Sermons tagged with Community

Good morning, Grace. It's good to be here with you in this way again. I'm so excited for August the 16th when we resume our in-person gatherings. On August the 16th, we're going to have the opportunity to participate in church in our home or yours. So for those of you who want to come and experience live church and see your church family and socially distance from the people that you've missed so much. I know that some of you have young kids and you really do want to come and you really do want to be a part of things, but we're also not able to offer children's ministry yet. So you kind of love the idea of coming and seeing folks and participating in worship, but might not feel great about trying to entertain a three or four or five-year-old during a boring sermon. And I totally get that. We have a four-year-old of our own. So if you want to come, bring your family, participate in worship, see your church family that you've missed so much, and then head home once the sermon starts, I just want you to know that's not going to hurt my feelings. I totally understand that. And if that helps you participate in the 16th and that's something you'd like to do, then we want to make that a possibility. So if that's something you want to do, please don't feel bad about that. I encourage that. I can't wait to see everybody who's willing to come on the 16th. And for those who are willing to wait, or feel they need to wait, I totally understand that, respect that, and look forward to seeing you whenever you feel comfortable venturing out. This morning we jump into the second part of our series called The Time of Kings. We're going to look at a story about the fourth king of Israel, a man named Rehoboam, that I love. If you read the Grace Vine, I said this week that this is another one of those sermons that I've wanted to preach for years. I love this lesson of the mistake of Rehoboam and how easily applicable it is to our lives today. By the way, if you just thought, man, I didn't get the Grace Vine, I don't see that, please let us know. Email me or email info at graceralee.org and we will get you on that email distribution list. But like I said, I've been looking forward to preaching this sermon. And for a little bit of context, as we just dive into scripture, we're going to end up in 1 Kings chapter 12. This is when we're introduced to Rehoboam. So if you have a Bible there at home, I hope that you'll grab that and open it up. Again, if you have folks around you, particularly kids, open up the Scripture and look at that text together. I can't tell you enough how important it is to go through text, to interact with Scripture as a family. Rehoboam comes after King Solomon. So the context for where we see this story is, last week we talked about Israel clamoring for a king. They wanted a king. God said it was a bad idea. They rejected God, and God said, just go ahead, Samuel, and give them a king. So they appointed a king named Saul. Saul was an egomaniac. He made it all about him and his kingdom and his wealth, and so God took his kingdom from him. He said, I regret making Saul king. And then he named Jesse, the son of David, the king over Israel. David, to this day, is the greatest king that Israel has ever had. The second greatest king, without hesitation, that Israel has ever had is David's son, King Solomon. Solomon, you'll know, is, according to the Bible, the wisest man to ever live. He wrote a bulk of the wisdom books that we find in the Old Testament. He wrote Proverbs and Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. I love the book of Proverbs that was written by Solomon as a letter to his son of just short snippets of wisdom. And as a matter of fact, as an aside, if you're someone who thinks, you know, I would love to read the Bible more. If you've heard me say before that there's no greater habit, there's no more important habit than anyone can develop in their life than to get up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. And you think to yourself, man, I need to do that. I would love to do that, but I don't know where to start. The Bible is really difficult to understand. It's 66 books. It spans thousands of years. It's a really difficult document to understand, and it's difficult to just drop parachute into a portion of it and know everything that's going on around us. So sometimes when we decide that we want to read the Bible, we dive into it and we don't understand it, and so then we put it away because it becomes frustrating. If that's your story, let me encourage you to start reading in Proverbs. Proverbs has 31 chapters. You can read whatever chapter corresponds with the date of that day. Just open it up, read a chapter, put it down. Proverbs is great because if you're skeptical about faith, if you don't know if you can trust the Bible or not, Proverbs is a great thing to pick up, to read, and to try to apply to your life. Is this truth going to work for me? If I do this, am I going to find out that it's true? It's a way to put the Bible to the test. It's also a book that doesn't require context. You can just jump right into it and start to read, and things are going to make sense to you without having to know the context of the rest of Scripture. So if you have a hard time reading the Bible, if you don't know where to start, Proverbs is a great place to start. If you have people in your life who want to read the Bible and they're asking you, where should I start? That's where I tell everybody to start is the book of Proverbs. And Solomon wrote that. And we think of Solomon, rightly so, as a righteous man because he wrote books of the Bible. He prayed to God. He prayed for wisdom when he could have had anything that he wanted. But it's also worth noting that later in Solomon's life, in many ways, he turned away from God. He took many hundred wives, he took a thousand concubines, he married for political reasons. Later in his life, he built an army. He built the first large standing army that Israel ever had, and he did that by taxing the people heavily. He built monuments and public works, and he did that by enslaving the people harshly. And so later in his life, Solomon became a really harsh king. To live in Israel under the reign of Solomon was not a pleasurable experience. History smiles on Solomon for his contributions, but if you were one of his subjects during his reign, you would not have enjoyed the reign of Solomon. So when Solomon dies, the mantle of the role of king goes to Rehoboam. It passes to Rehoboam. And when he's named king, you'll see in chapter 12, the people of Israel come to Rehoboam and they clamor for him. And they say, please take it easier on us. Your dad was so harsh on us. He was so ruthless. He taxed us heavily. He enslaved our children and us. Please don't do that to us. Can you please be a kinder, gentler king? And Rehoboam's response to them is telling. Rehoboam said, give me three days. Let me think about it. To which I kind of feel like that's your first indicator that Rehoboam's not really thinking very clearly. That seems to be a no-brainer, doesn't it? A group of people comes to you and they say, hey, can you please try to not be a tyrannical dictator? Can you please like lower the taxes so that we can experience some wealth and pour that back into the country? Can you please do that for us? Can you please like not take us as slaves? It should be a no-brainer to go, yeah, okay, that seems reasonable. But Rehoboam says, let me take three days and go think about this. So during those three days, he assembles his dad's old advisors, basically the cabinet of King Solomon. And he goes to them and he says, the people have asked me to take it easy on them. What do you think I should do? And Solomon's advisors give him good, wise, sound advice, the same advice that you would likely give that I would likely give to Rehoboam. And they tell him, you should listen to the people. If you will ease up on them just a little bit, man, I'm telling you, they're going to love you forever. You should heed their desires. Do what they're asking. Be gentle with them. Be kind to them. Be softer with them. You don't have to be as hard as your dad. You can be a different kind of king, Rehoboam. Listen to us. And listen, these are the men who walked through the fires with Solomon. These are the men who were right next to Solomon and watched him become ruthless and watched him become authoritarian and watched what it did to the people around him. They had led through the nuances of leadership. They understood everything that hung in the balance. And this is like easy leadership decision. Take it easy on the people and we can see, hindsight's 20-20, you can see as well as I can, that if Rehoboam would have just been kind to them, if he would have just said, yeah, okay, I'm going to be nice. I'm not going to be the kind of king that my dad was. That those people would have loved him. Those people would have served him. They would have run through a wall for him. But this was the advice of the old guard. This was the advice of his dad's advisors. And clearly it wasn't the advice that he was looking for. Because after receiving this advice, Rehoboam goes to his friends, the guys that he grew up with. And this is what they tell him. Look in 1 Kings 12. I'm going to begin reading in verse 8. Verse 8 says, but he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him. So the old man said, take it easy on him, be nice to him, be the king that they want and that they need, and he abandoned that. He said, no, I'm not interested, and so he goes to his young friends and he asked, what do you guys think I should do? And he said to them, My little finger is thicker than my father's thighs. And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. Which, by the way, as an aside, this week I learned that scorpions are worse than whips. I would not have thought that 10 days ago, but now I understand that's actually worse. He goes to his friends. He receives the counsel from the old men who say, be the king that they need. And his friends go, no way. Don't tell them that. You need to go tell those people that your little finger is thicker than your father's thigh, that you have more power and more authority in your little finger than he did in his whole body. You need to go tell them that if they were scared of your dad, they need to be terrified of you. Your dad disciplined with whips. You're coming at them with scorpions. Your dad enslaved this many. You're going to enslave this many. Your dad pushed them this hard. You're going to push them harder. You need Rehoboam to go strike fear into their hearts and into their minds and let them know that you are not a king to be trifled with. They built up his ego. He said, go tell them you're a bad dude, man. And Rehoboam, who grew up watching his dad, who was a young man, and as we know, young men feel this desperation to make their mark and to stake their claim and to gain the respect of everyone. And so he clumsily forced it, and he goes back to the people after three days, and he says exactly what his friends told him to say. Forget you guys. You want me to go easy on you? I'm not going to. You think my dad was bad? Get a load of this. You see the slaves my dad took? I'm going to take more. You see how hard my dad worked you? I'm going to work you harder. And he just set up from the very beginning this ruthless, tyrannical dictatorship where he said, I'm the man and you can't mess with me. And what Rehoboam failed to consider is that there was another guy named Jeroboam. Jeroboam was a rival of his dad and rose up at one point to overthrow Solomon and when that wasn't successful, fled to Egypt. And when Solomon died, Jeroboam comes back to Israel and listens to Rehoboam say this. And after he says that, Jeroboam knows that he's going to have enough support for what a jerk Rehoboam is, that he can garner a military and take over part of the kingdom. And as a result of Rehoboam's pride and selfishness and short-sightedness and refusal to listen to wisdom, Jeroboam took 90% of his kingdom from him. And like I said last week, within four kings, Israel descends into a civil war, the result of which we now have the northern kingdoms that are led by Jeroboam and the southern kingdoms that are led by Rehoboam. The northern kingdom had 10 tribes in it. The southern kingdom had two. Rehoboam loses 90% of his kingdom because he made a selfish, egotistical decision. And I've always loved this story because it stands out as a stark warning to avoid the folly of Rehoboam, to avoid this big mistake. So when we planned out this series, and I was flipping through the books of 1 and 2 Kings, wondering what am I going to teach to grace, and I came across this story, I knew I was going to teach it. I knew that I had to highlight it. And so as I sat down this week and began to interact with it, the question becomes, well, what's the point? What do we take away from this? What's the application to us in our lives here in 2020? What's the application to grace? And, you know, I've always taken this as a warning to listen to the older voices in your life. For most of my ministry career, I've thought of myself as young. I realize that those days are fleeting now. Just this week, Lily put her hand on my stomach and she said, Daddy, you have a fat, fat belly and you have a lot of gray hair in your beard. You look like a grandpa, Daddy. So clearly my young days are behind me. But in my young days, I would look at this and I would think, this is a warning to heed the older voices in your life. And it is. But I don't think that those are the only voices that we should listen to. And so then I thought, well, this is a warning to heed the advice, to listen to the voices that God places in your life. And you have this juxtaposition, this comparing and contrasting between the old guard that God placed in his life and the friends that he chose to put in his own life. But you know, honestly, I believe that God puts friends in our lives that we should listen to, and so I would never tell us not to listen to our godly friends. And so the more I thought about it, what's the lesson from this mistake, from this episode in the life of Rehoboam? I realized that the overarching message here is to listen to wisdom. Listen to wisdom. And I know this is not an earth-shattering point for a sermon. I'm aware of this. That's why we have it in all caps there at the bottom of the screen, to make fun of me for making this the point of the sermon. But it is. It's the point. It's what comes out of the story of Rehoboam. You know what we should do when we read this story and we look at this mistake that he made and we see what it costed him? You know what we should take away from this? We should take away from this that we should listen to godly wisdom. But even as I say that, it's not a shocker that a pastor would say in a sermon that we should listen to wisdom. That's a pretty simple thing. We know that. You know that. And Rehoboam knew that. And because of that, because we all know that we should listen to wisdom, we all know that the wise way is the best way, the more interesting discussion becomes, why do we have such a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom? If we all know that we should listen to wisdom, if we all know that we should obey the Bible, let's just put it down to brass tacks. If we all know that we should do the things that this book tells us to do, and we should not do the things that this book tells us not to do, but we keep not doing the things we should do, and we keep doing the things that we shouldn't do, what that means is we have a problem listening to wisdom. And so the question becomes, why is it that we have such a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom? If we all know that we should listen to it, if we all know that we should obey what God says in his word, if we all know that there are voices in our life that tend to tell us the right thing even when it's the hard thing, why is it that we continue to have a hard time hearing that wisdom and heeding that wisdom and abiding by it in our own life? And I think that this is a fair question to ask of Rehoboam, because if there's anybody who knew that they should value wisdom, it's Rehoboam. If there's anyone ever in the history of the world that was poised to be a good king and to learn to listen to wisdom, to be able to hear it and heed it, it was Rehoboam. Think about it. Rehoboam's granddad was David, the guy who wrote Psalms. The guy who penned Psalm chapter 1, one of the most famous Psalms, maybe just behind Psalm chapter 23, where he warns people. In this case, his grandson. Do not sit in the seat of mockers or stand in the way of scorners. Do not associate with unwise people. But he says, Raybaum knows that, just like you know that. Rehoboam's dad was Solomon, who wrote the quintessential book of wisdom and addressed it to his son. I don't know if he addressed it directly to Rehoboam, but I know that Rehoboam was his son and took over as king, so it would make sense to think that Rehoboam had read it. And if you open up Proverbs and you read it, the first four chapters, all it says over and over again is get wisdom. No matter what you do, pursue wisdom. Foolish people throw off wisdom. Smart people accept wisdom. Get wisdom. Cherish it. Value it. It is greater than gold. It is greater than wealth. Get wisdom with everything that you do. This is what's poured into Rehoboam. And yet at the crucial moment, when more than any other time in his life he needed to listen to wisdom, to hear it and to heed it, he ignores it. And I think if we can look at why Rehoboam chose to ignore this wisdom in his life, what we'll find is that we can relate to those answers too. And that the same reasons that Rehoboam rejected wisdom in his life are the same reasons that we often reject wisdom in our life. So I'm going to give you three. This morning, there are more reasons than this than we have a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom. But these are the ones I think we can pull out of