Sermons tagged with Jesus

20 years ago, Grace was launched by a courageous group of faithful believers with a dream to expand God's kingdom in North Raleigh. Part of this dream was establishing a permanent home to serve as a launching point for this ministry. Through the years, God has used Grace to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping and dreaming, now is the time for Grace to go home. Good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor. This is a big, special morning. I'm so excited to get to share with you. I am in the habit of praying before I get up to preach, and in both services, I've just prayed that God would give me the strength to kind of keep it together without just blubbering like an idiot, because it's just, I feel so excited about what Grace is stepping into and getting to share this with you. On most Sunday mornings, on all Sunday mornings, I feel like my job as the pastor is to get up and open the Bible and share with you what I believe is teaching us together. My job is to teach scripture. I try to anchor everything I say in scripture and simply open it up and explain it to us in a way that is hopefully compelling or convicting or inspiring, whatever God has for us that morning. I feel like that's my job. But this morning, I'm going to take a little bit of a departure from that and just share with you what's been going on for the last 18 months. If this is your first time with us or your first couple times with us, this is not a typical Sunday morning, but it's the right one for the life of the church now. So if you allow me that license, I'm just going to share with you this morning and not preach at you this morning. Hopefully, I never preach at you, but you understand what I'm saying. In September of 2018, we went on an elder retreat to a farm in Youngsville. We had our sitting elders, and then we had three of our elders that had been recently nominated and appointed but weren't yet voting. They were junior elders. I still consider them junior elders. And we all sat around talking and dreaming about grace. And two of our elders, Bill Reith and Burt Banks, said that it was time that we start discussing the 10-year plan for grace. What's our 10-year plan for Grace Raleigh? Their very corporate 10-year plans seem important in that world, and so they thought we should have one too. And one of the items that they had on the agenda to discuss was the question of, do we want to own our own permanent home in North Raleigh? Do we want to be owners or renters? Historically, we've been renters, and so this was the question of, do we want to own one day? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, the response of the room was, yes, this is what we want to do. And uncharacteristically, during this discussion, I remained quiet. You may find it hard to believe I'm vocal in meetings. I don't have a problem saying what I think, and sometimes I feel like that's the role, so I should share my two cents. But in this particular elder meeting, as these decisions were being made, I stayed very quiet. And I stayed quiet because I carry with me an acute awareness that this is not my church. This is not my building. These are not my dreams. The church's goals are not my goals. This is our church. This church existed long before I got here. This church existed and did things and people poured into it and developed a life here long before Nate arrived. And so I'm acutely aware of the shoulders that I stand on and that my job is to steward the dreams and the hopes of us, not me. And because that's such a huge decision, I didn't really want to be the driver of that. So I stayed quiet. They quickly decided, yes, we want to be owners. And so then the natural question is, okay, what's the timeline for that? When do we want to begin to make decisions to take us down that path? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, again, the answer in the room was right away. We need to start making decisions right away. We need to start moving towards that now. And I remember thinking, I can still remember where I was sitting. I was sitting on the fireplace looking at those couches and chairs and couch, and I can see the dim room around me. And I remember thinking as everyone discussed this, why don't we pump the brakes a little bit? Let's just, let's chill out. Like I'm, it's a big enough challenge to fill a 200 person auditorium. Let's not build a 400 person auditorium. Let's just wait. I'm not really sure I need that pressure in my life, you know? And then in my head, I'm also thinking, and I'll tell her story in a second, but we had just then that month moved out of a season of tremendous debt. We haven't even announced to the congregation yet that we were out of debt. And now here we are signing up to go into more debt. And I'm going, gosh, maybe we should just like chill out. Can we just be healthy for a little while? But these were the decisions that were made. And I began to understand why we were making those decisions. And so that had set in motion a series of events. Shortly after that, we formed a building committee. And it was their job to go out and figure out how much are we going to need to spend to accomplish what we need to accomplish. So they went out and they looked around and they came back to us and they said, this is kind of what we think. This is what it's going to cost. This is what we think monthly debt service on it would be. And so this is kind of our goal. And so then once we had that goal, we realized we needed to get capitalized. So we formed a capital campaign committee last spring and asked them the question, this is what we want to do. Let's come up with the best way to do it. And so we've been working behind the scenes for 18 months now and are ready to present to us, the church, everything that we've been hoping and dreaming and praying and thinking about. But to understand the decisions that have been made and why we feel like now is the right time, I think we also need to understand the story of grace. Because we have some here who have been here since the very beginning. We have others who have come recently, and I'm not sure we all remember exactly how we got here. So like the video said, in 2000, there was a core group of faithful believers, a group of people from St. Andrew's Presbyterian over on Falls, that said they had a vision and a dream for starting their own church. A church that would be a light in the community that they love so much. A church that would strengthen faiths and strengthen families and watch people come to know Jesus and watch faith get deepened. Watch people walk with Jesus with more depth. They wanted to impact the community of North Raleigh, and so they banded together and they launched, at the time, the church called Grace Community Church. The very first Sunday, this church met on the lawn at the YMCA, and they had no idea what to expect. And that first Sunday, over 1,200 people showed up and sat on the grass and listened to that preacher preach and sang songs together. Everybody was blown away by what happened. And it was that Sunday that God, for the first time, whispered into the ears of those who cared so much about grace and believed in this place, hey, this church is special to me. My hand is on this place. I'm gonna use this church. I'm gonna use this place. Grace matters to me. And so that core of people believed that and believed that God's hand was on this place and believed that God had big plans for grace and believed that God was moving to make this an effective church in his kingdom. And so very quickly they needed space. So they started to meet at a storefront that used to be a Michael's. It affectionately became known as St. Michael's. And the idea was never that that would be a permanent location, but that that would be a temporary space until they had the health and the finances to build a permanent home. That's been the goal from the very beginning. It was just deferred because they needed space so quickly. But then having outgrown Michael's and not yet being totally prepared to go out in health and build a building, they made the decision to rent a space over on Meridian Drive. It was a larger space, 600-person auditorium. They were filling it up and going and blowing, and it was a really, really special time where it was easy to be enthusiastic about grace. Understanding that they weren't yet home, but that soon, when they were ready, they would have a home. And during that season, it was incredibly evident that God's hand was on grace. It was evident that God cared about that place. There was a thriving student ministry, a thriving children's ministry, wonderful people and wonderful families being strengthened and coming to know the Lord, and God worked in that place. But it was also during that season where there was some turmoil and some tumult in grace. There were struggles and trials and dreams got deferred and difficulty to walk through as a church. And it was during this season that some of that hopeful core that helped to start grace with all those dreams began to wonder if God's hand was still on grace, began to wonder if God still had plans for this place, began to wonder if the brightest days of grace were still ahead or if they were already behind. And so grace began to dwindle, and grace began to struggle, and those dreams got deferred. And it was in this season, in December of 2016, that my story intersected with grace. I still remember it was December 8, 2016. I had my first interview with the Pastoral Search Committee. They had asked me to block off enough time for a two-hour Skype interview, which I thought was excessive, but what do I know? I'm not making the rules. So that day, I started to prep and plan for the interview. So if you know me, you know that I don't like to be unprepared. I don't like to be caught off guard. I like to know what to expect. If you ask for a meeting with me, I'm probably going to say, yeah, that's great. What do you want to talk about? Because I got to know it's going to eat me up inside if I don't, if I can't prepare and think through everything that needs to be said. And so going into an interview, you better believe I'm going to be ready. So I started to dig into grace. And at the time on the website, they had a history of grace, just the events that happened year by year. And so I read through that history and I saw the ebbs and flows and the triumph and the trials. And then they had their elder minutes online. So I started to read through the elder minutes for the past couple of years. And I got done with all of that and I thought, yeah, I'm going to cancel this interview. I don't really want to be a part of this church. I got done with that research, and honestly, my conclusion was, I just don't see God's hand on this place. I don't have a lot of hope for that church. So I don't think I'm going to go there. I don't want to waste anybody's time. I need to cancel the interview. And as I opened up my computer to email Holly, who was then chair of the committee, it occurred to me like, come on, big time. You're 36. You don't have big enough britches yet to start turning down interviews. Just take it. Use it as practice. Let's see what happens. So I did. And I did the interview. And it was funny because in the interview, I gave the most honest answers ever because I didn't care if these people liked me. I wasn't trying to get anybody to like me. I was just telling the truth. And then at the end of the interview, they said, do you have any questions for us? I said, yeah. I mean, I've looked at your history. I've read through it all. Grace has been a hard place to be a part of for several years. And they all kind of started smiling, nodding their heads. I said, so there's a lot of churches in Raleigh. What are you doing there? Why do you go to that place? What's so special about it that you're clinging on? And Holly got a big smile on her face. And she said, because we love this place. These people are special to us. Our kids grew up here. Grace means a lot to us. It's our community. And we believe that the best days are still ahead for grace. And everybody nodded and smiled and agreed. And I believed it too. And I realized that God's hand was here and that there was reason to hope for grace and that I too believe that the brightest days were still ahead. It was hard to believe that when I visited in February for my like official visit interview weekend and I came to a service and there's less people in the service that Sunday than there are in this room right now. But I still believe that God wanted us to be at this place, and that God wasn't done with grace. And so in April of 2017, my wife and I, Jen, and our then one-year-old daughter, Lily, moved up to Raleigh, and we assumed we became a part of grace. And when I got here, it was not going well. We were very far in debt. Our line of credit had been maxed out. The bank had frozen our credit cards. There were some people who told me like, thanks for coming, but you'll probably be moving home in about six weeks. We just weren't sure about this place. But there was all kinds of things that happened in that first year that I felt like was just God whispering in my ear, Nate, I still care about Grace. My hand is still in this place. I still have plans for it. I'll never forget the Memorial Day offering in 2017, that first year that I got here. My whole goal was to get through the summer without incurring more debt, without begging and borrowing and stealing more money, right? I just wanted to try to get through the summer without going into greater debt. And in the month of May, we were running a deficit. And going into the last week of the year, we needed an offering of $15,000. That year, we were averaging about $10,500 a week. So we needed 50% more, almost 50% more in the offering to come in that week for us to remain solvent and not have to go into greater debt. And I don't know if you know this about church world, but Memorial Day weekend is the worst, okay? It's the worst. Nobody comes and nobody gives. And I don't blame you because if they didn't pay me, I would go to the beach too. Nobody's harboring ill will about that. But the reality of it is, that's the lowest giving Sunday of the year, every year in every church in the history of churches. So to be praying for 15,000, 5,000 more than what we normally get is an absurd prayer. And I prayed it all week and I asked the elders to pray. We didn't send out an email. We didn't ask for money. We just prayed. If I'm honest with you, I didn't really believe that it would happen. That Sunday, $28,000 came in. Not a single huge gift, just faithful giving from people who cared about grace. Without being asked, I was blown away. That will always stand out to me as the first time I felt God's hand on my shoulders saying, hey, listen, pal, you just worry about preaching. I'll figure out the rest. Let's go. And I knew that God's hand was on his place. Later that year, a couple months later, we owed $17,000 to World Overcomers that took over our space on Meridian Drive. And the deal that we got to get out of there, we