easy to make and all that stuff. But suffice it to say, this is Joseph or this is Jacob in no uncertain terms, letting his sons know, this is my favorite son. I know that it's kind of been implied before. I know that you guys could probably figure this out, but now you need to know this. He's the guy. He's my favorite. It's not too dissimilar from the idea of somebody having a bunch of sons and whenever the son gets to be driving age, he buys them a truck, but it's a beater of a truck, like an old Ford Ranger with 180,000 miles on it that barely gets down the road. And then when Joseph comes of age, dad buys him a brand new F-150 with all the bells and whistles. And he takes that F-150 and he drives back to the brothers and he says, look at this truck. Joseph was incredibly unwise in this season of life. So he goes and he wears the coat around his brothers, which if it were me, I would thank you, dad, and I would fold that up and put it in my tent and I would come back to that later, but I wouldn't go wear it in front of my brothers. But this is what Joseph does because Joseph is dumb. And if you don't believe me that he's dumb, that he's just a dumb, bratty, snot-nosed 17-year-old kid, look at what he does. Joseph has some dreams. And this is important because Joseph has a gift from God that we'll see laced throughout the story as a dream interpreter, an interpreter of dreams. And I'll say up front before we read these, that there's nothing in the text that says that these dreams were from God, but all of the context around the text and all of the context around the life of Joseph suggests very much that these dreams are from God. And so I feel like I'm on solid footing if I were to espouse to you the idea that these are dreams that represent promises from God. But just know in your own thinking and the way you process the story yourself, it doesn't say that in scripture. That's just a license I'm taking with the context within which we find the dreams. We're going to look in 37 beginning in verse 7. These are the dreams that Joseph has. He says, So he has two dreams. In one dream, it's all equals, sheaves of wheat, stalks of wheat. And all of the wheat bows down to one wheat. And Joseph says, I'm the one. They were bowing down to me. Well, he has 11 brothers, so it's pretty obvious the symbolism here. And they respond in kind. Are you saying that you're going to rule over us? And then he has another dream. And in this dream, it wasn't just the planets, but the sun and the moon that bowed down to him as well, indicating his father and mother. And so the brothers resented him even more. But if you keep reading down into verse 10, what you'll find is it said that Jacob took this to heart. Jacob didn't get ticked yet because he kind of knew something was going on with this Joseph kid. He had already experienced in his life how God brings about his promises in unexpected ways. And this was really just a way of putting the writing, of taking the writing on the wall and putting it in front of their faces. Because the technicolor coat and all the other things indicated that Joseph was going to be the one to rule over his brothers. You'll remember from last week with the idea of birthright and blessing, that in the ancient world, the firstborn son received a double portion of inheritance from his father when his father passed away, and the firstborn son assumed the authority of the father if the father was incapacitated or passed away. So for Joseph to be the one that's favored above and beyond his other brothers, the writing is on the wall that one day all the older guys, Dan and Reuben and Naphtali and all the others, are going to be working for Joseph. And so it's at this point that I think it's worth just pausing and thinking about what Joseph is doing right here. Put yourself in his shoes. Pretend you're Joseph. And in your family dynamic, you know that you are your dad's favorite child. You also know that you have 10 brothers who are older than you. The oldest of whom is probably in his mid-30s. The rest are somewhere in their 20s. It's a whole swath between 17 and 35. And you know that they hate you. They can't stand you. They loathe you. They resent you. They do not want to work for you one day. And yet, your dad loves you and is going to elevate you above all of them. And so one day, you're going to have to find a way to get these guys to continue to work for you and produce for you and run the clan with them. These relationships are important. If Joseph is forward-thinking at all, which he was a 17-year-old kid, I don't know a single 17-year-old boy that is forward-thinking beyond prom. But if Joseph was forward-thinking at all, he would have understood, I'm going to have to lead these guys in the future. Me having a harmonious relationship with them is going to be pretty essential to our combined success. And so he ought to have slow played it. He ought to have been humble and played those things down. But instead he shows up wearing the coat instead of tucking it away and saving it for later. And if you had those dreams and you're Joseph, would you then go to your brothers who, by the way, in a land with no military and no police, no recourse for you, this is a place where might makes right. Are you going to walk up to them and be like, guys, I had a dream. Guess what it was? We were all weak, right? You with me? And then you guys bowed down to me. And then I had another dream. And you guys and mom and dad did too. How you like that, suckers? It was incredibly dumb and incredibly arrogant, incredibly bratty. At this point in his life, and we're going to talk about this more in a minute, because it's a stark transition from who Joseph becomes. But at this season of his life, Joseph is a snot-nosed 17-year-old brat. He's the worst kind of rich kid. He's kind of a terrible human, and he's rubbing his brother's noses in it. And so, one day, his dad says, go out to your brothers and check on the herds. And so off he goes. He goes to where his brothers are supposed to be, and they're not there. But someone points him in the right direction. He goes and he finds his brothers. As he's approaching, his brothers see him approaching and they begin to talk. And they say, hey, here's Joseph. He's coming. Let's just kill him. Let's just kill him and we'll tell dad that he's dead. And the thinking had to be, and then one of us can inherit the promises and we don't have to worry about that. One of us can be in charge of the family. We won't have to submit to Joseph. He's a jerk. That's going to be a terrible life to have to submit to this guy for the rest of our life. He's totally unbearable. Let's just kill him. And we'll tell dad that an animal got him. And they said, yeah, okay. Well, then the oldest son, Reuben, heard of this plan. And he was like, guys, let's not kill him. Let's just throw him in a pit. And in that way, he effectively saved Joseph's life, which is why to this day, the Reuben is the king of all sandwiches. I don't know if you guys ever knew that by that connection in scripture. They teach you that in seminary. So they decided to throw him in a pit. And then Reuben's off doing something else. I don't know what Reuben's doing. And Judah, one of the younger brothers, says, guys, what are we doing with Joseph in a pit? We can't make any money off of him. It doesn't do us any good. What are we going to do? We can't take him out now. He's going to tell dad on us. We're going to have to kill him. What do we get if we kill him? Nothing. Let's sell him. Here come the Midianites. They're known slave traders. Let's sell them to the Midianites. And at least we can make some money off of this, and then we'll tell dad that he's dead. So that's what they do. The Midianites come by. They sell Joseph to them. He's now a slave. They take the coat of many colors and they tatter it and they beat it up and they dip it in animal blood and they carry it home to Jacob and they say, we're so sorry we found this coat as we were coming back. It looks very much like some wild beast got to Joseph and killed your beloved son. We're so sorry, Dad. And then they grieve with him. And so Joseph goes from next in line to be the head of a tribe, the head of this clan, to on some ox cart in shackles, heading to a foreign country to be a slave. And it seems worth it to pause here and make note of this point, because this is not the Joseph that we know. When I think of Joseph, when I think of the Joseph of the Old Testament, I think of a man that personifies consistent obedience. I think of a man who at every turn does the right thing. I think of a man who we would all do well to be like Joseph. He is a moral exemplar in the Old Testament. Next week, we're going to look at his outright commitment to his own purity of heart and of spirit. I think of Joseph as a character to be attained to, of someone that I want to be like, who does the right thing all the time, no matter what. But in chapter 37, that's not the Joseph that we see. So there's a change that happens between chapter 37 and the rest of Genesis through 50. And I think that change is what's happening to him right here in this passage. And it makes me believe that humility always precedes obedience. Humility always precedes obedience. A humbling will happen before we can walk in the obedience that God asks of us. I'm not talking about little pockets of obedience. It's possible to be prideful and still obey in places. But what I'm talking about is it is impossible to live the obedient life that God calls us to. It is impossible to submit ourselves to God's word and to submit ourselves to God's will and his plan if we have not been humbled, if we are living arrogantly. Isn't this the fundamental agreement with salvation? Isn't that how it starts? Someone who is not a believer coming to the end of themselves, coming to a place where they say, you know what? I think I've been wrong about faith. I think I've been wrong about religion. I've been wrong about trying to be the Lord of my own life. God, I'm tired of doing it my way. I want to do it your way. Isn't there a fundamental submission in the obedience of salvation? And what is obedience besides agreeing that, you know what, I think that your way is better than my way? With your kids, we have a five-year-old. She has to choose to obey us. She has to choose to believe and humble herself and say, I'm not right here. You guys must be right, I'm going to trust you. Humility always precedes obedience. And if you think about it, how is it possible to become more Christ-like? How is it possible to be more like Jesus and carry a prideful and haughty spirit through life. Someone who is described as gentle and lowly in heart. How can we become more like that if we're prideful in ourselves? How can we produce the fruit of the Spirit? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. How can we produce those things? How can those things be produced in our life if we are walking in a prideful, haughty arrogance? If we walk out and we look at our house and we say, look at what I bought, look at how successful I am. If we look at our cars and say, look at what I drive. If we look at our friendships and say, look at who they are. If we look at ourselves in the mirror and say, look how good I look, which is a particular struggle of mine. And how can we look at the things in our life and attribute those things to ourself? Look at what I've built. Look at what we've done. Look at who I am. How can we walk through life thinking that we're right about everything and that the people who disagree, who deign to disagree with us are stupid and misinformed and watch the wrong cable network that they shouldn't watch? Like how can we walk through life thinking that we're right about everything and that people who disagree with us must be inherently wrong about everything and yet walk in the humility that obedience requires? How can we think highly of ourselves as Joseph did and yet walk in the humility that obedience requires. We can't. And those of you who have been around long enough, which is approximately seven years, after seven years of life, you ought to have figured this out. Life has a way of bringing us all low, doesn't it? Life will humble you. One minute, you'll think you're the best. The next day, you feel like the worst. Life has a way of humbling us. And so I think the option for us, if we'll accept that the obedient life that God calls us to follows humility. And we'll accept that humility is going to happen. The question becomes, do you want to be humbled the easy way or the hard way? Do you want in your prayers to ask God of it, God, please keep me humble. God, please remind me of how much you love me. Please remind me of my own sin that you've forgiven in me so that I don't think overly hypocritically about other people and condemn others. Do we want to be people who pray and ask for God to keep us humble in what I believe is a gentle and loving way that our God does it? Or do we want to, like Joseph, be broken into humility? Not because God seeks to break us, but because life humbles us. How do we want to be humbled? The easy way or the hard way? This may be why Proverbs says in chapter 16 that pride comes before the fall, that a haughty spirit comes before destruction. This may be why James says in chapter 4 that God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. There is a profound change in the life of Joseph, and I think it has everything to do with the humbling that he went through here. And the other thing worth pointing out, particularly for those of us in the room who are starting out our adult life, God had plans for Joseph. God made a promise to Joseph. Your brothers are going to bow down to you. Even your dad and your mom are going to bow down to you. God made that promise to him. There was a plan for Joseph. The problem was Joseph wasn't ready for that plan. The problem was the current version of Joseph was going to muck that one up. So Joseph has to go through a humbling and a changing so that when that plan arrives, he as a person is ready for it. And for many of us, sure, God has a plan for you. God wants things for you. God has designed you to do and accomplish certain things and to experience certain blessings and to be used in certain ways. The problem is you're not ready for God's plan yet. So His Holy Spirit grows us and humbles us and brings us to a place where our character can handle the plans that He has for us. So if it feels like you're treading water, if it feels like you're not accomplishing the things that you want to accomplish, or that you're not yet where you feel like you want to be, or even where it feels like maybe God has told you that you would be, I'm not saying it's the reason, but there's a chance that the current version of you simply isn't ready for the plans that God has for you. And so we're going to need to go through a humbling and a changing. At the end of this chapter, we stop at this perilous place for Joseph. Verse 36 in chapter 37 sums it up this way. It says, Meanwhile, the Midianites had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard. This is where we will leave the story. We see this picture of a snot-nosed kid who can't get out of his own way, who angers his brother so deeply that they sell him into slavery and they go back and they tell his dad Joseph is dead. And Joseph goes from second in command, from claimant to the promises, from heir to the throne of a tribe, where he was going to be the guy. He goes from that to a slave, the slave of the captain of Pharaoh's guard, a slave in the most powerful nation on the planet, working for a guy that was tasked with protecting Pharaoh. It is a precipitous drop. And in this moment in his life, as he's being carted off by the Midianites, as he's eventually bought by Potiphar or representatives of Potiphar, I believe that Joseph faces this question that all of us at different points and seasons in our life face? Is he to resent God because he betrayed me or trust God because he loves me? That's the question that Joseph is faced with now as he travels down to Egypt. Do I resent God because I feel like he betrayed me or do I choose to trust God because I know that I know that I know that he loves me? Because make no mistake, in this moment, Joseph had to have felt betrayed by his God. God gave him a promise. God rose him to prominence. God told him, your brothers are going to bow down to you. And in this moment, it seems like that's the exact opposite of what's happening. His brothers heard that. They didn't want it to happen. So they do the exact opposite of God's will and sell him into slavery so they don't have to worry about that anymore. Problem solved. We're never going to bow down to Joseph. And so it seems very much like what's happening in Joseph's life is the exact opposite of what his God had promised him. So Joseph feels betrayed. So he's got a choice. Do I resent this betrayal? Or do I choose to trust God because I know that I know that I know that he loves me? And if he loves me, he must have a plan for me. And here's the thing. Here's the thing that I love about this crossroads in the life of Joseph. The very thing that has caused him to feel betrayed by his God, the very thing that makes him doubt his faith, the very thing that makes it seem like God has let him down, the fact that he has been sold into slavery and has been brought low and humbled and is no longer where he was and cannot see a clear path to the promises that God gave him, the very thing that happens to cause Joseph to doubt God and feel betrayed by God is the thing that has to happen to bring about the future that God promises to Joseph. Do you understand? If you know the whole story, you know, spoiler alert, eventually his brothers do bow down to him. But his being sold into slavery by his brothers was a necessary trial and instance to go through so that God could put Joseph exactly where he wanted to put him 25 years later and bring about the promises that he made to Joseph when he was a 17-year-old snot-nosed kid. And from his spot, from the ox cart on the way to Egypt, Joseph cannot see that future. There is no path in his head that brings about the promise that God gave to him. He cannot see that future. And in the midst of that blindness where he cannot see how in the world is God going to be faithful to what he promised me, he has to choose. Do I resent God because he's allowing me to sit here? Or do I choose to trust him because I know that he loves me? And I know that he has his hand on me still. And you have to make that choice too. There are times in life when we feel betrayed by our God. When a diagnosis comes in that feels unfair. When we're faced with a loss that doesn't seem right. When we don't get the job, when we don't get the child, when the child that we do have is so difficult to deal with that we're not really sure what went wrong or how we could fix it. To be someone who follows God is to experience a season where we feel like in some way or another he's let us down. And when we're in that season, we have good company and that Joseph sat there too. And he had to choose. Am I going to resent God because I feel like he betrayed me? Or am I going to choose to trust him because I know that I know that I know that He loves me. And if He loves me, He must have a plan for me. That's where we're going to pick it up next week. Let's pray. Father, thank You for loving us. Thank You for having a plan for us. Thank You for creating us in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. I pray that we would cling to those promises. Cling to what is promised to us in Scripture. Because Romans tells us that we can hope in you because that's the one place we can put our hope where it won't be put to shame. God, thank you for your servant Joseph. And thank you for directing the author of Genesis to show us his humanity, to show us that he wasn't always this guy who made incredibly good choices at every turn despite the difficulties. Thank you for showing us that he was human just like we are. Lord, I pray for our humility, that we would be gentle and humble in spirit, that we would be increasingly like your son, Jesus, that we would think more highly of those around us and that we would see your blessings in our life and allow those to bring us appropriately low so that we can walk in obedience to you. Let none of us in here require the force that Joseph did to bring us to a place of humility. And God, if there are those of us who are tempted to resent you right now, I pray this morning that we would choose to trust you, that we would be assured in myriad ways that you love us deeply, profoundly, and unconditionally. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else? And what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day they're not nearly as big of a deal? What are our big rocks And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Isn't it cute in that video how I assumed that we were just charging right back into normal? And then here we are in masks again. Boy, the naivety as we roll into each wave of this is pretty funny, especially to think back. I can remember back in March of 2020 having conversations. Joe, the moderator of our board, called me in between the 8th and the 15th of March, and he said, hey, I think maybe we need to take a break. Maybe we can't meet in person this Sunday. And I was like, Joe, this is a big decision. I don't know if we should do this. And he goes, no, man, I really think we need to. And I'm like, Joe, listen to me. This is not going to be like a two-week thing. This could go well into April. So who the heck knows? But it's good to see everybody. Thank you for doing your part. And this is the last part of our series called Big Rocks, which if you've been here all four weeks or you've watched online all four weeks and you've watched that intro video of me four times in a row, good for you. That's serious partner of the year stuff right there. This week, as we talk about our priorities in life and approaching this fall, we're going to talk about the idea and the topic of community. And if you've been in church for any amount of time, you've heard a sermon on community. If you've been here, you've probably heard me talk about the importance of community. In our mission statement, we emphasize community by saying that grace exists to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. So you might be tempted when I say that the sermon this week is on community, you might be tempted to kind of glaze over and go, yep, got it. Christian community is important. I'm going to do it. Good. And then start thinking about whatever you've got going on the rest of the day, lunch plans, or if you're me trying to get the grass cut before the thunderstorm start, whatever it is you've got going on, you might be tempted to take your head there when I say that the sermon is going to be on community because we might feel like we kind of get it. But if that's you, I want to encourage you to lean in this morning. Because I hope that what we'll do is I'll leave here or I'll turn off our TVs, wherever we might be consuming this, that we will finish this experience this morning or whenever you're listening, thinking differently about the power and efficacy of community than when we started. I hope that we will be inspired to pursue it as if our lives depended on it. I think the idea of community is incredibly important. And if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the Gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament and you pay attention, what you'll find is a lot of we's and ours and collective you. Like when Paul writes in the letters that he says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And he says, I pray for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. That's not you as an individual. That's a collective you as the church in Rome or Philippi or Ephesus. The Gospels are written to an audience, are written to a church, are written to a group of people. You find in the New Testament very few personal, singular pronouns. You find very you singular yous. You should do this, you should do that, God did this, whatever it is for just you. You don't find those in the New Testament. What you find in the New Testament is collective we and are. The New Testament assumes that your faith will be communal. It assumes that you have other Christians around you walking in the same direction you are pursuing, the same Jesus that you are pursuing. As a matter of fact, if you go to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that's not in your notes, so you can write that down if you want to. You can turn there if you get bored at some point in the sermon, which is likely to happen. Turn to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, and make sure that I'm not making this stuff up. That is the quintessential church passage. There is no pastor who has preached more than two sermons on community and has not based one of the sermons in that passage. It is a quintessential church passage. It describes what the church looked like and did in its very infancy. As soon as Christ ascends and we have Pentecost and Peter and the disciples share the gospel, we see 3,000 people come to faith that day. That's the birth of the church. And then Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47 describes what the church did and how it behaved in its infancy. It is the barometer by which all church for the rest of time is measured. And if you read those verses, what you find is collective wheeze. It's communal. The church did this and they committed themselves to the apostle teaching. They devoted themselves to prayer. They met in one another's homes day by day. They were together all the time pursuing teaching, sharing meals, praying together, learning together, pursuing Jesus together. It is a communal activity. Your faith, if you have it, is quintessentially communal, which is why there's a little bit of an issue in evangelical churches with this phrase that we like to use sometimes. Raise your hand if you've ever heard the phrase that Christianity is about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Have you ever heard that? Now listen. Christianity is about a personal faith. It's about a personal belief that God is the creator and author of the universe, that to reconcile his creation to himself, namely you, he sent his son to die in your place, and we place our faith in Jesus' death on the cross, and we place our hope in his resurrection on Easter, that one day we will be united with our God and reunited with those who also have faith in our Jesus, and we have a hope that will not put us to shame. To be a Christian, you need to individually believe that and have faith in that, and one of the remarkable things about Christianity is that our God does offer us a personal relationship with him. But listen to me closely. We must have an individual faith, but your faith is not about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ because your relationship with Jesus Christ is not personal. It is communal. We see it over and over again in Scripture. It is a communal faith. It is not just your business. It is our business as a church. We don't see that phrase, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, pop up in the Bible. We see a necessity for an individually claimed faith. But make no mistake about it, your faith is quintessentially communal. It is, I would argue, it is impossible to grow close to Jesus and have a vibrant walk with him totally by yourself. To take your Bible and a prayer book and to wander off in the desert like these mystical people who have existed before us that we somehow, we look at and we think that they were the ones who had nailed faith. And I don't think any of those existed, but the people who just go off by themselves and just totally ensconced in God's word and in prayer, and it's just them and God. you can't have a vibrant walk with Jesus doing that because loving Jesus requires you to love others. If your love from Jesus does not cause you to pour out love onto other people, then you are not expressing the love that Jesus has lavished on you. You are bottling that up. You are keeping that to yourself. To live a non-communal faith is fundamentally self-centered. And we miss out on who Jesus is by not lavishing his love on others in the same way that he loves us. John tells us in his letters at the end of the Bible that if we love Jesus, then we will love others. The Christian faith was not designed to live alone. I think that there are parts of Jesus that you find in loving other people. We cannot come to know Christ in the way that he wants to be known if we are trying to do it void of loving others and serving others and doing his work. This is why the mission statement at Grace is connecting people to Jesus first, but also connecting people to people. Because your walk with God will not be as vibrant and as healthy as it can be if it is void of community as you share your faith. So community and our faiths is vitally important. It's why I think that community is God's primary tool for tethering, comforting, and sustaining his children. Community is God's primary tool for tethering his children to him, for comforting his children in their time of need and for sustaining them in their walks and in the commitments that he's led you to make. Now, I would offer you a caveat here. I need to, if you have notes, if you're a note taker, please write this in your notes. Community is God's primary tool dash outside of heaven. It's God's primary tool this side of heaven to tether us and to sustain us and to comfort us. Because he tethers us with his son. He sustains us with his spirit. He comforts us with Jesus as he weeps with us. But these things, this community I'm going to show you is the way that God gives himself time to work in your life to bring you to a place where you're walking with him. It's the way that God the Father throws his arms around you in times of trouble. It's the way that God comes beside you and sustains you when your faith and your commitments are faltering. So I do not at any point want to replace the work that the Holy Spirit and God the Father and Jesus are doing in our lives and moving in us, but I do want us to see that community is often the tool that they use to work powerfully and effectively in our lives. I say that it's the primary tool for tethering, for kind of keeping us attached to the faith, even at times when we might be wandering off. With that in mind, I'm going to share something with you that I really am not sure that I'm all the way ready to share, because if I share it and then I don't do it, I'm a failure and a quitter. But last week, I committed with some friends of mine to run a half marathon at the end of February. I committed to do this because I'm fat now, and I need to. Somebody asked me before the service, why is your shirt tucked down? Like, are you being serious today? I'm like, no, no, I'm fat. I need to be able to blouse a little bit for the camera, you know? But I'm sharing that with you because if you know me well, you know that I've got a group of really good buddies. One guy I've been best friends with since I was five years old, so we've been friends for 35 years. And then there's eight of us total. We've been friends together, all of us, for at least 20 years. And we talk on this app called Marco Polo. It's probably for high school girls, but we love it and we use it to talk back and forth. We talk every day. And so there's eight of us and we legit, we talk every day. Whatever's going on in the world, whatever's happening in sports, whatever's happening in our lives, we talk about it. Just this morning, I was watching my friend, he dropped his daughter off at college yesterday and was telling us how emotional he got about it. And I'm in my office getting emotional about Lily starting kindergarten tomorrow. And if I talk about it for too long, I'm gonna get emotional in front of you. So we talk about stuff all the time. And then we have different threads for different topics. You know, different things that some of us may wanna talk about, but not everybody does. Anyways, we've got one for