this story in 1 Kings chapter 12. The first reason why we often struggle to hear and heed wisdom is because wisdom doesn't care about our ego. Wisdom is wholly unconcerned with your ego. Rehoboam goes to the old guard and he says, the people want me to take it easy on them. What do you think I should do? And they told him to be the kind of king you don't want to be. He said, be gentle, man. Be loving. Be considerate. What they're really asking him to do is in your very first decision, in your very first my way or the highway moment, give in. Just give in. Just don't choose your way. Just let them have this one. You don't have to win everything. Be who they want you to be, not who you want to be. Let that respect come in a different way. Don't demand it of them. And then he went to his friends. And what did his friends do? They appealed to his ego. I got more strength in my finger than my father did in his whole body. If you thought he was tough, wait until you get a load of me. It was all ego. It was just being young and dumb and wanting to make a name for himself and being blinded by this appeal to his ego. And wisdom never cares about your ego. I remember a while back I was doing a wedding. And I was at the rehearsal in the rehearsal there's a little bit of a squabble between the husband and the bride-to-be. The husband wanted somebody else in his wedding party and the bride said that couldn't happen because that would be an odd number of people and it would throw off the entrance and the pictures and the whole deal and it was I mean, the bride's clearly right. It was a bad scene. And so they're frustrated at each other, and we're off to the side. I'm standing there with the groom and his best man, who happens to be his brother. And right before we're about to start the rehearsal, they're kind of fired up about it, and the groom's brother looks at him and he says, man, you just need to tell her. You just need to go right now. You go over there and you tell her that you're the man. This is your marriage. You're the man in this marriage. You make more money than she does and it's going to be your way and this person's going to be in your wedding. And I wasn't going to be disrespectful to the brother. But I had done some counseling with this couple, and I knew this guy well enough that I just kind of stood there quietly, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and I just went, that's terrible advice. Terrible advice for tons of reasons. But what it was on its face was an appeal to his ego. Foolishness appeals to our ego. You go be a man and you go be tough. No, that's stupid. That's not manly or tough. That's Neanderthalic. Don't do that. It's not going to help you do anything. Wisdom never comes in a package that appeals to our ego. It's always going to push us to do the kind thing. It's always going to push us to do the patient thing. It's always going to push us to take a back seat. Some of us with big egos have a hard time with wisdom because it doesn't kowtow to that. It just tells us the truth and we have to have the guts to walk in it. That's why Jesus says, when someone hits you, you should turn the other cheek. That's why we're told that a soft answer turns away wrath. That's why we're told in James that we should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry. That doesn't appeal to our ego, but that's the right thing to do. I think often we have a hard time heeding wisdom because it never comes in a package that strokes our ego. And for some of us, that's a thing that we have to get over. Rehoboam couldn't get over it, and so he made the wrong choice. Another reason that Rehoboam had a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom that I think we can relate to is that wisdom is rarely efficient. It's rarely efficient. Rehoboam wanted to get things done. He saw the works that his dad did. He saw the army that his dad did, and he wanted to do that too. He wanted to make a bigger army. He wanted to construct bigger things. And to do that right away within the next five to ten years, I've got to tax the people more heavily so I can make a bigger army. I've got to enslave more people so I can build bigger things. I've got to charge more taxes so I can get my things done. I can't let them off the hook, old guard, because if I do, then I can't accomplish the things that I want to accomplish. Wisdom often seems inefficient. It reminds me of one of my favorite Proverbs. In Proverbs 25, verse 15, it says, Sometimes in conflict. We just want to jump in with two feet and just make it happen and say all the things and give vent to everything that we're feeling and try to win the day when really a soft tongue breaks bones. Isn't this true in our marriages? When our spouse does something that bothers us? Sometimes we just want to jump on them with two feet. Hey, why'd you do that? I didn't deserve that. That's not fair. You shouldn't do that to me. You shouldn't treat me like that. You shouldn't expect that of me. When our husband or our wife bothers us, sometimes we just want to jump on them with two feet because we feel like we have every right to. But that's probably not what's wise. What's wise is to probably wait and to bite our tongue and to wonder what's motivating that choice. What's going on in their day and in their week and in their life? Let me just wait and see if they do it again. And then if they do, I'm going to approach this in a way that maybe can be helpful to everyone. But we live in a culture that just wants everything right now. And so we often throw off wisdom because it doesn't seem efficient. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this in the spiritual development of others and even in myself. Somebody comes to faith or gets reignited in their faith and they want to understand scripture. They want to be able to lead Bible studies. They want to be able to teach other people. And it's hard to accept that this takes a long time to learn. It's hard to accept that knowing the character of God, that knowing how to pray, that knowing how to hear the voice of God, that having a heart that beats with God, that having an understanding of the breadth of Scripture and how it all ties together and what's going on in Galatians that reaches back into the Old Testament that you need to understand so that you can understand Paul's letters and the things that Jesus says that are quotes of prophecies that he is fulfilling. It takes a long time to tie all of those together. It takes a long time to drop into the book of Romans and understand what it is that Paul is talking about and why it is such a radical gospel. But we live in a culture that wants everything right away. And I've seen so many people become believers, get ignited in their faith, start to read scripture or listen to a podcast or go to a Bible study or become more committed in their attendance for church. And they don't understand it like somebody over there understands it. It doesn't matter that that person has been walking with the Lord for 30 years. They don't understand it like that person understands it. And so they get discouraged and they walk away. And I think what we fail to realize is that this kind of wisdom is never efficient. If you come across someone who knows how to pray, when you pray with them or when you hear them pray or when they talk about their prayer life, it feels like they are literally at the throne of God, that they have this seasoned voice that you just don't have. You have to know that comes from a lifetime of prayer. That comes from worn knees and worn carpets. That comes from beating their head against the wall, wondering if these prayers are even leaving this room. That is a lifetime prayer. If you meet someone who knows the intricacies of the Bible, who knows how it weaves together, who knows which stories are talking about which person and which books are referring to which other books and how it all ties together, if you meet someone who you think has a mastery of Scripture, you have got to know that comes from a lifetime of diligent study. Spiritual growth is hard work. It is rarely efficient. But wisdom is found in that perseverance. Wisdom is interested not in short-term gain, but in long-term fruit. This is why the Bible over and over and over again encourages us to persevere and prizes perseverance as this thing that ought to be honored. Because true wisdom takes time and true wisdom will always push us towards future fruit rather than present gain. Rehoboam had a hard time with that. So he couldn't hear or heed that wisdom in his life. The last reason, and this one's my favorite, the last reason Rehoboam had a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom and the same reason that we have a difficult time sometimes hearing and heeding wisdom is that wisdom is often dumber than us. Come on. Come on, egomaniacs. Come on, guys. Those of you who understand me, it takes one to know one. Wisdom is often dumber than you, isn't it? It often comes in a package that you don't respect. If you're not sure if you're an egomaniac, here's a good test. If you've ever been in a room full of other people that you respect and had an opinion and tried to win the room over to your opinion and you left that room and no one agreed with you and you still thought you were right, then you and me are friends. Because I've done that before too. But that's a pretty good indicator that for one reason or another we're not accepting wisdom because we think that wisdom is dumber than us. We think we're smarter than the room. And sometimes that arrogance comes in the form of defiance, of loud defiance. Nope, y'all are all wrong and I'm right. Sometimes, though, it comes in the form of sweet, quiet stubbornness, of just sitting on it and thinking, I'm still not going to do all the things you want me to do. Sometimes it comes in this stubborn refusal to receive help. No, I still have it all together. It's all the same thing. It's all the same ego. It's us thinking we're the smartest ones in the room. It's us thinking I know better than these people that are telling me this thing. And Rehoboam's problem was that he was told truth. He was given wisdom, but he didn't respect the package that it came in. He thought you bunch of old men. You don't know what you're talking about. I watched you advise my dad. He probably took pot shots at their leadership, which is way easier to do when you're not the one making decisions. And he said, I'm not gonna listen to you guys. And Rehoboam very easily and swiftly sidestepped the wisdom because he didn't respect the package that it came in. And how often in our lives do we reject wisdom because we don't respect the package that it comes in? I remember when I first started writing sermons back at my previous church when they started asking me to preach. I would spend days coming up with a sermon. I would look at a text. I would think, what are the points here? What can we do? How do I want to approach this? What's the point that I want to make? And then once I felt like I had that, I would go to Jen. I would go to my wife and I would say, hey, here's the text. Here's the way I think I want to approach it. Here's the points that I think I want to make. What do you think of this? And most of the time she would go, I think that sounds really great. You do that. That sounds good. I'm looking forward to hearing this. But every now and again, she would say, uh, that's, uh, I don't think that's very good. She would say, I know that you think that's the point that the text is making. I got to tell you, I don't see it. She would say, I think you might want to take another go at that. I'm not sure that that's super good. And at the time, all I was interested in was her telling me, that's great. This is going to be the best sermon ever. I can't believe you're smart enough to come up with these things on your own. How do you do it? But instead, she says, you may want to go back to the starting board on that one. And I remember in my arrogance, thinking to myself, what do you know? You don't preach sermons. You've never had to do this before. You didn't go to preaching school like I did. You haven't been through seminary. You don't work at a church. Why am I asking you anyways? And I would go away mad at her that she didn't believe in me and get back into the text and try to write the sermon and keep butting my head up against a brick wall. And then one day it would dawn on me a week later, I think Jen was probably right. Maybe this isn't such a good sermon. And my arrogance in that situation, I didn't have respect for the package that the wisdom came in. Now, when she tells me a sermon isn't good, I'm like, well then, we can just slide this one over here. I don't think I need to do that one anymore because I've learned that I can trust her. I've learned that I respect her and her opinion. But often when wisdom comes packaged in a way that we don't respect, in a way that we don't look up to, we reject it. We reject the message because we don't trust the messenger. Isn't this what people do with faith? A lot of people who have a hard time accepting this is true think to themselves, this was written 2,000 years ago. How does it apply to me? Jesus taught these things to an ancient crowd that didn't have the nuanced understanding of life in the universe like we do. What did he know that I don't know? And we find ways to discount what's in the Bible in ways that we shouldn't really listen to Jesus in this instance or Paul in that instance. And I think what we'll find often when we are rejecting wisdom is that we're rejecting it because we don't respect the vessel. And if we'll stop doing that and just listen to the message and get over ourselves, we will learn lessons a lot more quickly and a lot less painfully. If I would have just listened to Jen and gotten over myself, which should have been really easy to do because I wasn't that impressive of a person and I'm still not, I would have had a lot easier time writing those sermons. If Rehoboam would just get over himself, he would have had a lot easier time being king. I wonder how many times in our own life if we would just get over ourselves and accept the wisdom or accept the help or accept the advice, how much better it would go for us. This morning, the lesson that we take away from Rehoboam's mistake that cost him the kingdom is that we should listen to wisdom. And I want us to acknowledge that often we have a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom because wisdom doesn't care anything about our ego. Wisdom is often inefficient, often choosing the fruits of the future rather than the gains of the present. And that sometimes God and his goodness packages wisdom in a vessel that we don't respect and we have to get over ourselves and hear it anyways. And I hope that we will listen to this lesson, to the wisdom coming out of the story of Rehoboam through the centuries and heed it in our own lives. And that this summer, this year, in this difficult time, we can be people who hear and heed wisdom. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. You are patient with us. Lord, with those of us who have voices in our life right now that are giving us good wisdom, would you please give us the strength to hear it? Would you please give us the courage to enact it? If our egos are getting in the way of lessons that we should be learning and voices that we should be hearing, would you sweep those aside? Father, if we're rejecting a message because in our arrogance we don't trust the messenger, would you help us see ourselves more accurately and the vessels that you've placed in our life more accurately? Lord, would you make us a people who hear and recognize and heed and obey your wisdom in our lives? In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's so good to be here with you in this way again. This week, we're jumping into a new series called The Time of Kings. You should know by now, if you've been a part of Grace for any period of time, that I love the Old Testament. I love the stories. I love the characters. I love the nuance. I love the way that diving into the Old Testament not only makes the Bible come alive, but sheds new and helpful light on the Old Testament. And whenever we do a series in the Old Testament and tell some of these stories from that period of time and that portion of the Bible, one of my hopes is that if nothing else, the Bible will come alive for you and you'll enjoy diving into it on your own. I hope that this whets your appetite or inspires you to dive into Scripture and read these stories on your own. We're going to be looking at the books of 1 and 2 Kings. We have a reading plan to go along with this series. That's on our website. So if you'll go there, graceralee.org slash live, you can find our reading plan. Many of you are on it right now and follow through the books of 1 and 2 Kings with us. It won't be exhaustive, but if you want to get ahead of it, then you can try to read in the margins and read through those books as we do this series for seven weeks. I'm excited about this series because the first and second Kings kind of covers a large narrative arc in the Old Testament. The Old Testament from Genesis all the way up through Ezra kind of tells the story of the nation of Israel. And then the books that come after that, the wisdom books and the prophecy books, the major prophets and the minor prophets kind of give us details of different portions of that story. And a large swath of the story is covered in the books of 1 and 2 Kings. And there's all kinds of good things tucked away in these books. And we're going to highlight some of those over the next seven weeks. But by way of background, so that we know where we are in history and in the life of the nation of Israel, I wanted to kind of give you a very quick overview of how we get to the book of Kings and what's going on around the story that we're going to focus on today. So if you go back all the way to Genesis, there's a guy named Abram who lives in Ur, a Sumerian city. God comes to Abram and he says, I want you to go to this place