still owed them money. And I emailed a lady that I didn't know on a committee that I had never talked to and said, hey, listen, I'm new here. This debt is gonna crush us. Can we please defer to the end of the year because we can't afford to pay it over the summer. And she emailed me back and she said, we love God and we love his kingdom and we love his church and you are forgiven of that debt. Don't worry about it. Again, God tells us his hand is on this place. He's not done with grace. And over these three years, I will have been here three years in April, over these three years, we've seen some of the people who thought that maybe God was done with grace begin to come back and breathe new life into it as well. We've seen people come back and believe that, yes, God's not done with this place. We've seen families added. We've seen our young family small group, Virgin, our three-year-old class is stinking full every week. We've seen more kids on the roster than Erin's had in the history of her tenure at Grace, which is now seven years. We're seeing small groups filled up. We have two established services. We're totally out of debt and saving money for the building already. We are in now a healthy place where we are watching faiths being strengthened. We are watching people being connected with Jesus. We are watching a community being built. And for the first time in the history of grace, we really are walking in health. And that's why we believe that after 20 years of wondering and wandering, that it's finally time for grace to go home and realize the dreams that we've dreamt for 20 years. Now, when we say that, that it's time for grace to go home, that we believe now is the time to pursue a permanent home, a permanent building, there's a couple things to understand. The first is when I say permanent home, I'm careful to say that because we could buy land and build or we could buy a building and upfit. We're open to all options. And I think the question becomes, why now? Why build? Why is it that we want to own our own building? Why is it that we want to own our own permanent home in this community that we love? And there's a lot of reasons for this. And in some business meetings that I'm going to tell you about, we're going to cover those reasons. But I think there's two really compelling ones that I would share with you this morning. The first most compelling reason that this is the time for us to go home and have a permanent home to call our own is to simply look around at this space. Now, we're grateful for this space. If this little room didn't exist, we would not exist as a church. No question about it. God gave us this space and allowed us to get our feet underneath us here. But look around. Does this feel like home to you? If you're not sure, sit behind the pole one Sunday and then answer that question. Where I have to walk over here to be able to see you. Hey, guys. Look in the corners because we have no storage. So we just put extra chairs on the sides and put tablecloths on top of them. That's less than optimal. We have a lobby. We say we're about connecting people to people. And a big part of that is our lobby and talking and being able to catch up with friends. The lobby time, honestly, is some of my favorite time of the week every week where I get to buzz around and catch up with everybody and see what's going on. It's too small. Try to hang out there right after the first service. It has to spill out into the front, whether it's cold or raining or whatever. Speaking of going outside, even if it's cold and rainy, have a kid in elementary school and have to walk outside every week, whether it's cold or whether it's fair, whether it's rainy or whether it's dry, and walk past the aquarium store and down the hallway of offices and get your kid in the repurposed children's space. We're grateful for that space. It just doesn't feel like home. If you think this feels like home, get here early on a Sunday morning when we have to get the air and the fans going because it smells like an aquarium. That's a thing. Come on Thursday, I'll show you. We'd love to have a restroom available in the lobby so that people don't have to walk down the children's space to get to it. If you've ever tried to, when that door's open and kids are trying to get into the nursery and other families are trying to get out of the nursery and you're just trying to get by to go to the restroom, there's a choke point over there that definitely does not feel like home. We'd love to have a playground for our kids to play on. I would love for our students, our sixth through 12th graders, to have their own space. Right now they meet in this space, and Kyle, our student pastor, is doing a phenomenal job with them, and he's gotten that. We're growing. We're running about 40 kids a week when everybody comes. But this space still swallows them up, and there's a limit on what they can do. Students like to be rowdy and rambunctious, and that's great, but we have to kind of keep a lid on that because we have not put enough money in Kyle's budget for auditorium repairs, so he's got to stay within some certain parameters. They need their own space that feels like home for them too. We need to invest in our student ministry. We want adult spaces during the week that feel more like living rooms where it's comfortable to sit in and meet in and have small group in so that our adults who come don't have to sit in repurposed children's spaces around white plastic tables and metal folding chairs. We're happy to do that, but we want other people to come too. We want you to be able to invite people to small group and have it feel comfortable and like home when they come. I dream of having some of our folks who work from home to take a day every week and come sit and work with us as a staff and as a community and make it kind of a hub during the days where people just are. We can't do that in our current space. And more importantly, all the things that I just mentioned, the pole and the chairs and the small lobby with the very nice hutch. If you go to Grace and you call Grace home, we don't think about those things. We don't care about those things. Those aren't really that big of a deal to us. But when you bring somebody for the first time because you want them to experience all that you've experienced at Grace, everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over in order to come here. The fact that you can't even see us from the road. We have signs on our building, but it's useless. Why do we even have that? You can't see it. You have to find us. We've joked that we're like a secret club. You only find us if you get invited. Everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over, that they have to get past so that they can be fully engaged here. As they assess whether or not they want to be a part of grace, those are all things that they have to be willing to move past too before they can really receive what God has for them here, before they can be encountered with the beauty and the grandeur of the gospel. And I just want as few things between people and Jesus as possible. I want people to notice as few things as possible that are detriments to what we're doing here so that they feel at home too and they feel freed up to encounter Jesus in this space. And so I think it matters. The next compelling reason that I think it's wise to build now is because it's really, this is not exciting, but it's true. It's fiscally responsible to own. It's the more financially wise thing to do with the resources that we have. Most of you in this room, you own your home. A vast majority of us do. Why do you do that? Because you know that financially it's the best decision for your family. The same is true for us as a church. We believe that it's the wisest thing to do with the resources that we have. Another thing you understand as you invest in a home now in whatever season of life you're in is if you'll do it up front, if you'll be financially wise in the early years of your life and you make sound choices, then later in the decades to come, you'll have the financial freedom to do what's really special to you with your money. You'll have the financial freedom to really spend your resources on what matters most to you. And we wanna do that as a church too. Right now we give 10% of our offerings to missions, to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. And I'm so proud that we do that. But I wanna see that number grow. What if we can get into a facility and get that manageable? And as our numbers and as our budget grows, our property cost doesn't have to and we can give 30, 40, 50% of what we have to things going on outside the walls of grace and be a generous church. It's more fiscally responsible to buy now so that we can be generous later. And just to kind of further drive that point home, we were in that facility on Meridian Drive for 16 years. In 16 years, we spent $5.4 million on rent. And that's conservative because for a season, we rented some extra space that cost more money. It's probably much closer to $6 million. And coming out of that space, we had debt to show for it. We want to make good choices so that that never happens again. That's why we believe that now is the time to act and move and go home. Now, with those things being said, there's some details that I do want to share with you this morning. And then I'm going to tell you about the informational meetings that we have and why we've chosen to go that route. The nitty gritty of it is, and this will be covered in those meetings, so you don't have to remember all this right now, but you're probably very curious. Our goal in the campaign is to raise $1.5 million over two years. We're going to ask everyone to make a two-year pledge and try to have that by the end of two years so that we can do what it is we think God wants us to do. The reason it's $1.5 million is because in the estimates that we have, we want to build a building that's between 400 and 600 people. The auditorium is between 400 and 600. In church world, once you have the auditorium size, you have the algorithms for all your other space. So it's really a decision about how big of an auditorium do we want. This one seats 200. The elders want us to have a 600-person auditorium. I want us to have a 350-person auditorium. I don't need that pressure in my life. But that's the decisions that we're making. We're open to buying land and building, but we would rather buy a building and up fit. Buying land and building takes more time and takes more money. The only reason we would do that is if there's a piece of land that's so attractive that we just couldn't pass it up. We want the building to be as close as possible to Capitol and 540. This puts us in range of everyone who calls Grace home. That's an optimistic goal. I was having lunch the other day with somebody who's been buying and selling land in the Raleigh area for probably 30 or 40 years. And when I told him where we wanted to be, he audibly laughed at me. But we think that God is going to look out for us. He'll give us the place that we need to be. If we were to buy and build, that could cost as much as $4.5 million, and $1.5 million allows us to borrow what we need to make that happen. If we want to go a little bit smaller, build and upfit, that is going to cost somewhere around $3 million. So 1.5 over two years positions us to do whatever it is we think we need to do. Now, to raise that money, we formed a campaign committee. And the campaign committee began, got a book written by an expert who's done 100 of these. And we started to read, what's the best way to go about this? And what we quickly learned is all the experts have a set way that you're supposed to go about raising funds for a project like this. What they wanted us to do is tear out all of the givers at grace and take like the top 15 families and I would go meet with them personally. Then you take the top 30 or 40 families and the elders go meet with them individually, share all the information, ask for a pledge. And then you take all the other families and we'll just get to you whenever we get to you. We're busy. We've got a lot of things going on. That's how it goes. You tear them out, you have the meetings, and the experts say by going and sitting down in someone's home and presenting to them and making a personal ask, you're gonna get more juice out of that lemon. That's the best possible way to get the funds that you need. That's the way you need to do it. And so because that's the way we need to do it, that's what we set about doing, is figuring out a way to do that. Now that was a challenge because at Grace, we have a long history, nobody knows what anybody gives at Grace. There's one person who knows how much people give. That's a guy named Tom Ledoux. He is our finance manager. He's living his best life in the villages in Florida right now. So you don't have to worry about running into him at Harris Teeter. And in between games of golf, he does our finances. We get a great deal on it. I love that guy so much. And he's the only one who sees what everybody gives. So to tear out our givers, I would have to start learning some stuff that is none of my business. But this was the way we need to do it. This is the money we need to raise. And so we started talking with the elders about it. One of the elders raised a concern. He's like, I'm really not comfortable with that. I don't think that we should do that. I think that we should just ask everybody all at once and let them respond however they want to and let the Holy Spirit move. And my response to him was, I think you need to go play in the forest and sing with the animals. Like, that's Pollyanna stuff, man. We got to get real. But the more I thought about it, and the more we prayed about it, the more I became convinced that that way to raise funds was just not right for grace. The more I thought about going into homes and presenting and asking, the less comfortable I got with it. The more, honestly, the more I saw it being the plans of man trying to figure out the best way to go about this and not making room for the Spirit. And so I thought rather than going to you individually and making an ask that I would just ask you corporately and trust you. I've tried as I've led Grace to trust you to be adults who love Jesus and love this place and trust you to go home and pray about it and allow the Holy Spirit to direct as if he saw fit that you would be sensitive to that and trust the pledges that come in. Another reason I didn't want to do the individual meetings is I began to think about it. And this is really what drove it home for me is, I don't want anybody in the church who gives to the campaign to think that their gift is valued any different than any other gift. We have some families in our church that because they've made wise choices, because God has blessed them, they really do have great means. We have some families in the church who have the ability, if they wanted to, to give in ways that were really impactful for the campaign. They give a lot of money. And that's wonderful. And then we have other