exercising. I can't tell you the name of it. There's a cuss word in it, but we've got one for exercising. And I started it. I started it back in January. I was like, guys, I'm fat now. I think I want to start eating well. I think I want to start exercising. Is anybody with me? And seven of them were like, yeah, let's do it. My one buddy, Tim, God bless him. He does not care. And I wish I could be more like Tim. But the rest of us were in there. And so we're encouraging each other every day, right? But eventually, I just stopped caring. I kind of fell off the wagon. Having a nine-month-old or an eight-month-pregnant wife will do that to you. And then so will having an infant and a three-month-old. It kind of takes you out of your regular rhythm. So it's been more difficult, and I kind of just lost my desire to do it, and to the point where they were daily talking about their workouts and the stuff that they're doing and yada, yada, yada. And I would just skip. Like, I wouldn't even listen. I would just fast-forward to the last one, hit play, skip to the end of that one, and so that those didn't show up as new, because I don't know. You people that just leave notifications on your phone, I don't know how you live with yourself. So I would have to go and just skip all the way through it, right? Ignoring it. And then I even became the devil on the shoulder of the people. They would share sometimes when I would listen, like, I didn't do anything today. I've been eating like crud lately. I just don't feel good about myself. And then I'd go out there and be like, come on over. It's great over here. There's barbecue and sweet tea. This is wonderful. Just buy larger fishing shirts and you're good. Like you can just let it all hang out. It's really, really great. It's good over here. But somewhere in that week and a half ago, my buddy got on there and he said, hey, I found a half marathon in Greenville and I think it would be fun if we would train for it together and try to run it together. And something about it, I don't know what it was. I don't know. I had some weakness that day and I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Like it caught me on a good day. And I said, let's do this. Let's do it. And they were all very surprised that I was into it. But now I think there's five or six of us who are going to do it. And I'm only a week and a half in and I'm just a slow lumbering mess. As a matter of fact, if you live in my neighborhood, Falls River and then Bedford or whatever, and you see me running, can you just do me a favor and avert your eyes? And we'll just both pretend like that never happened. Do not honk at me or wave. I do not want to know that you saw me. I'd just like to live in this world where no one can see me lumbering down the road. But it's been fun to get back to it and to begin to train and begin to exercise and share that with my buddies. And I feel more inspired now to do this than I have in a long time. And I really think it might stick. So barring injury, which is more of a factor than it's ever been in my life, Lord willing, I'll run that thing in February and I'm looking forward to doing that. I share that story because I believe that this is what Christian community does with us for the church. To be a Christian for any amount of time is to go through a season of wandering. It's to go through a season where I was once committed, I once cared very much about my spiritual health, I was once very consistent in going to church and going to small group and reading my Bible and praying on my own, and I can remember seasons of vibrancy in my life, but now I'm just, whatever you want to call it, I'm in a rut, I'm wandering off, I don't feel it right now, I just am not, I'm going through some things and I just not sure that I can really connect with God. I'm not really sure that's a thing that I want. To be a Christian is to have gone through a season of wandering and probably not just one. And what community does is it keeps us tethered to our faith, even in times when we're not necessarily very committed to our faith. I didn't leave that thread because I like my buddies. I wanted to know what they were talking about. I wanted the community there. Even though I wasn't engaged in what they were engaged in, even though I wasn't pursuing what they were pursuing, I didn't want to totally detach myself because I thought maybe one day I will. Plus, I want to know what my friends are talking about. I don't want to have FOMO. So I stayed in there. And then one day, because I was tethered to that group by the community in that group, something caught me right. And I said, yeah, I'm going to make that choice for my health or for my children. Church community does this too. As we're going through a season of wandering, maybe we're not feeling faith right now. Maybe we're not super committed to it. Maybe we're not doing the things in private that we know we ought to be doing, but we keep showing up because we love the people in our small group. We keep showing up because we love to serve on Sunday morning. We keep showing up because that's our community and we don't want to miss out and those are our people. And then one day when you're at church or your small group or you're having a conversation or one day God speaks to you. He shows you something. You have an experience that moves you. Something catches you right. And that's what clicks and you re-engage in your spiritual life and you begin to pursue Jesus again. Our community tethers us to God in a very real way. Don't raise your hand, but I would ask you, those of you who are Christians, has there been a season of your life where if you didn't have Christian brothers and sisters who loved you and who just accepted you, not who came after you and got onto you and tried to convict you for the decisions that you were making, but who simply loved you, have you had seasons in your life that if it weren't for your Christian community tethering you to your faith, that you would have walked away from it entirely? Yeah. Or you're not being honest. God places us in community because he knows there will be times when we wander, and when we do, he's tethering us about this wandering at the end of his book. he writes this, my brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Not only do we have brothers and sisters who love us as we begin to wander and tether us to our faith and kind of draw us back to God as God works on our souls to soften them back to himself. But we also have the opportunity in Christian community, in church community, to be the one that pulls back a wandering brother or sister. To be the one who just consistently loves, who just consistently shows up for, who just consistently says, I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to love you. I'm here to enjoy you. Not a project friendship, deep, meaningful friendship. When we express that with one another, when we express the kind of community that I've seen at Grace, we are used by God to tether people to their faith and draw them back towards him. You are a tool in his hand used to draw back a wondering brother or sister by simply maintaining community with people even if it feels like they're wandering. So those of you who have wandering friends, which, has there ever been an easier time than now to wander away from the church? Continue to love them. Continue to be that tether that lets them know anytime you want to come back, we're here, we love you. And you can be a brother or a sister that is blessed according to James as we do that. The community here is absolutely a huge way that God keeps us tethered to him and to our faith. Community is also an enormous tool in the hands of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit as they seek to comfort us. We're told in Psalms that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, that he saves those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we're at our lowest, God is at his closest. I've preached from stage many times, John 11, 35, the miracle of that verse. It's the shortest verse in the Bible that says that Jesus wept when he met Mary in her sorrow at the loss of her brother Lazarus. Jesus' response was to weep with her. And we get to preach and we get to claim and we get to know that we have a Jesus who weeps with us. And that's wonderful. But have you ever thought about how he does that? Have you ever thought about how God brings himself close to the brokenhearted? Will he bring his presence and his spirit close to the brokenhearted? Yes, absolutely he will. And he will speak into difficult times. Just yesterday, I was sitting on my porch swing and we've had a difficult couple of days and I felt pretty stressed. And I was just sitting there in the rain because that's what I love to do. And it was a good storm yesterday. And there was just this moment where God spoke some encouragement into my life. And it instantly gave me a peace. And so God will absolutely do that and comfort us in that way. But have you ever considered that the church community itself is also how God wraps his arms around us? Have you ever considered that our church community crying with us is also how Jesus weeps with us? Have you ever considered that that might be why Paul tells us to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn? Because that is the expression of the very body of Christ hurting with those who hurt. Jen told me as I was talking through this sermon with her, she said, you got to tell the Lisa story. And I'm actually glad she's not here. Jen's not here this morning, because we'd be a sobbing mess. But if you've been going here since the end of last year, at least, then you likely know that in December of 2020, December 29th of 2020, just to cap off a real humdinger of a year, we lost Jen's dad, John, to pancreatic cancer. That's who our son is named after. And so in the months prior, Jen had been down there a lot. They're located in Athens. Jen had been down there back and forth a lot. And at some point she came home. After Thanksgiving, she came back with me and we were home. And John has a brother-in-law named Edwin who's a doctor. And Edwin and Mary stayed with John. And Edwin told me, Nate, go back home, take your family. We don't really know what's going on with John. But when you need to be here, when it's time for family to be around him, we'll call you. I said, all right. So we came back. We were back for about a week. No, it was just a couple days. It wasn't even a week. And it was the Sunday of December 6th. And at the time, we weren't meeting in person because we'd had a COVID flare up, and so we were just chilling out for a little bit. And so I had to come that morning on December 6th, and we did a live service. So we had worship worship