that I'm going to show you that we know is the modern day nation of Israel. Then it was the land of Canaan. But he says, I want you to go to this place where I'm going to show you. And he makes Abram three promises for land, people, and blessing. He says, I'm going to give you this particular plot of land, which we know is modern day Israel. I'm going to make your descendants like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. And the Messiah is going to come from you. And then he changes his name to Abraham. And Abraham goes and he takes his family and he goes over to the land of Canaan. And Abraham finally has a son named Isaac. Isaac has sons named Esau and Jacob. Jacob is the one through some finagling that inherits the promises of Abraham and the blessing. Jacob has 12 sons, one of whom is Joseph. Joseph is kind of pushed out of his family. They sell him into slavery. He ends up in Egypt. Fast forward 30 years, there's a famine and Jacob's 11 sons, the rest of his family moves down to Egypt where they're reunited with Joseph and they exist in prosperity in Egypt for a long time. That's pretty much the book of Genesis. Then the book of Exodus starts, the second book of the Bible. We fast forward 400 years. Moses is there. He's a descendant from Abraham and a claimant to the promises that God made to Abraham. And he's adopted into Pharaoh's family. He spends some time in the desert. God appears to him in the desert and says, I want you to go free my people. And Moses does just that. He frees slaves from the most powerful nation in the world by the hand of God. And while they're wandering around in the desert, the people of God, the Israelites, the Hebrew people, are clamoring for rules. They're like, it's not enough to just follow you, to just kind of loosely obey you. We need some policies here. And so God gives them the Ten Commandments. And then on to the Ten Commandments adds more laws through the book of Leviticus. Until in the desert, we have developed this now formalized religion that we know is Judaism. That would later become Christianity. Then while they're wandering around in the desert, Moses passes away. Joshua raises up to take over leadership in the nation of Israel. They cross the Jordan River into the promised land of Canaan that God promised Abraham. They fulfill that promise. They slowly conquer it and take it over. Once they conquer it and take it over, Joshua divides the land amongst the 12 tribes of Israel and they set up shop. In this time, immediately after taking over the land of Canaan and dividing up the land into 12 territories, they don't have a king. They're ruled periodically by judges. What would happen is God's people, Abraham's children, would periodically rebel, forget about God, do whatever it was they wanted to do, ignore God's laws, and God, to get their attention, would allow them to be oppressed, sometimes enslaved, sometimes heavily taxed, sometimes kidnapped, sometimes at war. And when they were oppressed, they would cry out to God, please save us, we know we did wrong. And God would raise up what we call a judge, and the judge would free Israel of oppression and restore them back to sovereignty, and everything was good until the Israelites forgot again and they began to sin again, forgot about God, lived how they wanted to. God would allow oppressors to come in and then God would raise up a judge when they would cry out. And this is the cycle that we're in. One of the last judges was a guy named Samuel. There's two books in the Bible named after Samuel, 1 and 2 Samuel. Samuel was born to a woman named Hannah who was barren, who prayed and committed to God, if you'll give me a son, I'll commit him to you. So as soon as Samuel was able to eat solid food, probably at about four or five years old, his mom Hannah takes him to the temple, gives him to the high priest Eli, and says this is God's son, that he belongs to God. And Samuel grows up in the temple and eventually becomes the high priest, the prophet, and the judge of Israel. And this is where we pick up the story. If you have a Bible there at home, you can actually go ahead and turn to 1 Samuel chapter 8. 1 Samuel chapter 8. Now, I know that this series is over the kings and first and second kings, and it's weird that I'm diving into Samuel on the first day. But first of all, we're going to get into kings a little bit. Second of all, this story has more to do with the meta-narrative of the story of kings. This story is how Israel got their very first king. And I think that there is a cautionary tale that comes out of this story in 1 Samuel 8 that sheds a light on the rest of the time of the kings that's important enough for us to stop and focus on this morning. So in 1 Samuel 8, Samuel's getting old. He's appointed his sons as the next judges of Israel, and they're not good at it. They're taking advantage of their position. They're corrupt, and the people of Israel are upset about this. So they come to Samuel, and they say, hey, we want a king. And listen, it's important. if you have a Bible at home, please go ahead and open to 1 Samuel 8, because I'm going to summarize a lot of this chapter, and I really want you interacting with the text and following it along and making sure that I'm not making stuff up. But the children of Israel, the people of Israel come to Samuel, and they say, hey, we want a king. And Samuel says, why do you want a king? And Israel stomps their foot and holds their breath until their face turns blue and responds like a petulant middle school child. And they basically say, because everybody else has a king and we want one too. Jordan gets to have a king. Lebanon, they get to have a king. Egypt, they get to have a king. The Babylonians have a king. We want a king too. It's not fair. Everybody else gets a king and we don't get a king. And that stinks, Samuel. Please go to God and get him to give us a king. It's really an incredibly immature attitude from a whole nation of people, which is basically, why do you want a king? Well, everybody else has a king, so we feel like we should have one too. It's the same reason your fifth grader is demanding a cell phone right now. So Samuel is troubled, and he's angered, and he goes to God. And he says, God, they're clamoring for a king. What do I do? And he's clearly taking it personally. They've rejected me and rejected my leadership. They're asking for a king. Help me squelch this. Help me quell this. God, what do I say to them? And God responds this way in verse 7 of chapter 8. Listen to this. So Samuel goes to God and he says, God, the people have rejected me. They don't want me to be their ruler. They want a king. They're not happy with the judge. They don't like the current system. They've rejected me. What do I do? And God says, Samuel, Samuel, give them what they want and understand that they're not rejecting you. They're rejecting me from being their king. God says, Samuel, listen, man, I set it up this way on purpose. I directed Joshua to set up the nation exactly as I wanted it to be established. The way that things are currently orchestrated, that you're a judge and that you represent me and that my nation, my people, Israel, is different than the rest of the world in that they don't have a king. That's on purpose, Samuel. And if you think about it, it's not like God didn't know what a monarchy was when he set up his nation. It's not like the idea of kings hadn't occurred to him. It's not like he thought it was a great idea and just thought, nah, I want my people to just be confused for a long time. No, his people didn't need a king because God was the king and the judge was his representative. I mean, the Israelites had the best setup in the history of history. The most altruistic, selfless, powerful, loving, gracious, forgiving being to ever exist was their king. The king of kings was their king. There could be no better ruler than God. And they had him. But they wanted a physical king. They wanted to be able to see and touch him. And so they weren't happy with what they had because they wanted it so badly they couldn't see what God did for them. Israel's desire made them blind to God's provision. Israel's desire, their earnest want for a king made them blind to God's provision for them. Because they had an expectation that led them down this path, that made them expect this thing, they didn't see what was provided for them over here in such a deep and wonderful and profound way. Their own desire made them blind to God's provision. And so God says to Samuel, listen, give them what they want. Give them what they want because they're going to keep clamoring and they haven't rejected you, Samuel. They've rejected me. I've tried to provide for them as their king and they don't see it. So don't take this personally, Samuel. This is an offense to me. And Samuel warns them. Samuel warns them. He goes back to the people. He says, okay, God says that you can have a king. God says that you can have a king, but listen. Listen to what happens if you're going to have a king. I'm reading in verse 10. He says, so Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking from a king, and God's going to let you have one, but you need to understand. You need to understand, listen, this is not going to be a good thing. He's going to take your sons from you and he's going to put them on the front lines and they're going to die for him. He's going to take your daughters out of your home and he's going to take them to his palace and they're going to serve him there. He's going to take a tenth of what you own. He's going to tax you. He's going to enslave you. He's going to impoverish you. And eventually you're going to regret this choice and you're going to cry out to God and he's not going to hear you. Just so you know. It's such a stark warning to these Israelites who are crying out for a king because they want one so badly. You know, it reminds me of something that I've thought for a long time. It's not all the way true, but it's mostly true. You win every argument you get into with God. There's a couple examples where that's not the case. Jonah lost the argument. But for the most part, if you want to argue with God, you win. He tells the people of Israel, you don't need a king, you have me. And they go, but we really want one. And he goes, it's going to be terrible for you. You're going to hate it. And they go, we don't care. We really want one. And God says, okay, if that's what you want. You might remember the story of Jacob who wrestled with God. God comes to him in a vision at night. He wrestles with God all night long. And do you know who won that wrestling match? Jacob did. Is that because God's not powerful enough to defeat Jacob in a wrestling match? No. It's because when we argue with God, we win. God says, hey, I really want you to do this thing. And we go, oh God, no, I don't want to do that thing. But I really, I think it'd be best for you if you did the thing. No, God, please don't make me do the thing. I don't want to do the thing. I'll do anything but the thing. Please don't make me do the thing. And God says, okay, it'd be best for you. It'd be best for your family. You're going to find joy and contentment there, but I'm not going to make you. Or God says, hey, you know, your life would really be better if you didn't do the thing. Your family would be stronger if you'd stop doing the thing. And we go, but God, I really like doing the thing. One day in the future, I'll stop doing the thing. but right now I'm gonna keep doing the thing because I'm finding joy there. And God says, you know what? You can keep doing the thing, but you're only gonna find wreckage there. You're already walking in hurt and damage and leaving a terrible wake, and you're only gonna leave a greater one, and you're only gonna end in more damage and more death, but you keep doing the thing if you want to do the thing. Go ahead. When we argue with God, we get our way. He's going to let us win. But I think what we see out of the story of how Israel got their first king is that sometimes getting your way isn't the best way. Sometimes getting your way isn't the best way. Sometimes getting that thing that we desperately want, that we petition God for, we need it, we're praying for it, we're begging for it, we're asking for it, and we don't, God hasn't given it to us yet, but finally he gives it to us. And that's not the best thing. Sometimes God won't give it to us. So we force it and we find our own way to make things happen. And that's not the best way. Sometimes we argue with God and we say, I don't want to do that thing that you want me to do. And he says, okay, you don't have to do it, but just know you got your way, but that's not the best way. A big warning that I think that echoes through the centuries of how Israel got their first king is that sometimes getting your way isn't the best way. And it turns out to be true. If you'll read through the book of 1 and 2 Kings, what you'll find is that the first king they had was a disaster. He was a selfish jerk and that David, the second king, had to do a military takeover of Jerusalem just to establish his own kingdom. And then it went well for a while, but at the end of his reign, his son Absalom raised up against him and staged a coup d'etat and overthrew him. And David had to siege Jerusalem again, during which he lost his son Absalom. After that, he was able to peacefully hand it over to his son Solomon. Solomon hands it over to Rehoboam, who's such a terrible leader that the northern tribes revolt and follow someone named Jeroboam. And within four kings, within four kings, after they clamored in 1 Samuel 8, we need a king. it's gonna make us good, it's gonna make us better, it's gonna give us security, it's gonna get us respect among the nations. Within four kings, they descend into civil war and the nation splits forever. It exists for the rest of the Old Testament as the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribes of Judah. And within 300 years, each of those separate kingdoms is ushered off into slavery and exile in Babylon and in Assyria. And at the end of the Old Testament, they come limping back a people of slaves in a post, so I'll highlight for you the story of King Hezekiah. You can find this in 2 Kings 20. King Hezekiah was a righteous man. The southern tribes, the northern kingdoms of Israel had no good kings, had no godly kings for any of the 300 years that they existed. The southern kings, the southern kingdom of Judah only had three good kings. One of them was a guy named Hezekiah. Hezekiah was lauded for his faithfulness and his righteousness. When they were surrounded by the Babylonian army, led by a guy named Sennacherib. Sennacherib sends a letter to Hezekiah and he says, listen, get everybody out of the city because I'm going to burn it to the ground. I'm going to take this place over. And if you're stubborn, they're going to die because of you. And Hezekiah takes the letter to the temple. He lays it down before the Lord. He kneels and he lifts it up to God and he says, God, what are we going to do about this? And God says, your faithfulness has saved your people. I will save your people and you will not have to fire an arrow. And sure enough, that's what happens because of Hezekiah's righteousness. After that, Hezekiah gets deathly ill, and he's going to die. And he prays and petitions the Lord for healing. Please, please, God, save me. Please, please, don't let me die. And God in His goodness grants him 15 more years. And towards the end of those 15 years, there's an envoy of Babylonians that come back to Jerusalem. And Hezekiah and his pride can't resist but showing them everything in his kingdom. He shows them all the storehouses, all the wealth, all the things that he's done. It's not enough for Hezekiah to have the applause and the adulation of the nation of Israel for them to think he's great. He wants the Babylonians to think he's great too. In the south, we call that getting too big for your britches. And so after the Babylonians leave, Isaiah the prophet comes to Hezekiah and he says, hey, what did you show them? He says, I showed them everything because of his pride. And Isaiah says, because you did that, you know they're coming back and they're going to take everything that you showed them and they're going to enslave your people. And Hezekiah responds. Look at 2 Kings chapter 20. He responds, as long as there's security in my time, what do I care? Within those extra 15 years that God granted him, Hezekiah lost his way. He lost his character. He went from being humble and righteous and holy to prideful and arrogant and self-centered. And instead of remembering Hezekiah for this wonderful beacon of righteousness and hope that it can be done right, we have to balance his memory with his faltering in the last 15 years. And the story of Hezekiah shows us again that maybe getting our way isn't the best way. It would have been better for him to have gone into eternity when God allowed him to get sick. He regretted asking for those 15 years. And the same is true in our life. We all have things in our life that we petition God for, that we feel like we want so very badly. I can remember when I graduated from college with my freshly minted pastoral ministries degree. I had worked in Young Life. I had been around youth groups. I had had experience. I had done summer camp. And I wanted more than anything to be the youth pastor of a big, fun youth group at a big, fun church where I could do whatever I wanted. I wanted that, and I prayed for it earnestly. And instead, God sent me to Rocky Mount, Virginia, the moonshine capital of the world. Everybody's got to be proud of something. And we met, to say it was an old country church is probably a disservice to old country churches. We met in a colonial farmhouse on a hillside, literally in the middle of nowhere. It was about 35 people a week. There's three middle school boys in my youth group, and none of them cared what I thought about the G gospels. That's what God gave me. A far cry from what I petitioned him for. That was at 25, 24. But at 30, he gave me