families in the church that are far closer to mine and Jen's end of the spectrum that are in their 20s or in their 30s and kind of trying to figure out how to get life together. And some of us even living paycheck to paycheck and any amount that would be given would be really sacrificial. And if these families are able over the next two years to cobble together five or $10,000, I don't want to value that $10,000 any less than I would value the $100,000, $150,000. Because even though the amounts in those two gifts are different, the faith is the same. The sacrifice is the same. The spirit of generosity and obedience is the same. And I don't want to be a part of a system that makes those two people feel any different for what they gave. Because every bit of it is special. Every bit of it is impactful. I got a text this morning from a good friend of mine who just knew that this morning was when we were launching the campaign at the church. And they're a family like us. And he just said, hey, proud of you, rooting for you. Julie and I are committing $1,000 to the campaign this year. I started to cry in my bedroom. It's the same sacrifice. It's the same generosity. The gifts aren't different. And I don't want to treat them that way. So rather than going to your houses and doing an individual ask, we're having these informational meetings and we're asking corporately. There's three informational meetings. You have them on the cards in your seats. They're all identical. We're just asking that you would come to one of them. If you want to come to all three, because you just love this kind of stuff, knock yourself out. But we're asking that you would come to one. We hope that every partner and everybody who calls Grace home will come to at least one of these meetings. At those meetings, we will roll out for you all the things that we would have if I came to your house and sat down with you and talked to you. The type of ask that we're looking for, all the details of the campaign. There's an FAQ sheet on the huts that will give you a little bit more information if you have questions right away. We will go through all of those details. We'll have people from all the committees here that you can ask questions of. There'll be some give and take. And I think that those are going to be some good times for us at the church. That's where that's going to happen. We're hoping that you will come to those. And for the next five weeks, we're going to talk about the next steps of grace. Because I believe that the building, pursuing a permanent home, is just the first step that we need to take as a church that's now walking in health. The question facing grace now is, God, what would you have us do with this health? And so over the next five weeks, we're going to answer that. It's going to culminate in a pledge Sunday on March 1st, and we'll find out if this is a realistic dream. But as I close today, I would just share this with you. I was reminded in my preparation that in July of 2017, we had a business meeting. It was to talk about how to financially make it through the rest of the summer, how to exist as a church. And I remember there was somebody in the back of the room who stood up over there, and they said, hey, and they kind of talked to the room and said, hey, we just need to all give a little bit more and we'll be okay. And I was able to say to him and to everyone, actually, no, you don't. You don't need to give any more. This church is generous and doing everything that it can right now. You don't need to give us any more money. We need to be more responsible with the money that you're already giving us, and we're going to do that. And then I made a promise. I said, as a matter of fact, if you'll trust me, I'm not going to ask you for more money again until we're ready to build a building. So now here I am, three years later, because of God's grace, we've been able to keep that promise, asking you to consider participating in the campaign as we seek to go home. Asking you to consider participating in this above and beyond what you give to operational budget. So the invitation is to go home and just begin to pray and to think and to plan and earnestly ask God, God, how would you have us participate in this campaign? We'll have those informational meetings. We'll have our services for the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, we're gonna come and celebrate and submit our pledges together and we're gonna see what God is gonna do. In the meantime, if you have any questions, my door is open. I will meet with you, talk with you, answer whatever questions I have. If you'd like an individual meeting, we can have that. I'm just not going to impose that on you. But that's the invite. Let's go as a church and pray how God would have us be involved with what he's doing here and the next steps of grace. Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. We know that your hand is here. We know it's on this place. We know that what happens here matters to you. God, we believe as a body that it's time for us to take this step of faith and pursue a permanent home in this community where you've planted us. So God, I earnestly pray that if that's your will, if that's from you, let us marvel at how you make it happen. God, if that's not your will, if this needs to be our home for a while, then make it abundantly clear that that's your will and let us celebrate that too. God, we simply humbly ask that your will be done and that we walk in obedience to what that is. Father, be with these families and these individuals as they go and pray. I pray that they would be sensitive to your spirit. I pray that their hearts would be opened, would be moved by what moves you and that you would guide and direct us to exactly where and how you would have us participate. God, I cannot wait to see all that you do in this season of grace. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

How old are you, pal? Four. Four. When's your birthday? My birthday is in October. Speaking of birthdays, whose birthday are we celebrating for Christmas? Jesus's. Um, baby Jesus. Jesus's birthday. Now, where was Jesus born? Do you remember? In the manger. In the steeple. In the steeple? Who else was in the steeple with Jesus when he was born? The animals. What kind of animals do you think? Tows and donkeys. What about tigers? You can't look to the audience for help. Was anybody else at the manger with them? God, for sure. Do you know his mommy and daddy's name? Do you know the city that Jesus was born in? Bethlehem! I just watched that movie. I watched it. That's the bright star with those two little donkeys with that bird. That Jesus was in Bethlehem with those mean dogs. But at the end of the movie, the mean dogs turn into nice dogs. That's great. That's a Christmas miracle. Is that your favorite Christmas movie? Uh-huh. I watched it when I had a sleepover with my Nana and Papa. Sorry, Kendall. I'm sick. How did the shepherds know that Jesus had been born? Because they were smart boys. Now the wise the soul of Bethlehem. The wise men. I don't know what, but I think you gotta tell me. Um, those, links and more. Kendall, you might be the smartest four and a half year old I've ever met. How many wise men were there, do you know? Two. Two? You know, that's just as reasonable a guess as any other answer. First, um, Christmas, I am going to make Jesus a tank. You're going to make Jesus a tank? Oh, a cake. It'd be way better if you made him a tank. If you got to give Jesus three presents, what presents would you give him? A chew toy for when he's a baby. Sure. I'll go with my genie cup and a baby Jesus doll. Sure. I'm sure Jesus would love a baby Jesus doll. I think those are all the questions I have for you buddy. You did so good. I think I want to do one more question. Is there anything else that we should ask? Anything else? No. to meet you. I'm so glad that you're here. And like Kyle said, thanks so much for making us a part of your Christmas celebration. I know that you have a lot of options on Christmas Eve. It's the time when you're supposed to go to church. And so we're so glad that you chose to spend that with us. When we think about the Christmas story, I think all of us probably go to a very similar place, whether we're church people or not church people. If we come to churches like this a lot, or we come a little, we all kind of know where to go for the church story, right? It's Luke chapter 2, and though we might not know the reference, we know the content. We think about probably the peanuts special, right? When Linus quotes it, I think that's the one who does it, and it's the old King James, and it's, lo, they were sore afraid, the angel of the Lord shone round about them, right? And the shepherds were in the field giving watch over their flock by night. Like, that's what we think of is the Luke chapter 2. We think of Joseph and Mary going to Bethlehem for the census. There's no room in any of the hotels, so they got to stay in the manger or in the steeple, which was really, really great. We've got it that they can't stay there, and the baby Jesus is born, and we celebrate it, and the wise men come, and it's a whole party, and that's the deal. That's usually what we think of as the Christmas story, and if that's what you think of as the Christmas story, then that's right. That is the Christmas story. That's what we celebrate at Christmas. But I really think that to have a deeper understanding of the Christmas story, to really understand what's happening there, what we're celebrating, what are we all gathering here to celebrate for? What are we meeting with family and exchanging gifts to celebrate? Why did the angels appear? Why do we talk about the joy of Christmas? What's really the reason for the season? When we start to ask questions like that, I think we have to take a broader look at the Christmas story. I'm so fond of telling the Christmas story in this way that my first Christmas with Grace, I told it in this way, but I so believe in it, and I believe in it helping us see the power and efficacy of what the gift is that I wanted to tell it to you again. So if you'll indulge me for the Christmas story, you got to go all the way back to Genesis chapter one. And since this is the second service, I'm going to take my time, baby. You got to go all the way back to Genesis chapter one and understand what's happening there. God's word teaches us that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, that there is a creator God and that he made this place and that he created you and I. And when he did, he said it was very good and to a good God, that means it's perfect. It was exactly as he intended. And you, whether you realize it or not, whether you've thought about it at all in 2019 or not, your soul was created to be in harmony and relationship with that creator God. And the creation was made to be in harmony with that creator God, and that's how it was perfect. Scripture tells us that lion laid down with lamb, which is a way to say that there was no violence. There was no death when God created the earth. There was no cancer. Children didn't survive. Parents didn't survive their children when God created the earth. Divorce wasn't a thing in the Garden of Eden. Abuse didn't happen. Greed wasn't there. Malice and poor intent and evil and violence, that didn't exist. Selfishness did not exist. It was perfect until sin entered in and broke God's creation. And when we think of sin, for those of us that know the Bible at least a little bit, we know about the garden and they ate the fruit and that was kind of against the rules and they shouldn't eat the fruit and she did and that's a bummer. But really what's going on there is the sin of pride. What's happening with Adam and Eve is God said don't do this thing and they said, you know what? God, I hear you. I appreciate that. But I actually trust my judgment and my own life to determine what's best for me. And right now what's best for me is to eat that fruit. So that's what we're going to do. And they elevated themselves to the position of God in their life. And that's what sin is. And sin broke God's good creation. The first thing it broke is our souls that were again created to be in harmony with creator God. And as soon as sin entered the world, their souls were out of harmony with God, and as we're born into this world, our souls exist in disunity with our Creator God. That's why if we don't know Jesus, if we're not in harmony with our Creator and with our God, in our quiet moments, we have this sense within us. There has to be more to life. There has to be more to what's happening here. This feels broken. This doesn't feel right. I would argue that if we have a soul that's not in harmony with our creator God as it was intended to be, that we will scratch and claw for that happiness and for that fulfillment in any way that we know how, and what we really need is for God to rush in. What we really need is reconciliation because we're broken. And it's not just us and our souls that got broken when sin entered the world. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the world itself, creation itself broke. Do you understand that in the Garden of Eden there was no cancer and now there's cancer? In the Garden of Eden there was no abuse and now there's abuse. In the Garden of Eden there was no violence and now there's violence. In the Garden of Eden, lion lay down with lamb and now that is not the case. So the creation was perfect too and it was broken down by our imperfect decisions. And I think, I think Christian or not, whatever your background is, to be alive and aware is to know and to feel that there's something broken here. To be alive and paying attention is to get a sense there are some things here that are not right. There's some things that happened even in this last year that we look at that and no matter what your background or your worldview, you look at that and you go, that doesn't make any sense that that could happen. That shouldn't be so. That's not right. This place has to be broken. I saw on Twitter a couple weeks ago, one of those videos, it's like those heartwarming videos, right? That you watch it and there's like a bunch of cry emoji in the comments. And normally I don't watch those. My heart is as warm as it can be. And I just don't need any auxiliary help. But on this one, I thought, let me give it a whirl. And so I watched it, and it's these two children. They were probably seven or eight or younger, and they have cancer, and they're clearly in a children's hospital. And one was better able to get around than the other. And so the little boy that was able to get around takes the little girl that really couldn't move very well and sets her in his wagon and puts blankets over her lap and makes sure that the IV thing can follow. And he walks her down the hallway so that she can take a walk. And everybody watches that and they go, oh, that's amazing. That's great. This is what the internet is for. And I watched that and I thought, yeah, that's beautiful, but that's broken, man. Life shouldn't be like that. Kids shouldn't get cancer. That doesn't feel right. Why does that happen? And we felt the same way too. To be alive and aware is to feel that at times this place is broken. And Scripture agrees with that. In Romans 8, the Apostle Paul tells us that all of creation groans for its return, for its restoration to creation as God intended. All of creation cries out from the rocks and from its core. This is not right. There's something better. This is broken. This has to be fixed. This doesn't make sense. Life shouldn't look like this. All of creation groans along with you. When you see something in your Twitter feed or on the news or someone shares something with you and in your soul, you go, gosh, this just isn't right. This feels broken. Creation groans with you. And God himself agrees with you. Which is why in Genesis chapter 12, he enacted a grand plan to fix the broken things and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And to enact this plan, he went to a man named Abram, who would later become Abraham. And he made Abraham three promises. He says, you're going to be my guy and your descendants are going to claim these promises that I'm going to give you. And he promised Abraham the promised land that we now know as Israel. He said, your descendants are going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. And then he said, and one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. And Abraham might not have known it at the time, but we know it now. That was the promise of the Messiah, that one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That was God promising, and one day, one of your descendants is going to fix all this stuff. That feeling in your core that things are broken, that disunity in your soul that longs for me, one day I'm going to send somebody who's going to be one of your descendants and they are going to fix these wrong things. I'm going to make this right. I'm going to fix it and I'm going to reconcile your soul to me. And it's going to happen through you, Abraham. And thus began the practice of Abraham and all of his descendants watching and waiting and hoping for the fulfillment of that promise. When is this going to happen, God? And it was funny for Abraham to receive that promise because he didn't have any kids. So if he's gonna have all this land and he's gonna have all these descendants and then one of those descendants in the distant future is gonna bless the whole earth, it would be pretty good to have like one. And he doesn't. And it takes longer than he thought it should. And his faith wavers. And he gets nervous. and he makes a mistake in his 80s, and he has a kid, and that kid is not the one that was promised to him, and so he waits more, and he has another kid in his 90s, and that was the one that was promised to him. His name is Isaac. No doubt in my mind, Abraham told Isaac of all the promises. Abraham told Isaac that he was a claimant to the things that God told him. That said, Isaac, you're going to have massive descendants. You're going to have this land and one of your descendants is going to fix all the broken things and is going to reconcile us back to our God. And so Isaac is now the carrier of that promise and he joins in Abraham and watching and waiting and hoping. And Isaac has two sons, one of them named Jacob. Jacob's name is later changed to Israel, the namesake of the nation. He has 12 sons, and they make up the 12 tribes of Israel. The youngest son was a guy named Joseph. Joseph ends up in Egypt. And through a series of events that's really incredible in the book of Genesis, he ends up as the second most powerful man in the world. From an obscure nomadic tribe to second most powerful man in Egypt, therefore the world. And he is in control of all the food stores for that part of the world. No one survives the seven-year famine without going and seeing Joseph. He's estranged from his family. They don't know who he is. They don't know that he's there, but they are the remnant. They are the descendants of Abraham who are clinging to the promise of God that one day this will make sense and that one of our descendants will bless the whole earth and fix the broken things. That's what we know. And they're watching and they're waiting and they're hoping. Because of the famine, they have to go down to Egypt and they have to see the guy that's in charge of all the food. And they find out that when they get there, that that's their long lost brother, Joseph. Look at him. Look at his power. Look at how he provides. Look at how he fixes the broken things. And you have to know that his brothers and their little kids and the whole family and the whole clan wondered, yo, is Uncle Joseph the guy? Is he the one? Is he the one that was promised by God to our great-grandfather Abraham? Is he the one? But Joseph dies, and his bones are buried in the land of Goshen where his ancestors put down roots. And then as the people of God wait for the fulfillment of the promise, the Bible goes silent for 400 years. In between Genesis and Exodus, there's 400 years where we don't know what happens, where God doesn't speak, where the remnant of Abraham is left holding on to and claiming the promise, clinging to the hope of God. And at the beginning of Exodus, there's a guy named Moses who shows up. And I would imagine in the time of Moses that it was pretty difficult to continue to believe in the promise because Abraham's descendants, the Hebrew people, are now slaves to the Egyptian people. They are hopelessly in slavery. The Egyptians are the most powerful nation in the world. They are the slaves of the most powerful nation in the world. None of the nations around them care about them or are going to go in to rescue them, okay? There was no UN. They have no hope. They're just there. And I would imagine that to grow up a slave in Egypt made it pretty difficult to buy it when your grandpa told you about the promises that were made to your forefather Abraham. Hey, listen, I know it looks dark now. I know you've got to make all these bricks, but listen. God made a promise to your great, great, great, great grandfather. And we're his people. And one day, one of us is gonna fix the broken things and is gonna restore creation back to him and is gonna bring harmony to your soul. One day, that will happen, cling to those promises. I bet it was tough to cling. I bet it was difficult to have faith. But a faithful few, a faithful remnant of believers clung to the promises and held true to them and believed that God would keep his word and believed that God would keep his promises. And in the midst of clinging to that hope, Moses comes back from the desert. He had been exiled for 40 years. He comes back, and when he comes back, he's got the power of God with him, man. And he, God, through Moses, puts the 10 plagues on Egypt. They convince Pharaoh to let his people go, and now the people of Abraham go out into the desert, and they watch their savior, Moses, who delivered them from slavery and impossible bondage, part the Red Sea and defeat the armies of Egypt and miracle after miracle, day after day in the desert. And they watch as Moses goes up on the mountain and sees the presence of God and glows for days and brings down with him the 10 commandments and hands them a new religion. And they had to wonder, you can't tell me that they didn't. Is this the guy? Is this the one? He's got to be. He has to be the promised one. He's a descendant of Abraham. He's delivered us. He's begun to heal up our wounds and restore things to us. He's showing us how to be right with God, to unite our souls to him. This has got to be the one. But Moses dies before they ever enter the promised land. And he's not the one. And so Israel waits. And Israel watches. And Israel hopes that one day God will keep his promise. After Moses comes Joshua, they sweep into Israel and take it over, and that promise is fulfilled. Now the land is theirs. The problem is they don't have the infrastructure to be able to defend it, and so Israel kind of spirals down into this dark period in their history called the Judges, where all the different neighbors of Israel would come in and oppress them and take their stuff and bully them and make them give it to them, right? They couldn't keep their crops. They couldn't feed their kids. It was a tough time in the nation of Israel. And during that time, God would send judges to overthrow the oppressors and restore Israel to what it needs to be. And they had to wonder in the midst of this turmoil with every judge, is this the person? Is Gideon the one? Is Jephthah the one? Is Ehud the one? Maybe it's Deborah. Maybe it's Samson. They had to wonder, are these the people that God promised that are going to rescue us? Because it seems like they're doing it, but they weren't. The power of each judge was finite, and the timing of them was fleeting. The judges aren't the ones. And again, I wonder what it would be like to be one of the faithful remnant, clinging on to the promises that were passed down to them by their forefathers, when they can't even keep their own wheat harvest, when things feel really broken and life doesn't make sense. I bet faith was scarce in the time of the judges. Out of the time of the judges, Israel demands a king, and so they appoint a man named Saul. Saul was the guy that you would choose. He was head and shoulders above everybody else. He was very good looking. When you think of Saul, you can think of me. That's probably a good representation of who he was. But Saul was a terrible king. He was arrogant, and he used it for himself, and he wasn't the guy. But after Saul, there's a guy named David. David was the eighth son of Jesse. He was a little shepherd boy. But the last great prophet, a guy named Samuel, was directed by God himself to go and anoint David the next king. And what was said about David was that he was a man after God's own heart. And the mythology of David builds as he goes and he slays the giant Goliath. And all of Israel pays attention to him. And they make up songs about David and they celebrate him. And then he goes and he defeats their enemies. And he brings back the presence of God, the Ark of the Covenant. And he dances before it and he restores Israel, brings Israel to a place of international prominence that it had never seen. David's rule was so profound that he's the greatest king they've ever had and his star still flies over Israel to this day. He wrote the largest book in the Bible, the book of Psalms. And they had to go. David's gotta be be the guy. He's got to be the one. This has to be the one that was promised to us. Look, he's redeeming us. He's saving us. He's restoring us. He's fixing the broken things. This has to be him. But David wasn't the guy. David sinned profoundly. And I wonder how much faith wavered. But God, in the middle of David's life, in 2 Samuel 7, makes David a promise. He says, David wanted to build the temple. And God goes to David and says, you're not going to be able to build the temple in your lifetime. I'm going to let your son do that, but I've got something better for you, David. I still am going to keep my promise to your forefather, Abraham. I'm still going to send the Messiah. I'm still going to send the King of Kings. And when he comes, David, he's going to sit on your throne. And then this promise is a renewal of the hope of Israel. That God has not forgotten his promise that he made a thousand years ago to Abraham, that he still remembers. He's not forgetful of the things he said he would do. He still intends to keep his word. And when he does, he's going to sit on the throne of David and the hope of Israel is renewed. And it's good that it was renewed because after David comes Solomon. And then after Solomon, the country splits into a civil war from which it never recovers. And the northern kingdoms and the southern kingdoms have bad king after bad king after bad king after bad king. And the remnant gets smaller and the faithful get fewer. And there are fewer and fewer people who still cling to the promises of Abraham and follow the religion that was imparted on them by their forefathers. And then each of the kingdoms get drug off into slavery, one by Babylon and one by Assyria. And I can only imagine how difficult it would be to grow up as a slave in Babylon or a slave in Assyria and hear your grandfather or your grandmother or your mom or your dad tell you, hey, hang in there, be faithful. You should follow these laws and these rules because they were given to us by a God that made a promise to your forefather, Abraham. It would be really difficult to not look at those promises growing up as a slave in Assyria and go, yeah, what are those promises now? Because we're not on that land and no one's coming save us, and we're slaves. I imagine faith was pretty tough in the time of exile for Abraham's followers. And because it was a hard time, because even the return and the restoration was a hard time, God spoke to them through the voices of the prophets that told them more about their Messiah. And we see these great prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Habakkuk and Zephaniah and Malachi and all the ones at the end of the Old Testament that are proclaiming the coming Messiah. And they tell us things like when he comes, he's gonna bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted. When he comes, he's going to give good news to the poor. When the Messiah gets here, the blind will see and the lame will walk and the deaf will hear and the prisoners will be set free and the slaves will be released. When he gets here, he's going to make the wrong things right. He's going to fix this broken place. He's going to reconcile your soul to your God, and he's going to fix this creation that our sin has broken. He's going to do it. Hang in there. Be faithful. The Messiah is coming. Wait and watch and hope. And the faithful remnant did. Generation after generation, voice after voice, until we get to the end of the New Testament. And in the middle of this waiting and watching and hoping and clinging to the promises made by God to their forefather Abraham, there's another 400 years of silence at the end of the Old Testament. Malachi speaks and closes out that part of the Bible. And then in this darkness and in the silence, Israel waits and they watch and they hope. And they wonder, is our God going to keep his promise? Or are we foolish for this? And in the midst of that silence, there's a righteous man named Simeon. And we meet Simeon in Luke chapter 2. The Bible says this about Simeon. It says, now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. And this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him. Listen, Simeon was waiting for the consolation of Israel. He is the personification of all of the hope, of all of Israel, of all of his ancestors for all time up until this moment. He is representative of the nation of Israel and those who are paying attention, the rest of the world, groaning for the restoration, groaning for things to be made right and for the broken things to be repaired and for their souls to be reconciled to their creator. He is the personification of their hope. He is representative of the thousands of years of history that lead into this moment. And in his righteousness, he prays. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. How crazy do people think Simeon was? I wonder how many of his friends he told. The promised one's coming. The Messiah is going to be here. God told me. I'm not going to die until I see him. How crazy would you have thought Simeon was? And he came in the spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him, according to the custom of the law, on the eighth day of the life of a Hebrew boy, you take him to the temple and he is circumcised. And so moved by the spirit, Simeon goes to the temple to intersect with Jesus there. He took him up in his arms and he blessed God. And he said, I imagine the Simba moment as Simeon holds up baby Jesus and blesses God. And this is what he says, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people, Israel. Simeon says, God, I can die in peace. I'm holding the fulfillment of your promise. Do you understand what's happening in this moment with Simeon? Do you understand that he holds the promise, the ones that the faithful remnant clung to, generation after generation after generation, all the people before him that the culture told, you're foolish, you're dumb. God's not going to do that. If he's so powerful, if he's so good, if he keeps his promises, then why is this happening? All the people that ever asked that and got in clung to faith anyways, God is, Simeon is holding the fulfillment of that promise. He is holding the gift from God that through this Messiah, he is going to live a life in such a way that is perfect. And he is going to bear our iniquities and our transgression. And he is going to take our sin and our shame and all the things that break down our relationship with God. And he is going to hang on the cross for me and for you to reconcile our souls back to our creator God. That's what this baby boy is going to do. And that's what Simeon holds. And that's what he knows. But he doesn't just know that. He knows that everything else, this broken world, all the things that hurt and don't make sense and seem like they're broken, this baby boy is going to restore those as well. And so Simeon holds him up and he says, God, I can die. I understand. I get it. You have kept your promise. So let Christmas remind you that your God always keeps his promises. He always keeps his promises. Even when our life feels like the life when we're in the judges and we're getting oppressed by one thing after another, we're getting influenced by one thing after another, our faith is getting beaten up. It feels foolish to cling to it. We don't know if it's actually true. Remember, Christmas tells us that God always keeps his promises. Even when faith doesn't make sense to those who grew up as slaves in Egypt and are told about their powerful God and they say, if he's so powerful, why am I here? Jesus is a reminder that God kept his promises to them and he will keep his promises to you. And just like Israel went through dark times and had to cling to the promise, so do we. Sometimes life erodes our faith. Sometimes life picks away at our faith. Sometimes it makes it seem pretty impossible, but Christmas reminds us that for the faithful remnant that cling to the promises of our God, that he always keeps his promises. He will never let us down. And not only does that boy come to reconcile our souls to him, but he's going to grow up, he's going to become a man and go back to heaven, and one day he's coming back to fix everything else. And Christmas looks forward to that day too. So when we celebrate Christmas, go drink eggnog. Put a little something in it. Go nuts. Open the gifts. Enjoy your family. Celebrate all the blessings that we have. But know that this is what we celebrate. Know that we give each other gifts, not just because Jesus came to make salvation possible for you, but to make it possible for everyone to reconcile the soul back to its creator and that one day he's coming again and he's gonna fix everything else. He already came to fix your soul and he's going to come back again and fix creation and we cling to that promise. So let Christmas remind us that we cling to the promises just like the ancestors of Abraham and we anticipate the promise just like the followers of Abraham and that God always keeps His promises. That's why the angels sing. That's why they showed up in the sky. That's why the wise men came. That's why we celebrate it every year. Because the baby Jesus came and he restored your soul. And the son of God is coming back and he's gonna restore all of this. And so we cling to that hope. And Christmas is a reminder of that. That's the joy of Christmas. Let's pray. Father, you are good. And we are humbled by your gift. We confess, God, that sometimes things do feel broken to us. Sometimes it's hard to make sense of things. God, for some of us, even this year, even 2019 was one that has, if we're honest, eroded our faith. May we be reminded of the faithful remnant that clung to your promises, and may we be like them and cling to you as well. God, for those who are struggling, be with them. For those for whom this season is difficult, may they feel your presence. For those for whom this season is joyous, may they see with fresh eyes your blessings. God, may we never again reduce the gift of your son to a baby and a manger, but understand him for the God that he is. We thank you for Christmas and all that it represents. In Jesus' name, amen.

It's good to see all of you this Sunday. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I appreciate you being here on this December Sunday as we continue to gear up for Christmas together. I'm really excited about what we have in store for you, not only for Jingle Jam, but also for our Christmas Eve service. This is our series called Joy. Kyle, our student pastor, opened up the series talking about the joy of the light, of knowing Jesus and of sharing that light with others. Last week, I talked with you about the joy of forgiveness, and I really hope, my sincere prayer is and was, that God used that to bring about maybe some reconciliation in your life and in some of your relationships. I hope that you found that to be a helpful way to think about forgiveness. This morning, I want to talk about the joy of gratitude, the joy that we get when we can be people who are thankful, who are grateful people. The Bible has a lot to say about gratitude in the same way that it has a lot to say about forgiveness as it encourages us to forgive over and over and over again. The Bible encourages us to be grateful many, many times in many ways in many different places. In the Old Testament, David tells us that we are to enter God's courts with thanksgiving in our hearts, that we enter his gates with praise. And so it's kind of gratitude is the posture through which we approach the Lord. In the New Testament, we're told over and over again to be thankful in all things, be thankful always, pray without ceasing, and be grateful for everything. Everyone tells us that. As Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord's Prayer, He models for us a daily gratitude, thanking God for the blessings that we have in our life. We're even told by at least three different authors in the New Testament to be grateful when life is hard, to be grateful when we are in struggles, to consider it pure joy when we endure trials. So the Bible has a lot to say about gratitude. And I think it's because gratitude is one of the more underrated things or character traits that we could have. Fostering a spirit or a heart or a character of gratitude, I think, is something that we forget to do, but it's underrated in its power and efficacy in our life. And I hope today, as we leave, as you guys go back out into your week, that you have a new appreciation for what it means to be grateful and to have a grateful heart. To do that, I want to first talk about a picture of ingratitude, what the opposite of gratitude looks like. So last week I was doing my weekly Sunday tradition, particularly in the fall, which is to kind of go home and collapse. My whole week, the rhythms of a pastor kind of build up to the sermon. You're stressed about the sermon all day. I hope it doesn't suck and that people aren't disappointed who brought their friends and the whole deal. And I hope this honors God. And I hope that I'm not an apostate and the whole deal. And so you just kind of, you focus on the sermon all week and then I give it and I go home and I'm like, ugh. And I just kind of want to shut down for a while. And so in the fall, it's perfect because I get to watch TV. And so last week I'm watching football and the four o'clock game comes on. It's the Chiefs and the Patriots. And something incredibly interesting happened at halftime of this Patriots game. Now, for those who don't know, you may not know who the Patriots are. You may not be, that's football, by the way. You may not be into football, and that's all right. You don't have to know football to appreciate what I'm about to say. I'm going to kind of lay some groundwork for you, all right? So for those who don't know, the Patriots have had what I think is the best 20-year run of any sports team in the history of sports teams. I'm not talking about the best 20-year run in the last 20 years. I'm talking about besides maybe the 1920s Yankees have had the best 20-year run of any team in the history of teams. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely historic. I went back and counted. In the last 20 years, the Patriots have made it to the Super Bowl nine times. They've played in almost half of the Super Bowls. The other years, they came almost just one game short almost every year. To be a Patriots fan is to over and over and over again get to cheer for a winner. It's an incredible privilege to be a Patriots fan. I know this because I'm a Falcons fan. Okay? It is not a privilege to be a Falcons fan. I'm from Atlanta, and statistically speaking, if you combine all of the seasons without a championship, so you take in Atlanta at one point, that was four seasons in one year, hockey, baseball, basketball, and football going consecutively without a championship. Atlanta is the losingest city in the country. And that's statistics. That's not hyperbole. I have longed to be a Patriots fan. I wish that I could celebrate that sort of success. During those 20 years, they've been to nine Super Bowls. They've won six of them. There's only one other franchise that's won six Super Bowls, and they would even trade their last 20 years for the Patriots' last 20 years. They have the best coach to ever coach a sport. They have the best quarterback to ever play the game, and that pains me to say because Peyton Manning's my favorite football player of all time, but Tom Brady, man, you can't argue with rings. To be a Patriots fan has been an incredible privilege for the past 20 years. Yet, on Sunday, the Patriots are playing, playing the Chiefs, and the Patriots this year are having a good season, not a great season. There's some rumblings in their fan base that they may not be as good as they once were. It's looking like they may not win the Super Bowl this year. And at halftime, the Patriots are running into the locker room down two scores, 21 to seven. And as they're running into the locker room at Gillette Stadium, do you know what those Patriots fans did? Booed. They booed them. Can you believe this? After one bad half of football, and it wasn't even that bad, they booed them. They let them know loudly and clearly, you stink and we're dissatisfied and we deserve more from you. And I sat on my couch in shocked disbelief and I thought, and I'm sorry, you bunch of entitled jerks. Do you have any idea what I would do for the last 20 years that you've just gotten to enjoy as Patriots fan? If you're a 10-year-old Patriots fan, you just figure that they win the Super Bowl. That's just what happens. It's your birthright. Do you know what I would do to trade places with you? Try being a Falcons fan for like a season, you jerks. Like, it made me mad. They were so entitled. And as I thought about that, and listen, we have some Patriots fans at the church. They're lovely people. Steve, our worship pastor, he's kind of a Patriots fan. He's not really a sports guy, but if he were, he claims to be a Patriots. From everything I can tell, he seems to be a great guy. And so I'm not trying to run down all Patriots fans, but the ones in that stadium that day, my goodness, the entitlement on them. And I sat on my couch and I was kind of stewing and calling the names in my head and couldn't get over the audacity of it, texting my friends, did y'all see that? But of course, as I sat there, anytime you cast blame on somebody else, my mind begins to go, well, am I guilty of the same thing? And I realized we all are. We're all of us in that way, this pains me to say, we're all in that way Patriots fans. We all act like that because they were simply entitled. And to be entitled is to be forgetful of the past and desirous of the future. To be entitled is to forget everything that got us here, is to forget all the blessings and all the things I've enjoyed up to this moment, and then to not be aware or cognizant in this moment and just desire us of the future. And isn't that what they were? As they're in the stands and they're watching this one singular bad half of football, totally forgetting the last 20 years that they've had, that they've gotten to enjoy being a fan like nobody else on the face of the planet. In that moment that they booed and expressed their displeasure, aren't they simply forgetting all the things that they've enjoyed up to that point and only thinking about what they want in the future? Haven't they forgotten their past and become desirous of the future? And isn't this what we do? Haven't in our lives, all of us, at different points, been entitled jerks? If you don't think you have, look at your kids at Christmas. Come on, your kids expect stuff, right? They're not like hoping that maybe they get a present. They gave you a list in September. My three-year-old already has this figured out. Everything she saw over the course of the list, can you make sure and tell Santa that that's a thing that I want? Our kids grow up entitled. Entitlement says, I deserve this. It's my birthright. This is something that I've earned. You should give it to me. I don't have to be grateful for it because I deserve this anyways. That's what entitlement is. If our kids aren't enough to help us realize that this is a path that we are all on, how long does it take you and your life right now to get tired of the new shiny thing? How many weeks or months after that promotion, you finally get the job, you finally get the promotion, you finally get the thing, you get the position that you wanted, you've closed the sale that you've wanted, you're so happy about it, praise God, this is great. How many weeks does it take you to resent those coworkers too? How long does it take you to think, I wonder what's next? How long does it take you