Sermons tagged with Acts

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.

Well, good morning, Grace, and happy Father's Day to all the dads. This is a special day for those of us that have great dads to get to honor them, so I hope that you're able to do that today. And dads, I hope that you get to spend the day however it is that you want to spend it. This Sunday, we are in our series called Still the Church, where we're looking at the book of Acts, the story of the fledgling church and how it started and all the things that went into the beginning of this institution getting off the ground. It's the institution that 2,000 years later on another continent we participate in. It's the institution, the thing that is the bride of Christ that Jesus died for, that he came to start, that he left the disciples in charge of. And so we've been moving through the story, unveiling and uncovering the practices and the principles and the philosophies of the early church that we can still apply to our church 2,000 years later here in Raleigh, North Carolina. Today we arrive at the conversion of easily the most influential follower of Christ who's ever lived. A man who grew up by the name of Saul of Tarsus, and God changed his name to Paul. Paul wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. He did a lion's share of the missionary work immediately following the birth of the church. It's Paul that we look to who's responsible for spreading the gospel all over Asia Minor, who gives us a lot of our theology and the things that we understand about Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit and how they relate and how salvation works and what exactly it is we're all doing here. He's a hugely influential figure in the church. I would argue one of the most influential figures in history. And so today we arrive at his conversion. It's an important point in the book of Acts. It's an important story in the book of Acts. After his conversion, the rest of the book really mostly just details his ministry. That's how important and influential he was. So it's right and good that we stop and we go, what was it that converted him? And I think that there's a special insight that we can get in the events of his conversion, in the events of his conversion, that can apply to us right now. I believe that we're invited into the same thing that Paul was invited into, and I want us to see what that is this morning. So as we approach the story, you can find it in the book of Acts chapter 9. I hope you have your Bible with you there at home. I hope you guys are in the habit of watching these sermons with your Bibles open, of interacting with the text. There's nothing that can replace opening up God's Word and interacting with the text on your own, particularly if you have family and children around to go through it with them, because I want you to go through and pull out your own nuances and your own details from the story. More importantly, I never want you to accept what I say about the Bible at face value. I want you to do your own work and do your own thought and read it for yourself and make sure that what I'm saying is true to what God is communicating in here because I'm trying my best to communicate to you clearly what Scripture says, but I'm also human and I'm going to mess up. And I'd love a church full of people who are going to catch me when I do that because we're all reading our Bibles too. I would also love a church full of people who are gracious when they send me the email about catching me. But I hope you're following along in Scripture. In Acts chapter 9, we see Saul of Tarsus, who's a young and upcoming Pharisee, who's been given permission, special instructions from the high priest in Jerusalem to go to Damascus. The church was blowing up in Damascus and it was starting to cause a ruckus. And so Saul gets commissioned by the high priest to go to Damascus and snuff out Christianity. And we'll see later, we're going to look back at a verse in chapter 8, that Paul was ravaging the church. He was arresting people. He was putting people to death. He was pulling them out of their homes and throwing them in prison. He was doing everything he could, Saul was, to stamp out the church. And so he's on his way to Damascus to stamp out the new movement there. And Jesus appears to him in the clouds, knocks him to the ground. And he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And Saul says, who are you? He says, I'm Jesus. I'm the one that you are persecuting. And after seeing Jesus, Saul converts. He believes. He realizes that he's been spending his life trying to stamp out this movement that God himself appeared to him and said, hey, stop doing that. I want to use you to grow the movement that you're trying to stop. And it must have been an incredible scene because he had an entourage with him. And it says that they could hear the voice, but they couldn't see what Saul could see because he could see Jesus. And as a result of that, something like scales went over his eyes. And the text tells us that though his eyes were open, he could no longer see. And he went and rested in a place in Damascus for three days. And scripture tells us that it was three days without eating or drinking. So he is weak, he is feeble, he is blind, he is scared, but he's converted. And after this conversion, we see in Acts chapter 9 that the Lord appears to a man named Ananias. Now, Ananias was a righteous man who lived in Damascus. He was a devout follower of God. And the conversation that they have is incredibly interesting to me. I want you to look at it with me if you have your Bible. I'm going to pick up the story in Acts chapter 9, verse 11. In verse 11, the Son, or the Holy Spirit that appears to him. Scholars are unclear. But the words in my Bible are red, which indicates that at least the editors of the ESV think that it's Jesus who's speaking to Ananias. We hold that loosely, but that's probably a pretty good guess. So Jesus is talking to Ananias. And I just want you to pick up on this. This is one of those details that we're likely to just breeze right by. Ananias is just chilling out, and the Lord appears to him in a vision. And Ananias is apparently so used to discoursing with the Lord face-to-face in a vision like this that he just responds to him. He just talks right back to him. God says, hey, Ananias, there's a guy named Saul of Tarsus. He's in Damascus. I've blinded him. He's expecting you. I want you to go heal him. And Ananias responds. Ananias says, hey, listen, what he said is a very nice way of saying, I know who that is, and I don't want anything to do with him. You can find some other sucker. I don't think so, God. So let's just get together on this. Ananias is so righteous and so devout and so faithful that when the Lord appears to him in a vision, he just responds right back to him as if it's casual conversation. I don't know about you, but if the Lord appeared to me in a vision, I