Sermons tagged with Love

All right, sweet. Good morning, everyone. Everyone doing well? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Woo! Yeah, baby! All right. Sweet. Hey, I'm always for being applauded. I've already lost my notes. This is how this is going to go this morning. I'm all for getting applauded before I even have to do anything. So thank you guys so much for that. But as Nate said, I'm Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace. I'm so excited to get to speak to you guys this morning. I'm especially excited, honestly, because I have actually, probably about a month after we decided to do the book of John, I actually did a passage out of John with our students. We did John 4 and our students, and I had read it and kind of studied it a little bit, and something hit me in a different way than I'd ever been hit by this story before. And this is a story I think that many of us know. I know I've heard it tons of times, and it's incredible in itself, but I had realized something a little bit different that I said, you know what? After getting to know our students, I think this would really go well with them. And so I went through it, and it went well. I think that they really enjoyed it, and I really felt like the Lord had placed on my heart, Kyle, I have a bigger audience for you to tell this to as well. And as I realized, I was like, hey, we're doing a John series. I guess this is my moment. And so, you know, it's a pretty big story, and I was like, well, I don't know if Nate's going to let me do something that's that good, you know. But I went to Nate. I was like, Nate, what do you think about this? And he was like, well, you know, let's look at our times. Let's look at the schedule, blah, blah, blah. I didn't know. I didn't know what the schedule was looking like. I kind of had forgotten. I mean, I knew it was first weekend of March, but you know, I didn't know. And so we looked, and wouldn't you know that on the fourth week of John, I'd be able to talk about John 4. And I think that's incredible. And I think that there's something to be said about that. And I don't say that to say, get ready for me to knock your socks off. Get ready for the best sermon you've ever heard. I mean, are those things true? Yeah. No, they're not true. And if you're expecting that, then I'm sorry that it's going to be kind of a bummer. But what I will tell you is that clearly, that the Lord has clearly ordained the ability for me to be able to speak this to you this morning. And so for that, I would say, maybe he has something for you this morning. And so I would ask that you'd open up your ears and open up your hearts to maybe what the Lord has for you this morning. And I'm going to do my best to get out of his way and just let him take over. So anyways, let's jump on in. We're going to be in John 4. I'm going to kind of, we'll talk about it some. I'll read a little bit, you know, the classic one too. And so we're going to be in John 4, and basically at this time, Jesus and his disciples, they've been traveling. They're going from Judea to Galilee, and they stop in this town called Sakaar that's within Samaria. They stop there basically, you know, because they've been walking a long way. Like, I don't like to walk from here to Chipotle with Steve, and that's like right down the road, and I have shoes. So I don't even imagine where they were at, so I'd be stopping a lot. But anyways, they're stopped here, and the disciples go off to try to find some food for them as Jesus goes to the well to get some water. So as he goes, this woman comes up. It says around noontime or the sixth hour, both mean the same thing, that this woman comes and he says, woman, could you give me a drink? And that's where I want to pick up. I want to read her response real quick. Her response in verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? And I think to stop real quick, I want, I think it's very important to understand why she's asking that question. The reason in the cultural background and the cultural significance of that is the fact that Jews and Samaritan did not mix. They didn't mingle. They hated each other. It was an NC State fan and an UNC fan talking to each other. It just didn't happen. There was no love lost between the two people. And so this was a big deal that Jesus had crossed that cultural boundary to talk to this woman. In the same token, as she says, a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman, that not only that, but we know that in this time and in this culture, there was this hierarchy between men and women, that men were considered better, they were considered greater. And in the same respects, in this culture, men and women just didn't randomly, a guy would not go up and just talk to a girl in public, especially one that he didn't know. It just was not considered right. And in the same token, as we go a little bit more in depth into something that we know here, is that when it says that this was at noon when this woman approached, that what this is saying and what in this culture, as they would know and as Jesus would know, that the reason why this woman is coming at noon in the middle of the day when it's completely hot and she's completely alone and by herself, what we know about that, and we know that to mean that probably even within Sychar, even within her own people and in her own community, she was in exile. That she was an outcast. That she was somebody who was probably shamed and looked down on, that she was less than or considered unclean. And we realize, and as we get into this, that this is the truth and that she had basically these public sins. And so because of that, instead of going with the rest of the women early in the morning where it wasn't too hot, where they could get their water and come back and start working and doing their chores, doing the stuff that they had to do for the day, that this woman had to wait until everyone else was gone because she was so shamed. And so, hey, you cannot be here with the rest of the people. You have to come by yourself. You have to go in the heat of the day where, I mean, just to be real, probably not great. It was probably the worst. And not only that, but even just to consider the fact that she had to walk there every day by those people who had shamed her and who hated her. And so we know those three things. And the reason why I think those are important is because Jesus is about to talk about some incredible things. Jesus could give the message he gives this woman in a sermon, and it would do incredibly well. It's awesome. There's so much truth in this. There's so much awesome, great stuff in the love of Christ that he shares in this passage. But instead, he goes up to one woman. He walks past every boundary that has been placed culturally for her. And he says, you know what? I'm talking to you. I'm expressing my love to you because you need to hear it. And I think that that's incredible. And what I think that that shows us is that Jesus' love is boundless, and it's for everyone. It's not just for people who are Jews. It's not just for people who are men or who work in the church, who are in the church. It's for everyone. And I think that that's incredible. And so I want to pick back up, and we're going to start back in 10. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you holy water or living water. Sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. I would have given you living water. And she doesn't know who he is. She wasn't able to read the first three books of John before having this conversation. She didn't get to hear these great messages that Nate has posted online from the last three weeks. She doesn't know who this is. So she's like, okay, that sounds great, but you don't have anything to get the water, and the well is deep, my man. And so I just think that's funny, and I think that you should too. But in 11, it says, sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Ah, we've already read that. Sorry. We're going into, yeah what this living water is, it's this well that will spring up into eternal life, that it's this eternal well, this eternal spring where you never have to go back to the well again because you're forever satisfied, your soul is satisfied. And we understand what he means is God's love and the grace that's shown through Christ to us on this earth. We understand that he is pointing to, I'm going to die in a couple years and I'm going to for you, and then I'm going to be raised to life. And in the same way, if you'll come to me, you can experience this as well. This is incredible. It's awesome stuff. It's him saying, dude, look at this grace. This is offered to you, but she still doesn't get it. Instead, her reply, she said, the woman said to him, sir, give me this water that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. And I love that. She doesn't get it, but what she does get is I don't want to have to come back to this well and come back to the memory every day of the fact that I am completely isolated and completely alone. I don't have to walk past people trying my best to not make eye contact because I know they're looking down their noses at me. And this is not the main point of my message, but grace, may we never be that person. May we never be a place that people do not want to come back to because they're afraid of what people will think of them for a mistake that they've made, for a past that they have, for somebody who's sitting next to you right now that undoubtedly may mess up in their life. That we're always a place where you can come and you can experience the love of Christ with open arms coming in, and I don't care what you did yesterday because you're here today and I love you for that. May we be that type of church. Let's keep going. He told her, go, call your husband and come back. I have no husband, she replied. Jesus said to her, you are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you have five husbands and you've had five husbands and the man you are now with is not your husband. What you have said is quite true. Now, remember this moment because it seems random. It seems weird. It's always been weird for me. I've never really fully understood it, but I just said, you know what? This is a great passage, but this is what we're going to come back to. This is the meat of the passage, but I want to continue because I think it's imperative that we fully understand what Jesus is saying and who he is in this passage, and then we'll come back and see what that means. So let's just keep reading. I don't know if you have. Bibles need bigger print. You know what I'm saying? All right. Sir, the woman said, I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. And so basically what she's trying to deflect, trying to get, you know, like, okay, let's talk about worship for a bit. I can tell that you're a prophet. And so Jesus responds, and it's a little wordy, it's a little hard to understand, but basically what Jesus says is, let me tell you, first of all, the God that us Jews, the God that we worship is the one true God that Jews worship in truth because this God is the God. He is the only one true rightful God. But let me also tell you that a time is coming and a time has now come where not only is this the God of the Jews, but this is the God of all people, that this God created every person and loves every person. So a time is coming that not only will the Jews be able to worship in truth, but all people, Jew or Samaritan, will be able to worship in spirit and in truth. That when I die for you, that you have the ability to have the Holy Spirit inside of you, the same well that we've talked about that continues to come in, that you never have to go back. You're always forever satisfied. You have this eternal value and this eternal soul satisfaction. He says, this is going to be for all people, not just for Jews, but for Samaritans, for you as well. And so she responds and she says, basically she says, sir, I know that a Messiah is coming. I've heard that a Messiah named Christ is coming and that he's going to explain all of this to us. And Jesus says, I, the one you are speaking to, am he. This Messiah that you've heard about, that is coming to save all people, it's me. And I'm here to tell you that you're definitely right. And that I, as the Messiah, am here to love you. Not just to love people, but to love you. And how incredible is that? And how incredible is that truth? And if we just ended it there, it's like, oh my gosh, this is phenomenal. And like, how awesome is it that God is a God who loves everyone? And as I've read this in the past, I'm like, it's so great that not only does God love me, but God loves people who've sinned in drastic ways, people who are completely isolated, somebody who's dealt with adultery and seems like to continue to fall under adultery and probably other sins as well, as this passage alludes to. And I love that until I think, why was it in this passage? Why did he, she just asked for holy water, and then he changes the subject and says, come bring your husband. And so it's like, why, that's random, and that's weird. Why did you say that? And then the next question is, okay, so you did know that she didn't have a husband. You did know that she's had five husbands and that she's with her sixth man. You did know all of this. So then it just seems like she's putting the, that he's putting this lady on blast. Like he's just straight up calling this lady out and being kind of rude. And I hear that and I see that. And it also just doesn't make sense. Why are you doing it? But then as I, as I realized is there's no reason why this would be in here if it didn't completely connect with the rest of it. And what I think is that instead of him simply talking about her sin is that he is trying to get to the heart behind her sin. And when you get to the heart behind sin and when you start to think about it that way, it gets a little bit scarier for us. Because we, I don't, most people in this room have not been married five times and are on their sixth lover or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what the word is for that. Sorry, I said lover. But what I do think is that we all have hearts that are seeking out other things besides God. And what I do know is that what that means is we have sinful hearts. And so what I think is he's pointing at this and he's saying, you have been searching for value and worth and identity in men instead of in me. And so because of that, you're continuing to have to go back to this well, because it's never going to be enough. And so like I said, I know that we don't always have these stories. Like for me, like to give you a little background behind me, since I know I don't know all of you quite as well, and I haven't known all of you guys for such a long time, I think the best way to give you a little background behind me is to tell you a little bit about high school Kyle. High school Kyle was killing it with the braces game, aka had braces, like all of high school, which is great. Like, that's the time you want to have braces is high school. Like, you know, let the least amount of judgmental people around, you know, obviously. But no, I think the easiest way to really tell you is to kind of tell you what senior superlative I got. And yeah, I know, I know. Hold your plot. Like, I know I got a senior superlative. You guys are like, wow, this is a girl. I know, I get it. But chill, you know, I'm just a normal person just like you guys. But I, the senior superlative, so like, for those of you who don't know, or maybe you like forgot for whatever reason, but there's like, you know, most athletic, and there's like, most likely to succeed, most likely to be president, smartest. Like, I'm sure like if at Connor's school was like biggest sweetheart, he would, he had that unlocked, because he is the sweetest of hearts. Shout out to Connor. Everyone go meet him because he's great. But I didn't get any of those ones that were mentioned. I got most involved. And most of you know, it's like, oh, cool. That's great. That's whatever. Like, when you think about what most involved is, it's basically a participation medal of the superlative game. Like, literally, it's the participation trophy of superlative. It's like, Kyle, we know you worked so hard in school, and you did really well, but there's just people who did better. And we know you worked so hard in sports, and you played a lot of sports, but there were just people who were more athletic. And we know that you were, like, vice president of your class, you were in a lot of leadership roles or whatever, but, like, you're not going to be, you're not most likely to be president in this scenario. Like, you know, like, but you tried so hard, and so we have to give you something, and so here's this. And so it's really sweet, and I don't know, maybe my mom asked them if they would make that just to be sweet to me because she felt bad. But that's what I got, and we laugh and we joke about it, but at the same time, like, I did wear that with a lot of pride. I think it adequately described who I was and who I am, that I'm somebody who is very focused on succeeding. And I want to work as hard as I can to do the very best that I can in every scenario. You know, I wanted to make 100 on every single test. And it's funny how it goes. If I made 100, then I'd be, like, nervous about the next test. I'd be excited for a second and be like, oh, my gosh, now I have to make 100 on the single test. And it's funny how it goes. If I made 100, then I'd be nervous about the next test. I'd be excited for a second and be like, oh my gosh, now I have to make 100 on the next one. But then if I didn't make 100, if I made a 98 on the test, I was devastated and it was the end of my day. And I think some of us can relate to that. Some of us can relate to the fact that we so seek out success and the success is where we're driven. It's where our worth and our value comes from, and we don't quite reach it, then we feel like we've completely failed. And it takes, it like just messes with our hearts in the same way I wanted to be the guy who was known as somebody who worked really hard. I wanted coaches to be able to talk about, man, that guy's work ethic is incredible. Or to tell the players, if you had the work ethic, that if everyone had the work ethic that Kyle had, then we'd be a better team. Or I wanted parents and I wanted teachers to say, this is a great kid. This is a kid who loves the Lord. This is a leader. This is someone who I want my son or my daughter to grow up to have a faith like Kyle. And I say these things to say that these are not bad things. And I think so many things in our life are not bad things. But when I recognize where he's calling this woman out, it was the same with me. I sought so heavily to find my value and to find my worth and to even rest my identity into things outside of Christ, into being seen as a good person, into being lifted up. I can remember at Greystone, the last church I was at, I would be so excited to preach God's word. I would be so excited to get to talk to our students and I had something for them. I knew that the Lord was ready to speak through me to do that and I'd get done and I'd I'd feel great about it, and I'd leave, and I'd be super bummed out at home because not enough people said it was good. I didn't realize, and what I finally realized is this tweet by my man Timothy Keller. He's an older man. He's actually not a pastor anymore because he's retired. Incredible preacher, incredible writer, incredible tweeter. So the big three as far as I'm concerned for being a pastor. But he actually tweeted this week, and I was like, how incredible that he did this, and this is perfect. He said, sin is not simply doing bad things. It is also putting good things in the place of God. I realized, and it hit me pretty hard, that there are so many things in my life that I seek after. There's so many things that I try to find worth and value in, and it never is enough. I love the way that David Foster Wallace puts it. He's got a two-part last name, so you know he's smart. I may start doing my middle and my last name. So Kyle Jordan Talbert said this. So if you quote me, say that, because then people will listen to you. beauty and sexual allure, you will always feel guilty. If you worship power, you will always feel weak and afraid. Worship your intellect, and you will always view yourself as stupid and a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And let me tell you guys that anything you worship outside of God will end up eating you alive. And what is the issue with these things? What is the problem? Why is it? Why can't I find value in these? Because they're earned. Because you have to work as hard as you can to earn them. And anything that you earn, you are always on the verge of also being able to lose them. And there's always someone else. There's always somebody else who doesn't like you. There's always someone who doesn't laugh at your joke. There's always someone who doesn't approve. There's always someone better. There's always someone more successful. There's always more money to be made. When we focus on our success, when we focus on anything else besides God, then we're left coming up short. One scholar says, and I love this, he says, we seek to find our identities horizontally on earth when we have been hardwired to find them vertically in God's