the thing I had asked him for. I had a big fun youth group at a big fun church. And what I became certain of is, if he'd have given me the petitions of my heart at 24, they would have ruined me and I would have ruined it. And so because God knows better than I do, he said no or not yet to my request when I was 24. We all have things that we petition God for. We all have things that we earnestly want. Maybe we earnestly want a new job, a new opportunity, a new challenge. Maybe we're working through an anxiety and a depression and we just, we've cried out to God, please take this from me. Maybe there's some turmoil in a relationship that matters to us and we've prayed that God would fix it and it just seems to be getting worse and we're not sure what's happening. Maybe we need money. Maybe we just want more money than we have. Maybe we want a bigger house than we have. Maybe we're praying for a move that's not working. Maybe we're praying for an opportunity that we're not getting. Maybe we're being passed up for a promotion that we feel like we deserve. Maybe we're praying for a child that's not coming yet. We're all petitioning God for something. Maybe we're even praying for health or healing for ourselves or for a loved one. We, like the children of Israel, have this thing that we really, really want. This morning, in light of the cautionary tale that comes out of how Israel got their first king. I want us to think about that thing or those things that we really want, that we earnestly need. Some of them might be silly. Some of them are deathly important. But this morning, can we just pause for a second and consider the possibility that God's answer has been no or not yet because yes isn't best for you. Can we just stop and slow down and that thing that you feel like you want so badly that might even seem like a good and righteous prayer. Maybe God hasn't given that thing to you yet. Maybe his answer is no or not yet because yes isn't best for you. Maybe God knows, no, I'm not gonna just drop in and magically heal your relationship because if you don't go through these hard times and do the hard work to find a way to help, then you're not gonna have a foundation for it to not get unhealthy in the future. You need this struggle. No, I'm not going to give you the job yet because you're not ready for it. And if I do, it's going to destroy you. No, I'm not going to give you the money yet because if I do, you're going to be an arrogant jerk and that's going to destroy you too. And you're going to lose your friends. And I don't want that for you. Your greatest happiness is here. I'm providing for you in a way right now that you're not acknowledging that if you would just stop looking at what you're focused on and focus your eyes on God, you would see that he's already met that need for you in your life. Just like the Israelites who were clamoring for a king, yet they had the best one ever. And I know that it's hard to hear. And this one hits close to home for me. But it's possible that even though we earnestly pray for healing, that healing simply isn't what's best. The healing wasn't best for Hezekiah. We so often forget that God sees things from the scope of eternity. And we see this much of it. And even though in this much of it, sometimes it feels like we want something so badly and we can't understand why God wouldn't let us have it, He sees this. And He understands perfectly. And in eternity, you will too. Consider this morning the possibility, just the possibility, that the reason you don't have the thing that you want so very much, that seems like God should want that thing for you, is because having it wouldn't be what's best for you right now. Consider the possibility that God is already providing that in ways that you don't notice. And listen, hear me. I'm not saying that we shouldn't petition God. I'm not saying that we shouldn't go to Him in prayer. I'm not saying that we shouldn't lay out before Him the things that we earnestly want. Jen and I prayed for years that we would have a child. Lily is the answer to that prayer. I don't regret having Lily. It's one of the greatest blessings in my life, if not the single greatest blessing in my life. We should absolutely petition God. The story from Kings is not that we shouldn't go to him with what we want, but maybe it points to a prayer by Jesus himself in the New Testament and encourages us to pray like that. I don't want you to hear this morning that you shouldn't petition God, but I do want you to hear that we should pray like Jesus did, according to the Father's will. When the disciples go to Jesus and they say, how do we pray? He says, when you pray, pray like this. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The disciples said, Jesus, how do we pray? And he says, you pray like this. First, you praise God. You acknowledge who he is. Then you say, not my will, your will. What you want, God. Let your will be done here on earth as it is in heaven. And to put his money where his mouth was in praying like this, we see Jesus literally pray like this at the end of the Gospels when he's in Gethsemane, the night that he's getting arrested to be crucified. He's laying prostrate on the ground. He is sweating blood. He is maximum stressed out that a human can possibly endure. And he is crying out, God, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. I don't want to do the thing. I don't want to get crucified. I don't want to die like this. Please don't make me do this. But not my will, but your will be done, Father. See the difference? Israel says, God, we want this thing no matter what. God says, it's not going to be good for you. That's not my will. They go, we don't care. This is what we want. We know better than you. Jesus says, God, this is what I want. I want it desperately, badly. But God, I acknowledge that my will might be different than your will, so your will be done, not mine. I think the message coming out of 1 Samuel 8 and the overarching narrative of the results of this desire that's expressed in chapter 8 that we see in 1 and 2 Kings. There's this stark reminder that when we argue with God, He's going to let us have our way, but our way is not the best way. And we should remember that if there is something that we earnestly want, if we've gone to God like the Israelites had and said, hey, we really want this, and God hasn't given it to us yet, it's probably because it's not best for us. And let us remember that when we pray, when we petition God, we should do it like Jesus did. And lay out the things before the Father that you earnestly want, but let's blanket that with, Father, not my will, but your will be done. Let's pray. Lord, you are good, and you are gracious, and you are loving. You are boundlessly patient with us. You were gracious with our frailty and our humanity. I pray that we would see that more and more. God, in light of the sermon, I pray for grace. I don't know how much longer COVID is gonna be a thing. God, I hate that we can't all be together. I know that you hate it more. I know that you're seeing us through this season. And God, even though we earnestly pray that we can all come back together with a feeling of safety and security without anxiety about catching a disease that some of us cannot handle. God, not our will, but your will be done. Let us all return in your perfect timing. God, with the different issues that we're facing with our employment, with the anxiety that we're facing with whether or not our job's going to exist in a couple of months, for those of us who are on the incredibly competitive job market, Father, not our will, but your will be done. Father, may your will be done in the marriages of grace. May your will be done in the raising of the children of grace. May your will be done in the day-to-day lives of the people who call this place home. May your will be done in my life. God, help us pray like that. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's so good to be back in the saddle again, getting to talk to you. I'm so grateful to have people like Kyle who can step in for me last week. One of the values that I feel we have at Grace is the desire to hear multiple voices, multiple influences, multiple perspectives. So I was excited to have Kyle in here to do a phenomenal job talking about the joy of Paul and Silas last week. This week, before we jump into the sermon, I'm really excited to announce that we are going to resume in-person gatherings on August the 16th. 10 a.m. right here. You're invited to come participate in church live. We're thinking of it as having church in our home or yours. So by August the 16th, we're going to be prepared to do a live streaming simulcast of our service. So you can come and experience in this room in person, or you can experience it in your home where you have been experiencing it all summer long. I understand that a lot of us simply won't be ready to come back by August the 16th, and that's all right. We're going to have a full service, worship, announcements, sermon. Our very first service back, we're going to be focused largely on worship, corporate worship together, because I miss nothing more than worshiping with you guys and being in the lobby and talking with all of you. on August the 16th. If you're not quite there yet, you can stay at home and have the exact same experience. There's going to be details to follow about all the precautions that we're going to take on Sunday mornings. One of the things I know that we're going to do, I was just talking to the elders about this this last week, is we're going to ask that everybody in this place be wearing a mask. So if you're not comfortable with wearing a mask, if you're going to be mad about that, then go ahead and email me and let's start having that discourse right now. But that's going to be part of the deal when we come back. We're all going to wear masks. We're going to distance ourselves. We're not yet going to have child care. Everyone's going to be invited to participate in the service. The mechanics of child care just won't work out yet. But I'm super excited to get to see everybody again. I'm super excited at the idea of preaching to people. I'm super excited to worship with you, to see you, to catch up with you. If you feel comfortable with it, I hope that you'll consider joining us on August the 16th as we resume our in-person gatherings. And I hope if you're going to consume them from home that you'll look forward to that being a live stream with full worship and everything we do as a service. Hopefully it can begin to feel like grace again. Now this morning we are finishing up our series in the book of Acts called Still the Church. We've been looking at this book that chronicles the beginning of church. Jesus goes up to heaven, he leaves behind his disciples, and he tasks the disciples with the job of building his kingdom on earth, to build the church, right? And we've been pulling out from this book the practices, principles, and philosophies that we should apply to our church today, the things that we should still be doing. And so we looked at Jesus going up into heaven. He left the disciples behind. After a few days, they received the Holy Spirit, and they go out. We spent two weeks looking at the seven distinctives of the early church that should still be true of our church today. And then we moved through the book looking at these key events, these substantial events in the life of the early church that really formed and played a big part in who we are and what we should do. And after the conversion of a guy named Saul into Paul that God said was his chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles, the rest of the book of Acts really mostly chronicles his ministry, the most influential ministry of all time. And Acts ends in the 28th chapter. And at the very end of the 28th chapter, we kind of get the synopsis of Paul's ministry. We get our final words from him, and then Luke, the author of the book, kind of shares with us what happens at the end of Paul's life. So if you have a Bible there at home, go ahead and turn it to Acts chapter 28. You can go to the very end of the chapter. We're going to be looking at verses 28 through 31. And in verses 26 and 27, Paul is speaking, and he's speaking to a Hebrew audience. You'll remember from this series and from sermons past that the Hebrew people were God's chosen people, and they believed erroneously that God and his kingdom and his salvation was only for them. The problem was they didn't really receive it or accept it the way that they should. The problem was that when God finally sent the promised Messiah for whom they had been waiting for millennia, that they rejected him. And because of that, God is now, through Paul, opening up the gospel to the rest of the world. The intent was always to reach the world. He gave the Israelites, his chosen people, the news first, but it was their job to spread it. They didn't do it. So now Paul says, I'm going to do it instead of you, and they get to hear it instead of you. And so in 26 and 27, he quotes back to them from a passage in Isaiah that they all know very well, that essentially says that God's people will be ever seeing and never perceiving and ever hearing and never understanding that they're going to listen but that they won't hear. They're going to be exposed to the gospel but they won't receive the gospel. And then in response to that, Paul says this in verse 28. He says, So he's talking to the Hebrew people and he says, you've had a chance to listen and you've chosen not to. You're ever seeing and never perceiving, ever hearing and never understanding. So now I'm going to take this gospel, I'm going to take this truth and I'm going going to preach it to the Gentiles, and they're going to believe it. I'm going to preach it to the whole world. And then Luke finishes up the chapter like this. Speaking of Paul, he lived there. By now Paul is in Rome. He's in house arrest in Rome. So it says, So the book of Acts chronicles the beginning of the early church. I think of it as a baby deer learning to walk, finding its footing, becoming an institution. It grows into 3,000. It spreads in Jerusalem. It spreads in the Diaspora. It spreads in Asia Minor all the way out to Rome. Paul has three or four missionary journeys depending on which scholar you ask if the shipwreck on Malta counts as one. And he plants churches the whole way. And then he finishes his life in Rome. Many scholars, most scholars believe that Paul died in Rome a few years after this was written. And for the last years of his life, he preached the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. He preached the gospel. And as we look at the book of Acts, we've been asking every week, based on the example in the book of Acts, what should we be doing? And if you're watching this, listen, let's be real for a second. It's in the middle of July and we've been doing online church for four months. If you're watching this, you care about church. If you're watching this, you care about the things of God. If you're watching this, you're asking the question, okay, that's great that Acts 28 ends that way, but how can that relate to me? How should that inspire me? What can I take out of that that should spur on action and passion within my own heart? What is happening in here that can stir my soul? If you're watching in the middle of July, in the fourth month of a pandemic, then what I know is you want to apply this to yourself. You care deeply about the things of God and about mimicking the early church. So what is it in this passage that we can pull out and apply to us? I think it's this simple truth, that like Paul, each of us must spend the rest of our lives preaching the gospel, just like Paul did. It says that he finished his life preaching the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance, just like he had done in all of his previous years. In Paul, we see a life poured out. He even says that he is a drink offering and that he has been poured out for the sake of the gospel. We see a man who says, I have run my race, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith. In Paul, we see a life that was poured out for the sake of the gospel. And if there's anything that we should take from Paul, it's the truth and the reality that if he spent his last years preaching the gospel, that we should spend our years preaching the gospel. If he invested his life in preaching the gospel, then we should invest our lives in preaching the gospel. And even as I say that, I think it stirs up two questions within us. First, what is the gospel? How do we succinctly and clearly define that? And second, how do I preach it? And I think that those are both legitimate questions. And I don't know how many of you are watching this right now, but I would be willing to bet if I could sit down with each of you and ask you, how would you define the gospel? If someone were to ask you, what is the gospel? What would you say that it was? I bet I would get a bunch of answers that were at the very least really close to right. But I also bet I would get a bunch of different meandering responses trying to really hone in on what the gospel is. And so I think it would be helpful for us to have a clear and concise understanding of the gospel so that when we talk about this idea of preaching the gospel, what do we mean? What are we preaching? How do we define that? And so this week I sat down and honestly I researched a bunch. I read over 50 different definitions of the gospel. Some short, some super long, and some had a ton of details, some didn't have very many details because I had an idea of how I wanted to describe it for the church, but I wanted to make sure I was right and on solid footing. And so I've come up with a definition of the gospel that I believe is true, I believe is accurate, I believe is fair and workable. It's stripped away of detail, but I think all of the details are embedded in it if you pay attention. And so for the sake of this morning, for the sake of our church, as we think about how do I preach the gospel, what is it, I want to define the