and then I was to preach, right? And five minutes before the service started, my phone rings and it's Edwin. And he says, you need to get down here. So I said, all right. So I called Jen. So we need to get down there. I'm going to go ahead and preach this sermon. And then we'll hop in the car and we'll go home. Let me tell you something. I have no idea what I preached December 6th. I have never been less present for a sermon in my whole life. If you watched it and got something out of it, the Holy Spirit is good, okay? Because my mind was not on that sermon. And I got done and things felt so urgent that I literally, and I never do this, I just pulled off my mic and everything. I set it down. I got right in my car and I drove away. Steve was still playing. The band was still going. Folks were still here. I just got in my car and I left. And when I got in my car, I texted Steve and Kyle because they were both here that morning. And I said, hey, I'm so sorry for leaving so quickly. Here's what's going on. We got to head home. And I go home. I get Jen and we're scrambling to get out the door. We scrambled to get out the door so quickly that to pack for this trip, I just opened up the biggest suitcase I have and dumped all my dirty clothes in it and then grabbed clean clothes and threw them in there, zipped it up, and we headed out the door. I can do laundry where I'm going. I don't know how long I'm going to be there. But that's the kind of urgency that we were trying to get out the door with. In the middle of that, somebody rings our doorbell. And we're like, who's ringing our doorbell on a Sunday morning? And we look, and it's Lisa Goldberg, Steve's wife. And she's at our door, and clearly Steve had called her or texted her and told her what was going on. And see, Lisa's mom passed away of pancreatic cancer a few years prior. Actually, right before, right as Steve and Lisa were moving here to become a part of Grace. And she knew the road that Jen was about to walk. So Jen goes and answers the door. And Lisa has a little gift bag prepared for her and hands it to her and just gives her a hug and starts crying. And Jen was telling me about it this week, and she said she can't even remember Lisa saying any words. Maybe I'm sorry. They just hugged for a really long time. And then we got in the car and we left. And that hug and those tears meant more to Jen in the following weeks than they did in the moment. Because in the moment, she didn't know the hell that she was about to walk through. But Lisa did because she had walked it. And so that provided her with comfort as she walked through that period. You can't tell me that that morning wasn't Jesus coming to our door and wrapping his arms around my wife. He did. That's how he weeps with us. That's how he comforts us. That's why he tells us to weep together. Because when we do those things, we're the hands and feet of God. We're the hands and feet of Jesus wrapping ourselves around people who are hurting. That's how God expresses his love to us. That's how we express ourselves as the body of Christ. He places us in community so that our community can comfort us when we need it. So that he can be close to the brokenhearted. So that we can experience having a God that weeps with us. That's what community does. And it also sustains us. And this is my favorite. Community sustains us. There's this great picture in Exodus. Exodus chapter 17. I'm just going to tell you the synopsis of it, but the story is in verses 8 through 16. I'm going to be a mess. David, can you go get me a tissue? Do you mind doing that? Thank you, sir. Oh, Wes is on it. Thanks, Wes. That's why Wes is an elder, because he does things like that. Oh. That's why Cindy's a resting elder. Thank you. All right, give me a second. I'm sorry. Especially if you're watching online. You're just going to watch me turn my back. All right. Does anybody else need some of these? I saw a couple of tears out there. In Exodus 17, there's a guy named Amalek who's brought his armies against Israel. Moses is the head of the nation at this point. Joshua is his general. Moses is too old to lead people into battle. And so Moses tells Joshua, you go down into the select some men, go down into this valley and you fight Amalek. And as you fight him, I will be up here and I will have my hands raised to God. And as long as my hands are raised to God, then you will win the day. And Joshua says, okay. So he goes down and he begins to fight Amalek. And as he's fighting Amalek, Moses is on the top of the mountain with his hands raised. And as his hands are raised, then what he said comes true. And God is with Joshua and Joshua is winning the battle. But battles are long and Moses is old. And I guarantee you, he had lived a life of shepherding for 40 years. If you wanted to have a hold your hands over your head contest, he would crush everybody in this room. But at one point or another, no matter how strong you are, you'd get fatigued. And he needed to take a rest and let the blood get back in his shoulders. And when he would rest, the army would begin to be defeated and the battle would go towards Amalek. And so he's in this struggle of trying to hold his hands up, but not having enough strength to do it. And they're losing the battle if he can't hold his hands up. So what happens? Well, his brother Aaron and his friend named Hur, H-U-R, are next to him and they find a rock and they put a rock behind him and they tell him to sit on it and then they stand. I love this picture. They stand next to him and they hold his hands up so that he doesn't have to anymore. That's the best picture of community in the Bible. Because each of you, your husband, your wife, your friend, your Christian, your son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, if you're a woman in this church who's married and you have children, you've got a marriage that you're holding up, that you're offering to God. You've got children that you're trusting to God. You've got concerns in your own life. You've got your own faith that you need to carry. You've got your own stresses and your own anxieties and your own worries, and you're facing those battles. And life is long, and I don't care how strong you are. At some point or another, your hands get tired. At some point or another, you think, I don't know if I can do it with this marriage. I don't know if I have the energy it takes to make this thing go. I just don't know if I can pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can continue to love these kids the way they need to be loved. I don't know what to do. I can't pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can walk in faith. I just can't see it. I have so many questions. God's disappointed me in these ways. I just don't know if I can keep doing this anymore. And when you're on your own, you're right, you can't. This is why we're placed in community, for our friends to come up beside us and grab our hands and say, hey, buddy, I got you right now. I will fight for your marriage right now. I will hold your hands up and fight for your faith right now. I will stand beside you and hold your hands up for your children and for your business and for your health and for your love of Christ right now. I will stand in this gap for you, and I will be the strength that you don't have. That's what community does for us. Our friends come alongside us, and they hold our hands up, and they give us the energy and the strength for the battle that we can't fight right now. And that's what community offers to others. This is why I think that community, this side of heaven, is the most powerful and effective tool that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit use to tether us to him, to comfort us, and to sustain us in our faith and the commitments that he's led us to making. And I'll end with this because I think this is important. Community is a choice. It's a choice. That kind of community, that kind of community where someone shows up at your door just to wrap their arms around you because they know what you're about to walk through, that kind of community that grabs your hand and holds you up when you can't do it, that kind of community that loves you when you're wandering and keeps you tethered to your faith so that you can wander back. That kind of community, that doesn't happen by default, man. We don't just stumble into that. That kind of community we show up for. Sometimes in small groups, I'll talk about it in a second, we sign up for. And then we let the Lord do his work in bringing us together and knitting lives together. We have to choose that community. Just last night, some friends of ours had a birthday party. And our childcare fell through, and so we had to figure out what to do. And so we decided that Jen was going to go to dinner, and they were going to go to drinks afterwards. Jen was going to go to dinner, and then when she got home, I was going to go and have a drink or two with our friends and then come back. That's what we decided we were going to do. Well, Jen stayed at dinner until like 9.15. I needed her to be back at like 6.15. Do you think, listen, I don't know how well you guys all know me. You think I wanted to go anywhere at 9.30 on Saturday night? No, I was in my gym shorts with paint on them and a big baggy t-shirt and Crocs and I was unshowered. I didn't want to go anywhere. But I also knew that I couldn't get up here today and preach about community if I wasn't going to prioritize my own. So they got Saturday night and ate and I showed up just how I was dressed. And we had ourselves a grand old time over at, I think, Tonic in Wake Forest. We have to choose community. It's not always convenient. You're not always going to want to go to small group. You're not always going to want to prioritize it. Parents of elementary and middle school age kids, you'll never be in a busier season in your whole life. It's so hard right now to prioritize small group. Do it. Community is a choice. It's an essential tool that God has placed in our life to bring us closer to him, to experience his love of us. In a minute, I'm going to talk more about small groups. But I want to encourage you here at the end of the sermon to sign up for them. If you're not in one, join one. Step into this community and let's begin to pursue it together and let's let God use this place to further connect us to him. Let's pray. God, thank you for you. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for who you are. God, thank you for our friends. Thank you for the people who love us, who we get to share life with. Thank you for our brothers and sisters who draw us back in our wandering. Thank you for the ones who comfort us. Thank you for the ones who sustain us and hold up our hands when we are too weak to do it. God, give us the desire and the conviction to choose community. To choose to live our faith with those around us. Remove any obstacles that we might have, whether fabricated or real, and knit us together, God, as a church family, that we might love one another well, that we might express your love for one another well. That we might support and sustain one another well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. It's so fun to watch myself for two minutes before I preach every week during this series. This is the third part in our series, Big Rocks, where we're talking about the large priorities in life. And this week, I want to talk about having a Jesus-centered home and a Jesus-centered family. So this, I will tell you up front, is family-centric. But it applies to having a Jesus-centered marriage. If you're a single person, there are principles here that we can absolutely apply to having a Jesus-centered life. But when I throw out that term, Jesus-centered home, I think a lot of us would go, yeah, we have one of those. Like our home is a Jesus-centered home. But I want to kind of challenge you up front on that by just making this simple point. A pro-Jesus home is not the same as a Jesus-centered home. A home that's pro-Jesus, if we would say, yeah, we got a Jesus-centered home, well, is it a pro-Jesus home or is it a Jesus-centered home? For instance, the Rector House, our home, is a Kyle Tolbert pro-home. We are pro-Kyle Tolbert. Thank you. Thank you for that. He's running sound today for me, so a little less pro-Kyle right now. But overall, the Rector Home is a pro-Kyle home. We like him. We hope things work out for Kyle. I bet most of the homes in this church are pro-Kyle homes. We want the best for the guy, right? We hope things work out for Kyle. We hope that he has good days. We're fans of what he does. We like DJ KT and Christmas Kyle and Easter Kyle and Summer Extreme Kyle. We like all the versions of Kyle, right? But it's not a Kyle-centered home. We don't pray every day that John and Lily will become more and more like Kyle as they age. We don't wake up going, what can we do? What can we implement in our home to get our children to be closer to Kyle, right? Like we don't do that stuff. We don't have WWKD bracelets, right? We don't have what would Kyle do, like anywhere in our home home. We're pro-Kyle home. We're not a Kyle centered home. I think a lot of us have pro-Jesus homes. We're foreign. We hope things work out for him. We want his will to be done. We might pray that sometimes. We support, in this house, we support Jesus. There's no more, I don't mean to step on any toes. If I do, I'm a little bit sorry, not a lot of it, sorry. There's no more pro-Jesus sign in a home than at Christmas time when you see the poster or the postcard or whatever it is of Santa kneeling at the cross. Like in this house, first Jesus, then Santa. Santa kneels to Jesus here. We are pro-Jesus, even during Christmas. Good job, right? We have pro-Jesus homes. Do we have Jesus-centered homes? Do we have Jesus-centered conversations? Do we wake up every day thinking, what can we do? What can we implement so that our children grow more closely to Jesus? What can I do to make Jesus the center of my life? What can we do to make Jesus the center of our marriage? What kinds of things can we implement to make sure that the relationships in this house, the things that happen in this home are things that revolve around Christ? And so to that end, I wanted to talk this morning about actually having a Jesus-centered home. And I'll tell you this up front, okay? As I was thinking about the sermon and the best way to approach it, and really, most of the time when I'm thinking about a sermon, I'm thinking, how can this be maximum helpful to the people who got up and showered and brushed their teeth and came today? Like, how can this be maximum helpful for you? And so as I thought about that, I really didn't think it was worth investing a ton of our time in this idea of having a Jesus-centered home. I didn't want to come in this morning and try to convince you to have a Jesus-centered home or leave with this compelling vision of what can happen when Jesus is the center of your home. Not because I don't think a compelling vision is worth having, but because I think you're probably already with me on that. Like you got up in the summertime and you came to church and your kids are over there or you're here or whatever it took you to get here, you're here. So I think I'm going to assume that a majority of us, I'm not saying that everyone in here is in on this hook, line, and sinker, but a majority of us in here, if I could talk to you and say, do you want to have a Jesus-centered home, you would say yes. So I'm going to assume that we came this morning, you didn't wake up thinking, boy, I really want a Jesus-centered home. But when I first started mentioning it, I'm going to assume that you're with me and that this is a thing that you'd like to pursue. This is something that you'd like to implement. So to that end, a couple things. First of all, my goal for you today, if you have someone to drive home with today, is to have a family meeting in the car. It's to schedule a family meeting in the car on your way home. If you have children, I want you guys, my goal is for you guys to schedule something with your children to talk about some things that you're going to do. I want mom and dad to talk about how can we make this a more Jesus-centered home. I want husbands and wives to look at this and go, okay, there's some things that we can implement. How do you want to, which of those seem practical? Which of these seem like something that we can actually do? So my goal is for you guys, to whom it's applicable, to have family meetings as a result of today to talk about how to implement some of these things. Also because of that, this is just a ridiculously practical sermon. I'm going to give you six suggestions of things that you can do to have a Jesus-centered home. Because again, I wanted it to be maximum helpful. I didn't want to bring you in, talk to you about having a Jesus-centered home, and then send you home with no practical ideas, just leave you to search Google and figure it out on your own. So this is the place where we're going to do that. Our guiding passage today is found in Deuteronomy chapter six. So if you have a Bible, it's the fifth book of the Bible. Deuteronomy chapter six is just a sideline. This doesn't mean anything. Deuteronomy, the word Deuteronomy literally means the law repeated. So Deuteronomy is like a synopsis of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Okay. So if you really want to know what's going on in those three books, Deuteronomy will kind of give you the highlights for better or for worse. And it finishes up the narrative of that portion of scripture. But in this portion of Deuteronomy, they had just received the law, and Moses is telling them how they are to teach it to their families, how they are to implement this as a culture. How are we going to learn this law, to breathe this law, to obey this law as a culture? Here's how we're going to do it. This is what he says. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. He's talking about the law. You shall teach them diligently to your children. And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your. When Moses is telling them, this is the law of God, this is our religion, this is our faith. Here's how we're going to implement this countrywide, nationwide. To us, it'd be nationwide. To them, it was peoplewide. The Hebrew people, this is how we're going to implement that law. You're going to teach it to your children. You're going to write it in your homes. You're going to keep it on your hands and on your head. To this day, if you go to Jerusalem, you go to the wailing wall, you will see some Orthodox Jews, some men who have it, literally, phylacteries, I think is what they're called, tied to their head and tied to their wrists with these elaborate leather bands in obedience to this. This is how they said that we are going to learn God's word and learn the law and learn our faith. And what's interesting to me is he does not say, diligently take your family to church, diligently go to synagogue, diligently go to the tent when we set it up and we have the sacrifices. No, no, no. And he doesn't say, listen to your pastor, listen to your priest. He doesn't say, make sure the kids get to youth group. What's he say? He puts it all on the parents. You teach it to your children. How's this faith going to go forward? You teach it to your kids. You teach it in your house. You teach it in your house. We'll teach it in our house. And the next generation will do the same thing. And somewhere along the lines, we kind of lost this a little bit. Where we bring our families to church and that's where they get their Jesus. But our families need to be learning Jesus from us, from the parents. So the other thing that I want to say about this as we apply it to our lives, this verse is talking about the law, the Ten Commandments, the law of God. However, the New Testament teaches us that Jesus perfected the law. Jesus himself said that he did not come to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it. Romans tells us that he perfected it. And so not in every case in the Old Testament, but in this particular case and others like it, I think it's fair to apply what God wanted his people to do with the law, to apply that to his New Testament people and say, this is what God wants people to do with his word and with his son. So teach our kids the word. Talk about it. Write it on our houses. Keep it in your head. Keep it in your hands. This is how we are to have a Jesus-centered home. This is how we are to be obedient to this command in Deuteronomy. I think the same impetus still sits on us to center our lives and our homes around Jesus and around God's word. So how can we do that? What are the practical ways to be obedient to Deuteronomy, to have not just a pro-Jesus home, but to have a Jesus-centered home? Well, the first thing is the most obvious one. It's where all of your heads went, so I just thought I would go ahead and get it out of the way and say it up front. Family devotions. Have family devotions. In your marriage, read something together. Talk about what you're reading in the Bible. Even if you're not reading the same thing, you're not on the same reading plan, you're doing different small groups, you're doing whatever, read it and talk about it together. But for those who still have children in the home, have family devotions. And I know that that feels intimidating. I don't even have my own devotions. How am I going to do a family devotion? This