love. We've been created to be able to, we've been created to have a relationship with God, our Father. And that is where true eternal value and significance and satisfaction come from. We need to, we need something to change what our heart loves and what it rests in and what it fixes itself on the most. Jesus says he's the only object of worship that won't abuse you because you don't earn his love, his grace, and his favor unlike every other object of worship. And because the point of the gospel and the point of Christ's sacrifice is that the love and the grace that is given to us is given to us as a gift, as free. And so therefore, it is ours. We can't lose it. It's a perfect love and it is a perfect sacrifice that we only receive. And therefore, we're not at risk of losing it. I love, I wrote this one, so whatever. Maybe it's not good. I just kind like, I'm no longer those things. I'm no longer Carl and Suzanne's son. I'm no longer Jay's brother. I'm no longer Connor's coolest friend. I'm Kyle, child of God. And that's in your thing, but I don't want you to write Kyle. You can if you want. That's nice. I want you to write your name because I want you to realize that that is who you are. That's your identity. That's how Christ sees you. That's how the Lord sees you. It's his child. When the creator of the universe would send his son simply for a chance to have a relationship with you, there's not much more value and there's not much more worth you could ever feel than that. And it's a love that keeps coming and it keeps welling up all the way to eternal life. So what does that look like? What does that look like practically? Because it's a cool point. It's an awesome thing. But as my students know, I don't care at all that you understood my message. Like, if you understood my message and you talked about it and then you don't apply it, then who cares? It didn't mean anything. So what does it look like? And I think a very awesome, very cool example is Trevor Lawrence, who was the freshman quarterback at Clemson who won the national championship this year for football. He said he was in a press conference and they basically asked him about his nerves during the game. Ask Asked him like, you know, like, I don't know the exact question, but his response, I love his response. He says, no matter how big the situation is, I know it's not going to define me. It doesn't matter what other people think or say about me because I know what Christ says about me. My identity is in Christ. My value and my worth comes from what Christ says about me. And that was written in stone a long time ago. And so I don't have to spend all of my time worrying about what other people are going to say about me or what other people are thinking or if I am a great quarterback or if I choked or if I'm the best. I'm not worried about that because that's secure. And so does it mean that the Lord took away football because he gave up football in his heart to God? No. The dude won a national championship this year. But can you imagine how much more fun it was for him to play the game that he loves on the biggest stage, not worried about what everyone else thought of him, not trying to find his worth and his value based on the way that he played in that football game? What if that was the way you guys were at work? What if that's the way that we were in our relationships, in our family? What if we weren't solely concerned with having to find our value and having to find our worth by what people thought of us? And instead, we could simply just enjoy it. Enjoy life. Go through life with joy. Going through life knowing that our value and our worth and our souls are completely satisfied. I think it goes even further, honestly. I mean, like, the way that this passage ends, I absolutely love. Like, this woman who was completely isolated from her society and probably was shown, like, a true picture of love, maybe for the first time in her life. I bet her life was a pretty rough one. And so what happens when she finally realizes this? What happens when she finally understands who this man is and the love that he's offering her? She sprints down to Sicar and she starts yelling, you guys have to hear about this person. I think it could be the Messiah. I think it could be this person that we've heard about. He literally told me everything I had done in my life. You have to come find, you have to come see this person, hear from this person yourself. When Christ changes our hearts, when our value is in him, we care far less about what the culture would have us do, what our culture would have us do. We care a lot less about how other people see success. We care a lot less about how other people think we should parent, how other people think we should be as a friend, about what we should be concerned about, what we couldn't. This woman was completely isolated. She wasn't allowed to interact with any of these people. But when you realize and when you fully allow your heart to understand, realize, and be overwhelmed by the love of Christ, there's no way that it doesn't change the way that you live, the things that you talk about. And can I tell you that in such a cynical and fallen world, someone who's completely joyful, you can tell it on them. Someone who has a worth and has value that doesn't go away based on their current circumstance, people see it. And so they heard that and they saw this woman. I think they probably cared less about the words that she said and more just the fact that something incredible just happened to this woman who I probably haven't made eye contact with in years because she's been trying to avoid it because she doesn't want to be seen with shame. I think they cared less about what she said. I think they cared more about the fact that she was so changed in her heart that she would go out in total love and look like a completely different person in her everyday life. May we be those people. May we experience this living water. May we experience having value that is eternal, complete soul satisfaction. And may it change who we are. May it change what we look like. And may it be like the end of this passage where these people, when they saw this woman, they had to go see for themselves. Jesus made a pit stop into a three-day stop because these people wanted to hear what he had to say because they saw what he had done for this girl. May we have people in our lives who have to come see what's going on here, have to go see what's going on in this person's heart, because man, there's just something different about it. Let's pray. God, thank you for your love. God, thank you for your son, for his sacrifice. God, thank you for the fact that you literally show and offer your love to every single one of us, regardless of our past, regardless of our present, that God, if we would come to you, you offer love. And God, allow us to realize that this love is the only thing in this life that we need. And so instead of worrying so much about our current lives and what's going on in our future and what our past was, God, that we're simply able to rest in the peace of your love and the assurance that that brings us. Man, God, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sending your son to die for me for some reason. Thank you that you see me as a child of God, as a child of you. And God, I do just want to take a second to say thank you for whoever wrote this next song because man, they did a good job. We love you. Amen.

My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here, so thanks for being here this morning on this special weekend. Kids, thank you so much for being here. I know that I made these services too early for you on Metta weekend, and I feel terrible for you that you had to get up as early as you did, especially like the 15 girls that were all in the same house taking showers at the same place. Most of you are unshowered, and that's all right. But we are so happy that you guys are here. I will try to go quickly for you guys to keep you engaged. But while we had just a Sunday in-between series, we just wrapped up our Lessons from the Gym series. I'm going to tell you about our upcoming series here at the end of the service that I'm really excited about. I wanted to pause and focus on the church's responsibility with the next generation as we sit here at the tail end of Metta Weekend. All of these kids got here on Friday night and have been hanging out, learning about Jesus, talking about spiritual health, talking about sitting around the table, how their health affects other people for the whole weekend. And this is meant to kind of be the capstone for that weekend. And you know, a lot of y'all know that I cut my teeth as a student pastor. That's what I came up doing. So I've had a lot of weekends like this, a lot of weekend retreats, and I love them because there's so much, first of all, there's so much fun that was had. I got a couple videos texted to me last night of my wife lip syncing on stage. So it looked like that was probably a good time. If you text me, I'll be happy to send those out throughout the congregation. It looked like a good time. They were having fun. There's stories that come out of those weekends. We believe, as Connor was saying, in connection and friendship here. And so connection and bonds are formed over weekends like that that matter for a long, long, long time. So I believe they're hugely important. But most importantly, what happens over the course of those weekends, every time when you slow down, this happens to anybody, it's not just students, it's adults, it's everybody. When you slow down for 72 hours or 48 hours or however long it ends up being, and you just kind of cloud out everything else, you get rid of all the other stresses in life, and you just focus on what God has for you in this time, you always walk away with a desire to grow closer to Jesus. You always walk away with a little bit of more of a spiritual awareness, of an awareness of your spiritual health and a desire to grow in spiritual health a little bit. Weekends like this always generate these commitments and decisions that really excite me. Because some of these kids, I know them, they walked in this weekend and they have a faith, but as a result of this weekend, they're very likely, some of them going, you know what, I want to take my faith more seriously. Spiritual things matter to me now. I want my faith to be the most important thing in my life. I hope some of you guys made that decision this weekend. Some of them came in, I've seen that happen before. You come into a weekend like this and you're under the impression because you grew up in church that you're a believer, that you're a Christian, but then you go through the weekend and you realize, oh my goodness, I've never really known Jesus. And so for the first time in their life, they come to know Jesus. Other people come into the weekend and they know that they're not a believer. But by the end of the weekend, they are a believer. And it's phenomenal and powerful and important. And hopefully life-changing decisions have been made and will be carried out through the years. That's always my prayer. It's always my hope. And I always love to hear the stories. I can't wait to sit down with Kyle and to talk with Jen, my wife, who leads the upperclassmen girls, and hear the stories and the conversations and the commitments that came out of this weekend. And even as I get excited about those things, I've been in ministry long enough to, in the back of my mind, be wary of something that tends to happen. And it's going to feel, when I bring it up, like I'm being a little bit of a Debbie Downer. I don't mean to do that. Also, if your name is Debbie, that's a really stinky phrase for you. I'm sorry. I'm sure you're a lovely person. But I don't mean to be a downer about it, but whenever I have a weekend like this or see a weekend like this, I'm always reminded of a passage and a principle that we find in the book of Judges. Judges is in the Old Testament. It's, I think, the seventh book of the Bible off the top of my head. And it follows this book called Joshua. And in the book of Joshua, there's a man. Can you guess what his name is? His name's Joshua, and he follows Moses. Okay, so Moses has led the people out of slavery in Egypt. He's led them in the desert for 40 years. He's moved them around. He started the religion that we look to as Judaism. That's really the precedent to our religion. He began kind of our faith. He's given the Ten Commandments. He's written some books of the Bible. And now he's reached the end of his life. And the Hebrew people are on the banks of the Jordan River, and they're poised to cross and take over this land that was promised to their forefather Abraham several hundred years ago. But Moses sins. God doesn't let him have the privilege of doing that. And so there's a guy named Joshua that succeeds Moses, and he takes over leadership of the Hebrew people. And it's under Joshua's leadership that they cross the Jordan River. They go through what was then the land of Canaan, and they win these unbelievable battles. Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, some of you might be familiar with it. They didn't even have to fight. The walls just came down and team Jericho gave up, right? There was these five kings, the five kings of Ai that got together and conspired against Joshua. Overwhelming odds. And God gave Joshua power. He stopped the sun. He held it still. And Joshua won this incredible battle. So they sweep through Canaan, just conquering the cities, clearing out the land, and claiming it for God's people. Some of his tactics were so good that they still study them in war colleges now. Okay, so Joshua was a bad dude. He knew what he was doing. So they conquer the nation of Israel. They get there. They settle down. And then in Judges, they start their civilization. And so he looks at all the different people. There's 12 tribes of Israel. He looks at the head of all the tribes, and he says, okay, this is your land. This is your assignment. This is your land. This is where you guys live. And he divvies up the nation. And it's all settled, and it's all done, and God has done a great work. And then Joshua reaches the end of his life. In verse 6 of chapter 2 of Judges, you can just listen. It says, when Joshua dismissed the people. So he gets them together. He says, you guys go live in these places, and he dismisses the people after all these great victories. And the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. And then Joshua, the son of Nun, servant of the Lord, died at 110 years old. They buried him in the boundaries of a certain place. And then in verse 10 it says, And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. So the generation of Joshua, this triumphant generation that has seen all these miracles of God and has watched God do all these incredible things for them, and were by all accounts a very faithful and devout generation, they all were gathered and they went to their fathers. So that generation passes away. And then this verse happens, and it's a heartbreaking verse. It says, And then after that is just verses of how they messed up. it says, after other gods. And that happens to us too. We leave the faith and we begin to prioritize other things. To chase after other gods doesn't mean that we erect idols in our home. It simply means that in our life we prioritize something over our relationship with God. We value something more than we value God. That's what it means. And so that's what happened to the generation that forgot about God. And it's, to me, an ominous and a foreboding and a heartbreaking verse. We have this generation of people who were walking with the Lord, who were a devout people, who saw God move in incredible, undeniable ways. And their children rose up going to church, going to weekend retreats, doing all the things that you do in the church. But yet somehow they forgot about God. And they fell away. And they prioritized other things over God. And the truth of it is, this isn't just something that happens in the book of Judges that's a thousand-year-old principle. This is something that we see happen too. If you've spent any time in the church, you've seen it happen. I have a group of buddies, my closest friends in the world. I love every one of these guys. I would do anything to help them. They are my good, good friends. I hope that you have friends like this. It's eight buddies. We're on a text thread. One of them has been my best friend since kindergarten. We were in children's church together. I'm not making this up. His name's PJ. We were in children's church together. We're sitting there. We're eating. They gave us snacks. I don't know. It was almonds. And at the same time, we chewed up our almonds, and we showed them to the's daughter who was sitting across from us. And she was grossed out and we high-fived and we were best friends. And that was it. That's how it went. The thickest thieves ever since, me and Peach. And then I made some other buddies in high school. And all of us still talk all the time, every day. We find ways to hang out at least twice a year. We get somewhere, because we live all over the country now, but we get together, we hang out about twice a year at least. I love these guys. All of these guys, all eight of them, believe it or not, not that this is necessarily a good thing. I think that the church does a terrible job of pushing people into vocational ministry. Like if you're a good Christian, then you'll go find a way to get paid to be a Christian, when really we just need some more godly accountants. But anyways, all eight of these guys ended up at one point or another in their 20s going pro and getting paid to be Christians. So they were in vocational ministry. They did Young Life, or they worked at churches, or they made videos for churches, or whatever it was. We all at different points went into ministry. And so I just say that so that you know that every single one of them at one point in their life would have said that my faith is the most important thing to me. Three and I would say a half of them, that half would be offended if I called them the fourth, have totally walked away from the faith. Totally walked away. Began to encounter questions and issues and events in life. And they would look at me right now and they would say at the best, I'm agnostic. I believe that there's probably a God. I don't think anything beyond that. They've walked away from the faith. They're supportive of me. They cheer for me. They love what's happening here in Raleigh. But they don't affirm it. And they don't claim it. And the one who's the half, I say half because he would still say that he probably has a Christian faith, but it's no priority to him. And for me, it breaks my heart that these guys would grow up in the church. They have good parents who love the Lord. They were in church their whole lives. They grew up. They went into vocational ministry. They prioritized their faith as much as you can prioritize it. But yet in our 30s and now in our 40s, they've walked away from the faith. And I see some of them raising kids with no faith at all, and it breaks my heart. And you've seen it too. For some of you, that's your story, right? You grew up in church, you did all the things, you did the metal weekends, you got the t-shirts, you made the commitment, it was great. Then you got to college and independence happened and you fell away from the faith. And that happens. And I like to position grace to be right here. For those of you who are coming back to the faith after wandering off, I'm like, here we go. Let's go. Let's have fun. Come on. That's okay. And then what happens is a big life event, marriage or children or something like that, or profound sadness over an unexpected tragedy, some big life event will happen and bring you back into the faith and have you prioritize your faith again. And some of you, that's your story, and you've been walking with the Lord ever since to varying degrees. Others of us, we've watched this happen to other people. And it's a really, to me, sad thing, and it's a big, to me, indictment of the church. Because what's true is this doesn't just happen in judges. It's not an isolated thing with my group of friends. It's not unique to your story or to Grace or to some people that you know. Statistics bear out based on research by the Barna Group that a majority of kids who grow up in church, once they get to college, they leave church, they're out of the nest, they experience independence, a majority of kids who leave the church who are youth group kids walk away from the faith when they get to adulthood. A majority. Not some, not a lot, a majority. And that's a really sad statistic. I hate that statistic. I hate it so much that I'm bringing it up to cap off a really fun weekend. Sorry, team. Because I think if we talk about it and we ask essential questions about it, that this can actually be a hopeful and inspiring thing. And so in light of all of that, my story, your stories, the people you know where that happened, and just so we're clear, just as an aside, okay, I've seen so many parents who watch their kids walk into adulthood and walk through seasons where they don't have any faith. And I've seen how it breaks the hearts of parents. And I'm terrified of that. Jen and I talk about that all the time with Lily. But just to say it, it's entirely possible to do all the right