to forget what got you there and be desirous of what's ahead? How long does it take for the new car to become the one that you want to sell? How long does it take after we buy a new house to put the Zillow app back on our phone and just see what's out there? How about this? How long did it take you after you got married and all the happiness and all the pomp and circumstance around that day to have an evening where you looked across the living room and you thought to yourself, I could have done better than this. For Jen, it was about three days. How long does it take us to be dissatisfied with the blessings that we have, to forget our past, to be totally lost to the present and be desirous of the future and in our own way be booing our life because of a simple bad half? To be shaking our fist at God and saying, God, why do I have to deal with this? Why do I have to go through this? Why can't I have that thing with no mind at all to everything that he's already given us? How long does it take us to become entitled? And the problem with entitlement is it's the antithesis of gratitude. If the Bible tells us to be grateful, to be thankful, to give thanks in all things and at all times and in all circumstances, if that's a characteristic that we're supposed to embody, then we should acknowledge that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. It's the exact opposite of gratitude. And we should also acknowledge that there is a natural drift towards it. You haven't all been entitled jerks because just in your soul you're a bunch of jerks and we're a bunch of brats. It's all us. We're all that way. Gratitude is something you have to choose on purpose. We don't naturally drift towards gratitude. We naturally drift towards, I deserve, I earn, this belongs to me. We naturally drift towards being forgetful of our past and desirous of what's in the future with no mind to what's going on in the present. That's a natural drift that we have. I don't think, and I'm not here this morning so that anybody feels badly about it. I'm just here so that we will acknowledge it and understand that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. Because entitlement says, I deserve this. And gratitude actually confesses something. I learned this in my research from an Irish monk, and I thought it was a good way to think about gratitude. Gratitude is a confession. To be grateful for something confesses that this is a gift that I do not deserve. Gratitude says, this thing that I have in my life, this person, this relationship, this material possession, this house, this opportunity, this skill set, this location in time and in space and in geography, all the things in my life, gratitude acknowledges this is a gift that I do not deserve. To go back to our original illustration, those Patriots fans have not done anything to win those Super Bowls. Nothing. They've not done anything that any other fan base hasn't done. They just have the luxury of being born in New England and getting to cheer for Patriots. And good for them. But it's a gift that they got that they did not deserve. Being a Falcons fan is a punishment that I've received that I do not deserve. God and I are still working that out. But to be truly grateful for something is to confess, this is a gift that I've received that I do not deserve. If you feel like you deserve it, if you feel like you've earned it, then you can't be grateful for the thing. If you're a salesperson and you go out and you slay the dragon and you get the big commission check that comes from slaying the dragon, you don't walk into your boss's office and go, thank you so much for this check. This is such a sweet thing for you to do. No, it was negotiated. You earned that. You deserve that. The gratitude comes in when we reflect on the skills and abilities that got that deal done, and we thank God for blessing us with those. But gratitude has to confess that the thing that I'm grateful for is a gift that I do not deserve. The other thing that gratitude does that I think is so very powerful is it anchors us in the present as we remember the past. Gratitude anchors us in the present as we remember the past. We're not fast-forwarding ahead. We're not looking to the next thing. We're not anxious or desirous about the future. We haven't forgotten the past. We're reflective on the past, the moments that conspired to bring us here. We're anchored in the present, and we remember the past. The best example of this I've seen that I think of often is, I call him my Uncle Edwin. He's really Jen's Uncle Edwin. Jen's dad, John, has a twin sister named Mary. She married a guy named Edwin, and they live in Dothan, Alabama. If you didn't follow that, Jen's aunt and uncle live in Alabama. And every Thanksgiving, we go down to Dothan, Alabama, and we have Thanksgiving with the Morrises. Jen's family, the Vincennes, go down with the Morrises, and we get together and we have Thanksgiving. And Edwin and Mary have three daughters that are about our age, and they have kids now too, and it's just a really great, sweet time. It's one of the great gifts in my life to have been grafted into that family. I'm very grateful for that. And when we go to Thanksgiving, we have the meal. It's a big, good meal. It's one of the best ones I have of the year. There's still an adult table and a kid's table. The parents sit at one table, and the average age of the kid's table now is like 36, but it's still the kid's table. And we have way more fun at the kid's table. There's always much more laughter going on as we swap stories and catch up and reflect on old ones and things like that. And at one point or another, I've caught Edwin doing this several times. He comes into, he leaves the adult table to have his cup of coffee or a camera or dessert or something, and he'll stand off in the corner. He's not trying to be noticed. He's not trying to speak. He's not trying to get anyone's attention. And he'll look at what's happening in his kitchen, And he'll just grin from ear to ear. And sometimes I'll watch him kind of wipe away a tear. And I've never spoken with him about those moments. But I know that Edwin is a man that loves God very much. And I'm certain that in those moments, he's standing there and he's just soaking in what he considers to be one of the great blessings in his life, of the family that he has. He's anchored in the present and he's thankful for the past. And in that moment, he's grateful, acknowledging this family is a gift that I did not earn. And it's tempting to jump ahead. It's tempting to be desirous of the future. It's tempting to be anxious about what could happen. And there's different times and different seasons of life with the Morrises that he could have jumped ahead. During one of those Thanksgivings, he had a daughter that was going to vet school who dropped out to go to art school, which no parent wants to hear. Now, fast forward that, and it worked out really well for her. Another time, he had a daughter who was dating a guy that he was actively praying against every day. Not in a funny way, even though it is funny, but in a very serious, concerned dad kind of way. And God answered those prayers too. But in that moment, when he's standing there, grinning from ear to ear, grateful for what's going on in front of him, he's not anxious about the future. He hasn't forgotten the moments that have got him there. He's anchored in the present, and he's grateful for God's gifts. But more than those things, more than humbling us so that we acknowledge that things in our life are gifts, more than simply anchoring us in the present and helping us reflect on and be grateful for the past, I think there's something far more powerful that gratitude does. And I think we see that in a story tucked away in one of the gospels, in Luke chapter 17. If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 17. I'm going to start in verse 11, and verses 16 through 19 will be up here on the screen. I want to read it for you. On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by 10 leopards, talking about Jesus, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Okay. So I want to say something very, very clear right here. He's going through Samaria. There's racial tension going on. The racial tension going on there. There's a whole separate set of issues that we could talk about. But there's 10 lepers. And in the ancient world, leprosy was the death knell. It was the death knell. It was the worst possible disease that you could get. It was the worst possible diagnosis that you can receive. If you received leprosy, it was contagious, so you were ostracized. You had to go live in a colony with a bunch of other depressed people who were losing their skin and their limbs and their digits all at once and just marching towards death together. It was a really, really difficult diagnosis. And so there's 10 lepers, and they cry out to Jesus. And look what they cry. They say, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So what do all 10 of them already know? That's Jesus. He's the Son of God and he has the power to heal us, right? They already are acknowledging that that's Jesus and we believe he's the Son of God. They've admitted that. Then Jesus answered, were not 10 cleansed? Where's everybody else? Didn't I heal 10 of you? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at this, this is so powerful. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Let's not miss what's happening in this story as we reflect on gratitude together. These 10 lepers looked at him and they said, Jesus, Master, we believe in you. We believe that you are who you say you are. We believe that you have the power to heal. Will you please heal us? He says, yeah, go and show yourself to the priest and you'll be healed. And so they run off to go to the priest and on their way, they are healed. And as they are healed, we can only assume. Now, we don't know. There's not a lot of details. This is conjecture. But something happened in the minds of nine of them that they didn't think it was important to go back and thank Jesus for what he did. I like to think that their minds immediately became desirous of the future. They became desirous about who they were going to tell and what they were going to do and who they were going to see and all the next things that they wanted to do in light of this healing. Maybe in their head, they went, gosh, that Jesus is a great guy. And they went on and they did their thing. But what they didn't do is express gratitude. What they acted like was that they were entitled, was that they somehow deserved that healing. Jesus is the Savior of the world. He's the Son of God. He has the power to heal. He sees us. He should heal me. He owes this to me. That's what God does. God heals, so heal me. Thanks, great, and then they move on. Only one of them was so moved by his experience with Jesus that he went back to him and he said, thank you. Thank you for healing me. And in that moment, we see gratitude. We see an acknowledgement. This gift of healing is a gift that you gave me that I did not deserve. Thank you. And Jesus' response is fascinating to me. After he notes what the others did, he said, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you well. That dude just got saved. You understand that? We call it getting saved when someone is returned to harmony with God. Our souls were created to be in harmony with our creator God. They were designed to be in union with him. Our sin breaks that union. It is forever broken. There is no way to restore us into that union. So God sent his son to die on a cross so that we wouldn't have to, so that by placing our faith in him, we can be restored into union with our creator God. Your soul longs and clamors and claws for harmony with your creator God. That's what it does. If you're here this morning and there is an unease in your soul, if you're not a believer yet, but there is something that you just can't seem to wrap your mind around, if you've clawed for happiness in your life and then gotten there and found that it was empty, it's because your soul was designed to claw for harmony with our Creator God. And Jesus restored the soul of that leper. Gave him what his soul really longs for. And why did he do it? Because the leper was grateful. Don't you see? It wasn't enough to just go, hey, you're Jesus and you can heal me if you want to. Thanks, see you later. No, the leper came back and was grateful. Thank you for what you've done. And Jesus says, your faith, he doesn't say gratitude. He says faith because the faith is implicit in the gratitude. To be truly grateful, you have to admit, you've done something that I couldn't do for myself. Thank you, Jesus. Your faith has made you well. I'm worried as I read this story that we don't understand that gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God. Gratitude is the gateway to harmony with God. Don't you see that these nine lepers did what so many of us do, particularly in the South, just give mental assent, acknowledge, you're Jesus, you're the Son of God, and if you want to, you can do these things for me, but it never goes beyond that. They had the beginnings of faith, but they weren't truly grateful for who Jesus was and what he did. And because of that, they never received the actual blessing that Jesus came to give them. He didn't go through Samaria that day to heal people of leprosy. If he did, we would have seen him healing a lot more people. He walked through Samaria that day to bring some souls back into harmony with God. He walked into Samaria that day to save people. And the only one that got saved was the one that expressed gratitude for what he did. And I worry about how many of us can sometimes be like the lepers. And once we receive the blessing from God, once we receive the taste of Jesus, once we receive a little bit of the blessing, we go, thanks, that's good. And we don't stick around for the true blessing that God has for us because we're entitled. I don't want us to miss the power of gratitude. This guy didn't have to pray the sinner's prayer. He didn't have to have everything figured out. He didn't have to understand the ins and outs of the New Testament. He was from the priest that Jesus sent him to go see wasn't even a Jewish priest. It was a hybrid religion. He didn't even understand what it meant to have faith or to be a believer. He was simply grateful to Jesus for what he did. And to Jesus, that was enough. Your faith has made you well. We cannot miss the power of gratitude. It's a gateway to harmony with God. And I really think that what happens when we're grateful is that all paths lead to God. I think gratitude always leads to God, which in turn always leads to joy. I think gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God, is a guaranteed pathway to joy. That if we can begin to express gratitude in our lives for anything at all, that what that will ultimately bring us to is gratitude. It doesn't take me very long to do that in my life. If I look at the things I'm grateful for in my life, I look at Jen and I look at Lily. It doesn't take me very long to