is a good way to learn them. And here's the thing. Your kids have never had a family devotion either. They don't know that it sucks. They don't know that you're not good at it. So just start. They're not going to know that you're not any good at it. And you'll get better. And you'll figure it out. And here's the thing that I bet most of the parents in this room don't know. Do you know that every week, one of Erin Winston, our children's pastor, one of her volunteers, every week, puts a piece of paper in your hand when you pick up your child that has prompts, that has devotional prompts on it for three to five days of the week. Age appropriate according to what they talked about in that room and in that room over there on the other side of the aquarium store. According to what they talked about, she puts a piece of paper in your hand with prompts that are age appropriate. They get more and more detailed as your child ages to help you have these conversations and have devotions in your home. She also last summer gave to all the families a devotional book and has a ton of resources for you. So a devotion is just a time where you sit down, you read usually just a verse of scripture, you reflect on it as a family, and you move on. So if we want to have a Jesus-centered home, one of the first things we can do is implement some regular family devotions in our house. You can do it. Moms, dads, step up to the plate. It'll be all right. You can do it. Married people, have your quiet times. Don't hold each other accountable. Don't pester each other about it. That doesn't work. I don't think that works in a marriage. If that works in your marriage, that's fine. I'm not advocating that, but every now and again, you should say, hey, what have you been reading? What have you been learning? That's a good conversation to have. The next thing that I would tell you to do to have a Jesus-centered home is to have public quiet times. Have public quiet times. And what I mean by that is quiet times that are visible to the rest of your family. I don't mean put on your cool jeans and go to Sola and read your Bible like a lonely hipster. I don't mean that. I mean, read your Bible in a place where your family can see you. I've told you guys this before. Growing up, I would come downstairs to go to school in the morning as a teenager, And every morning I would see my mom's Bible open to a different portion of scripture. And I would see a mug of coffee that was almost all the way gone every morning. And I knew that she was praying for me every day. And I knew that she was reading God's word every day. And I'm going to tell you something. When she told me the Bible says this, or I think God says this, or I think you need to do this, I gave her words more weight because I knew that she was reading her Bible. My dad traveled all the time, but when he would travel, he would take his Bible with him. I saw that in my parents. I knew that they knew their Bible. I have been meaning to, I read my Bible when I get into the office. That's my quiet space because we have two young children. But I'm going to try, you can hold me to this, I'm going to try to intentionally shift to sit in the chair that you can see. I can see the stairs so that when Lily wakes up, she'll see me there doing my devotions. Steve, our worship pastor, he gave me this idea, and it's a great one. He listens to scripture on his phone. He's got a great porch with a great view of some woods. He'll turn Scripture on on his phone on the Bible app and just let that read it to him. So you could do that on your way to work or whatever, but he'll sit there, have his cup of coffee, and let the Bible app read Scripture to him. And I thought it was such a great idea that me and John, my three-month-old, listened to Colossians four or five times through this week while I was feeding him in the mornings or whenever else. And while he's doing that, sometimes his son Grayson will come outside and he'll say, what are you listening to? And he's saying, First Thessalonians. And he's like, can I listen too? Yeah, sure. So then they talk about it. Have public quiet times. Let your spouse see you doing that. Let your kids see you doing that. Make it a part of the regular rhythm of your home. It's not a thing that needs to be hidden. Another very simple thing to do to make your home a Jesus-centered home is to write scripture on your wall. It's simple. It's easy. But it's important. Pick a verse. Pick a passage that characterizes your family. That really depicts. Maybe it's the fruit of the Spirit that you want to hang on the hallway. Not so that your children will have the fruit of the Spirit, but so that you'll be reminded to have the fruit of the Spirit with your children, right? Put the verses in visible places in your home so that they become a part of your family life. When I walk in the door every day, one of our favorite verses is on the wall right when you walk in from the garage door, and it's a phrase out of Psalm 1611. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, neither me nor Jen put that there so that we could walk in and go, ah, fullness of joy. We didn't think about that. We just put it there because it's small and it fits on that wall. That's why we put it there. But when I walk in and I see it, there are times when I see it and it reminds me. In God's presence, there's a fullness of joy. And I remember that my family is one of God's biggest blessings to me. And so the joy that he intends for me is found in this place. It grounds me. Jen may not say that that feels true to her, but it's true sometimes. She doesn't know what I would be like if I didn't read that verse. Put it on your wall. We have something that we're going to put on our wall. It's written out. It's a prayer from Paul that we've had. Her cousin wrote it out. I've got to get it framed, and that's going to sit in our living room wall and kind of be our family verse. If you go into all of the children's rooms, Erin has selected a verse that's appropriate for that season of life, and she's put it on the wall. If you walk back through the hallway into the kids' room back there, the one thing you see down the hallway is love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. You see scripture everywhere. Put it in your home. Display it. Go into Hobby Lobby in Kirkland, those stores that are filled with what I call old lady clutter. There's tons of it there. Go look at the old lady clutter because some of it has scripture on it. Buy some pretty old lady clutter and then put it in your home. It's an easy, easy way to have things, to make, to follow this prescription from Deuteronomy that says write it on your walls. So legitimately do it. Find a verse, find a scripture, find a passage that's encouraging to you, find something that you want to implement with your kids and display that on your home and those verses will stick with them and they will stick with you. It's an easy, easy way to do it. Pray together. Number four is pray together often and about everything. Pray together often and about everything. Do we pray for our meals? Let's start there. Let's pray for our meals and let's do it in such a way that we're actually remembering who got us there and why we're there. Do we pray in the morning before we take them to school or camp or wherever it is they're going? Do we pray at night before they go to bed? Do you pray with your spouse? When your spouse is stressed, is your knee-jerk as a couple, let's go to Lord in prayer on this. Or is it the same, that stinks, and keep talking about whatever else. Listen, I'm not good at this either. But if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, I think one of the easiest things to do is to pray often and to pray about everything. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so got a bad diagnosis. Let's pray for them real quick. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so is pregnant. Let's pray that God, let's celebrate and then pray that God keeps this pregnancy safe. I'm stressed about this at work. I'm stressed about this for our kids at school. I'm unsure about this thing. Okay, well, let's stop and let's pray together. And to that end, I would just throw this out for you guys. Give your spouse permission to suggest that you pray. Give your spouse permission to grab the kid and pray about something. And here's why I'm saying that. Because if you exist in a relationship where there's never any prayer at all, and after hearing this sermon, your husband, the next time something comes up, reaches over and says, well, let's stop and let's pray about this. Your inclination is going to be to go, who the heck are you? What? It's weird. No. I'll pray about it later. Your inclination is going to be to look at them like they're a hypocrite. And it's going to be to say, you're only doing this because Nate said we should do it. Yeah. That's the reason. If it wasn't happening before today and it happens after today, then yeah, it's happening because I brought it up. All right? So let's just accept that up front and let's let prayer be brought into our marriages and into our homes. This refocuses us consistently and constantly on the Father. It refocuses us on his throne, on who he is and on who we are. It reminds you this is out of your hands anyways. There's nothing that you can do about this. It settles down control freaks and people who like to worry. If you do it with your children, doesn't it set this incredible pattern for them and their own life to go to the Lord in prayer all the time? To have this ongoing conversation with the Father? Doesn't it set them on a pace to be obedient to the instruction in Thessalonians when he tells us that we should pray without ceasing? To have a continual conversation with the Father. Let's implement prayer more in our homes. Let's give each other permission to work on this, to do this well together, to not look at each other like we're hypocrites when we suggest it. Let's start modeling that and bring our attention to God as spouses and then model bringing attention to God for our children. So that one day when they're grown up and they hear a sermon about incorporating prayer in the home, it doesn't feel like a weird, awkward thing for them. All right? We're already, we've lost. Okay, we're done. We failed, but they have a chance. Let's pray and teach it to them in that way as well. Number five, and I'm excited to get into this today. Know your role. I wanted to talk to you guys about gender roles in the house this morning. I'm just kidding around, I'm not doing that. Know your role. We're not talking about roles in the home. It's an easy way to say and to remember this idea. You are in your spouse's life. You are in your children's lives. You