things as a parent. It's entirely possible to make all the right choices and put them in all the right places and teach all the right things in your home and just have a child that needs to walk through a season of independence and for it not to be your fault. But all of that begs this question that I think we should answer and look at this morning. The question that our church needs to think about is what can we do to prevent generational fallout? What can we do to prevent generational fallout? What can we do, honestly, as a church this morning, what can we do to make sure that the decisions that were made this weekend stay intact? What can we do to make sure that they stay the course? What can we do to make sure that grace is not a place that sends good, godly kids to college only to watch them walk away from the faith? What can we do to ensure that here we don't have the story of judges and see a generational fallout? That becomes the question, right? And so I think that there are, the answer to this is multifaceted. There's a lot of decent ways to answer this question. I think this question is so important that as we are hiring the student pastor, we interviewed, gosh, we interviewed so many people. I looked at probably 60 to 80 resumes and so did Cindy and the rest of the team. And then we interviewed folks and we finally settled on Kyle. We were just getting tired of looking. We asked to every, Kyle's the best. He's the stinking best. We love that guy. We asked every one of those candidates when we got to the point where we were talking to them this question, what do we do to prevent generational fallout? We didn't phrase it that way, but that was the question, right? And like I said, I think there's a lot of answers to this, and the candidates gave us a bunch of good answers, but I think we see one really good answer that we often forget, that I think if it characterizes grace, we stand a good chance of preventing this cycle from taking place here. And it's a principle that we find in the book of 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy chapter 5, if you'd like, you can turn there. In 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to Timothy. Timothy's a young pastor. Paul is reaching the end of his life, the end of his ministry. Paul was a guy who went around planting churches and then writing letters back to the churches to encourage them, and that became our New Testament. So he's writing two letters to Timothy that become known as 1 and 2 Timothy, and he's instructing him on how to be a pastor, how to lead a church. And so there are some things that are in these two books that are just for pastors or just for elders or church leaders, and that's the application. But there are other things that apply to everyone in the church, and the advice that he gives him here at the beginning of chapter 5, I think, applies to all of us. And so this is what he says. And I'm going to read this and you're going to go, I don't really know how that answers our question. But we'll get there, okay? I think it's a principle here that we find. This is how Paul advises Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 5. He says this, verse 1, So he's telling Timothy, listen, when you're dealing with the people in your church and you need to get on to an older man, maybe there's an older man, he's doing something he shouldn't be doing, do not rebuke him. You entreat him as a father. Do not look around at your peers and those younger and rebuke them. Treat them as brothers. Treat the older women as you would your mother. Treat the women, your peers, and those younger as your sisters. And so what we see Paul telling Timothy is the church is really designed to operate as a family. The church should operate as a family, right? That's what we are. We are a family of faith. Paul talks about this in Romans when he says that if you have faith, then you are an adopted son and daughter of the king with Jesus, co-heirs with Christ, he says. And you know, it's funny. I grew up Southern Baptist. My lovely wife grew up Southern Baptist. And in the church world, we like to make a lot of denominational jokes, right? We like to make fun of people. Often we make fun of Southern Baptist, and that's fine. Most of it is well-earned. But there is one place where Southern Baptist actually did kind of get it right. Did any of you grow up in a church or have been around people where they called you brother or sister so-and-so? Yeah. There's a guy at my old church named Tim. He used to call me Brother Nate. He was the only dude there. It was 1,800 people. He was this one old school dude going, Brother Nate, how you doing? And I used to love it. Brother Tim, how are you, baby? Like, that's great. I'm not advocating that. That would be weird now just to start that from scratch. But it's a cool attitude that they had in the church. It's one place where they got it, where they said, we're family, and family matters. And I think that this principle is incredibly important to view those who go to church with us, who are in our family of faith, as our brothers and sisters and our fathers and our mothers in Christ. I think that's so important because we live in a culture that's increasingly independent, right? That's increasingly isolated. That's increasingly like, why are you talking to me? Right? We see this in greetings. If I were to just ask you, let's say that you're just in the lobby and somebody walks in that you know, maybe you're in a small group with them, maybe you kind of serve on a team with them or whatever, and they go, hey, how you doing? And you go, great, how are you? And they go, not too good. Tough weekend. Wife's getting kind of sick. Got some real issues with the in-laws. I'm just stressed out at work. I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep my job. It's tough. What are you thinking in your head? You're thinking, I hate that for you. All right, I'm going to get some coffee. Right? We don't want to talk about that. We don't want to engage in that because we're isolated and increasingly we think that's your issue. That's your deal. That's your kid. Hope it worked out for you. That's your marriage. I'll be praying for it. That means I'm going to forget that this happened, right? That's what we do. We become increasingly isolated. But if we look at this principle and we realize that other believers are our family, it should shape the way that we think about them. How do you think about your family? Those of you who are lucky enough to have a family that you love and know, how do you think about them? I've shared before that I'm not as close with my sister as I would like to be. That's my fault. I'm working on that. That's my deal. But let me tell you something. There is nothing I wouldn't do for her. There's nothing I wouldn't do for her. She's got three beautiful daughters. There's nothing I wouldn't do for those girls. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my brother-in-law. Jen's family, I love Jen's family. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my in-laws and for my sister-in-law and for my brother-in-law and for their kids, right? We fight for our families. We love them. When they need something, we are there. We might not talk to them all the time. We might not check in with them every day, but we care about them, and we fight for them. And when their marriages are struggling, we jump in. And when they're depressed, we talk to them. And when we can sense they're down, we take them out. We have fun with them. We try to cheer them up. That's what we do for family, right? Right now, somebody's going to have to do something for their family in the nursery. That poor kid, that's a bummer. We fight for family. They matter to us a lot. And what I want to see is us take on a mindset as a church that no, no, no, no, this isn't your kid and that's not your marriage and that's not your issue. Those are my issues. This is my family. These are my kids. These are my younger brothers and sisters. And what I want you to feel as Grace Church, like if you're here and visiting, you feel however you want to feel, okay? I'm not talking to you right now. You just look in and you take it in, and if you want to be a part of it, that's great. But if you call Grace home, I mean this. Their decisions are your decisions. The commitments they made this weekend, those are your commitments. The things that they decided to do, you fight for those things for them. You pray for those things for them. Not in the flippant way that says, yeah, I'll do that, but in the way that means I will write this down and I will pray over these decisions. You take ownership of the kids who are graduating from here and you say, I will do whatever I can and whatever opportunities I have to fight for their faith as they go into college to make sure that when these kids move on, they don't fall away from the faith. They're the influencers at their school that are drawing other people into the faith. That's what we fight for. We fight for marriages when we see them struggling in our small group. We reach out even when it's uncomfortable because that matters to us because that's my brother and that's my sister and I want to see it work. We reach out to the older crowd in our church and we make sure that they're good and we make sure that they have what they need. We reach out to our friends and our peers who are moving into a season of life where they're taking care of their older parents and we make sure that they have what they need or that they just have a respite. We look for ways to help. Those are not their issues. It's not their marriage. It's not their commitments. It's ours because we're a family. And when this principle really got impressed upon me, I'll never forget it. I was a student pastor at Greystone, and we had a great kid in the youth group named Tristan. Tristan came from a broken home. Now, there are some homes, there are some families that are divorced, and those parents do a phenomenal job of raising their kids together and of blocking them from what is usually carried out from divorce. There are some families who do a phenomenal job of that, but Tristan's family was not one of those. His dad was a mess. He got invited to church by a friend. He started coming to church for a couple of months, and he accepted Jesus. He became a believer. And shortly after becoming a believer, and this guy, I mean, he was a good-looking kid, man. He was athletic. He had everything going for him. He was charismatic. Everybody loved this kid. He comes to a retreat like this. And we didn't even talk about this in the retreat. It wasn't the point of the retreat. It was just a conviction that he reached on his own. And he came after the retreat and he shared with me and he said, Nate, you know, I've decided that I want to save myself until marriage. I'm going to wait until I get married. And I said, that's great, pal. That's awesome. Good for you. Good for you. Let's pray for that. And I was so thrilled for him to reach that conclusion. It wasn't even a thing that we talked about. It was just something that the Lord impressed upon him after becoming a believer, and he said, this is what I want to do. And I was so excited for him. Then Tristan went home, and he told his dad about his new commitment. You know what his dad said? Tristan, don't be stupid. Don't do that. That's a big mistake. You've got to live your life, buddy. I'm telling you, don't listen to those people. Broke my heart. You know what I realized? Kristen was a spiritual orphan. He had parents. He had a biological dad. But he didn't have anybody in his life that he could look up to as a spiritual father and say, I wanna be like that. He didn't have anybody in his life that he could look up to as a spiritual father and say, I want to be like that. He didn't have anybody in his life that he could look up to and model himself after. And when you think about how your parents, those of you who had good ones, influenced you, not a whole lot of it was them sitting you down telling you something in a Bible study format. It was just watching them and what they did and learning from them and how they went through life. And Tristan had nobody that he could look to and see as a spiritual father. He didn't have spiritual brothers and sisters around him in his life outside of church encouraging him. And Tristan, more than anybody I've ever met, needed a spiritual family. And it makes me wonder, how many people here in our church at Grace do we have who are spiritual orphans? Who have parents, but they don't have anybody in their life that's older than them that they look up to and they go, I want to be godly like that. I want to live my life how they live it. I want to learn from them. How many here are just going through life? How many young parents do we have who are just trying to figure out how to be parents without losing their minds at a three-year-old, right? How many parents do we have who are trying to do that, and when they get to a spiritual place in their life, they don't have a parent that they can call and say, Dad, what'd you do in this situation? Mom, how did you handle this when this was happening in your marriage? Because they have parents, but they don't have spiritual parents, and so they come to church where they need them. How many young families do we have in this church who are just going it blind right now, trying to figure it out the best they can? How many older families do we have in this church who have kids in college or in young adulthood who don't quite know how to be parents, who don't quite know how to encourage faith in their kids, who don't quite know their way around it, who don't have anybody to look up to and anybody to call and say, hey, how'd you do this? My kid's making these decisions. It's breaking my heart. What do I do? How many people in our church don't have somebody to call when that happens? How many folks in our church are taking care of their older parents and don't know how to bear this burden in a godly way? How many folks in our church are retired and they're looking around going, what do I do in retirement? How many spiritual orphans do we have here? The answer to that question impresses upon me the need that we have to see ourselves as family. What I want you to understand this morning, what I want you to see is that we have a generational responsibility to reach both forward and back. We as a church, as individuals in the church, we, and when I say we, I mean you, buddy, we have a generational responsibility to reach both forward and back. To look at the generation in front of us and grab somebody and pay attention to them and go, how do I do this? How do I navigate life? And to reach back behind you and to grab them and say, let me show you how to get through this season of life. Let me fight for your commitments that you're making. We have a generational responsibility to do this. We have to. And I think, listen, I think if we do this, I think if we do this, we protect the commitments that they made. What if all of them had a room full of 20 and 30-year-olds who were reaching back and pouring into them and helping them and being a contact for them after they went off to college, kind of like their small group leaders are right now? What if our young families with young kids are pouring into the people in our church that are just getting married and started out and don't have young kids yet? What if our parents with kids in the youth group are pouring into our parents over here with kids in the nursery? What if our parents with kids in college are pouring into those below them, right? What if we actually did this and we actually looked out for one another? Can you imagine the health and the sustainability of grace? I've said as your pastor often, I don't care about growing big, I care about growing healthy. Is there a healthier way to grow than this? Than to accept our generational responsibility to reach both forward and back? So how do we do this? What does it look like practically? Because it's great to say it, but what do we do? And this is a tough answer, but here's one of the things I think we do. I think there's really two things that we do. First, we intentionally put ourselves in multi-generational situations, okay? If you don't have anybody who's older or younger than you right now that you could reach out to and you'd be like, hey, let's grab coffee. And listen, if you do have that, do it. If you have somebody that God's been laying on your heart to reach out to and be like, hey, I wanna learn from you, can we grab some coffee? Or if you have someone who is younger than you and God's been placing them on your heart and for some reason you can't get them out of your head, send them an email. Be like, hey, let me buy you coffee, I just wanna hear more of your story. Everybody's up for coffee. And listen, as a dude who knows literally every 30-something and below in this church, all of them would love to get an email from someone older than them going, hey, let's talk. All of them. None of them would turn it down. I know it's an awkward thing, but I promise it will work out. So if that's not an option for you, what do we do? We put ourselves in multi-generational environments. A great example of this, I'm going to pick on him. I've got a buddy at the church named Ben. Ben's a good dude. He's from Wendell, by way of Tobaccoville, so he's still got that accent that we like, right? And I have a Wednesday morning Bible study. It's at 6 a.m. to keep out the riffraff. And so at 6 a.m., the dudes come. There's 10 or 12 guys that come every week. And what I love about this is it's multi-generational. Connor comes sometimes. Connor comes. He's the youngest. We got folks who are near in retirement. We got everybody in between. And I love it. And Ben has flat told me, because we're buddies, bro, I'm not waking up to hear what you have to say about the Bible. I'm getting up because there's older men in this group and I want to be around them. It's an intentional decision that he's made. It's the right decision. And he makes a fair point. I wouldn't get up to hear what I have to say either. But he's intentionally placed himself in a multi-generational environment so that he can begin to learn from those above him, and he's pouring into those who are younger than him in different ways. You can do that too. As we have Bible studies, sign up for them. There's a Bible study here on Monday nights. It's a bunch of old men who would love to really, like Harris right here, who would love to pour into younger men that are interested, right? Do that. Put yourself in those environments. Sign up for something like that. When you're in your volunteer teams, look around and take notice of who else is there. One of the greatest strengths of grace is that we are multigenerational and generationally diverse. We should take advantage of this. The next thing that you do after you've placed yourself in those environments is you honestly, you pray. And you ask that God would help you to notice the opportunities you have to have real conversations. And instead of throwing those out, you engage in them. And you watch the opportunities come up. And you begin to learn from other people who are older than you. And you begin to see people who are younger than you that may be struggling a little bit. And it becomes perfectly acceptable and comfortable to shoot them a text and go, hey, I just wanted to check on you. You doing good? You wanna get some coffee? Grace, I think that if we'll do this, if we'll embrace our generational responsibility to reach both forward and back, if we will intentionally place ourself in multi-generational environments and then be prayerfully sensitive to what we can do there, I think we'll be a healthy place. I think we'll be a church that operates as a family. And I think that we will be a place that beats the odds and does not graduate generation after generation that walks into college and falls away from the faith, but that we will be a church of unique health and vibrance because we look out for each other and we fight for each other as family because we, like God, see everybody else here as our brothers and our sisters in Christ. Let's do that. Let's fight for each other and let's fight for these kids. All right, let's pray. Father, we love you. We're so very grateful for you. Lord, I'm so grateful that you filled this church with folks from all different generations, all different times, all different ages and demographics. I pray that you would begin to bridge those gaps, that you'd begin to look out for us or help us look out for one another. Help us see one another as brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers. Help us fight for one another and take a vested interest in one another. God, give us the courage to send an email or a text. Give us the courage and the bravery to step into an environment that may not be the most comfortable for us. And make this a place, God, where faith is fought for, where commitments are owned by everyone, and where your help, God, and your love and your vibrancy abound. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am the pastor here. I know a lot of you guys are wondering, did Nate do that voiceover? Yeah, I did. I did, actually. I worked really hard on that and my accent. But I am so excited about this series, about the book of John, about spending. We're going to spend 13 weeks in the gospel of John, and I really couldn't be more elated to do it. And I will tell you a couple things. First off, the whole point of this morning, like Kyle alluded to in the announcements, is to get you excited about John, to help you understand why this is such a big deal, why this is such a big book, why it's important enough to stop and spend 13 weeks in. I really haven't been excited for a series, this excited for a series, in a really long time. Part of the reason I'm excited is because I feel like we've been waiting to do this as a church. I've been waiting to do this as your pastor. I told you guys last week, if you were here, that when I came in April of 2017, that I looked back through all of the series that had happened at the church to see where you guys had been and what you guys had been learning about to make sure that I wouldn't be repetitive moving forward and to see if there was any gaps that I felt like I needed to teach. And what I saw was that we spent a lot of time in the Gospels. The Gospels are the books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus' life. It's the first four books in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And so you had spent a lot of time there, and you'd spend a lot of time in a book called Acts that kind of tells the story of the early church. It's a fun book. It's a storytelling book. It's the only one in the New Testament. And so it's a good book to be in. But I felt like there was so much more that we needed to study and know about the scripture. So we spent time in the Old Testament focusing on characters like David, and then the names of God, and then how the Old Testament points to Jesus. And so we've done that for a long time, and now it's time as a church to dive into Jesus, to dive into the story of his life, to acquaint ourselves corporately with our Savior, with someone who loves us and who died for us. And I'm really elated to do this. But I will also say this, and I'll remind you of this here at the end of the service. As I sat down to prep for the series and outline it, one of the things I realized is there is no way I can teach everything that I want to teach from the book of John. There is no way that I can do justice to the book of John. When I was growing up, my pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, who I adore and respect immensely, he passed away a couple of years ago, but I consider myself lucky to grow up under his teaching. And my passion for scripture, I think, was ignited a lot by him. He spent four years going through the book of John, every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, until his elders finally sat him down and were like, dude, we need some Proverbs or something. You've got to switch it up. So if he could do that, I couldn't do four years, but I could do more than 13 weeks. I sat down to outline the series, and I just started by opening the Bible and just writing down everything that I saw. I was like, oh, I got to teach about that. Oh, yeah, that can be a sermon. Oh, yeah, they need to know about this. And I got through the first two chapters, and it was already like an 18-week series. So this really, if I'm being honest, isn't us going through the book of John. It's really Nate's 13 favorite things in the book of John. So to really get all of it, you're going to have to work along with us, okay? And we're going to get to that at the end. But I just want to say that as a preface to the series. As we preface the series this week and we launch into what does God say to us through this book, I want to answer some fundamental questions about why we're even doing this. I think one of the fundamental questions that we should answer is, why should we study a gospel? What is interesting to us about the gospels? Why were they written? Why did these books matter in some ways, in a different way than all the rest of Scripture? And so that's the first question we're going to answer. And I think John gives us that answer, at least the beginnings of an answer, in the 20th chapter of his book. The Gospel of John is 21 chapters long. And at the end of the second to last chapter, he throws in this statement, verse 31. And he says, I have written these things that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. So he says, I've written all of this down, my experiences with Jesus down for this reason, so that you, you being whoever reads this ever, may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. So he wrote this so that you believe that Jesus was who he says he was. He wants you, he wrote this down so that you would know that Jesus is real and Jesus was who he says he was. And I don't know if you ever thought about it this way, and this is why we need to study a gospel and why Jesus matters so much to us. Do you understand that Jesus is the hinge on which all of history swings? He's the fulcrum on which all of history rests, that he matters more. He stands alone in history as the single most influential figure to ever be on the planet. Do you understand that? Do you understand that all of history and all of faith really boils down to two questions? These are the only questions that matter. Was Jesus real, and was he telling us the truth? That's all that matters. Was Jesus real? Did a guy named Jesus of Nazareth actually walk the planet 2,000 years ago? And if he existed, was that guy telling us the truth about himself? Because what he claims is that he is the incarnate son of the creator God who came to reconcile our relationship back to that God and that all reconciliation that we know as salvation flows through him because of what he did while he was on this earth, because he died and resurrected and defeated death and sin, and we'll see that later. Because of all of that, we can have a faith that we place in God if he's real, because that's what he claimed. So we have to answer those two questions. Was Jesus real, and was he telling us the truth? And I would say to you this morning, if you were here and you're not a believer, if you were here and you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, maybe there's someone close to you who kind of encourages you to come to church and so you come to do the nice thing. First of all, good for you for doing the nice thing. But if you're considering faith, dipping your toe into the waters of faith, unsure about faith, I would tell you that the very first thing you need to figure out is the answer to those questions. When I do my research, when I look at history, based on all the evidence, did Jesus, did he really exist? And then, do I believe that he was telling us the truth? Because if the answers to those questions are no, I don't think he existed. I don't think he was telling us the truth. Then nothing else matters, right? Nothing else matters. The Old Testament doesn't matter. What we understand about God doesn't matter. Nothing else in all of Christendom and the way that we understand the world and our worldview and the way that we understand faith, none of that matters if Jesus wasn't real and he wasn't telling us the truth. But if he was real and he is telling us the truth, that changes everything. Because that man during his life is recorded as affirming the first 39 books of the Bible that we call the Old Testament, that he called the Talmud. He affirms those, the law and the prophets, as scripture, as God breathed. He had the same 39 books that we have today by the time he was on earth. They were assembled around 250 BC and the people in Jerusalem said, yep, this is the holy text. And so Jesus affirms the holy text. So if Jesus is real and he is who he says he was, then he said he himself believed that the Old Testament was God breathed and was the word of God. So we can believe it too. If he's real and he is who he says he was, then he actually died and he was actually resurrected and he actually went to heaven. And the church that he leaves us in Acts is actually true and that was really the kingdom that he came to start that goes through the rest of history. It's the kingdom that we sit in now. If Jesus is real, then all of history before him looked forward to anticipating a Messiah, and all of history after him looks back to him as the Messiah and looks forward to his return, if he's real. So Jesus really is the hinge of all of history. We have to figure out what we think of him. We have to understand whether or not we can believe him. I think those questions are the most fundamental and the most important questions for anyone to answer in their life. If you've never answered them for yourself, it is worth the effort to do it. I promise. Get those answers for yourself. Because in Jesus, what we see is these essential qualities that we absolutely have to have. They're revealed in the Gospels, and it's why we study the Gospels. What I want you guys to understand is Jesus is the divine exemplar. He is the divine exemplar of our faith. An exemplar is just a fancy word for the best possible perfect model. And we see both of these things in the gospel. If you really want a fancy theological term, it's called the hypostatic union, that he is 100% God and 100% man. And we will never really understand how that all works out. But both elements are necessary and both elements are displayed in Scripture. And we need him to be divine, because without his divinity, we do not have the faith that he gave us. Okay? Without his divinity, there is no faith. Right? We understand that? And then, if we don't get his example, if he doesn't live for 33 years, three of which are really highly recorded, if we don't see the gospel stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then we never get his example, and we need his example because without it, we have no perfect model for the faith that he founded. He is the exemplar, and that's essential for us as well. Without Jesus, we get other pictures of the faith. We get Paul, who may have struggled with arrogance. We get Moses, who may have struggled with anger. We get Esther, who had her own struggles. We get Ruth, who had her own struggles. We get them throughout Scripture, but they're all imperfect models. Jesus is the perfect model of your faith. So because he is the hinge of history, because he's the most influential person to ever live, we should really, really, really want to know everything we can about him on a more personal level than that. Jesus is your Savior. If you're a believer, he's your Savior. He is the one person to whom everyone else looks. He is the one person on whom all of Scripture is focused, whether it's looking forward to him or looking back to him or anticipating him again. Understanding Jesus is fundamental to your faith. That's why the prayer of Paul for all of his churches is that you would know Jesus along with the saints in the breadth and the depth and the fullness of the knowledge of Christ. It's why he prays it over and over again, and he praises the churches throughout the ancient world for their knowledge of Jesus, because it all boils down to how well we know Jesus. Jesus says in John 15, and we're going to spend a whole week on this, that if we abide in him, that he will abide in us, and that we will bear much fruit. And all of life boils down to focusing on Jesus. The author of Hebrews tells us to run our race, to throw off the sin and the weight that entangles us. And how do we do that? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If you are a believer, there is no element of your faith that is more important or fundamental to you than understanding the person of Jesus and getting to know him in a very real way. And there is no better way to do that than the Gospels. If you are considering the faith, and you wouldn't say yet that you're a believer, the best thing to consider in the faith is who was the person of Jesus. It's essential to us that we study him and that we know him. I heard somebody say one time, a scholar once said, you couldn't possibly claim to be a Christian who knows Jesus if you don't read all four Gospels a minimum of once a year. I'm not espousing that as true. I would never say someone is not a Christian who doesn't know Jesus. That seems pretty inflammatory. But the attitude behind it is, if we believe, we have got to dig into these things and get to know the person of Christ. So, because we see that studying the gospel is so essential, something that we have to do, we should want to do, the question becomes, well, why John? There's four options there. They all do a great job of it. So why do we choose John? Why have I chosen John for us to go through? Well, I believe that John has a unique relationship with Jesus. He has a unique relationship with our Savior. And I think that because there's clues dropped all throughout his gospel that show us that this is true. First of all, one of the things I would point to is Jesus in his life had about 100 to 120 people kind of following him around wherever he went. Sometimes we don't know that or we forget about that. We think about the 12 disciples that were with him all the time, but really there was others around him, 100 to 120, that followed him all over the place. Actually, in Acts, when Judas has to get replaced, one of the requirements to be the replacement disciple, which ends up being a guy named Matthias, is he had to have been here from the very beginning. So there's people for all three years of his ministry that followed him around that were just never mentioned. Those are people of great faith. Then there was the 12 disciples, the 12 that he called, and we know the 12 disciples. But then there was an inner circle of three disciples, the only disciples that he gave nicknames to, Peter, James, and John. When Jesus met Peter, his name was Simon, but he renamed him Cephas or Cephas, which means rocky, which is translated Peter. So Jesus named some dude Rocky because he just kind of had an attitude that was like ready, fire, aim, right? And so Jesus was like, you're Rocky. Then he gives James and John the coolest nickname in all the Bible. They were brothers, and their dad was named Zebedee. And so they were called the sons of Zebedee, but his nickname for them was the sons of thunder. Come on, man. That's awesome. I want to be a son of thunder. I'm just Nate. That's lame. But they get the best nickname in the Bible. They're in the inner circle. They have access to Jesus that even the other disciples who see him every day do not have. Little things like, and it's not a little thing, it's actually a huge thing. And some of you know the story and some of you don't, and that's okay. But at the end of Jesus's life, he's about to be arrested and he goes to pray this incredible prayer in what's called the Garden of Gethsemane. And he leaves the disciples and he grabs three of them and he says, will you guys come pray with me? And John's one of those disciples. Throughout the entire crucifixion process, John is present there. He had access to Jesus that nobody else had. We'll see an intimate moment between he and Jesus at a meal here in a minute. John was so comfortable with Jesus that his mom felt total comfort in asking Jesus for special favors for her boy. They were walking into Jerusalem the last week of Jesus's life to begin Holy Week. In Christendom, we understand Holy Week kind of sets in motion the gears that bring about crucifixion and resurrection, and then we celebrate Easter. And so they're walking into the city. Jesus has been being welcomed as a king. One of the things you'll see in the gospel as we go through it is nobody, my contention is, nobody understood who Jesus was or what he came to do. Nobody really understood Jesus except for two people, Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. I don't think anybody else got it until after he came back to life. They expect Jesus to walk into Jerusalem. All the prophecies are that he's going to be a king. So they expect him to walk into Jerusalem, sit on the throne of David, overthrow Roman rule, and make Israel awesome again and this world's superpower, and Jesus is going to be the king of the world. And so walking into Jerusalem, John's mom is behind Jesus tugging on his tunic going, hey, when you take over the planet, can John be like your vice president? Moms, man, forever. They're all the same. Moms are the best. That's why we have a day for you guys. Fathers have a day for you guys because we felt bad about dads, but moms, they deserve their day, right? Because they've always done that. That's how comfortable she was. She felt like she could ask for that from Jesus. John actually records that he was the first disciple to the tomb. After Jesus dies and is resurrected, John records that Mary Magdalene was the first one to the tomb, but then she goes back to the disciples and she goes, hey, there's nobody there. And so two of the disciples take off running, John and Peter, right? Two of the very close ones. And John makes sure to record in his gospel 60 years after it happened because he's a dude. We started running together, but after a while, the one that Jesus loved left behind Peter and got ahead of him. So he's like, hey, just so we know, for all of history, I won, all right? Like I got there first and had enough time to review the tomb and fold some stuff up before Peter ever gets there. He was the first one to the empty tomb. He was so close to Jesus that when Jesus was hanging on the cross and said very little because of the excruciating pain that it required to speak, he looked at John. And John was the lone disciple around. He looked at John, who was standing next to Mary, his mother. And he says, Mary, behold your son. John, behold your mother. And what he's saying is, John, take care of my mom for me. Especially in that society where old women had no way to make a wage and they were entirely reliant on their families to care for them, this was a huge responsibility. And he looks at John, of all the people that he's met in his life, of all the people that he knows, he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. Makes him the executor of his will. Remarkably close. And then we have this moment in John chapter 13 that I think impacted John for the rest of his life. It gives us a picture of the relationship that Jesus had with him. In John chapter 13, what's happening is the disciples are reclining at the table. And when the Bible says reclining at the table, for us, it really just means like drooping in your seat, probably with your legs crossed and just kind of slouched down like you own the joint. Okay, that's what it looks like when I recline at the table. But when they reclined at the table, it literally meant that they were kind of laying down on their side with their elbow out and eating off the table like this, kind of in a pinwheel situation, like chest to back. Not totally spooning, but closer than you'd want to be, okay? And that's how they're reclining at the table. And in this meal, it's before Holy Week, before things are set in motion, he looks at the disciples and he says, one of you is going to betray me. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be a disciple in that moment. To go, what? Who? Who would betray you? But he says, one of you is going to betray me. And Peter, of course, because he's Peter, wants to know immediately. I love Peter so much. I relate to him so much. He wants to know immediately, but he knows he can't just brutishly ask in front of everyone. So he hits up John, like in elementary school. Hey, John, figure it out. He says, hey, John, ask Jesus who it is. Who's it going to be? Because he knows that John has Jesus' ear. It's a tip of the cap to the relationship that Peter knows they share. And John leans presumably back to Jesus. And he says, who's going to betray you? And Jesus says, it's the one that I give this morsel to. And he takes the bread and he dips it and he hands it to Judas. And John knows. And he's the only one that knows. Because Jesus trusted him with that secret. And then I'll say it now because we're not going to get to it later because there's just so much. But this incredible moment happens. He gives it to Judas. And when he gives it to Judas, it says that Satan swept into him. So now Jesus is eye to eye with Satan. And he looks at him and he says, what you're about to do, do it quickly. Incredibly intense sentence. And if we're reading too fast, we don't get it. What you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And then it says, and then it was night. And the whole tone of the book in Jesus' life changes. Because before then it had been light. It's an incredible moment there. And right after that moment, Jesus offers a profound teaching to only the disciples who remain, to only the faithful ones who will now carry his kingdom forward because Judas has been exposed and he's now gone. It says the disciples didn't know what he was talking about. They thought when he said, go and do it quickly, and they thought maybe he's going to get some money for a meal or something like that. They didn't know, but John knew. And so John was really paying attention to what happened. And then Jesus gives them, the faithful disciples, this teaching. And he says to them in John 13, and you can just listen. He says, little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me. And just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, where I'm going, you cannot come because he's going to death. They don't understand this yet, but that's what he's telling them. He says this, It's the whole commandment. It's the new commandment. It even supersedes the commandment to love God and to love others. It's the new one. Love one another. Love, love, love. It's the final commandment that Jesus gives. It's the only new commandment that he gives. And it touched John so much that at the end of his life when he was writing the other epistles, John, first, second, and third John that we have at the end of the New Testament, you know that 1st John, if you open it up and you read it, it is a commentary on these two verses, on that one teaching, love one another. That is how the world will know that you are my disciples, love one another. If you go in your Bible and you open up 1st John, it is a commentary, it is an exposition of what Jesus teaches right here that stuck with him so profoundly that he writes about it as an old man wanting everybody to understand what Jesus was teaching in that moment that mattered so much to him. If you open up 1 John and you read it, what does it say over and over again? If you say that you love Jesus but you hate your brother, then you are a liar and the truth is not in you. If you do love Jesus, then you will love your brother. And if you love your brother, then you must love Jesus. It's an entire exposition on this moment. And then there's this other moment that I really love in Revelation. John goes on from here. He goes on. He takes care of Jesus' mom. And all the disciples we see in Acts, a lot stay central to Jerusalem. Some disperse and begin to preach the gospel in other places. But John, we learn, is the only disciple that did not die a martyr's death. All the other disciples were put to death for their faith. But John was allowed by God to live for many, many years into maybe his 70s or 80s. A lot of people believe that John was maybe the youngest disciple. Some put him as young as potentially 10 years old when Jesus called him. A lot of scholars believe that the disciples were high school boys and college freshmen when Jesus called them. Can you imagine that? Leaving the keys of the kingdom to them? Yikes. I don't know that that's true, but a lot of scholars believe that that's true. And that means that John has a lot of time between when Jesus passes to remember back. And he's got a lot of years of ministry and a lot of preaching and a lot of writing and a lot of influencing. And he discipled early church leaders like Polycarp and set in motion the vehicle of the church. He was like the first real church father. And at the end of his life, he's on exile. He's in exile on the island of Patmos, somewhere around 93 AD, 60 years now after Jesus has passed. And all of these years, he's preached about his Jesus. He's taught other people about his Jesus. He's taught them about his best friend and his hero and this man that he loved so much that he has devoted his entire life for. And now he's in exile, remembering and writing and looking forward to when he finally gets to meet his Savior again. And the Holy Spirit comes to him in this season and sweeps him up and takes him to heaven. And he says, here, I want you to write down the things that you see. And that book becomes Revelation. And at the beginning of Revelation, we have this incredible glimpse of the relationship between John and Jesus, where they are reunited. And I'm going to read. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen. John is in heaven, and he's seeing all of these visions. And then he sees this man that scares the fire out of him. And this like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like flames of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze refined in a furnace. And his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars. From his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword. And his face was like the sun, shining in full strength. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. He didn't know yet that it was Jesus. And he falls on his feet, terrified, because he's never seen the heavenly reunited with his Jesus. He knows that it's Jesus' hand on his shoulder and that it's Jesus' voice speaking to him. And the one that he had lived his life in memory of and devoted to and longed to be reunited with was there, and he finally meets him in his heavenly form. And it's this man, with those unique perspectives, that writes us the gospel of John. We study John because it gives us a unique perspective of Jesus. How could it not? You know, in John's gospel, he never refers to himself as John. He refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. And some scholars argue that this is evidence that he didn't actually write the book himself, that somebody wrote it for him, because what an arrogant thing to call yourself the disciple whom Jesus loved. But man, as I read that and I think about the relationship that John had with Jesus, I don't think it's an arrogant thing at all. I think that John, in his old age, he's 50 or 60 years removed from Jesus. He's in his 70s. He's in the twilight of his life, particularly with life expectancy back then. He was an old man reflecting back on his early years. And as he wrote this, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. And I think that he uses that not because he was proud of himself or somehow arrogant. I think he was astounded that he was the one that Jesus chose to love and reveal himself to in that way. I think as he thought back that he was touched and humbled, I can't believe that Jesus trusted me with the secret of Judas. I think he was touched and humbled. I can't believe that my Savior, that my hero asked me to care for his mom. I can't believe that he swept me up and spoke to me in Revelation. I can't believe that all the other disciples have passed, and for some reason he's allowed me to shepherd the early church, his kingdom, his building into the next age of leaders. I can't believe that my life has included these amazing privileges. I cannot believe I'm the disciple that Jesus has chosen to love. And so he calls himself that. And that's the man that offers us a perspective of his Jesus. By the time he wrote this, all the other gospels had been written, and they had begun to circulate in the churches. So we have every reason to believe that John had actually read the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And those are called synoptic gospels, and they're different than John's gospel. They're synoptic because they tell the same story with the same chronology from beginning to end. And so what John is able to do is read those and go, okay, here's what you need to know about my Jesus. Here's what you need to know about my best friend. He is a man in his old age who loves Jesus, who knows him maybe better than anyone has ever known him, writing down a book that you may believe that Jesus was who he says he was, telling you, you know what? If you want to know Jesus, then here's what you really need to know. Look at these things. That's why his book is unique. That's why the other books include parables, pithy sayings that are memorable teachings of Jesus, and John doesn't include any of those. In John, we get these big sweeping monologues. We get these real long teachings from Jesus. In the other books, we have the long teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, but John doesn't share the Sermon on the Mount because it's already been taken care of. Instead, he shares with you these big, long conversations like the one that he has with Nicodemus in chapter 3, the Pharisee that comes to see him at night because he's ashamed and embarrassed that he might actually believe in this Jesus guy. So Jesus has a conversation with him that John records. We get stories that we don't get in the other Gospels, like when Jesus' closest friend in the world, Lazarus, dies and Jesus goes to raise him from the dead and comfort his sisters in the city of Bethany. And we get this verse, John 11, 35, the shortest one in the Bible that says, Jesus wept, that answers for us for all time. How does Jesus respond in our tragedy? Well, he comes and he weeps with us. We know that because John tells us so. We get in John these I am statements. There's no parables there, and there's not as much figurative language, but he says, I am again and again. I am the bread of life. I am the living water. I am the good shepherd. Over and over again, we see these things. We get the miracle at Cana, where Jesus' first public miracle is to keep the party going. You guys do with that whatever you want to, but it's in there. We get one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, John 17. It's called the High Priestly Prayer. Right before Jesus dies, he prays for them, and he prays for the church. And get this, 2,000 years ago, he prayed for you. And it's recorded in John 17. We have all these things in his gospel that we don't get in the others. And the others are not unimportant. They're incredibly important. And we can't get a holistic picture of Jesus outside of those gospels. But John is an old man in his old age reflecting back on the person that he's loved the most in his entire life saying, here's what you need to know about my Jesus. Here's what you need to know about my friend and my hero. Unique and it stands alone. And it's an amazing book. And it's worthy of our consideration. And like I said, the whole point of this morning is to get you to a place where you go, I want to know what John says about Jesus. Wherever you are, if you're dipping your toes in the water of faith, start with John and see what he says about the person you're considering. If you call yourself a Christian, then read John and look at what he says about his Savior that you love so much and learn about him. And like I said at the beginning, this is not a series working through John. I'm going to skip around and share stories and it's going to be good. I really, really hope. But if you want to get the most you can out of this series and you have got to do the work on your own on a daily basis. So I made a reading plan for us for John. There's one, they're in the lobby, they're on the information table. The one thing I want you to do from this sermon is leave and grab one of those. There's gonna be one online, they're gonna be in a couple of different places. I've even, I want you so badly to read the book of John with us that uniquely I've included a catch-up day, okay? Every Saturday it just says, catch up, man. I know you missed one, I did too. Let's catch up. Do it. Use the YouVersion app. If you don't know what that is, Google it. Use that app, and you can listen to it in your car, okay? If reading is hard for you or you're lazy like me, just listen to it in your car, man. Listen to it on your jog. But it's two chapters a week. It's easy. The whole goal for you leaving today is to be excited enough about the book of John and what God's servant John has to say about his Jesus that you're willing to dig into it on your own. And then together as a church, we're going to learn more about who our Jesus is. And my prayer for you is that you will know him, Jesus, more deeply and more intimately than you ever have by the time we get on the other side of Easter this year. I hope that you'll do that with us. Let me pray, and then we're going to take communion together. Father, we love you. We are so grateful. We're so grateful for the book of John. I thank you for inspiring him to write down what he did. Thank you for giving him the perspective that would allow him to remember the things that he remembered. God, thank you even for preserving it through all of history, through the years and through the wars and through all of the torrent of the times, God, that you brought this book down to us. Thank you for the diligent scribes that recorded it, that protected it, that gave their lives for it, that we might learn from it. God, I pray that you would reveal yourself to us in this book in incredible ways, that we would see the tenderness of your son, that we would see your heart revealed as it's poured out in the form of him, that we would come to value the spirit that he's left us behind, and more than anything, that we would come to know you in an intimate way through this series and through this study. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. In just a minute, we're going to take communion together, but as we do, this is probably the appropriate place to acknowledge that earlier this week, a young boy, 17-year-old, named Leighton Holidayiday passed away overnight in the early mornings of Wednesday. A lot of us know the family and know his dad, Craig Holliday, was the founding pastor of Grace. And so the community grieves, and Grace in particular grieves with the holidays with Craig and Rhett and his brother Cody. And so this afternoon there's going to be a funeral at NRCA at 3 o'clock. Everyone's invited, and the family would appreciate your attendance and your prayers and your support. And I mention it now because we're about to do communion, and today is a tragic day. It's been a tragic week. One of the most sad things in life is to bury a child. And so today, there's nothing that makes today not sad. But here's the thing. Because of communion, because of what it represents, today isn't just sad. It is tragic. But because of Jesus, it's not just tragic. Because Jesus defeated death and holds the keys to hell and Hades, this day is not just tragic. It can also be hopeful. And that's an amazing thing. So when we take communion today, we remember the death of Christ that united us with our creator. But what we also remember is that this was the moment that Jesus defeated death and took the sting out of days like today and made them not just tragic, but also made them hopeful, which is a remarkable thing. As the disciples were reclined around the table the night that Jesus was arrested, he took the bread and he broke it and he says, this is my body that was broken for you. Every time you eat of this, do it in remembrance of me. And then he took the wine and he poured it out and he says, this is my blood that was poured out for you. Every time you drink it, do it in remembrance of me. So I'm going to pray and we're going to take communion. And as we do, as we always do, we reflect on how grateful we are that Jesus, through this breaking of his body and through the spilling of his blood, reunites us with him. But today we also are grateful for the fact that through this act he defeated death and Hades and that days like today aren't just tragic. They can be hopeful too. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for sacrificing him for us. We thank you that he rose again and defeated death and hell. We thank you that he has taken the sting out of sin and says to death, where are your shackles? That it has been defeated. God, we are so grateful that you've saved us from ourselves, from our own foolishness at times, that from our own choices, God, you reunite us with you and we are so grateful for that. God, we are also grateful that you take the sting out of tragedy and that you promise a future that is delivered by Jesus. Thank you for communion and everything that it means. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. I'm Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. You guys, it's a holiday weekend. I mean, for the love of Peter, you're supposed to be out doing fun stuff. You chose to come to church. I am so thrilled about that. So it's good to see all of you, and thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. This is the third part of our series, Lessons from the Gym. As a disclaimer in that video, I've had a lot of people asking me, like, why do you think you're too good for turn lanes? Okay, here's what was happening in that video, is the shot was supposed to be, Nate, let me, this is, Steve was filming this, he says, Nate, let me get a shot of you exiting the gym, like pulling away, like that's the shot that we need to get. So I'm like, okay, good. So I pull out of the gym, and then I let him get a shot of that for as long as he could, driving down the road, and then just cut into the parking lot real quick to go pick him back up and not strand him. And what does he do but put that in the video and make me look like a degenerate? So thanks, Steve. But that's the story. I do actually abide by some, not all, but some traffic laws that make sense. All right. For the first couple of weeks that we've been in this series, we've been looking at what we're calling lessons from the gym and talking about getting spiritually healthy, right? Pursuing spiritual health in our lives. And as I've thought about it, what we've really been doing and what I've really been bringing to you is as you pursue spiritual health in your life, here are some things that I'd like for you to consider or to be aware of. And so the first week we said, here's five things that I want to tell you on your first day as you begin to pursue spiritual health. And then the next week, what I said was, listen, you can't do this alone. So those were things that were really descriptive to you of what does it take to be spiritual, like what do I need to know to be spiritually healthy? And so for the next two weeks, for this week and next week, I want to begin to answer the question, okay, what does it really mean to pursue spiritual health? What does it really require of me? What does it take to get there? And this whole time, I've been doing a parallel between pursuing physical health at the gym or working out or whatever it is we do to care for ourselves physically and paralleling that with our pursuit of spiritual health. And so as I got into the gym and began to pursue this physical health, there's a couple of things that became apparent to me. To go to the gym, to wake up one day and decide to go for a jog, to do push-ups, to buy a Beachbody DVD and try to do that, to do whatever it is you decide to do to get into the physical shape you want to get into, implicit in doing that, implicit in going to the gym, implicit in going for a jog, is this admission that I care about my physical health, right? If you don't care at all about your physical health and you don't go to the gym, you don't do the workout, you don't do the jog. You just eat the cinnamon rolls and sit on the couch. That's what you do. But to do any of those things, implicit in that action is an admission that physical health is important to me. And so when I went to the gym, everybody there is saying being physically healthy matters to me. The other thing is, as you go and you decide you want to be physically healthy, there are myriad goals within physical health, right? Everybody's got the before picture, and then we're all shooting for the after picture. We've got the before with the gut hanging out, we're wearing the t-shirt, we look like an overstuffed sausage. We've got that deal, and then we've got the after picture in our head, whatever it is that we're going for. And to some people, like, get in the gym and some people like they're in it, they're in it for the competitions. Like they are, they like go to competitions, they are lifting weights, they have figured out ways to isolate an exercise to get one strand of their triceps so that when they rub baby oil on it, it's really going to pop at the competition. Like that's their deal and that's their goal, which is also my goal. I'm very close. But that's what they want to do, right? They're in it for the competition. Others just, they just want to, like me, I just wanted to look good in a t-shirt. Like I just wanted to be able to put on a t-shirt, feel confidence without seeing my man gut. I'd love to be able to take Lily swimming and take my shirt off in front of other people and not be embarrassed about myself. Like that's pretty much it for me. Other people, they want to look good, but they want to be built, but not too built, you know. And others, when they start to get healthy, it's really not the way, it's really not about the way they look at all. It's about performance for them. They want to do a marathon or triathlon or whatever it is. And so for them, it's really about getting the body to be disciplined to do what it's supposed to do. And so people can have all kinds of different goals for their physical health, right? But whatever your goal is for your physical health, whatever you want the after picture to look like, there's actually a portion of the scientific community that has defined health for you. Whatever you want to look like, whatever you want your after picture to look like, whatever your reason was for going into the gym, if your goal is to be healthy, the scientific community has actually given you guidelines on what that health looks like, right? They're like, there's guidelines for BMI, for our body mass index, and for fat percentage. There's guidelines for what our cholesterol should be. There's guidelines for what our heart rate should be, our resting heart rate should be, for what our blood pressure should be. And really, whatever's going on outside of those indicators is fine and good, but if we're talking about health, there's actually some guidelines that dictate for us whether or not we are truly healthy. Because we can look fit and not be able to run a mile, and we can be cardiovascularly healthy but have some weakness in some other areas. So it's actually good to have a standard of physical health regardless of what our goals are for it. And in the same way, I think pursuing spiritual health parallels all of that really well. To me, to be in church in January, to be listening to this on a podcast or watching it online, implicit in the decision to do that, implicit in your decision to get up this morning to shower, which I hope you did, and then come here. And if you have kids, the hassle of getting them up and getting them ready for the early service. To do that, implicit in that is, hey, I care about my spiritual health. It could be a lot. It could be a little. But implicit in your attendance here is spiritual health matters to you. Implicit in listening to sermons online is the idea that spiritual health matters to you. And it could have mattered for a very long time. This could be an ongoing thing to you. This January is no different than last January or dozens before that. Or it could be a new initiative. But what I think is true of everyone in the room is that we are saying with our attendance that spiritual health matters to us. Now, there could be a difference in our spiritual goals. If we think about it as a before picture, this is what I looked like last year. This is what I looked like before I began to prioritize my spiritual health. And this is what I'd like to do now. There really is a wide range of goals that we could have. We could say, listen, I just want to be a good mom. I just want to exist in the house with my kids without losing my mind at them. That's what I want to be able to do. I'm just looking for a little bit of peace. Maybe it's my life has just felt so crazy that I just need some peace. I want to feel a connection with God. Maybe it's just things haven't been going my way for a while, and I just want to get some clarity about this. Maybe it's things have been going great and I want to begin to live a life out of this feeling of gratitude. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe we think I want to get plugged into a small group. I want to meet other people. I'd love for God to use me in ways in other people's life. I'd love to be involved in ministry in a volunteer capacity or even in a professional capacity. That's what I want to do. I'd love to be an elder of the church. I see these people that I admire, and I want to do that. Maybe we've got big, huge spiritual goals. Maybe we've got very modest spiritual goals, but we all have them, and I would say they're all good, at least as a starting place. But it got me to thinking, does the Bible, like the scientific community offers to those who are pursuing physical health some guidelines for what it actually looks like to be healthy, does the Bible offer similar guidelines to us for what it means to be spiritually healthy? And if it does, what are they? And I actually think that the Bible does this. Regardless of what your goals are, just to be a good spouse or a good co-worker or a good church partner or beyond that, regardless of what your goals are, does the Bible give to us standards that really define for us what spiritual health looks like, and I think that it does that. In the Bible, Old and New Testament, it talks a lot about this idea of bearing fruit, that if we're healthy, if we're good and we're vibrant, we will bear fruit. The book of Psalms was written by a guy named King David. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. Jesus is going to sit on his throne one day. The flag flying over Israel now bears his star. He's an important dude. And he wrote the longest book in the Bible, Psalms, which is actually a collection of five different books. And in the Psalms are basically journal entries from David. Worship songs, times when he was sad, times when he was joyful, times when he, blessed are those who do not invest their time with people who don't love Jesus and love them, like what we talked about last week. But if we will delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, if we will pursue him in spiritual health, then we will be like a tree planted by streams of water. We will yield our fruit in season, and all that we do, we will prosper. We will yield fruit if we follow the Lord. So then the question becomes, okay, what does that fruit look like? And I think that answer is twofold, and we find it in the New Testament. If we're going to ask ourselves, what does it look like to bear fruit, to be spiritually healthy to a place where we are bearing fruit, what does that look like? Well, Paul answers this question in the book of Galatians. I talk about Paul a lot. He was a really influential Christian. He planted churches, and then he wrote letters back to the churches. And one of the churches he planted was in Galatia. And he wrote a letter back to them that became the book of Galatians in our New Testament. And in the fifth chapter, there's this really famous, and you will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And so, to that question of what does it look like to bear fruit, what does it look like to be spiritually healthy, well, it means that we're going to bear fruit. Well, what kind of fruit are we going to bear? Well, Paul tells us in Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think of that as character. So to answer the question first, if we are going to be spiritually healthy, what is an indicator of that? Well, our character is an indicator of that. As a matter of fact, I think this is such a good diagnostic tool that within churches there's always this question, am I really saved? How do I really know if I know Jesus? How do I really know if I'm going to heaven? And I say, well, Ephesians tells us that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a deposit on our salvation, that God's going to make good on this promise. And we can tell if we have the Holy Spirit in our life by whether or not we bear the fruit that Paul lists out in Galatians chapter 5. So I would tell you, if you want to know whether or not you know Jesus, look at the wake of your life over the past three to five years and ask yourself the question, are those things growing in my life? Are those eight, nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those things growing in my life? Are those nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those increasing in my life, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Are those increasing in my life? Am I growing in those areas? If you're not, it doesn't do you any good to lie to yourself about it. I think it does us a lot of good to get on our knees and pray about it. But if we're going to ask that question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? Well, we have to ask ourselves, am I bearing fruit? I think there's twofold ways that we bear that fruit. And the first is to be growing in our character as outlined in Galatians 5.22. The other way we see ourselves bearing fruit based on scripture is found in a lot of places, but I'm going to look at John 15, where Jesus says, and I've talked about this in recent weeks, I am the tree, essentially, I am the tree and you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. And in this instance, he's talking to the disciples. And when he's saying bearing much fruit, what he means is you will produce a lot of ministry. There will be people who are closer to me, closer to Jesus, as a result of you being in their life. And so biblically, to bear fruit means to grow in character and to grow our personal ministries. Does that make sense? And what that means is, can I look at my life, at the wake of my life, and point to individuals who would say, because that person is in my life, because I've been in PTA with them, because I work with them, because I played on the same tennis team as them, because I served in church with them, because I'm in a run group with them, because they are my friend. I am closer to Jesus because of them. If people would look at you and say that, then that is fruit. So when we ask the question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The answer is, well, it means that we will bear fruit. And what does it look like to bear fruit? Well, it looks like we're growing in our character and we're growing in our ministry, okay? That's what that looks like. So as we define spiritual health this morning and say, what does it mean to pursue spiritual health? That's what we're going after. The after picture before is, I'm not doing that stuff. I need to grow in my character. I need to grow in my ministry. The after picture is I am bearing fruit, both in character and impact. So as I'm at the gym and I'm thinking about this idea of physical health, what it means to pursue physical health, one of the things I realized is I think I had committed at first to go three days a week. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to go three days a week. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I'm only going to do the stuff I want to do, and hopefully I get sweaty, and then I'll sit in the steam room, and then I'll go back to the house. That's what I'm going to do. But as I'm looking around at the people there, the people who look really healthy, and I'm thinking, I hope I can look like that. That's good for me. That's what I want to be, right? As I'm looking at those people, one of the things that occurred to me is, and it's really the thought for this week, is my goodness, what I see in them at the gym has a lot more to do with what they do at the gym. It has a lot more to do with what they do outside of the gym than what they do in it. You see? I'm looking at them going, man, their commitment to health is a lot more than 60 to 90 minutes three days a week. Their commitment to health is a lot more than coming into the gym and throwing up some weight and getting on a treadmill. And those of you who have pursued physical health before, you know that this is true. It takes a lot more. There's not just one thing that you can do. You can't just go to the gym three days a week and then do whatever you want to outside of the gym and get physically healthy. It doesn't take very long when you're valuing your physical health to realize that to get physically healthy, it really takes a holistic commitment to this health. If you're going to go to the gym and exercise or run or whatever it is you're going to do, at some point or another, you have to become at least moderately familiar with exercise science. You've got to know what the exercises are doing to your body when you do them. If you just repeat the same ones over and over and over again, you're not going to get physically healthy on a grand scale. You're just not. You're just going to have really big arms from doing curls. That's it. You've got to learn a little bit of exercise science, what it means to mix in some cardio. You have to learn to value that even though you don't want to. You have to learn what it means to eat right, not just healthily, but to eat right so that when you're at the gym, you're actually burning the stuff you want to burn off and not muscle, right? You have to learn that stuff. If you want to get physically healthy, then you have to be committed to eating right. You have to be committed to a diet. I would sometimes go to the gym in the afternoons, and that would impact the way that I ate lunch. I'd have a lunch meeting, and I'd want to eat something big and fun and filling, and realize I can't swim with that in my gut, so I've got to eat a wrap. Darn it. I have to eat fruit right now. But then I would actually feel decent later. So it begins to dictate all the things you do. You begin to think more holistically. You don't just eat to lose weight, but you eat to actually fuel yourself and get healthy. So you have to make a commitment to that. You make a commitment to sleep because you understand that the way that I sleep and the way that I rest really impacts the way that I'm able to perform when I'm trying to get healthy. And then sometimes to get healthy, and this is the hard part, means that you have to let go of something you really love, right? Any of you guys ever been to the doctor and they told you, all right, listen, here's the issue and you need to get better and if you want to get better, you got to chill out on the red meat red meat. That would be a tough one. I know that's coming. Both of my grandfathers on either side of the family had passed away from heart issues. So I'm really cruising for a bruising here if I keep it up with all the meat. I know that. At some point I'm going to have to give that up. I have found I'm a sucker for baked goods. I can be on quite the streak, and then some well-meaning jerk brings some stuff to, I'm just messing around about jerk. It's really sweet, sweet people bring stuff to the office, and I'm like, oh man, I really need to eat that right now. You know, like, and then staff members will mess with me, and they'll come and they'll put it on my desk, because they know that I'm a sucker for it, and I'm going to eat it. Like, I love that stuff, but sometimes getting physically healthy means giving up things that you really love, but it takes a holistic commitment, right? It doesn't just happen in the gym. And I think similarly, when we make a decision in our life and in our hearts that we want to pursue spiritual health, one of the things that we sometimes do is reduce that pursuit to a commitment to things like church and small group. And we don't intentionally reduce it to this, but we just start like anybody else does. Somebody says, I want to get physically healthy, and so they go, okay, I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start running and pursuing prioritized physical health there. I'm going to make this important. And so they take a couple steps to make it important, but as you get into it, what you realize is, oh my gosh, this is not going to cut it. I really need to be entirely, like I need to be bought all the way in on this, or I'm never going to actually get healthy. And it works the same way spiritually. I think a lot of us make decisions to pursue spiritual health, and then as a follow-through on that decision, we go, I'm going to attend church more regularly. I'm going to try to listen to worship music in the car. I'm going to try to go to small group. I'm going to get involved in serving at the church. And as I think about those things, those are good things. But I wonder, is that enough? If we're serious about getting spiritually healthy, is that commitment, I'm going to go to church more, I'm going to sign up for a small group, I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to do that. Is that commitment really enough to bring about holistic spiritual health in our life? And I think there's a passage that actually answers this question. It's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It's in 2 Peter chapter 1. It'll be up on the screen in a minute when I start reading it. There's a Bible in front of you if you'd like to look at it yourself there. But it's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Peter was like the leader of the disciples. And 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, as these disciples are popping up all over Asia Minor, Peter writes a letter. And the idea of this letter is for it to be circulated from church to church as he encourages them in their spiritual growth and their pursuit of spiritual health. And in the first chapter of the second letter that he wrote, that we call 2 Peter, he gives us what I think is a roadmap to spiritual health. He says, if you want to be spiritually healthy, then here's what you need to do. So I want us to look at this list together, verses 5, 6, and 7, and understand that this is really a roadmap to spiritual health. Here we go. For this very reason, Peter writes, make every effort. Another translation says, with all diligence. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. And virtue with knowledge. And knowledge with self-control. And self-control with steadfastness or perseverance, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. Now, as an aside on this passage, this is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside on this, one of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is really so simple. Jesus, when he comes on the scene, he boils all the do's and the don'ts and the things that we get worked up about down to two very simple commandments, love God and love others. And so the greatest of these, Paul tells us, of all attributes is love, and that's what we're supposed to pursue. And so part of us goes, okay, this is great. I just have to focus on loving other people and I will fulfill the law. Me and God will be good. And that's true. But what Peter says is you cannot possibly love until you've mastered brotherly affection. You cannot possibly master brotherly affection until you have mastered godliness. And you can't master that until you've mastered what comes before that, perseverance and all the rest, so that there's actually building blocks to even be capable of loving. We don't start at love, we work to it. That's an aside, but I think it's an interesting part about this passage. And so I would ask you, if these, faith, virtue, or integrity, knowledge, learning more about God and the Bible, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection and love, if those are the characteristics that we should pursue, he says make every effort to add to this characteristic, this characteristic. If those are the characteristics that we are to dedicate our life to pursuing that result in spiritual health, I would ask you, can you pursue those on a Sunday morning? If you just come to church every week, can you pursue these things? If you go to church and you add to that a small group and you add to that serving and that's your Jesus time, that's your God time, that's your spiritual health time during the week, can you build these characteristics in your life? Or as you read through those and think through the mechanics of pursuing them, does it sound like those need to be on your heart and on your mind every day? Do you think it's possible to come to church once a week, to go to our small group on Tuesday night, to serve once a month or twice a month when we're supposed to serve, and then go through the rest of our weeks like God's not a priority, to go through the rest of our weeks like he's almost an afterthought, to just wake up in the morning whenever our job requires us to wake up, to encounter the stress at our job as it comes to us, to maybe every now and again pray for our food before the meal, and then talk about spiritual things when it comes up. And if we're being honest, most of us get into a habit and into a cycle where that is really our spiritual effort. If that is true of us, is it possible to develop these characteristics in increasing measure in our lives? Does it sound like we are being obedient to what Paul tells us to do in Thessalonians where he says rejoice always and pray without ceasing? See, what I think is if we're going to be spiritually healthy, it requires a holistic commitment with our whole life. We can't just go to the gym three days a week and expect to get healthy. Do you see? That's the first step. But if we're actually serious about our spiritual health, and remember, even being here and listening to me, implicit in that action is that to some degree or another, my spiritual health matters to me. And what I want to tell you this morning is, if it really does, and if you really want to bear fruit, and if you really want to be spiritually healthy, then what it requires of you is a holistic spiritual commitment from your whole life to pursue the health that God outlines for you. It requires waking up in the morning and intentionally pursuing the presence of God, spending time in his word and spending time in prayer. It requires putting people around you who love you and who love Jesus. It requires being able to get to a place where you understand God's word and you grow in knowledge so that you can teach it. You at least have some sort of moderate understanding of how the Bible ties together. It is hard work to get spiritually healthy, but I think a lot of us live in this place where we can pursue spiritual health with a minimal commitment. And what I think Peter is telling us is it does not work that way. We have got to be holistically committed to spiritual health. We can't half-heartedly pursue it. And when people do this at the gym, we see what happens, right? I've been at the gym and I've seen these, it's usually dudes who, they can throw up a ton of weight, man. Like they get over there bench pressing and I'm like, yo, don't mess with that guy. Like they can really throw it up there. They're squatting all kinds of stuff. They got thighs the size of my waist. Like they're some big old dudes. But you can also look at them and you can go, but they don't really seem healthy. They had a bigger gut than me. They're strong. They're good at the gym. They're not healthy, right? I think this happens in church too. They're good at church. They know their Bible. But, man, there's some stuff about them. I don't know if they're healthy. They're kind of jerks. I don't know if I see fruit. I mean, they're good at church. Like, man, they are a killer in Bible study. You ask them a question, they know the answer. But I don't know if that's what I want to look like. Right? And so I wonder this. If you're in a place right now in your life where the after picture doesn't look like what you want it to look like, your