end up thanking God for those things and to find joy and harmony with God. If you look at the things in your life, it doesn't take you very long to think of the things that you're grateful for and find a path that leads us back to God. I think it actually kind of works like this. As I was thinking about it this week, I thought of this map that I remember seeing online. If we can put it up there. This is a map of all of the streams and rivers in the United States and how they all lead to the ocean. Every last one of them. You can pick any tendril that you want to and at one point or another, it's going to end up in the ocean. A brook is going to lead to a stream, is going to lead to a creek, is going to lead to a river, is going to lead to a bigger river, is going to lead to a basin, is going to lead to an ocean. And I think that gratitude works the same way. Even if you think about the things in your life that you think you've done, the accomplishments that you think you've made, the businesses that you think you've built, the children that you think you've raised, who gave you the gifts and abilities to do those things? Who decided in his sovereignty that you were going to be born in the United States in a first world and even have the opportunity to exercise those gifts? Who decided that you weren't going to be born in the slums of Delhi and instead were going to be born here? God did. Our very gifts, our very location, our friends, all of our blessings are a result of God's goodness in our life. That's why I think that all gratitude is simply a path that leads us back to God, that leads us to joy. That's why I think that the Bible tells us over and over again to be grateful in all things, even in the hard things. I think that even if Christmas is difficult, because for some of us, Christmas is a reminder of loss. If we want to find a path to gratitude, even in the midst of a Christmas that reminds us of loss in our life, that loss hurts so much because there were times that were so sweet. And we become grateful for those times. And we see God working in them. And it serves as a pathway that ultimately leads us back to God where our souls will find harmony with Him and we will find joy. Gratitude is incredibly powerful because it is a gateway to harmony with our creator. All paths of gratitude lead to him. And I am convinced that once we are in harmony with our God, once we are grateful to him, all those pathways lead to joy. So let's go and let's be grateful together. Let's be anchored in the present, remembering the past, and be grateful to our God for the things that He has done in our lives. Let's pray. Father, we love You. We truly are grateful to You. We're grateful for the memories that we have. We're grateful for the scars that we bear and the lessons that we learned as a result of those instances. God, we're thankful for all the different blessings that you've placed in our life, for the relationships, for the possessions that bring us joy, for the places that make us feel safe or cozy or happy. God, we're so grateful for all of those. We're thankful for the means to earn those things, to make the sale, to close the deal, to figure out the account. We're grateful for the discipline to go to work and to learn more and to sharpen our sword. We're grateful that you built us all with our gifts that allow us to go out and serve you and enjoy the blessings that you've given us. God, may we actively fight against entitlement. May we be people who acknowledge every day that the things in our life are gifts from you that we have not earned and acknowledge that in your goodness, you've given them to us anyways. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

Thanks so much for being here this morning. It's good to be back with you. I missed last week on a little trip. You may have seen on social media that I had a mustache for that trip, which is why my beard is so thin today. I promise you, I'm trying to grow my beard back just as quickly as I possibly can so I don't look like the new youth pastor giving you sermons. Speaking of the youth pastor giving sermons, Kyle did an excellent job last week. I'm so grateful for him and his ability to fill in. He's on a fall retreat right now, so your applause means nothing with the students. So we're praying for a safe return and for life change there. I'm so excited to step into the Christmas season with you guys. I love that we're decorated, that we're singing the Christmas carols, that we're getting ready for Christmas. Of course, I love the Christmas season, the reminders and the time that we get to spend with friends and family. For me, it means going back home to Atlanta and getting extended time with friends and family there. And so Christmas is really a reminder of blessings. It's a celebratory time, and it's a time that we really, really enjoy and look forward to. But for those same reasons, Christmas for many people is hard. For those same reasons, because it's a time of family, because it's a time to reflect on blessings, because it's a time to celebrate, for many of us, Christmas is difficult. We know that Christmas and the holiday season is one of the most difficult seasons of the year for some folks. And so before we just jump into Christmas and everything that it is and all the joy of Christmas and rah-rah around here, I wanted to stop and take a minute and acknowledge that for some people, December is hard. For some people, this month is difficult because of old wounds or maybe new ones. This is going to be a difficult season for you. And if it is a difficult season for you, in a room this size with this many people, there are inevitably folks who are not looking forward to Christmas and all the reminders that it brings. And if that's you, I want you to know that we're praying for you, that we care about you, and that we see you. And let's not, in our own lives, just plow through with joy while we ignore the fact that this may be a difficult season for those around us. I would hate to do that as a church. For that reason, because this can be a little bit of a difficult season for some folks, I wanted to talk this morning about the joy of forgiveness because I believe that forgiveness can actually be a key that unlocks a more joyful holiday for the rest of us. I'll tell you where I had this idea. I thought about it in a way that I hadn't thought about it before. A couple weeks ago, I went and saw that new Mr. Rogers movie with Tom Hanks. I'm not going to ruin it for anybody, but you should really go see that movie. It was a really great movie. And forgiveness plays an integral role in that movie. And I began to think about it in ways that I hadn't thought of it before. And it actually made holiday seasons better for the people in the movie because forgiveness was extended. And so it occurs to me with a church family our size, it's entirely possible that some forgiveness received or some forgiveness extended could reunite some families, could help redeem some relationships, could very well be the key to unlocking a more joyful and reflective and grateful holiday season for many of us in the church. If not that, as we move forward, forgiveness is a principle that we all have to deal with. So this week is the joy of forgiveness. Next week is the joy of gratitude. And then after that, we're going to do the joy of Christmas. And then the last Sunday of the year is the joy of skipping church together because there is no church, okay? So we all get to experience that joy at the same time and in the same way. But I wanted to talk about forgiveness, not just because I feel like it's helpful for the holidays, but because the Bible makes a pretty big deal out of forgiveness. The Bible has a lot to say about this idea. There's actually almost 90 verses in the Bible that have the word forgive or forgiveness. And a lot of those talk about how God forgives us. A lot of those talk about why we are supposed to give others. And we're going to get to those verses that are represented here in a minute. But as I was looking into the topic of forgiveness, one of the things that I had not considered before is that forgiveness is such a big deal to God. It's so important to God, that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise for us. I had not really thought about forgiveness in that way until I got into what the Bible had to say on the topic, and I see in the Lord's Prayer that it says forgiveness should be a part of what we do every day. If you have a Bible, you can turn it over to Matthew 6, and you can see there Jesus is praying. The disciples have asked him, how do you pray? Like, we know how to pray, but you're praying, and clearly you know how to do it differently than we do, so how do you pray? This is not, we don't just recite these words every day. This is a model for how we should pray. And there's different elements of the prayer. It's very much worth exploring and discussing what are the different things that Jesus includes in this pattern of prayer. But one of the things that he includes is to acknowledge that we are forgiven by God and then to daily and prayerfully forgive those who have hurt us. And I never thought about it that way. I'm not sure that I would have somebody to forgive every day. I don't know that people are offending me or hurting me every day. But as I sat down and I thought about it and I tried to apply this this week, It's a worthwhile exercise to ask ourselves, what hurts am I holding on to? What things am I still grabbing on to? Who do I need to extend forgiveness to? Who am I still dragging through the mud? Who am I still keeping attached to myself in that moment when they weren't at their best? What things do I have to forgive? To God, forgiveness is such a big deal that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise because we'll see later, I believe that there's freedom found in forgiveness. And I actually think it would be a worthwhile exercise for us. It would make the sermon more practical and less ethereal if we would all in our heads kind of think, okay, if I were going to forgive somebody, who could I forgive? If somebody has hurt me, if I needed to walk up to somebody or write an email or make a phone call today and say, hey, listen, I just want you to know that this happened. It hurt me. I forgive you. Who would that be for you? Or would they just say, like, if you said, hey, I forgive you, would they be like, for what? That does not count. You got to have somebody that has hurt you in some way, and you can think about, man, if I were to call them and say, listen, I want you to know I'm not holding this against you anymore, who would that person be for you? I think that's a helpful exercise. As we think about that and we reflect on God's commandment, God's instruction to daily and prayerfully forgive others, it's important to note the motivation that the Bible gives. Because it doesn't just tell us that we should forgive, but it supplies us with a why. I said earlier there's about 90 verses that mention forgive or forgiveness. Most of those, a lot of those are verses about how God forgives us. But a lot of them are encouraging us to forgive others. And most of the time they have a motive there to forgive others that's common amongst all these verses. So we're going to look in our Bibles at Colossians 3.13. But as we look there, I want you to know that that is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. Colossians 3.13 is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. It is the verse. If you want to know, like, what does the Bible say about why we should forgive, that we should forgive, and why we should do it, turn to Colossians 3.13, and it's pretty much the summary verse of what the Bible has to say about this. And Colossians 3.13 says this. I'm going to start in 12. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. So if you wanted to ask, what does the Bible have to say about forgiveness? It tells me to forgive, but why should I do it? That's the verse. That's the archetypal verse that will tell us why we need to forgive. We forgive because God forgave us. You should forgive somebody else because God forgave you. And this isn't an unfamiliar principle for us. Even for those of us in the room who might not call themselves Christians. If you were here this morning, you wouldn't call yourself a believer. You're just kind of kicking the tires around. You're a spiritual person. Someone else invited you to come and you wanted to be nice and so you came. If that's you and you might not believe in the same God that we believe in, you can at least intellectually concede that if there is a God and that God is perfect, they are likely offended by our imperfection, right? That's not that big of a jump. If a God exists that is perfect, we have, in our imperfection, likely offended that God. And so that God has extended forgiveness to us. Now, for Christians, we know the story. We know the drill. We know that God sent His son to die for us because of our imperfection. And we know at times with our life and with our choices that we have trampled on that death, that we have presumed upon it. We all in the room, if you're a believer, I would be willing to bet everything I have that we've had this thought process. I shouldn't do this thing because it's not right, but I know God's going to forgive me anyways, so let's go. We've all had that thought. Even the nicest among us, even the sweetest, littlest old ladies have had this thought of, I know I shouldn't do this thing, but I know God's going to forgive me, so here I go. We've all presumed upon God's goodness and grace in that way, and in that way, disrespected the death of the Son that He sent for us. So the idea that we have offended God and that God has extended to us forgiveness is not a foreign one to a Christian. This is why, this is the reason we're told to forgive others, that we should forgive others. Why? Because God forgave us. There's even a parable about this. Jesus told a whole story about this that most of us know. There was a guy that owed the king, we'll say $500,000. He goes to the king and the king says, listen, I know you can't pay $500,000, so you're good. Like you don't owe me anything. The guy's relieved. He thought he was gonna get killed or put in prison. He's incredibly relieved. He goes and as he's leaving, he bumps into another guy that owes him 50 bucks. And he says, hey, you owe me 50 bucks. And the guy says, I'm sorry, I don't have $50 right now. And he said, you're going to jail. And he calls the cops and he puts them in jail. The king finds out about this guy and he throws the guy that owed him $500,000 in jail. It's a very quick version of the parable. And the parable, the point of the parable is this guy was forgiven for a $500,000 debt. And because he was forgiven of so great a debt, he should have been willing to forgive this guy 50 bucks. And so we forgive the $50 offenses because we recognize that our offenses are more than that. And I would say that this motivation is the right motivation for most offenses. I want to talk about two different kinds of forgiveness today. I