gospel this way. We know that the gospel is good news. It comes from the word euangelion, which literally means the good news. So what is the good news? The good news of the gospel is that God invites you into a perfect eternal kingdom and Jesus has secured your citizenship. That's the gospel. That God, creator God in heaven, has also created a perfect eternal kingdom that he's invited you into and Jesus, through his death on the cross and covering over of your sins by that death, has secured your citizenship. The gospel says that there is an eternal kingdom in which God sits on the throne, and that in that kingdom, the Holy Spirit intercedes on your behalf. Romans 8 tells us that the Holy Spirit intercedes on your behalf with groanings that are too deep for words, that when you pray, the Holy Spirit hears those words and takes them to God the Father and says, here's what they really meant. Here's what she really needs. Here's what's really on her heart. And that in this perfect eternal kingdom, we're told again in Romans 8 that Jesus himself sits at the right hand of the Father interceding for you. That Jesus sits next to God the Father and he says, he's okay. He doesn't mean what he's doing. Have patience with him. Be gracious with him. I'm vouching for him. I died for her. The gospel is the reality of an eternal kingdom in which the Holy Spirit intercedes for you, and Jesus himself advocates for you, and Jesus can advocate for you because he has secured your citizenship with his own life. That's the gospel. And listen, because that's the gospel, that changes everything. You understand? Because we know, because as believers we are aware of the reality that there is a perfect, eternal kingdom, It changes everything in this world. Doesn't the reality of the gospel change the way we process pain and loss? Doesn't the reality of the gospel change the way we process hurt and tragedy? Paul says in Corinthians that though we endure struggles for a small time, James says that we should consider struggle a pure joy because we know that it's only temporary. We know that it won't last forever. Don't you understand that the gospel says that years like 2020 are not all we have? That the gospel says that there is a perfect kingdom beyond political division and racial strife and pandemics. That 2020 isn't all that there is. That there's more on the other side of this. That even if the world were to end in 2020, that there is another eternal perfect kingdom waiting for us on the other side. The reality of the gospel should change the way we process pain. It should help us see everything as temporary and not permanent. The pain that we're experiencing in our life, heartbreak and tragedy and abuse and disease, they don't get to put a period on the end of the sentence. God finishes that sentence later in eternity. Because the gospel is true, we can say things at funerals like I did a few weeks ago. We've lost a great partner of our church, a guy named Wes Clark. And I got to do his graveside service for his family a few weeks ago. And at that service in front of his wife who loves him and his six wonderful kids who loved him dearly, who didn't have a negative thing to say about their father and his grandkids who loved him dearly, I got to tell them, because the gospel is true, I got to tell them that this service isn't goodbye. It's goodbye for now. It's just goodbye for now. We're going to see him again. When I was growing up, there was this old gospel quartet, and I'll never forget one of the stanzas of one of their songs. It says, Because that's true. Because there's an eternal kingdom in which Jesus has secured our citizenship, death doesn't have a sting like it did. Sin doesn't have its shackles like it did. Everything changes. I love that quote from Pope John Paul II that says, we are the Easter people. We will not give way to despair for we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. We can have this uncommon joy in the face of tragedy. We will not despair. We will always sing praise because we know that there is an eternal perfect kingdom waiting for us and Jesus has secured our citizenship there. If you're watching and you don't know if you're a part of that kingdom, talk to some people around you. Email me because Jesus has died for you too. But the gospel doesn't just change the way we view pain or the way that we view struggle or the temporary nature with which we view this earth that the Bible tells us we are aliens in a foreign land here because we are members of another kingdom. We're citizens of another kingdom. It also imbues us with purpose. Because the gospel is true, each of us have something much larger than ourselves to live for. We have something much larger than our children to live for, much larger than our businesses or our families or our legacies to live for. We have the kingdom of God to live for, which is why it was so easy for Paul when he was struck with the reality of the gospel to spend his entire life preaching it. And because of the reality of the gospel, we should spend our entire lives preaching it. So if that's what the gospel is, if the gospel, if the good news of it is that God invites us into an eternal perfect kingdom, and Jesus has secured our citizenship in that kingdom, and it's our job to preach it. We might ask ourselves, Nate, how do I realistically do that? How do you want me to preach the gospel? Because you might be looking at me on your screen thinking, it's easy for you to connect those dots, pal. Like you're a pastor. You just preached it. Go you. That's a pretty easy equation to figure out. But how do I do that? How do I preach the gospel if I'm not given a platform? And to that, I would simply say this. I'm going to give us four ways to preach the gospel, but I would also remind you that I get to preach the gospel to people who love Jesus in the middle of July and are watching online. That's who I get to preach the gospel to. I don't get to preach the gospel to your coworkers. I don't get to preach the gospel to your neighbors. I don't get to preach the gospel to some of your circles of friends. For some of you, I don't get to preach the gospel to your adult children. You're the one left to do that. So while it may be easy to connect the dots on how a pastor can preach the gospel, we should also acknowledge that my audience is different than yours and that your audience needs the gospel too. They need to know that an eternal perfect kingdom exists and that Jesus has secured their citizenship in that kingdom. So if that's what we're supposed to do, how do we preach it? Because when we think of preaching the gospel, we often think of using words, of telling people about Jesus, of going out and proclaiming. But I would submit that there's a lot of ways to preach the gospel, to show this truth to people. And I'm going to give you four of them. There's more than four. You could probably sit after the sermon if you're really ambitious. You could think of more than these. And I would also tell you that because I'm going to give you four applications, four ways to preach the gospel, my challenge to you is just to pick one. Pick one that resonates with you. If I say one and it doesn't click with you, then just wait. I'll be to the next one in a few minutes. But pick one that resonates with you, that clicks, and try to preach the gospel to the people around you in that way. But here are four ways this morning that we can preach the gospel and be obedient to that calling like Paul was. The first way is that we can preach the gospel with eternally inspired kindness. Eternally inspired kindness. And I say eternally inspired kindness because it's kindness that we treat people with in light of the fact that the gospel is true. extreme lenses we can see them through. One is to see everyone through the best possible lens to give them the benefit of the doubt. My wife, Jen, does this. She's one of the kindest, gentlest people that I know. She's so nice to everyone, and she sees everyone through this lens of benefit of the doubt. She just thinks the best of every person. Whenever I'm criticizing anybody, she says, that person is just doing blank. That person is just having a hard day. That person is just stressed. That person might be rushing home and cut you off because they have three pregnant wives and they're all about to give birth at the same time. You don't know their reality. You should be nice to them. So she's always finding the benefit of the doubt. I, on the other hand, am on the opposite end of the spectrum with my kindness, and I tend to view people through the spectrum of objects that are in my way to get the things done that I want to get done today, right? And we fall on that spectrum somewhere. But eternally inspired kindness, I don't think sees people through that grid. Eternally inspired kindness sees people through a grid of, that is a person for whom Jesus died. And they might not know that there's an eternal kingdom beyond this world that could fill them with a hope that will not put them to shame. And I need to be kind to them in such a way, I need to treat them in such a way that my actions towards them can push them towards a knowledge of this eternal kingdom. We can absolutely preach the gospel with our kindness to one another. We can preach the gospel with our kindness when there's somebody at work who we know good and well talks about us behind our back. To our face, they're kind, they say nice things, but behind our back, they're saying things about us that are not kind. And we know what they really think of us. And our coworkers know that we know. And we can choose to treat them like they've offended us. We can choose to distance ourselves from them, or we can choose to treat them with eternally inspired kindness. Understanding that not only is this person someone who needs to know that there's an eternal kingdom and Jesus has secured their citizenship in that kingdom, but the people who are watching me now and know that I'm a believer, they need to see that there's something different about my kindness and the way that I treat that person. The neighbor that you have that just loves to sink their teeth into a conversation and overshare and wears everybody out, they're an energy sucker from everyone who's around them. And most of your neighbors just try to spend their time avoiding that person and not getting caught up in that conversation because they have other things to do. Eternally inspired kindness just locks in and lets them share and lets them go and listens and empathizes and lets your neighbors around see that you're treating this person different than anyone else does. And we're doing that because we're offering kindness in light of eternity. I think eternally inspired kindness absolutely preaches the gospel. It shows people that there's no way this person could treat others the way they do unless there's something else going on in their life. And I wanna know what that thing is. How are they possibly so nice? Is that real? That's eternally inspired kindness. Another way we can preach the gospel is through eternally inspired joy. Kyle preached about this last week, this joy in the face of trial and hardship and tragedy. He talked about Paul and Silas being locked in the jail in Philippi and an earthquake coming through and loosening the chains. Everyone is scared. Everyone is terrified. Things are crumbling around them. And Paul and Silas are worshiping God in the midst of this. And because of that contagious, eternally inspired joy, he gets saved and his entire household gets saved. What better time? I loved the sermon last week. I love the point of it. And I thought it was incredibly apropos of the moment. What better time is there to display eternally inspired uncommon joy than 2020? Than a pandemic we're all tired of, than political divisiveness that is wearing us all out, than racial issues that are bubbling up and causing different emotions on totally different ends of the spectrum. What better time is there to display this uncommon, eternally inspired joy, this peace that passes all understanding, acknowledging that there is an eternity on the other side of this, that God is going to fix this one day, what better chance to display that joy than in our current context? When we have eternally inspired joy, we have a joy and a peace and a fulfillment that this world and the circumstances of this world can't touch. And in a year like this, that joy stands out like a city on a hill. And we preach the gospel and point to God with eternally inspired joy. We can preach the gospel with eternally inspired generosity. Not just with our finances, but with our time and our energy and our effort. We can be incredibly generous people. I think increasingly to be a believer is to have this awareness that everything I have is God's and I am to leverage it for the sake of eternity. I'm to use everything I can, every ounce of my resources to push people towards this kingdom that God has created and to make them aware that Jesus has secured their citizenship in that kingdom. And when we think of generosity, often we think of finances, and that's true. We should. That's a wonderful application. I think that Christians should be the most financially generous people on the planet. I think we absolutely should be the most generous people on the planet, but it also means being generous with our time, being generous in the things that we pour ourselves into. I think it means being generous with our forgiveness, offering it when it's not deserved. The older that I get, the more I want generosity to define who I am. And listen, I'm woefully short of that. I'm not sure if anybody listening to this would think to themselves, you know what I think of Nate? I think of generosity. But I know that I want that to be true. To me, a generous spirit in all ways is one of the defining characteristics of someone who knows and loves God and is aware of his kingdom and has this eternal mindset in the way that they handle all the things that were given to them. We can absolutely preach the gospel through eternally inspired generosity. The last way that I would give you this morning is through eternally inspired boldness. It's to actually preach the gospel. It's to use the words and form the sentences and to have the conversation. It's to let it be known. Some of us aren't very public with our faith because we don't want to be offensive. We're afraid that faith will cause a disruption in our friend group, a disruption in our neighborhood, a disruption in our office space. We kind of avoid talking about religion the same way we avoid talking about politics because to bring up politics is to invite strife, it's to invite division, and we feel the same way about our faith. But I would simply say to you that I totally understand this aversion to discomfort. But if we really believe the gospel's true, if we really truly believe that there is an eternal, perfect kingdom that John describes in Revelation. Revelation 21, I talk about this passage a lot. And in this kingdom, there will be no more crying and no more weeping and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And God will be with his people and his people will be with their God. And it will be perfect. If that kingdom really exists, if we truly believe that there is a perfect eternity waiting for us on the other side of death and that Jesus has secured our citizenship in that eternity and all we have to do is believe in what he did on the cross and we will enjoy that eternity forever. If we believe that is true, isn't it worth a little discomfort with our friends and neighbors to get them to go as well? Isn't it worth our boldness? Isn't it worth being a pariah if we can bring a few with us on the way? If the gospel's true, isn't it worthy of our boldness? If this book is true, there's a creator God in heaven who loves us, who loves us so much that he sent his only son to die for us, to cover over our sins so that we might spend eternity experiencing him forever in perfect joy. If that's true, isn't it worth our whole life? Isn't it worth preaching in every way possible? Isn't it worth bringing as many people as we can with us on our way to this perfect kingdom? That's why Paul spent his last years preaching the gospel. And that's why I think for us, as individuals who care about God and who do believe that this is true, we should spend every day of our life preaching the gospel too. I hope that we'll find ways to do that. And I hope that God will use you in incredible ways and you'll get to sit on the front lines of ministry because we have faithfully preached the good news that there is an eternal perfect kingdom and that Jesus has secured our citizenship in that kingdom. Let's pray. Father, you are better to us than we deserve. God, we bring everything that we are and we lay it at your feet. We know that you see both the good parts and the not as good parts. We know that you see the purity of motives that exist in our hearts and we know that you see the messy stuff too. God, for those struggling with faith, build it up, strengthen it. Let us believe that this is true. God, for those who desperately wanna preach the gospel, show us places where we can do that. For those of us like me who struggle with kindness, God, give us eternal eyes. Let us see people as you do. For those of us like me who struggle with generosity, God, let us hold things with an open hand and let that word define us. For those that struggle with boldness, give them courage. For those who struggle to be joyful, help them find reasons to celebrate in the midst of hardship. Father, make us a church who preaches your gospel every day and let people come to know you because of how you use us here. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