are in your family's lives. As a tool to be used by God to help them become the person that he created them to be. That's your role. Do you see why I reduced it to know your role? You're married to your husband because God is sanctifying him. God is changing him. God is working in him. God is developing his character and his spiritual maturity. And he is trying to learn to walk with God more and more every day. And the world is trying to get him to not do that. And you've been placed in that marriage by God to help him become the godly man that God wants him to be and created him to be. Husbands, you are in your marriages to help your wives become the most beautiful version of themselves, which is to say the most spiritually healthy version of themselves. You have been placed by God in that marriage to help them walk more closely with the Father than they ever have before. That's your primary role for your spouse, is to cultivate their spiritual life and their spiritual health and to see them flourish and become people who are passionately following Jesus. That's why God placed you in that marriage. It's not for you. It's not because you're a good decision maker or you're a bad decision maker or I'm not good at directions and she's good at directions, or we both like the same music, or any of that stuff, God placed you in that marriage first and foremost to be used as a tool by him to fashion your spouse into the person that God created them to be. To help them see more and more that they are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that they might walk in them. That's why he placed you in that marriage. And I think that sometimes we lose sight of that. I know I do. But when we think about our spouses, if we want to have a Jesus-centered marriage, our very first thought towards them ought to be, how can I help them grow into the person that God created them to be? The thing that we love most about them ought to be how much they love Jesus. It ought to be a heart for the Father. These should be regular things that happen in our marriages. And then the next step is our children. Know your role with your children. I'm going to say this to particularly parents with young kids. We have a five-and-a-half-year-old. Sometimes we like her more than we did when she was three, sometimes less. The summer entering into kindergarten is a challenging one. And there are things that Lily needs to learn. But I need to be constantly aware of and reminded of. My goal in parenting is not to have a six-year-old who behaves herself so that I don't get embarrassed in public circles. My goal is to raise a daughter, excuse me, who fiercely loves Jesus and requires as little counseling as possible. That's my goal. My goal is to raise a son and a daughter who care about the people around them, who love Jesus better than I do, who are humble, kind, meek, gracious adults. That's my goal. And if we get so caught up in parenting our children as if the goal was for them to not embarrass us when there's people around, as if the goal was for them to not be inconvenient during this season, which goodness, that's a great goal. But if we'll parent them knowing that the goal is to release grown-ups into the wild who love Jesus fiercely, who we respect because of that. So when Lily does something that she shouldn't do, when she displays an attitude that she shouldn't display, as a loving, godly parent, it's my role and my job to find the good part of that attitude that she just displayed. Well, you're very defiant. This can be good because you're going to be willing to stand up for yourself when you need it. Try not to stand up for yourself right now. That's not needed here. But at some point, it will be. Our role as parents is to fashion our children into the people that God created them to be as well. And, you know what's funny? That's why they're in your life too. I was talking with a buddy of mine, Shane, over there outside, and he just made mention to me. He said, man, I tell you, I just can't pray for enough patience right now. These kids are driving me nuts. And I just made the joke like, yeah, I never pray for patience. Because when you pray for patience, God just puts things in your life that requires patience, right? So I pray that God, would you give me grace and the patience that you're teaching me and can it be enough yet? Like I never pray for more patience. I'm happy with the current amount that I have because to get more stinks. But in a very real way, those children are shaping his patience into being a more gracious version of Shane. And God is using them as tools. All of the family dynamics are there to bring us closer to God, closer to the Father, closer to Jesus. So let's know our role within those dynamics and see that as our goal to help the people in our families and in our lives become the version of themselves that God created them to be by helping them to walk more closely with Jesus. That's your primary role in your home. Finally, number six is have Jesus-centered conversations. Talk about them. This goes back to the devotions. What are you reading? What are you learning? How's your faith? What'd you think of the sermon? What's your favorite worship song? What do you think God's teaching you right now? How's so-and-so's faith doing? Have Jesus-centered conversations. I saw this in the Bible. I didn't know this. Did you know this? I didn't know that this passage linked to this passage. Did you know that those passages linked together? Have conversations about it. Talk to your children about Jesus. Just bring them up in conversation. Erin puts out, our children's pastor, again, she puts out parent cues. Just these short little one-sentence things, I think on Instagram, she can give you a bunch of them if you reach out to her. Just little prompts to have spiritual conversations. And here's the thing about having Jesus-centered conversations, okay? You've got to bring them up a lot to have a good one. If you have a kid, you know that having a good conversation with your child is a really life-giving thing. It's also a fleeting thing. It's hard to do. Hopefully, if you have older children, you're having better, longer conversations with them, and you're getting to a place where sometimes you have really meaningful conversations with them. But those are still fleeting. And you know that to get to a good conversation with your child, whether they're four years old or whether they're 20 years old, to find a good one, you've just got to have a lot of them. I can talk with Lily all day long. Give me a Saturday. We can talk all day long about this and that as she runs in and out and whatever it is. And then at the end of the night when I think she's about to go to sleep and I'm ready to go downstairs and do something else, she starts talking. I'm there. I'm present. I don't know when the conversation's going to hit, so I'm just here for them. Jen is far better at that than I am. It works the same with Jesus-filled conversations. You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your spouse? You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your children? Bring them up a lot. Talk about it a lot. Make Jesus feel like a regular figure in your home so that it's not foreign when we start talking about spiritual things. And then you know what? They'll know how to talk about spiritual things too. And really and truly, it's not really possible to have these Jesus-centered conversations if we aren't ourselves Jesus-centered. So if you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. If you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. That's as simple as it could possibly be. All of these things, one through six, you could put, you could implement all of them in your house. You could have family devotions, public quiet times, write scripture on the wall, pray together often and always. You can know your role in fashioning others, and you can have Jesus-centered conversations. But if you're not centered on Jesus in your own life, all that's going to feel fake. All of it's going to feel fabricated. All of it's going to feel like you're trying to push a rope up a hill, and you're just going to stop. You're not going to do it. These things have to pour out of you. Now, the good news is they work synergistically. It's impossible to do those six things and that not orient you more on Christ and him be more the center of your life. But you can't do these things if he's not. It's going to feel unnatural and you're going to quit. So if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, and I think we do because you're still looking at me, then we've got to have a Jesus-centered life. Jesus talks about this in John 15 when he says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about these six things. You abide in me. And if we're having a Jesus, if we have a Jesus-centered heart, he's going to spill out of it. We're going to talk about him all the time. We're going to want to read his word. We're going to get caught reading the Bible. We're going to want to go to him in prayer in every instance. If we have Jesus as the center of our life, then we're going to want to fashion other people in a way that he becomes the center of their life too. It would be like Psalm 1 when it talks about the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night and he is like a tree planted by streams of water and everything that he does he prospers. If we want to have Jesus-centered homes we have to have a Jesus life. And if we'll do that, these things will pour out of us naturally. So, I hope you'll do some of these things. I hope you'll have a family meeting. I hope that you'll allow non-hypocritical prayer into your life. Not be hard on each other. Let's be supportive of each other. Let's have family meetings. Let's do it today. Before we go to bed at night, let's talk about this or let's commit to a time where we're going to talk about this. And if it seems intimidating to do all of this stuff, pick two. Do them this week. See what your home feels like when you do that. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. We confess sometimes that we have pro-Jesus homes. Would you help us grow to a place where we have Jesus-centered homes? Would you fill our hearts so much with you that you are what spills out? God, give us the discipline and the determination to have devotions with our family. Give us the openness, the honesty, and the desire to have spiritual conversations with one another. Would you fill our hearts and our lives and our homes more and more and more, God, so that what happens here on Sunday is simply a small supplement to what's been going on every day in our lives and in our homes. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.