want to call this kind of forgiveness immediate forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. Immediate, thoughtful, daily, prayerful forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. When people do something to harm us, they do something to wrong us, they say something mean when they lash out, they act gruff. I had a guy in traffic yesterday that flipped me off. I have no idea why. I legitimately don't. I was just driving along and I came up behind him and then I went around him and he was doing five miles an hour under the speed limit and I went around him and he hung me the bird. And I thought, I don't understand what just happened. I really wanted to stop my car and talk to him. Be like, bro, like I'm not even mad. Just what's going on? That situation, immediate forgiveness. Don't care about that guy. There was something going on in his day that wasn't happening in my day. I hope it helped him out to relieve his stress in that manner. It doesn't matter to me. Most offenses can be forgiven immediately. As a matter of fact, if you think of the people that have hurt you or hurts that you might be carrying right now, I bet if you see what they did to you, the hurt that they caused you in light of the hurt that you've caused others, that you could probably extend them grace. I think about our spouses. If you're married, there are so many, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to believe it when I tell you this. Some of y'all know Sweet Jen, and you know how great she is. There are some things that she does that get on my nerves, and I have to just give her grace for, I have to forgive her. But every time I do, I try to think of all the things that she's forgiving me for that she doesn't even tell me about. And it makes it much easier to forgive. And so this idea that grace and forgiveness have been extended to us, and if we'll just be empathetic with whoever hurt us, we can extend grace and forgiveness to them too. That's the right response for most offenses. And I would say to you this morning, if it's possible for you in your life with the people who have hurt you, if it's possible to extend immediate forgiveness to them, then it's right and good for you to do it. And you should. Scripture tells us you should. But even as I say that, I think that there are some people here who would say, buddy, you don't understand the way that I've been hurt. You don't understand what's happened to me. What's happened to me was not a $50 offense. There are some of you that when I started talking about the idea of forgiveness, it popped right into your head who has hurt you and how they've hurt you. And it's entirely possible that you can hear me talking up here and be like, that's well and good to just immediately forgive somebody, but buddy, I'm not there yet. Nate, I can't handle that. If you knew what had happened to me, you might even think it's well and good for you to preach that. That's not fair for you to say that I should just go and forgive someone. You don't know what happened. You can't relate. You don't understand. And to that, I would say you're right. I have to admit that I can't relate. There are no great offenses in my life. I've never been faced with a challenge of difficult forgiveness. I've never been faced with the challenge of what I'm calling having to offer processed forgiveness. Some offenses require processed forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is just not practical. It's just not going to happen. The hurt is too deep. The wound is too profound. I just can't turn around and go, you know what? I forgive you. My life is wrecked, but I forgive you because God tells me to. That's just not a practical thing to do. And I want to acknowledge this morning that some offenses require processed forgiveness. I think of a friend of mine who, when he was eight years old, his dad left the house, left him and his brother and his sister and his mom. He grew up without that dad. He was saddled with a stepdad who didn't care about him. In adulthood, his dad passed away early. He was the only one of his siblings who went to the funeral. And he had to sit there and look at this man who caused him a life of pain and abuse and neglect, who had never said a kind word to him, but he showed up at his funeral anyways, and he had to find a way to forgive that man so that he could move on with his life. That's a lifetime of neglect. I've never had to forgive like that. And I admit that. Some of y'all have. Some of y'all are walking through that process. And I want you to know that I think the Bible makes space for this process forgiveness. If you look in Luke 17, Jesus is telling us that we should forgive our brother or our sister who offends us. But he says, pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him. Let him know, hey, that's wrong. And if he repents, forgiven. There's this admission in the text and in the teaching of Jesus that sometimes we're not ready to forgive right away. Sometimes there's reasons to withhold forgiveness. Sometimes we're waiting on something before we offer the forgiveness that we're instructed. And I want to be a voice that tells you, that's all right. If you can't get over it right away, that's all right. If the hurt is too deep or too profound, that's okay. You're allowed some processed forgiveness, but we should arrive there eventually. And because I've never had to walk through that deep of a challenge in my own forgiveness, I turned in my research to some people who had and tried to read stories and listen to talks about people who had overcome things in their life. And I ran across a girl, oddly enough, named Sarah Montana. That's a real name. I thought it was fake when I saw it. It's legit. Her name is Sarah Montana, and she gave a TED Talk. The details of that TED Talk are on your bulletin. So if you want to go home and watch it, you can. If you are one that is carrying a deep pain and is struggling through the idea of forgiveness, I think you'll find it incredibly helpful. But in that talk, she shares her story. And her story is, at the age of 22, she had just graduated college, and she was about to start her job and her career working at a hedge fund when she received word that a kid that she had grown up around in their neighborhood had come into their home and murdered her brother and her mom. Instant, deep, and profound hurt. And it was his fault. And so she shared her story and the process of forgiveness. And one of the things she said was that because she believed it to be the right thing, because she thought it would bring her some sort of healing, because she felt pressure from other people to go ahead and do this, she forgave him right away. She said publicly that she forgave him. She came out on the news and said that she forgave him. But she realized years later, she said the words, but she never really forgave him. And in that way, she kept him tethered to her and her life stayed tethered to that moment. And she desperately wanted to be able to forgive him. She even noted that she searched the Bible and she said, the Bible seems real high on forgiveness. It seems to talk really highly of it, but there's not a lot on how to do it. And so she began this exploration on how do I actually forgive? Like, what are the things that I have to do or say? What are the magic words? And in her exploration, she came upon this truth. It's actually an old Jewish truth. It's a teaching of Judaism that you cannot forgive a murderer for the murder because that murder didn't happen to you. It happened to whoever it was that you love. So you have to forgive them. You have to actually name the things that they took from you and forgive them for those. And so for her, she was able to start listing them off. That day, that kid took from her a friendship that she wanted to enjoy for her whole life with her brother that you cannot replicate. You cannot replicate. If siblings are close, you cannot replicate that relationship. And he took that from her. She had to forgive him of that. He took wedding pictures from her. He took the joy of her mom seeing her walk down the aisle. He took from her the joy of her mom experiencing her kids and becoming a grandmother. She had to name the things that he took from her because she couldn't just blanket forgive him for the murders because those didn't happen to her. She had to actually name the things that he took from her. And as she was talking and as I was sitting in this research, it occurred to me this idea about forgiveness that I had never thought of before, that withheld forgiveness exists because a debt is owed. Forgiveness is withheld because a debt is owed. I never considered that before. But isn't that what we do? And our petty little arguments, when we're mad at somebody, when they said something offensive to us, when our spouse hurt our feelings, when somebody we work with hurt our feelings and we give them the silent treatment, what are we waiting on? Waiting on an I'm sorry. The I'm sorry is the debt owed. You've offended me in this way. I will forgive you, but I'm gonna hold on to my forgiveness and I'm gonna hold on to this hurt until you salve it with an I'm sorry. That's the debt they owe. Isn't that so true? This person that murdered her mom and her brother took from her things. He owed her a debt and she couldn't offer the forgiveness until he reconciled that debt. Somebody owes us money, we can't really forgive them until they give us the money back. Someone hurt us in some profound way, we are withholding our forgiveness until they can make it right. When someone hurts us, they take from us our confidence or our security, our sense of self-worth or our innocence. We withhold that forgiveness until they can somehow offer the healing to make it right. And it makes sense to us to say, now you are forgiven. We withhold forgiveness because we are waiting on a payment for a debt that is owed. And isn't it interesting? I never thought about it before, but isn't it interesting how that's how Jesus words it in the Lord's prayer? In the versions that are more accurate word for word, it says, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The language has been there all along. Before we can forgive someone, we have to acknowledge what the debt is that they owe us. What have you taken from me that I am trying to get back? What pain have you caused me that I need you to heal before I can offer you this forgiveness? That's why it was revolutionary for me to finally understand the freedom found in forgiveness and what biblical forgiveness really is. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from your debt because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from the debt that you owe me because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. You don't have to say you're sorry for the thing. You don't have to make me feel better. You don't have to heal my soul because I believe that Jesus is going to pay it better than you ever could. We withhold forgiveness for somebody. We're waiting for them to make us right, to make us whole, to make us feel better again, to give us back the confidence that they stole, to give us back the innocence that they took, to give us back the self-worth that they took from us. And when we forgive, we say, listen, I'm not going to hold you accountable for that debt anymore because I acknowledge that you can't even pay it and that Jesus is going to be way better at paying it than you are. And when Scripture says that we should forgive as God forgave us, isn't that how God forgave us? We offended Almighty God with something that we did, and we owed Him a death, that we owed Him a debt for our offense. And He says, no, no, no, you're released from that debt. You do not have to pay that because I have trusted my son Jesus to pay it on your behalf. And so when we forgive others, isn't it the same thing? When we can look at somebody who represents a life of hurt and pain and neglect and say, you know what? What you did was wrong. The way you treated me was not all right. And you have hurt me profoundly with the choices that you've made. And you owe me for that. But you're off the hook. I release you from that debt because I believe that my Savior can pay it better than you ever could. I don't need you to heal me because Jesus is going to do it for you. I don't need you to make me whole anymore because Jesus is going to make me whole. I think that there is freedom and power in forgiveness because we can finally acknowledge the things that I've been clinging to that I feel like you owe me to make me better again. I acknowledge you can never do that in the first place. So you're off the hook and Jesus is going to pay your debt because he's better at it anyways. That is biblical forgiveness. And my hope and prayer is that as a church and the different families and relationships represented here, that we would walk in that freedom of forgiveness. That we would acknowledge the person who hurt me, it was wrong. And they do owe me. No one's arguing that they don't. But they can never pay me in a way that's going to make me whole. And because of that, they're forgiven. And I'm going to trust Jesus to pay the debt that they owe me for that offense. So as we move into Christmas together, when you think about your lives and your families, first of all, if you're the one that needs to be forgiven because you were dumb, admit it. Make it easier for them. Go to them and say, you know, listen, I want to acknowledge that I owe you a debt and I'm gonna do everything I can to pay it, but I know it's not gonna be good enough and I'm sorry. More importantly, believers, if it is within your power to reconcile a relationship by picking up the phone or writing an email or grabbing a coffee and sitting down and saying, you know what? You hurt me and it's not right and it's not okay, but I've been waiting for you to pay a debt that you can't pay and you don't owe it to me anymore. I'm gonna go to Jesus for the healing that I need for this and I'm gonna love you and your own health too. Then let's do that. Let's have some reconciliations going on this month. Let's have some good conversations that happen this month. Let's pursue forgiveness as a church. And let's experience together the joy and the freedom of forgiveness. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much and are so grateful for you. For the way that you love us, for the way that you forgive us, for the way that you set us free from the things that we have done and the offenses that we have brought. Lord, for those in the room who are hurting, who have somebody in their life that it will just be a challenge to forgive, I pray they would first know and see and feel that you see them, that you are with them, and that you are walking in that pain with them. Give them the strength and the courage and the vision to see that the healing that they are waiting on can only ever come from you. And in your way and in your will, give them the strength to forgive. Reconcile relationships even in this room this morning, God. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.