All right, good morning everyone. My name is Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace, and I am so thrilled to be able to be preaching this morning to you. Before we get into it, I've got to give you a quick warning. Because of just how excited that I've been for preaching and just excited anticipation, I didn't sleep very much last night. And so I say that to say that this morning I got here and as I was going through my message, making sure everything was good, my voice started kind of cracking a little bit and got a little hoarse. And so feel free to laugh at that if it happens throughout this message. But I also did want to let you know that because of that, you could possibly hear me cough once or twice. And I just wanted you to know that it's only the annoying type of cough, not the dangerous one. But anyways, we're going to be continuing in our study of Acts this morning. We're going to be jumping into Acts 16 and really focusing on the story that starts at verse 25. And so I would love for you guys to grab your Bibles, open them up, and read along with me. Before we jump into actually the verse 25 and beyond, I want to give a little bit of background of what's going on. And so definitely be opening up your Bible as I'm doing that. And so as we start off, we see two men named Paul and Silas. We've talked a lot about Paul and Nate did a whole sermon about Paul's conversion, that the Lord brought Paul out of this place of killing Christians and brought him and said, Paul, you are going to be my tool. You are going to be the person who brings my joy and the joy of myself in Christ to the Gentiles, to all people that are not Jews. And so if you didn't listen to that, go and check it out because I think it was incredible. But here we have Paul doing just that. He's going and he and Silas are bouncing around from place to place, city to city. They're worshiping God. They're finding places to pray and worship. And even more so than that, going and finding places to preach the good news and tell people about who Jesus Christ is and who their God is. And that is absolutely awesome. And so in the middle of chapter 16, we find them coming to a river in Philippi. Now, as they go down, they encounter this group of women, and there goes my mic. Let me just pull that back real quick. They encounter this group of women that they're like, hey, these are people. And so they go up to them and they start preaching to them. They start telling them who God is and, you know, about who Jesus is and what Jesus did for them and that this salvation is offered to them, not just to Jews, all this stuff. And so as they're saying these things, a woman named Lydia is so excited to hear and so excited to learn about God and about Jesus and everything that they're talking about that she actually gets baptized on the spot. Her heart is saved for eternity. And how incredible is that? And then in the next small passage, they encounter another girl. This girl doesn't have a name. She's called a slave girl that they come in contact with. And she was possessed by a demon spirit. Now, this spirit was one that gave her the ability, or the spirit through her was able to be a fortune teller, was able to tell people their fortunes and predict the future. So this obviously made her really valuable to her owners. Her owners had used this ability and used the spirit and this demon that was inside of her to gain just a ton of money. Well, Paul and Silas encounter this girl and as she kind of follows them around, the spirit continues to call out through this girl. And finally, Paul turns around and he basically says, through the power of Jesus Christ, I tell you to leave this girl now. And the spirit immediately exit this girl's body. This girl is set free from the spirit that had taken over her entire life. And so once again, you're like, wow, look at how incredible this is. Look at the amazing things that Paul and Silas are getting to do through the power of God. And it's just awesome. And it's super exciting. But the bad part is that what made this girl valuable was her ability to tell fortunes. And so her owners were furious. And so they go over, they grab Paul and Silas, they forcefully take them to the marketplace and take them to the magistrate and say, these people are just doing all of this stuff, all of this awful stuff. What is it? They say that he, I don't know. It's funny. But they basically lie. They say these people are running amok in the city. The whole city is going nuts and they're freaking out and they're doing all of these things that Roman citizens should never do. These are Jewish people who are doing things that are anti-Roman and they deserve to be punished. And they're in the marketplace. So what happens? People start joining, and people start seeing what's going on, and they begin to get furious as well. And they're all yelling and freaking out about it as well, basically saying, these people deserve to be punished. So the magistrates say, okay, we agree with you. So they said, have these men stripped, have them beaten, and have them thrown into prison. Not only just thrown into a jail cell, but have them bound by the stocks. Have them bound by the stocks in a way that they have to be upright to where they can't even lay down and go to sleep. And this is where I want to pick up and actually just start reading through the scripture as they are beaten and as they're thrown into prison and what happens once they're thrown to them. Suddenly, there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once, all the prison doors flew open and everyone's chains came loose. The jailer woke up, and when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted, don't harm yourself. We are all here. The jailer called for lights, rushed in, and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, Now I want to do some quick living room participation. I know that I can't ask for hands to be raised and I can, you know, call people out that are raising their hands and whatnot. So I'm calling you out to raise your hands if you've heard this story before. All right, take it one step farther. And the reason why I'm really asking is more because who has heard this story a lot? Because I know I have. I know this is the type of story that you grew up and you learned like constantly when you were a child. You know, like when you're able to look at the little cartoon drawings or watch the cartoon about them sitting in the jail, and then you hear how God brought a hurricane that was able to set them free, but they actually stayed and they saved a man's life and his family's life for eternity and all this stuff. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I absolutely love this story, and I love to hear it preached and talked about over and over again. But as I read it this time, there were a couple things that stood out to me. There were a couple things that I thought, that I thought, man, I hear this, I hear these stories preached in a way, in the same way super often. But I think that there's more here. I think that there's some underlying things within this passage that may be even bigger and more important than what we often talk about. The first thing that I think people talk about is, man, look at how great the Lord is. Look at how the Lord has worked through Paul and through Silas to save these two women. One, save them for salvation. The other, to literally get rid of a spirit, to remove a demon, evil spirit out of this woman. And then look at how big and how strong God is that he can bring a hurricane that is so big that it makes a guy say, I want to know who this God is. And let me tell you that all of those things are so right. They're so incredible. They're so accurate. And praise God for how incredible he is. And praise God that he uses his people like Paul and Silas to do his work. That is amazing and that is awesome. But I think sometimes what skipped over as I think a huge factor for why that jailer was interested in being saved is not just the hurricane that he witnessed, but what actually happened and took place in verse 25. So let's return to that. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. Can you imagine what the other prisoners were thinking? Can you imagine what the prison guard was thinking at that time? Like, I'm sure they were super confused. Like, these are two guys that had just come off of getting beaten and thrown into prison. And here they are in the middle of the night, just joyfully singing praises and hymns to their God. I imagine it was shocking for a couple of reasons. The first is because I bet that it wasn't just shocking because there was like noise, right? Like, of course, people probably in jail were like, you would probably hear grumblings or people that were like aching or hurting from being beaten before thrown into prison. Or maybe, you know, probably what's more common is people are yelling at the jailer or heckling the jailer because the jailer had thrown them into prison. You know, probably a few expletives were yelled at this prison guard in his day because they don't want to be in prison. But instead, they get this joyful singing and praising, and it didn't make any sense. I'm sure it was a 180 from what they were used to hearing from two people sitting in a jail cell. And the other reason I think that probably had them wondering and listening and a little bit confused is, why are they praying to their God, and why are they singing hymns that are praising their God and the goodness of their God in the midst of them sitting in a jail cell after being beaten? What do they have to praise God about? Sure, like praise God when you saved Lydia. Praise God when you released a girl of an evil spirit. But while you're sitting in a jail cell after you had been beaten, what are you doing? And I'm sure it just confused them. And I'm sure it, like, I would probably be the same if I didn't understand who God was of just sitting there and being like, I've got to listen to this. I've got to understand what these people are doing. One, because I don't get it and I need to understand. But two, maybe even in a deeper and more spiritual sense, they've got just as much going wrong in their life that I do. How is it that they're able to have peace? And how is it that they are able to have joy in the midst of going through the same thing I'm going through, sitting in a prison after being beaten? I love the way that William Barclay puts it as he talks about Paul's worship. He could sing hymns when he was confined in stocks in the inner prison at midnight. The one thing you can never take away from a Christian is God in the presence of Christ. When God, with God there, is freedom even in a prison, and even at midnight, there is light. And bouncing off of that, the other thing that you hear when you hear this passage taught and when you hear this passage preached is how incredible it is that the Lord is always there, is always with you, is always providing this joy and this peace in your heart if you will just turn to him. That if you can learn to worship and to love God, not simply because of the blessings that he's bestowed upon you or not simply because of all the great things that are a part of your life, but because of how good he is and because he has gifted you with this eternal salvation, guess what? The joy of how great God is and the joy of an eternal salvation is never soured. It never goes away. It's never changing. And guess what? Once again, what a beautiful, incredible message that is, that we are able to experience that peace and that joy, and our hearts can forever be impacted by that love of God, not simply when things are going well, but when things aren't. But oftentimes people stop there, but I think that there is one more thing going on underneath all of this that isn't quite as talked about, but I think may be an even more valuable component of worshiping through hardship. And that is that it not only impacts your hearts, their worship didn't only bless the hearts of Paul and Silas, it didn't, the presence of God wasn't simply within their hearts, but because of their worship, because of the joy that they exuded and the peace that they exuded, it impacted the people that were around them. When we are able to worship in the midst of tragedy and hurt and anger and frustration, anybody who's around you that's able to experience it is going to be impacted. Especially, especially, especially non-believers. Alistair Begg is a pastor and he puts it this way. He says, While I think he is in general saying this, I would rephrase it to even go further. And I would say not only is praise possible when the circumstances seem to dictate otherwise, but worshiping in the midst of those circumstances can be used to evangelize in a uniquely special way. There's something uniquely special about not simply worshiping when everything is great, but worshiping when nothing is. It's special for you, but it is impactful to people who don't understand. Think again about how the jailer and how the prisoners thought. Like what must have they been thinking? All it says is they sat and they listened. I'm sure they were curious. I'm sure they wanted answers. I'm sure they wanted to understand like what is this? Why is this happening? I need more facts. I need more information, just like the curiosity within them. But underlying that curiosity, I bet it's more of a hope because though they didn't know God, they knew the exact suffering that Paul and Silas were going through. And I bet that the thought of being able to experience joy and peace like they had been exuding is something that they surely could get on board with. This reminds me so much of a story of my best friend Brandon from senior year. Brandon, super electrifying personality, just fun, energetic, funny, hilarious. Like people, like when he's in a room, people gravitate towards him. He's hilarious. He's funny. He's goofy. Just all of the above. He just has this type of energy that it's just like, I got to be around this guy because he is just great to be around. And I say all of that, but I think probably the main reason why people love to be around him and love even more than that to befriend him is because he just loves people well. He just loves people in general. He just loves people so much. And while I think that's definitely just a character trait and a characteristic of him, I think that that has been sown so deeply into him because, man, there are not many people who I know that love the Lord more than Brandon. And because he loves the Lord so much and because he also loves people so much, he wants everyone to be able to know and love the Lord the way he does. He wants people to experience the love he's received from the Lord. And so he does everything he can to be that love to everybody that he comes in contact with. Not just his family, not just his youth group, not just his close friends like me and our group of friends in high school, but every classmate, every teammate, all of these people, whether they know who God is, whether they're completely anti-God, he wants them to know how much God loves them, not simply through his words, but by his actions. That's the type of dude Brandon is. Brandon, he's got the heart of like, we used to do this thing called prayer chapel where Brandon has, he's an incredible worship leader. So he was normally the one, we would go to this small chapel just at a local church and we would just take some time where normally it'd be Brandon. He would just sing and lead worship and we would sing and worship with him or we would pray silently or pray for people, read scripture. It's basically just a time to come and to celebrate and worship God. And we all loved it. It was just kind of our group of friends that went and did it. But man, every single week, Brandon would go all through classes and invite everybody to come and do it with us. Or he would throw it on Facebook or he'd send texts to all of these people. And not just like believers, like people who weren't believers, people who he just like was friends with in class. And he just wanted everyone to come and do it. And people didn't really come, you know, like it wasn't a thing people did, like, you know, which kind of makes sense. Like going to something called prayer chapel, that's just kind of this intensive type worship type thing is probably not the most like exciting thing for someone who doesn't, you know, believe in God or is not a Christian. And so, you know, but it's just kind of the guy that Brandon was. He wanted anyone who, he wanted everyone to know they were welcome. And more than that, he wanted everyone to just have some opportunity to get to know who God was. So fast forward to the end of senior year. Only a few weeks left in the school year. And Brandon feels a lump on his lymph node. And so he goes to the doctor and obviously he gets it tested. And so you have the kind of limbo, the amount of time that you kind of sit and you wait before you get any results. During that time, Brandon had really devoted himself to just praying, devoted himself to really like going to the Lord and saying, you know, like, God prepare me for this. And as he did so, two things he said were just very clear and very evident to him. The first is that God had him. He said more than ever before, he felt the presence of God and he felt, he heard God's voice in a sense and just felt God saying, Brandon, you are in my hands forever and always. I love you. I've got you. We're going to get through this together. And so because of that, he was able to experience the same type of peace and the same type of joy that Paul and Silas had even when they had been beaten and thrown into prison. The second thing, and I think probably because of his experience and how vastly he was able to experience God and God's protection over him, is he knew for sure he had cancer. He didn't need to hear the results. He didn't need to get them back. He knew. And so that whole time while people are sitting and praying and waiting in fear, Brandon was pretty certain of what was to come. He was pretty certain of the result. And the Lord had prepared his heart in a way that he was completely at peace about it. So the day comes that he gets the results and it hit us pretty hard. And by us, I mean me, his close friends, I mean his family, my family, a lot of grief, a lot of hurt. But I also extend that to say kind of the school. It