spiritual health doesn't look like what you'd like it to look like, you would not look at where you are spiritually and say, this is where I wanted to be. And to me, to be a Christian is to have at least multiple seasons in your life where you look at yourself and you think in your heart and you know it. And this is so true of me. This has been true of me more times in my life and for more of a portion of my life than I even want to admit. But when I think about where I am spiritually, what I tend to think is, man, I should be so much further along. I should be past this now. And if you've ever thought that too, and we would sit where we are right now and say, you know what, I'm not spiritually where I'd like to be. I wonder if it's because we've just been going to the gym three days a week. I wonder if it's because we've just tried to half-heart it. And we haven't ever really made a holistic effort to being spiritually healthy. I wonder if it's because we know that there's something that we really like. And we want to be healthy, but we don't want to give that up. Some of us are still hanging on to that red meat. Right? But here's the thing, and this is why I love Peter. And this is why I love this passage. There's a promise at the end of this passage. Do you know what happens if you'll commit yourself to being spiritually healthy? If you'll radically change your priorities and make the holistic commitment to spiritual health? Look at what happens in verse 8, and I love this verse. It says, Isn't that great? If these qualities are yours and are increasing, if you will lean into these qualities, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive. If you lean into these qualities, if you pursue them with your whole heart, if you will commit to holistic spiritual health and do what it takes to allow God to work in your heart, to bring you closer to him, then Peter promises you that you will bear fruit. Your character will change. You will produce the fruit of the Spirit. And even, I think, more importantly than that, more impactful than that, more rewarding than that, is if you pursue these, then he guarantees you that when you get to the twilight of your life and you begin to look back on all the things that God did in you and through you, that what you will see in your wake is people who would point to you and say, I am closer to Jesus because you existed in my life. Isn't that what we want? All the other crap aside that we pursue with our life and that we put effort into, what could matter more than getting to the end of our life and being able to say what Paul said, that I have been poured out like a drink offering? What could possibly matter more than being able to look at the wake of our life over the decades and know in our heart that there are people who would point to us and say, I am closer to the Father because that person existed in my life. What could be more important to pursue than that? And Peter says, if you will make a commitment to pursuing spiritual health by making every effort to make these characteristics true of you, then I will promise you that one day as you look back on your life, you will see a wake of ministry and impact and character there that will lead to a fulfilling life. I promise you it is not wasted effort. I promise you it will not return null and void. I promise you this is the best possible way to invest your life. So I would just challenge you this morning by asking you, is it possible that your spiritual health isn't where you want it to be? Because in whole or in part, we've reduced that pursuit to going to the gym three days a week. And is your spiritual health worth making a life-altering, holistic commitment to the pursuit of it? I've been saying since the beginning of the year, I hope this is the year that you move closer to Jesus than you ever have. And a big part of that is, what are you willing to do to pursue it? Let's pray, and then I'm going to call the ushers forward for the offering. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for the way that you love us. God, we are so grateful that you meet us in our effort, that you meet us in our cry to be closer to you, and that you do the hard work for us. Father, I pray that we would commit, that we wouldn't make a half-hearted effort towards you, but that we would offer our entire selves to you, that we would follow this roadmap that you lay out in 2 Peter. God, I pray that the people of this church would be people who bear fruit in ministry, who grow in their character. Let us not be a church who simply goes to the gym. Whatever stands between us and health, Father, I pray that you would give us the courage to get it out of the way. Let us be people who know you and are fruitful in that knowledge. It's in your Son's name I pray. Amen.

Thank y'all for being here. It's so good to see you. I'm actually the pastor here. They let me do it, which is silly. But my name is Nate, and it's good to see all of you. And again, thanks for being here as we start out January in 2019 together. We have launched the new year with the series Lessons from the Gym. And that started in 2017, that whole year. For whatever reason, I had an uncommon burst of discipline, and I spent more time in the gym that year than I ever had before. And while I was there, just some things occurred to me. I observed some things and learned some things, and I began to see a lot of similarities between going to the gym and trying to get physically healthy and coming to church and trying to get spiritually healthy. And so I just kind of kept track of these things. And as we approached the new year, we knew that some people would be making some resolutions to get physically healthy. I mean, I had my first day back in the gym already this year. It went really well. I was throwing up tons of weight. And then some of us have some resolutions to get spiritually healthy. And we want to meet those and foster those as well. And so as we start the year together, I thought I would share with you some of the things I learned or thought about while I was doing that. Last week, I shared with you my experience in going for the first time and how that could be intimidating when you go to the gym for the first time and you don't know what to do. You feel like kind of an imposter and everyone's kind of looking at you and they're going to figure you out, right? And then it occurred to me that, oh my goodness, this must be what it feels like to go to a church for the first time. It's got to feel uneasy. It's got to be a little bit unnerving, even for those of us with more confidence, which has to be just a little bit intimidating for us to do that. And so I thought, man, what are five things I would love to be able to say to people on their first visit with us at Grace? And what are five things that I want us as a church to be saying to other people through our words and our actions as they come to Grace? And so I would say this, I never do this. I never tell you like, hey, go back and listen to the sermon because that's self-aggrandizing and gross. But for this one, I do think it's important because last week I shared five things that we would love to tell people on their first visit at Grace. And so if you're new to Grace, I would encourage you to go find that online or on the podcast and give it a listen. This week I want to tell you about a meeting that I had with a nutritionist at the gym. As I started to exercise, one of the things I learned is that exercise is good. It makes you healthy. It's very helpful. But if you really want to change the way you look, meaning my goals was for when I sweat, for my sweat to show up on my chest before my belly. That was my only physical fitness goal. But to start changing that, I didn't need to get in the gym. I needed to eat right. And I realized that diet is really more impactful than exercise. So then I started thinking about like, well, how can I diet, right? How can I eat right? Because there's a lot of fad diets out there and they seem unmanageable and unwieldy. And I'm not going to be able to like do those in perpetuity, right? Like I heard somebody say like you have to eat the rainbow every day and that feels like a real hassle. I don't want to do that. I know some people who are on Whole30, which really should be called Whole Hassle. It's so annoying even to be friends with these people when you go out to eat. You may as well just hand a note to the server when you walk in going, I'm really sorry, I'm going to be a hassle for you today. That's not sustainable, right? Because you have to know all these things about food and how to eat. You can do that for 30 days. You can't do that for forever. And so I wanted to learn how to eat right moving forward, something that would be manageable. And so I found a lady who was a nutritionist at the gym and I set an appointment and I went to meet with her. And I was fascinated with what she had to say about nutrition and all the different ways it works and the way that like different bodies respond to different. And I had no idea that it was that detailed. And I quickly became overwhelmed and a little disinterested because I thought, I'm not going to do any of this. So instead, I noticed that her job in trying to help people get physically healthy is a lot like my job in trying to help people get spiritually healthy. And so I began to ask her questions about that. She kept trying to go back to nutrition. I'm like, yeah, that's great. I'll eat some eggs. But let's talk about this, right? And I noticed that she has people come in. She gets to know them, what makes them tick. She comes up with a plan to move them towards health. And then they provide accountability around those people to help them become healthy, and that's really what I do. And from her vantage point, she's seen a lot of people come into the gym wanting to get healthy, and she's seen success stories, and she's seen others that flamed out, and she was telling me the importance of, if you're going to do it, and you're going to do it right, then you really do need a trainer because we hold you accountable. It would be good to have a group of friends or a group of buddies to kind of work out with you or at least see at the gym to hold you accountable there. It would be good if you would do that. Her nutrition and program, she said, was great because you keep a log and she holds you accountable for what you eat and all those kinds of things. And a question occurred to me that I thought had some application at the church. I said, how many people do you see come in? Because when you're at the gym and you're a trainer, January, right, you see us all come in. All the people with our holiday weight on us, like we come in and they see us and they kind of know whether or not we're going to be successful or not. And so I said, how many people do you see come into the gym with the goal of getting physically healthy, but they're doing it alone? They don't have any accountability. They're not hooked up with a trainer. They're not doing the nutrition program. They're just on their own through their own personal discipline. They're just trying to get themselves healthy. How many people do you see successfully do that by themselves? And she very quickly said, less than 5%. Less than 5%. That's nearly impossible. And I thought, oh, how interesting. Because if you think about segments of our culture that are disciplined, people who go to the gym are disciplined, right? And so if you wanted to isolate a segment of our culture that does exhibit discipline that's maybe even above and beyond the mean, you would go to the gym. And what I thought was interesting was even amongst people who are by nature disciplined and have taught themselves self-discipline over the years, less than 5% of them are able to accomplish physical health without other people around them. You cannot get physically healthy alone. And to me, everything in my brain went off as I think about church, because I know that it's entirely true that just like you can't get physically healthy alone, you don't stand a chance of getting spiritually healthy alone. You cannot do that. She said less than 5% of people come in and achieve physical health by themselves. I would say nobody comes into church, regardless of their resolve and their background, void of other people in their life who love them and love Jesus, and moves to a place of long-lasting spiritual health. Nobody does that. You can come to Jesus on your own. You can come to Jesus in the privacy of your own heart, in the privacy of your own home. You can do that on your own. You can get connected with Jesus by yourself. That's absolutely possible. You hear a sermon that compels you. You have a conversation with a friend. You have a big life event. There can be something that just between you and God, you accept Christ and you're connected now to the Father through Jesus. You can do that on your own, but you cannot sustain that growth and flourish in your spiritual health on your own. There is no such thing as a Lone Ranger Christian. I have been doing ministry now, vocationally, for nearly 20 years, which is, I feel old. But when I was 19, I went pro, right? They started paying me to be a Christian, which is, that's all ministry is. It's not a big deal. But at 19, I got involved with Young Life, started doing youth ministry, kept doing youth ministry, started doing some other stuff, got involved in a church. I oversaw small groups for a church of nearly 2,000 people and kind of watched the spiritual maturation process within the several hundred folks that were in those and have just been around church world for a long time. And like the trainer at the gym, I've seen a lot of people come in and out of the church. I've seen a lot of people come into the church with gusto. Something's happened in their life. They really want to pursue spiritual health. They want to prioritize their walk with the Lord. They want to prioritize. They want to get some things out of their life that they've been wanting to get rid of for a long time. They want some things in their life that they feel like they've been missing for a long time. I've seen this happen a lot. And sometimes you watch people, it just takes off. Something clicks and they move towards spiritual health and it's a really cool story. And other times you watch them flame out. And maybe that's part of your story. You go back to church with gusto. We've seen this happen. If you've been a church person for any length of time, you've seen other people do this. And maybe we've done it too. We recommit. We make a commitment. I'm going to get spiritually healthy. I'm going to do this. This is going to be important to me. And so we prioritize our walk with the Lord. But then the spiritual things in our life, church, small group, whatever matters most to us, I don't want to set up Sunday morning like it's the number one indicator of spiritual health. It's not. But our commitment to those things tends to fall away, right? At some point or another, it's going to trickle down. No matter how much energy and effort we have and commitment we have going into it, eventually our enthusiasm wanes. And I've seen people come in and they meet with me and they're on fire and they want to get plugged in and they do all the things, but then like attendance and engagement starts to kind of fall off, right? For a couple of months, I don't see them as often. And then after those couple of months, I just don't see them at all. It just falls off. And as I've watched this process over the years, one of the things I've learned is this, that the number one, and I believe this with my whole heart, the number one indicator of your future spiritual health is the community of people that you have in your life. The number one indicator of whether or not you're going to be walking with the Lord in three years and five years and 10 years is who you have in your life right now that is connected to Jesus and connected to you. It's who you have in your life who loves you and who loves Jesus. You show me a person, and not that anybody ever does this, this is a ridiculous hypothetical conversation, but if you showed me a person and you said, this is Kyle, how do you think he's going to be doing spiritually in five years? The very first question I would ask is, who are his friends? Who does he have around him? Who does she have around her that loves her and loves Jesus? To me, that is the number one indicator, more than whether or not we're getting up and reading our Bible and praying, more than what their church attendance is. No, no, no, no. Who do they have in their life that loves them and loves Jesus? It is the number one indicator of future spiritual health. I believe that community is vitally important. And I believe so strongly that you can't be a Lone Ranger Christian that I think it should be prioritized in church above and beyond almost everything else. And this isn't just my idea. This is not something I've learned over observation in ministry. This is a very biblical idea. If you look at Jesus, the Son of God comes down to earth, lives in Nazareth and the area of Galilee and northern Israel for 30 years, and then at the age of 30, he starts his ministry. And if you're a Bible person and you've read the Gospels, the first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, they all tell the story of Jesus' life. If you've ever opened those up and you've read them and paid attention to them, when Jesus starts his ministry, when he goes public, what's the very first thing he does? He calls the disciples to himself. Does he go, okay, I'm starting, and then just go out and start preaching and talking to people? No. He goes and he gets community around him. We actually see evidence in Jesus's life that he had some very best friends that lived in a town east of Jerusalem called Bethany. And that those were his people. And that those are who he loves. And when he called the disciples, he didn't just call one or two or three, he called 12. And when you watch Jesus interacting throughout his ministry, he's interacting with groups on a group level. You very rarely see Jesus having a one-on-one conversation with somebody. He's always teaching corporately. He's always keeping people around him. Jesus was one who believed in the power of community. Paul, the most influential Christian to ever live, he wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. He was a man, his name was Saul, until God got a hold of him, changed it to Paul, and said he is the chosen instrument to reach the rest of the world. And what he did to reach the rest of the world is he went on three, maybe four, depending on what you think of the last one, missionary journeys where he went around planting churches in cities like Thessalonica and Corinth and Philippi and Ephesus and Galatia and Rome. And then he would write letters back to those churches which have become our New Testament. And when he would go on those missionary journeys, the most influential Christian to ever live, did he go alone because he was so close to God that he didn't need anybody else? No. He had with him what we refer to now as the traveling seminary. Younger men and women that he was training for ministry, that he was pouring into, that he was leaving at certain places. Did you know that there's books in the Bible, 1 and 2 Timothy, that Paul writes to a young pastor because he left Timothy, who was in his traveling seminary, in Ephesus to continue the work there. He discipled him relationally. Even Paul surrounded himself with community. If you read his books, what you'll pay attention to and you'll notice is that friendship mattered a lot to him. The book of Romans, the entire last chapter, Romans 16, is almost entirely greetings and salutations to people who were in Rome to whom he was close. These relationships mattered a lot to Paul. If you look at the book of Acts, where the early church starts, Acts chapter 2, Jesus has lived his life. He's died on the cross. He's come back to life. And then he gave the disciples some instructions. You guys lead the church now. You guys make it go. I'm going to heaven. I'll see you when you get there. And they get together in this upper room and they go, what do we do? And the rest of them go, I don't know, what do we do? And they waited for the Holy Spirit. the Holy Spirit showed up and told them what to do. And so they went out on their balcony and they began to preach to the thousands of people in Jerusalem who were gathered around the disciples to see what do we do next. And when they heard the message of the gospel, when they heard who Jesus was and why he was here, they said, I want in. And the church immediately grew to thousands. Two or three thousand people right there in Jerusalem. That was the birth of the church that we are now a part of today. And in Acts 2, chapter 42 through 47, or chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, we have the seminal passage on what the early church looked like. Like, if you care about church at all and you want to know, like, are we doing this right? The biggest indicator is to go back to Acts chapter 2 and look at the characteristics of the early church that are listed out in those verses. And we're not going to turn there today because I don't have time to do it, but I'll tell you that the characteristics there are they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the breaking of bread, to eating meals together in their homes. It says they gathered in their homes daily. It says that they pooled their resources and shared them together and gave them to whoever needed them as those needs came up. And then it says that the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. You know what characterized the early church? Community and connection. It's that important. It's not just important in the New Testament, it's important in the Old Testament. In the days of ancient wisdom, Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, wrote the book of Proverbs. And in Proverbs chapter 10, he says, the companion of the wise will become wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. My dad used to say, show me your friends, I'll show you your future. It's absolutely true. And then in Ecclesiastes, Solomon writes this. I love the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes has the guts to just be dead level honest with you and tell you the truth. The rest of the Bible tells you the truth, but this one just who love you and love Jesus and are helping foster that commitment. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon says, the more the merrier. The more people you have around you in your life who love you and love Jesus, the better chance you have of maintaining and growing and flourishing in a spiritual health. I believe that this is so important, this concept of connection and community, that if you were to ask me what the most important part of my job is, that's what I would say. Which is interesting because when I took this job, that's not what I thought it was. If someone were to come to you and ask you, hey, who's your pastor? You would say, well, it's a guy named Nate. We're kind of going through a rough patch right now. But then if they were to ask you, what is his job? You would probably say, well, he preaches. We prop him up there on Sunday morning, and he runs his mouth, and then we go home, and that's how it goes. His job is to preach. And when I took the job, I felt like my job was to preach. But the more I've thought about it, I've realized that's not the biggest thing that I do. The biggest thing I do is to create systems and processes that funnel you into connection that matters. The biggest thing I do is get fanatical about connecting you with people once you come here. The biggest thing I can do is activate those of you who are grace people, who are grace partners, to use and leverage your community and your connections to graft others into the family of God so that they have the community that you have and are plugged in in such a way that we propel them towards spiritual health. The most important thing I do is to help us be fanatical about getting other people connected to people who love Jesus and who love them. It is the difference maker in future spiritual health, and it is vitally, vitally important. It's a huge deal. And if you hear that and you think, gosh, man, I hear you. We do have to get people connected, but you should preach, man. We got to learn the Bible. There's other things that are super important. I agree with you. Because of that, I want to ask you to do a little exercise with me, okay? I'm being serious now. You can get a pen. You can get your bulletin. You write this thing down. Or if you're like me and you're going to ignore my instructions anyway, just think about it for a second. Here's what I'd like you to do. If you've spent any time in church, if you're not a church person, this is your first time in church, this is going to be a hard exercise for you. You just chill out for just a second. But if you're a church person, I want you to do this for me. I want you to take 30 seconds and write down the five most influential sermons you've ever heard in your life. The five sermons that you've heard in your life that have impacted you in such a way that's moved you to a place of spiritual sustained health. The ones that you look back on and you go, that one was good. That one really changed me and impacted me. Five most influential sermons in Go. Y'all can't even remember two of mine. All right. Time out on that. If you're really doing it, you can continue it later. It is an interesting exercise. Now I want you to do this. Same piece of paper, same thought process. Make a list in 30 seconds of the five most influential people in your life who have impacted you spiritually and pushed you more towards Jesus. That's an easier list, isn't it? It's a much easier list. And when the pastor asks you to write down influential sermons, you think, oh, shoot, I've got to come up with something here. No, you don't. Here's what I know. Can I just tell you this? Can I just be honest with you? You guys don't remember what I say. I know that. You guys don't remember my sermons. Maybe. I've been here almost two years. Maybe one, maybe two. You don't remember my sermons. And that's okay. You're not supposed to. I've worked the hardest I can to give you something on Sunday morning that's worth showing up to. I don't expect you to remember it on Wednesday. I just hope that there's something over the course of time that we learn about Scripture, that we learn about our God, that we learn about our Savior, that moves us closer to Him, that they can impact us for that day, for that week, but we just push the needle every week. We just push the flywheel every week. There's not one single sermon that moves us in that direction, but do you know what impacts us? People. Over the course of my ministry here, if God blesses me with decades here, you know what will be most impactful to you is the times that I am able to show up at the hospital, the times that we're able to sit around a table together, the times that we served on committees together, the times that we were in small group together. You know what's going to impact you at grace more than my sermons is the friends that you have here that push you towards Jesus. That when you begin to fall away a little bit, they reach out and they grab you and they go, hey, why don't you come back? That when your marriage starts to struggle a little bit, they put their arm around you and they go, hey, is everything okay? That's going to impact you. The people in your life are going to impact you so much more than what happens here on Sunday mornings. And I understand that. Which is why I believe that the most important thing I can do for you is to connect you in community. The other reason I believe this, if we're just being honest, thinking about church moving into the 2020s, which is super close now, which is nuts. And I know you guys probably haven't thought about this. I think a lot more about church than most folks. Do you realize that the only part left of church that you can't download is friends? You ever thought about that? The only part left of church that you can't download is your friends. Listen, I work hard on these sermons. You guys say, most weeks I work hard on them. Sometimes I wing it. You guys say nice things about the sermons. But this is not false humility here. There are world-class speakers and preachers who their sermons are uploaded every week. You can listen to me on Sunday and go listen to six better ones every day of the week. There's better sermons and better preachers out there. That doesn't hurt my feelings. It's just true. And if you're coming to church for the sermons, you can download those. If you're coming to the church for the music, which by the way, time out, wasn't that freaking great this morning? Gosh, that was so good. I'm so proud of the way, the job that Steve has done and the way that they sounded. And it's just, I really like that. And I love singing Reckless Love. But you can get in your car and sing it with the person who wrote it, who got paid to record it, who is really good. You can download worship songs. You've got Spotify. You can dial up anyone you want. You can have a big, long worship session in your car or in your office or in your kitchen, wherever you want it. You can download that. You know what you can't download? Your buddies. People who love you and love Jesus. And so I believe that the churches who emphasize community most are the ones that are going to be healthiest and best as we move into the future. The ones who emphasize community and connection are the ones that are going to actually be healthy because we're paying attention to what matters in the lives of others. And so my goal for you is that you come in here and you get connected with other people. That's what I think about. And can I tell you that that's the reason I chose Grace? That's the reason I came to Grace was because of the tremendous sense of community that we have here. In December of 2016, I had an interview set up with the search team from Grace. It was a Skype interview. It was going to be two hours. And so I woke up that day, I think it was December the 8th, and I began to do research about the church because when they asked me, why is it that you want to work here? I'm not going to go, I don't know, what's on your website? Like I was going to have a good answer for them, right? Which by the way, if you're interviewing for jobs, like you should do that, like research for the company. They appreciate that. So I was just learning because I didn't want to look dumb. And can I just be honest with you? Some of you guys know this story. Others of you don't. So I'm sorry about this. The more I learned about grace in December of 2016, the less I wanted to be here. Because that church at that time was not going well. It was kind of leaking like a sieve. And I thought, I don't think that this is, I got a job I like, comfortable in, I have a family. I'm not moving six hours for that. So I actually opened up my computer to write the email to cancel the interview. But then I thought, time out, big time. You're not so important that you should cancel interviews. Just take it and practice. You need it. So I took the interview. And they asked me all the questions and whatever it was. And then at the end, they said, well, do you have any questions for us? And I thought, yeah, I mean, I don't really care. I said, let's just let it fly. I was interested in this. And I said, you guys, you guys have not been doing well. You've been shrinking for several years. And that church has been through a lot of strife. What are you still doing there? And they said, we're here because we love each other. We're here for the community. We're here because our kids grew up here and this place matters to us. And we're here because of our connection with others. And when they said that, I thought, that's where I want to be. That's what I want to be a part of. A church that values community like that. Because I so strongly believe in it. And as I've come here, I've seen that that is what's most important to Grace. I've watched you guys as we've come and we've grown over the last 18 months. As people come in who maybe haven't been in a while, there hasn't been even a hint of, oh, you're back now. It has only been open-armed welcomes. It has only been warm receptions. And I hope that as you've come back to Grace that you've experienced that same warmth as well. If you haven't, I'm sorry that we have failed you, but I think that's what characterizes Grace. I think it's what we do, and it's what we do best. Which is why, as I came here, and I thought about what are we going to look like in the future? What's going to characterize us? Because we're in Raleigh. There's hundreds if not thousands of churches. All of you guys, this place could fold. All of you guys could be in another church next week, okay? And I know that. So it's important to me to figure out what makes us us. What makes us Grace Raleigh? God has different churches that he's positioning throughout the city to build his kingdom here. What's our niche? What do we need to lean into so that we most wisely invest our resources and our time? And I'm convinced it's community. It's our ability to graft other people in and get them connected. Because of that, in the fall of last year, I began to look at our mission statement. And our mission statement was a good one. Loving Jesus, loving our neighbor, and living faithfully. We said it here every Sunday. It's a good mission statement. And for those of you who are unindoctrinated, the mission statement of a church isn't a huge deal, except that it really serves as kind of the marching orders for a church. The mission statement, what you say it is, has two purposes. It's descriptive to outsiders. As they look at the church from the outside in, what does that church do there? It's descriptive to them. It's prescriptive to insiders. It prescribes for us what we need to do. Our mission is to love Jesus and to love our neighbor and to live faithfully. That's what we're going to do. That's what's going to be expected of me if I go there. And that's a good mission. But this thing I had in the back of my head was the idea that that's a good mission, but that's not graces. That's not personalized to grace. That doesn't make grace unique. That doesn't capture who we are and what we most deeply care about. And to me, the belief in community and commitment to one another, connecting with one another as we connect to Jesus, is what's most important to us. It's what is vitally important to us. It's the reason I came here is because I felt like we were on the same page with that. And so at the beginning of the year, I proposed a new mission statement to the elders, and we had a really great, I would call it a healthy give and take discussion about it. And it was a worthwhile investment of time because by the end of it, we were all on the same page and of one accord. And we came up with a mission statement that I don't believe at all changes the direction of grace. I think it captures what we already do and makes our future more clear. So now, beginning in 2019, the mission statement at Grace Raleigh is connecting people to Jesus, connecting people to people. That's what we do. It's who we are. This doesn't change our direction. It just makes it more clear because we're already passionate about doing this. Because I think you know without ever saying it or thinking through it that the best indicator towards someone's spiritual health is whether or not they're connected to other people who love Jesus and love them. And so when someone walks through the doors at Grace Raleigh, our very first goal for them is that they would get connected to Jesus. But what we understand about the power of community and the difficulty of life is that no one grows closer to him by themselves. And so the very next thing that we have to get, we've got to be fanatical about is getting them connected with community. The shorthand of this is connecting people. Grace Raleigh, connecting people. That's what we do. Who do we connect them to? Well, first we connect them to Jesus and then we deepen that relationship by connecting them to other people who love Jesus and who love them. I hope that fires you up. I hope that you like that. I am excited about that. I've had people ask me a lot over the past several months, what do you think is the future of the church? How big do you think we're going to be? How big would you like to see us become? Where do you think we're going to go from now? What are we going to look like in five years? And to all those questions, I always go, I don't know. That's a lot of pressure, man. I just have to preach. I don't know. And to be honest with you, I don't really care. I don't really care how big we get. That's not really important to me. What's important to me is how healthy we are. What's important to me is how good of a job we do at what I believe church exists for. And the entire time I've been here, whenever anybody would ask and they say, what's your goal for the church? My goal is that on Sunday morning, when somebody walks through those doors, we acknowledge that God has entrusted us with that soul and we are a good steward of that soul. Whether it's for the first time or the thousandth, we need to be good stewards of the souls that God entrusts to us when they walk through those doors. And I believe that the best way to do that is to teach the Bible, connect them to Jesus, and to get them as quickly as we can connected with other people who love them and love Jesus so that we can sustain this desire for spiritual health in their life. We have to do it. I don't want to see people coming in here and fading away. That breaks my heart. So we have to fight for these connections. And the challenge at Grace is to take a sense of community that for years has protected us and sustained us and been inwardly focused by necessity and now begin to turn that out and graft other people into the family that God is growing here. That's what we need to do. Because of all of this, we have small groups. Small groups are the best way to get connected with people at Grace. If you are thinking right now, man, I don't know if I'm connected, I really need to be, then this is the next step for you. I would encourage you to do an inventory and think about your friends. Who are the top five people I talk to most often? Do they love you and love Jesus? Because if they love you, that's great, but if they don't love Jesus, that doesn't do you much good. If they love Jesus and not you, that's not very helpful either. We need both those things. Do you have that? Some of us need to lean into that more. Some of us need to rekindle some old friendships and say, hey, I really need you in my life a little bit more. Don't say it like that. Think of a cooler way to say it, but that's what you need to do. Some of us, you're coming in from other circles of life, and your circles of friends, they might not go to church right now, and that's great. I'm not telling you at all to disconnect from those friends, but what I am telling you is you need some connections in church. You need some connections of people who love you and love Jesus. And so I would encourage you, if you're not a part of a small group, to fill out that piece of paper that's in the seat that you're sitting in. That's an easy informational thing. You just write your name, write the way that you want me to get in touch with you, and then you put when you're available and what you think you might be looking for, and I'll give you a call or shoot you an email. We don't do sign up for a small group anymore like you pick from a catalog. I like to play matchmaker, and as long as I can, I'm going to do that every semester and just spend the time with the individuals and figure out what's going on in your life, what are your needs, what's the general sense I get from you, and how can I best place you in a group of people who are like you, where you're going to feel comfortable and get connected. So my encouragement to you is, if you're not connected, fill that out. And when we're done, in a minute we're going to take communion, then we're going to sing a song, and we're going to be dismissed. And as we're dismissed, at the end of the aisles, the doors, is either going to be an usher or a little table with a basket in it. Just put that sheet in the basket. Those are going to be put on my desk this afternoon, and I'll follow up with you this week and try to get you connected. As an aside, if you're here and you're in your 20s, there's a lot of you here. So many that I'm taking a break from my young family small group, my wife and I are, and we're going to help give some energy to the 20-something small group this semester. So if you're in your 20s and you'd like to get connected here, please indicate that on that white piece of paper and I'll be in touch with you this week. I'm particularly excited about that this semester. But whoever you are, whatever your walk of life is, we have a way to get you connected here and I hope that you will be. And I'm so excited as we move forward that this mission statement is going to characterize us. Because being committed to that, I think and I hope that we're going to to come to a place where we have to choose between do we grow more or do we try to stay smaller because if we grow too big, we can't do this. I wanna make that choice and I wanna choose health. I don't care what we look like. I hope that I get to be here for decades and I don't care what we look like at the end of that but I do, as far as size, but I do hope that we're healthy. That would be success. And I think by staying committed to this, we have a really good shot at that. And I'm going to pray, and then we get to partake in communion. Father, we love you. We're so grateful for you. We're so grateful for the way that you reach into our lives, that you love us recklessly with no regard for yourself, how you pursue us. Lord, we are so grateful for the connections in our life that move us closer to you. We are grateful for the friendships that have sustained us in this place. I pray that you would use those friendships in amazing ways moving forward. God, as people come to grace, may this be a place where they get connected quickly, where they experience community and your love quickly. And may that community serve to move us closer to you. If there's anyone here who's experiencing any trepidation about just taking that first step towards connection, I pray that you would give them the courage to do at least that today. We thank you for who you are and all the ways you love us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.