kind of just hit the school really hard, all grades, but especially seniors and the people that were in his classes, because this is the same Brandon I was just talking about that is just so loves people so well and so therefore is loved by so many people. And so when this happened and when people heard this, there was just utter grief and hurt and like this sense of just like sadness and melancholy and depression within the student body. People were mourning because guess what? At the time, not many of us even understood cancer in general anyways. We didn't know what it meant. And so we were like, we've heard of what cancer does to people. And so everyone's just kind of terrified and freaking out. Well, guess what? In the midst of that, in the midst of people reacting in that way and reacting out of fear and sadness and just overwhelming sense of just like, what is going on? Guess who's not responding that way? Brandon. Why? Because Brandon had trusted in God and Brandon had the heart to go to God in worship and in prayer, knowing that this is the same God it had always been. And the same Jesus had died for him now, just like he had before Brandon had cancer. And within that, Brandon said, you know what we need to do? We need to have a prayer chapel night. I want to do prayer chapel tonight. Why? Because I want to worship my God. I want to lead a time of worship and I want to lead a time of just getting to pray to God and praise God with the people that I love. So I wish I could say I had the same type of faith, but obviously I was going to be there for him for that. But I was not excited about that. I was pretty frustrated with God at the time. But anyways, we do that. You know, he does all the same stuff. And you know, hey, we're doing prayer chapel tonight, whatever, on Facebook, text, all that stuff. And we show up to about 90 to 100 people in this small little chapel. Not just family, not just close friends, not just people in the youth group, people in the church. I would say the vast majority of these people are these classmates and these teammates and these people who Brandon had spent his life loving, that though they had been turned off or though they had been closed off to Brandon's faith and to Brandon talking about God and all of those things, they still loved Brandon so much because he just loved them so well. And so at this moment, I think they thought two things. One, I think they thought, man, I want to be there for Brandon. Brandon has loved me so well, and he's been there for me for anything that I needed. I want to do the same for him. But you know what I also think? What I also think is these people for the first time were asking the question of, what? Are you kidding me? Are you serious? Why in the world would you want to put together a night of worship where you stand up in front of everyone, the person who just got the news that he has lymphoma, you stand up in front of everyone playing piano and singing praises to God. Why in the world would you want to do that? And I think they needed to find out. Because it made sense to them before. While they didn't believe in God, they fully understood that somebody who did believe in God would just absolutely radiate joy and absolutely praise God just with all of his might. While he's got just all of great friends and great family. And he's an excellent tennis player who's going next year to play tennis in college on a scholarship. He's got his health. He's got all of these incredible things. And guess what? It makes a lot of sense to worship God when all of those things in your life are going well and going right. But when Brandon wanted to worship, when Brandon wanted to praise his God for how good his God was when his whole life had just fallen apart. When he went from going next year to play college tennis to now not in a month, his whole body is going to just break down because of chemotherapy and he's clearly not going to be able to do that anymore. Fear of losing his life, fear of what's to come, fear of next steps, all of these things. Now this doesn't make sense. Brandon, how are you still worshiping this God for being good? I don't get it. I've got to come and I've got to figure it out. And so they came. They showed up. And boy, did they witness the presence of God. I talked to Brandon a couple weeks ago on the phone as we were kind of reliving that night and as I was talking to him about the sermon and stuff. And we just both agreed that there was maybe never a time before or since then that the presence of God was so prevalent and so present in a room. Filled with people who didn't know the Lord, filled with people who didn't know about Jesus and about Jesus's sacrifice. And there they are sitting in this room, listening and witnessing people worship and people give their lives in worship to God, talking about and just praising how good he is and experiencing for the first time how incredible, how amazing, and how immaculate the presence of God is. Nothing changed. Nothing about Brandon changed. Nothing was different about him. He loved God the same way. He treated all of those people the same way, And he worshiped the exact same way. He didn't make the night anything special. He simply just wanted to have another prayer night. He just simply wanted to have another night to do prayer chapel. The only difference was his circumstance. And that circumstance led to such a large, more vast audience and in such a larger space for God to impact people's hearts and to impact people's lives. There's simply an aspect of worshiping in the midst of tragedy that captures the attention of non-believers who otherwise might just be completely indifferent. I can't stand in front of you and say that there were tons of people who gave their lives over to the Lord. I can't tell you that all those people became Christians. Unfortunately, I would say a lot of them didn't. But for the first time, they were willing to be open to hearing it because they saw something that didn't make sense and they had to figure out what it was. And that was somebody who had just received the worst news in their entire life saying, I want to praise God for how great he is and I want to show my love for him. And it was the same with Paul and Silas. Paul and Silas had experienced the goodness of God. They've experienced God doing great, incredible, powerful things. seen, as soon as the jailer found out that Paul and Silas were still there, he sprinted to them. He fell at their feet and he said, how can I be saved? Was that because he witnessed the amazing size and power of God who had just brought a hurricane? Yes. But I think it was also because prior to that, he had found and he had been able to hear that this is clearly a God that loves his people so well that even in the midst of brokenness, even in the midst of bruises, even in the midst of prison, they would still praise his name. That power mixed with that love is something he needed to know and needed to be a part of. And because of that, he and his entire family heard the gospel that night and were saved. Not only is praise possible when circumstances seem to dictate otherwise, but worshiping in the midst of those circumstances can be used to evangelize in a uniquely special way. Worshiping amidst tragedy, amidst heartache, failure, isolation, struggle, not only impacts your heart, not only does it provide joy to you and peace to you in a time where there might not be either on earth, but it impacts the hearts of the people around you. It impacts the hearts of people who don't understand and want to. It piques the interest of people who cannot understand why you would be praising God for his goodness when everything is so bad. And it impacts them because while not everyone knows they need Jesus, that they need a Savior, pain, struggling, hurting is universal. And intrinsic to that pain is the longing for peace and the longing for joy that seems absent within it. Everybody who hurts wants to feel peace. Everybody who's feeling pain wants to feel joy in the midst of that peace or in the midst of that hurting and in the midst of that pain. Intrinsic to that pain is the longing for peace and the longing for joy that seems absent within it. And so when non-believers catch a glimpse of someone whose faith leads them to joyful worship in the midst of pain and in the midst of suffering, they want to know more about what it takes to experience the same, to see that joy, to feel that peace, to know those in the midst of anything that life throws at them. And what a beautiful way to share with someone the goodness of God. Let's pray. God, thank you. Thank you, God, that you are the same today, tomorrow, forever. God, thank you that your blessings, that though they come at times and at other times we maybe feel like there aren't so many around, that the blessing of you and that you have saved us forever is the only one we need and therefore the only one that should provide us with the joy and peace we need to roll through this life. God, I pray that you give us the faith to be able to praise you in the midst of anything going on. Give us that joy and give us that peace in our hearts, God. Even more than that, God, allow us to share that with people around. Allow us to never miss an opportunity to praise you, not simply when things are going well, but when things are going poorly. Because it's noticed. Because you can't fake praise and you can't fake all glory to God when not everything is going well. Allow us to be your vessels in this way, God. Allow us to show people what your joy looks like regardless of circumstance. We love you so much. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to share in another morning with you like this. Before I dive into the sermon, I just wanted to clarify something. This week I saw someone from Grace in person that I haven't seen in a long time. I happened to be wearing a suit. And as they got out of their car, the first thing they said to me is like, oh, you look slimmer. And I said, slimmer than what? And they said, well, you know, the camera, you know, it adds like 15 pounds. And so you just, I've only seen you on camera. And so seeing you in person, it's just a little different. I was kind of taken aback by that comment and just wanted to assure those of you who have been following along during COVID that if you think that makes looking a little chubby, that's the camera. I am the picture of health. If you could see me in person, you would note that I am both slim and trim and fit. So I'm just throwing that out there for the record. Now, as we jump into the sermon, we're in the middle of this series called We Are the church in the first century ought to still guide the church in the 21st century because we are still the church. This week we arrive at a passage that I think is really crucial to the story of the church and the story of Acts and impacts you in profound ways that you're probably unaware of. I've never heard a sermon on this passage before. We're going to be in Acts chapter 15. If you have a Bible, I hope that you'll turn there. I've never heard a sermon on this before. I've never heard it taught before. But as I go through Acts for myself, I see chapter 15 as this crucial turning point moment that has an incredible impact on the rest of Acts, but also the rest of the New Testament. It has an incredible impact on you and I think is super important in the narrative of the book of Acts. So I'm hoping that this morning, the sermon may be informative. It might be educational. This might be a place that we haven't stopped and camped out in before and sought to understand. And then hopefully it can also be inspirational in that it will encourage in us some behaviors and thought processes that we see come out of the story, and we can apply those to our own life. So in Acts chapter 15, the council, the leadership of the early church is getting together. By this time in the story, it's Peter and James and John and the disciples, but it's also a group of Pharisees and some other people who have now been grafted into the leaders of the church. Some other converts with leadership potential are now in this leadership council and they're faced with this question. This is a crucial question. And the tension that we see underlying this 15th chapter of Acts is a tension that we see massaged out in the book of Galatians. It's a tension that we see that exists throughout the book of Romans and in the book of Hebrews and a lot of other Pauline epistles, a lot of other of Paul's letters. This is a tension that runs throughout the New Testament, which is how is this new church going to handle the integration of the law and which portions of the law should we integrate? Here's what's happening. The church sprung up out of a Jewish culture and a Jewish faith. God chose the Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, to be his people. And he gave them laws through Moses that we're going to talk about in a minute. And then through those people, God brought the Messiah, Jesus, who died for the whole world. And now Gentiles, non-Jews, are being grafted into this faith. Paul and Barnabas are going out and they're reaching people throughout the region. They're planting churches in Asia Minor. And all of these Gentiles are coming to faith. And the Jews have only ever understood faith through the lens of the law. So they're faced with this question, how do we integrate the Gentiles who don't know our culture and our laws into our faith with our culture and laws? And this is a hugely important question. To understand and appreciate the importance of the question, we have to appreciate the law. The law was given to the Hebrew people by God through Moses. Moses comes down Mount Sinai. He's holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments. That's in the book of Exodus. And then in the book of Leviticus, God adds more laws to their laws until they have about 630 total laws. Over 270 thou shalts and over 330 thou shalt nots. And so when you start to look at all of that, that is the complexity of the Jewish faith and the Jewish law. And for centuries, they had adhered to that law. The law that they received dictated to them their rhythms of life, the ebbs and the flows of life. It dictated to them their days, the rhythm of their days and their weeks and their months and their calendars and their celebrations and even their decades. Even every 50 years there was a certain thing that they had to do according to the law, the year of Jubilee. It dictated to them their social structure. It dictated to them how they interacted. It dictated to them principles about marriage and about faith and about what they needed to do and what they shouldn't do. It was inculcated into them from a very young age. Not only did the law dictate to them the machinations of their society, but it was also the ruler by which your spirituality was measured. The better you were at following the law, the better you were at being what we would think of as a Christian. The better you were at being a believer, the more faithful you were. The sign that you were in, that you were a participant in the law, that you were a claimant of the promises made to the forefather Abraham was circumcision in the males. And so part of the law was to be circumcised and then everything flowed out of that. So to be a Jewish person was to know the law inside and out. It was to be raised to follow it well. It was to measure your spirituality by the law, and it was even to believe that your path to reconciliation with God, if you were to ask them, how can you be saved? What do you have to do? They would say, obey the law, follow the law well. And so Peter and the council are faced with this really difficult question. All of these Gentile people who have no knowledge of the law are coming to faith and want to be a part of the church. And we want them to be a part of the church as our new brothers and sisters, but how much of the law should we ask them to adhere to? What of these rules and standards and practices that we've been following should we now apply to them? This is an incredibly important question because whatever they answer in Acts chapter 15, whatever they say are laws that still apply to you and I. Whatever they say here applies to Gentile, non-Jewish people applies to us in our faith. And that's the question facing them. How much of the law do the new believers who aren't Jewish have to follow? And so they get together in their council and they begin to discuss this. And there's a group of more conservative, they used to be Pharisees and now they're integrated into this new church, and they think that they should at the very least be circumcised. We should apply that part of the law to them. And what's helpful to understand is we know, hindsight is 20-20, we know now in light of history that the whole purpose of the law was to hold up a mirror in front of you and show you your need for a Savior. Because the law kind of comes out of this question of, God, what do we have to do to be right with you? How can I live to satisfy you? What can I do to reconcile myself to you and earn my way into heaven? And God says, okay, if that's what you want to do, here's the law. Here's all the rules. Follow these perfectly and you can earn your way into heaven. And so generation after generation of Jewish person did their best to follow these rules, fell short, and now we realize that the whole reason for the law in the first place was to hold a mirror up in front of you so that you would see your need for Jesus. This is why Jesus says, I did not come to abolish the law, I came to fulfill it. Romans 8 tells us that Jesus fulfills the law on our behalf because we are unable to. He came, he fulfilled the law perfectly, he died a perfect death for us, and now we live in an era of grace and faith rather than obedience to the law, and that's what reconciles us to God. The disciples are still working this out. They're still understanding how this new era of grace and faith integrates with this old era of the law. That's what makes this such a crucial moment in the history of the church. So there are some that are saying that the new Gentiles should at least be circumcised. There's other laws that they should follow. Which ones do we think are the most important? Which ones do we want to keep in this new church? And Peter has this remarkable moment of compassion in the midst of this discussion. I want you to hear what Peter says in Acts chapter 15. I'm going to pick it up in the middle of verse 7. This is how Peter addresses the leadership. He says, Now here's what he's saying. He's saying the early days. He's referring back to Pentecost, which we discussed in God has intended this whole time for Gentiles to be a part of this family of faith. He's made them His children too. He makes no distinction. He looks at the heart. In light of that, He says this in verse 10. I love this. Now therefore, why let's just stop for a second. As we stop and think which parts of the law should we apply to these new believers, which parts of the law should they have to follow, what parts should they have to obey, let's just stop and be realistic about something. We're not good at this. Neither us nor our fathers successfully followed the law. We've never been good at this. And you can read into that that there is no generation of people in the history of histories who should be better at following the law than Peter's generation. Peter's generation has centuries of family history poured into understanding this law, into following it well. They followed parts of the law instinctually by this point. It was ingrained into them. They had millennia of the law preceding them. They had teachings. They had methods of imparting it on children. They had known it their whole life. There's no generation that has ever lived that should better follow the law than Peter's generation, yet he looks around at the room and he says, guys, we stink at this. None of us follow the law well. He calls it a yoke or a burden, meaning he's acknowledging that everybody in that room had felt the disappointment of trying to follow the law perfectly only to fail and have to get up and dust yourself back off and double down on your efforts at discipline this time. Everybody in that room had experienced the disappointment and the sense of failure that comes when you can't successfully follow the law. Everyone in that room knew what it was in their heart of hearts to be woefully short of the standard of God, yet project this public image like they were exactly what God was looking for. He knew the hypocrisy in that room and the struggle in that place. And praise God for leadership like Peter's when he knows that so well and so intimately that he identifies it as a burden in his own life. And he says, with all compassion, why would we place that on our new brothers and sisters? Why would we ask them to do that when we can't even do it? They're Gentiles. They have every disadvantage in the world. They have no idea of all the laws. The learning curve on that would be so steep. It would be so discouraging to them and their faith. We have no learning curve, and yet we still stink at it. Why would we place that on them? It's incredibly compassionate. It's this woke moment of Peter to just be honest and authentic and admit where they all fall short. And he calls out the room. And they all agree with him. They all in their own way say, yeah, that's a good point. Let's not burden them with that. So then they begin the process of distilling down all of the 630 laws to the bare essentials. As we look at all of these laws, what are the ones that we think are so important that they still need to be acknowledged? And we've done stuff like this before. We've had done this exercise. This is how we plan series at church a lot of times. The last time we did this, where we whittled things down to some bare essentials, was when we as a staff planned the parables series. And what we do when we plan a series is we put everything up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables, and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40-something parables, and they're all up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40 something parables and they're all up on the whiteboard. And then I kind of look through them and I go, these are non-negotiables. These are ones that I love. I have to preach about it or it's going to just burn a hole in my chest. We've got to be able to do this. And then we look at some other ones and we go, what are the commonalities? What are the points of the parables? And we kind of look at ones that make similar points and then we pick the one that we feel like might be most impactful. And then from that group, we kind of say, all right, which ones are right for grace in this season and in this moment? Which ones do we need to hear and learn and be encouraged by the most? And so we whittle it down to the six or the eight, like bare essentials. These are the parables that we want to cover now. And you've done an exercise like that in your workplace and in your life too, and that's what the disciples are doing here. Of all the laws, which ones do we follow? Which ones do we tell the Gentiles, hey, these have been taken care of, but these are the ones that we think you should be mindful of? We get that answer later in the chapter, beginning in verse 28. This is the distillation of all the laws. I have in my Bible a note that you can't see, but it just says, that's it, in all capital letters with some exclamation marks and question marks, because this is what they've distilled it down to. They write a letter to the churches declaring their decision. And the letter says this in verse 28, That's it. That's it. 630 laws distilled down to those four things, and the first three are essentially the same thing. The first three is don't eat food that's been sacrificed to idols, which was a pagan practice. These churches existed in pagan cultures, and so there's a lot of things happening in their culture that didn't sync up with Scripture and the heart of God. And one of those things was don't eat of that meat. That's a pagan practice. Don't associate yourself with those people. That's highly offensive to Jews. Please don't do that. Then it says, This comes from Leviticus chapter 17. If you have notes there, make a note or make a note in your Bible. I have one in my Bible and just write Leviticus chapter 17. And in your free time, you can go back and read. But there's this whole explanation from God of why you don't eat the blood of an animal. And God explains that the very life essence of a creature is in its blood and that it's not ours to eat. That is sacred to God. So he tells us not to do that. That's near and dear to God. And to eat blood or to eat things that are strangled, to kill an animal by strangulation was a way to maintain the blood in the animal so that you could eat it later, which sounds repulsive to us, but that was a practice then. And all of those practices, eating food that was sacrificed to idols, eating food with blood or food that was strangled, were things that were deeply offensive to Jewish people. And so those three things can really be summed up in this idea of just don't do things that are, like, please just don't do things that are super offensive to Jewish people. There's going to be Jewish people in your midst. That's incredibly difficult for them to get over. Please don't offend them in that way. And please don't portray that image in society that you participate in those things. That's not what's best for those around you. And then there's a provision in there to avoid sexual immorality, which is probably just a good provision to put any time we're advising Christians or a group of people on anything throughout all of history. It's probably a good addendum to just say, hey, be careful with this. But it's particularly relevant in this culture because in those pagan cultures, they had far different rules and standards about sexual morality than Scripture does. In one of the cities, in Ephesus, there's a temple of Diana, and there was temple prostitutes that were priestesses that you could go and partake in any time you felt the need to. I read that in some of these cultures, intermarrying and family and cousins was a regular practice. And actually, if you go back to Leviticus 17 and then 18 following that same passage, it talks about that practice and advises and clearly gives laws against it. So in some ways, this is just a distillation of just those two chapters of the book of Leviticus. But what's going on in these pagan cities is that the north star of sexual morality was their culture. And Paul is saying shift that north star of sexual morality to Scripture, which just as an aside is still good advice for us today. It's very easy to shift our north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral, and it is our job to constantly maintain the north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral. And it is our job to constantly maintain the North Star of sexual morality as dictated to us by Scripture, by God's Word. But to me, there's a common theme in these provisions. As we ask the question, why these four things? Why is that what they landed on? I think that there's a common theme and a common concern in these that tells us the type of faith that we're supposed to have. As I read this and I see these provisions and this direction to the new church, what I hear coming from Peter and the council is this simple admonition to have a faith that considers others. What kind of rules and things should we follow? What should we concern ourselves with? We should concern ourselves with things that impact others. We should have a faith that considers others. And this, to me, makes a ton of sense. Those rules about what to eat, That's all about how it looks to other people. How does it look to the Jewish people? How does it look to the pagan people? Have a faith that considers them and not wanting to give the wrong impression or not wanting to give offense. Just be unselfish in that way. Be selfless in that way. And don't let yourself eat or partake in those things because of how it might be perceived. Have a faith that considers others over yourself. And isn't that the root of sexual sin? Isn't all sexual immorality fundamentally selfish? Isn't all sexual activity outside the bonds of a loving marriage fundamentally selfish? Because we take things from that person that aren't ours, and we give things to that person that aren't ours to give because they belong to our spouse. And in the end, sexual sin is a fundamentally selfish and self-seeking sin. And when we avoid that sin, we consider others. And so I hear Peter saying here, have a faith that considers others, that is others focused. And as I think about practically how to do that out of this story, out of this instance occurrence in the book of Acts, what are the things that we can pull out of this that we can apply to our faith today so that we can live out a faith that considers others? I think the first thing that we can do is that we can consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. We consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. I love the example of Peter in this passage where he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait. This part of our faith isn't working for us. Why would we pass that on to the next generation of believers? Guys, we're not good at this. This is a burden. This element of our faith discourages us and actually causes distance from God, not a clinging to God. So why would we perpetuate that in the next generation of believers? And as I think about my own life and the faith that I've inherited, I can see both sides of that happening in my life. I was led spiritually by people who grew up largely in the Southern Baptist Church in the 60s and the 70s. And when I say I was led by people, I mean my parents, I mean my pastor, I mean those that poured into me as I grew up. And in the 60s and 70s, the Southern Baptist Church was incredibly legalistic. Incredibly legalistic. You couldn't dance ever. You couldn't have dancing at your wedding. There's no talk of alcohol ever. Everyone's a teetotaler. If you did that, you're definitely a sinner and not a Christian. You could not go to the movie theaters. You could not play cards. Skirts had to be certain lengths. There was all these provisions and rules around the faith. And my spiritual leaders and my parents and their goodness and then their compassion looked at those elements of their faith and they said, these don't work for us. These aren't a true reflection of the heart of God. These discourage us and pull us away from God rather than encourage us to cling to him. So we're not going to pass on that legalism to the next generation. I grew up with a generation of leaders who passed on a compassionate faith and said, this part didn't work for us. This isn't from the heart of God, so we're not going to saddle you and burden you with that. But in the same way, as I think about what was passed on to me that I don't want to pass on to Lily and to those that I pass my faith on to, I think about how certain that generation was. I think about the certainty that people around me grew up with. My pastor was so certain about some things. People who poured into me were so certain about some things. They had very strong opinions about exactly when Jesus was going to return in the tribulation. I grew up with people who were so certain that Calvinism was right, that God chooses who he's going to save, and that we don't choose God. And I grew up around some people who said, no, you choose if you're going to choose God. He doesn't choose you. I grew up around some people who were certain that you couldn't lose your salvation and some people who were certain that you could. When I was growing up, it was so black and white. There was no gray. And as I've grown up in faith and become an adult leading my own family and now leading a church, and the rubber of theology meets the practical road of life. I've become far less certain about things. And I don't understand how things could be so black and white in a world that has so much gray, and scriptures that have so much nuance, and scriptures that lay things down next to each other like predestination and like self-determinism and go, yeah, both are true. And don't seem to want to resolve that for us. And so for me, I want to pass on compassionately the gift of uncertainty. I want the people that I lead, I want Lily to know, I want my church to know that it's okay not to be sure. Everything doesn't have to be black and white for us all the time. It's okay to wonder at God and not fully understand him. It's okay to not have all the answers. It's okay to go, is it possible that God chooses me to be saved? Yeah. Is it possible that I choose him? Yeah. Are both true? Yeah. It's okay to say, where does the intersection of my effort and then my prayer and asking God for his effort, where does that meet? What's the exact right amount of things to pray about and how long to pray for? And when do I just sit back and wait and ask God to come in and when do I meet him with my effort? I don't know. And that's all right. It's okay to not be certain about things as long as that uncertainty drives us into a deeper faith in God and his work through Jesus. So we ought to pass on a compassionate faith that's aware of the burdensome things that we might have added onto our faith We should maintain a simple faith. Jesus is constantly trying to get us to do this. This is what the disciples do. They distill all those 630 laws down to these four simple things that can be summed up and consider others. And Jesus is doing this too. Jesus says that the whole law and the prophets, all of those laws can be summed up in these two things. Love God with all your heart and your soul and your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And then later he says, this new commandment I give you, love others as I have loved you. Jesus is constantly simplifying a faith. And we generationally are constantly complicating it. Adding all of these rules and regulations and standards by which we judge ourselves and others that Jesus didn't ask us to adopt. I think we're constantly complicating our faith. And if we want to have a faith like Peter did, like the early church did, then one of the things that we need to do is be constantly simplifying our faith. And judging our standards by, is this loving of God? Is this appreciative of Jesus, and is this loving for others? Am I living out a simple faith that considers others? So I hope that that's what we'll do. I hope that we'll take this lesson from the early church, that each of us will have a faith that considers others more important than ourselves and that we'll consider others in our faith by passing on to our children and to those around us a compassionate faith and that we personally will maintain a simple, pure faith that prizes Christ and a love for him above all else and lets everything else flow out of that. And in doing that, I think we can capture the essence of the direction that was given to the church in Acts chapter 15. Let's pray. Father, we sometimes make being a Christian so complicated. We ask questions like, is it a sin to do this? Is it wrong to do this? Is this something that God wants me to do? God, I pray that you would help us clarify and simplify those things. I pray that we would be men and women who are after your heart, who cling to you, who strip away the things from our religion that only serve to discourage us and pull us away from you, that we would lean into you more, that we would know your son well. Father, give us a compassionate, self-aware faith that we can pass on to others. Give us a simple faith that is unencumbered of any expectations that you didn't place on us yourself. Father, I pray that you would bless us in this difficult time. I pray that you would bind grace together in the midst of COVID and not being able to see one another. I just pray and ask that you would continue to keep your hand on this place. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.