would spend the next 12 to 24 months trying to figure out if I really saw the Lord in a vision and what to make of it and what it meant and if I could trust it, and then I would write a book about it and start a ministry. If the Lord appeared to me in a vision, I would be terrified. And Ananias just talks right back to him. He says, yeah, I don't think so, God. I can't do that. Are you kidding me? I know who that is. He's going to kill me if I go. And God's response is profound. To me, this statement is so packed with truth that it's one of the most profound statements in the whole Bible. Look at what God says to Ananias. When Ananias hesitates and says, I don't think so. I know who that is. He's going to kill me. This is how God responds to him. Verse 15. Whoa. Ananias says, no, I don't think so, God. I don't want to do that. That's dangerous. I know who that is. And God says to pause. I want to pause this sermon right here. I'm going to leave that sermon here, and I'm going to go over here, and I'm going to talk about something else. Okay, so let's pause on this sermon. I try to do the best I can usually to follow one thread and not get sidetracked with other things, but this is such a big deal that I wanted to pause and say it and preach it for a second and then jump back into this sermon. So pause with me right here if you can, and we're going to talk about, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Okay, I'm over here different. This is parenthetical, okay? I'm within some parentheses. I just want to say this. There exists in Christendom, in faith, this insidious doctrine, this harmful and hurtful belief that to be a faithful Christian is somehow an insurance policy against pain and suffering in our life. Somehow or another, and I'm not exactly sure where we developed it. We assume that because God is love, that a loving God would never allow me to hurt in a way that is profound. And by the way, I am the sole arbiter of how much pain is too much pain. And so we walk through our lives with this erroneous and harmful belief that because I'm faithful, because I follow the rules, because I do my part, because I play my role, and I'm faithful to God and I live for him, that because of those things, he is going to insulate me and protect me from pain in my life. That because I'm faithful, God will navigate me through the raindrops of tragedy. And I think it's worth it because it's so dangerous and so damaging because what happens is people believe that and then pain happens in their life, tragedy comes into their life, and it shipwrecks the faith that they built on false assumptions that God never promised. Nowhere in the Bible are we told that when we follow God, our problems go away. Nowhere in Scripture does he promise that when we love him and obey him, that we won't encounter pain and hurt in this life. Paul, one of the most faithful people who ever lived, one of the most passionate people, most purpose-filled people for the gospel who ever lived, easily the most influential Christian who ever lived on the Mount Rushmore of faith, that there is anyone who deserves the blessings of God and the protection of God and to be able to circumvent tragedy in his life, it's Paul. If there's anyone who deserves God's protection, it's Paul because of service rendered to God. Yet Paul himself in one of his letters details his suffering for God. He details the times that he was beaten to within an inch of his life with the same punishment that Jesus received before he was crucified, the 39 lashings of the cat of nine tails. He details the times that he was mocked and that he was persecuted. He details the times that he was stoned and left to die on the ground. He details the times that he was shipwrecked, the times that he was so sick that he was sure he was going to die. Does it sound like based on Paul's life that Christians get to dodge the raindrops of tragedy? We don't. They're a part of life. They're a part of this fallen creation. And the more quickly we can move away from that expectation, the more holistically we can offer our faith to God and the better understanding we can have when tragedy and pain do befall us. Back over here in this sermon. Thank you for allowing me that freedom. The phrase that I really want to key in on in God's response is not, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. The phrase that I want us to let ring in our ears today is that God says about Saul that he is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. And in his sovereignty and in his great sense of irony, God had even prepared Saul for this moment. See, Saul of Tarsus grew up in the religious system. He grew up as the star student. He went to the Ivy League equivalent schools. He was a young, up-and-coming Pharisee. He was going to step in and be in the Senate and lead the nation. He was very likely a future high priest of Israel. He had all kinds of potential, and God had prepped him and groomed him for this moment. He had prepped him and groomed him to lead. Saul grew up exposed to the best possible training. He grew up learning the Old Testament inside and out, and he didn't know it, but he was learning it inside and out so that when Jesus appeared to him, he was able to uniquely connect all the dots from the Old Testament to the New Testament. And we see him do it in remarkably succinct and accurate ways all through his writings. God was preparing him for what was ahead. He exposed him to leaders and leadership. He learned how to peddle and exchange in the respect of men. He learned how to commandeer a room. He learned how to orate. He learned how to do all of these things for what he thought would be the sole purpose of stamping out the very movement that he was going to take those gifts and use them to advance. God and his sovereignty knew this. And if that's not enough to see that even when Saul thought he was preparing himself to do the exact opposite of what he was going to do, God was already using him. This is remarkable to me. This is something that I discovered years ago and I've been wanting to preach about it ever since. I'm so thrilled to get to share this with you this morning. But if you look back at chapter 8, beginning in verse 1, it says, Last week, we look at Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who with boldness and faith stuck his face in the wood chipper and spoke truth to power, knowing that they were going to kill him for it. And while they killed him, there was a young man named Saul of Tarsus who held everyone's coats and approved of what they were doing. And after that, he began to ravage the church. There arose this uprising from within traditional Judaism to stamp out this new movement of believers. It says is in trouble. Stephen has just been martyred. The powers that be, the authorities have decided that they do want to actively stamp out this movement. They're not going to be patient with it any longer. And Saul becomes the epicenter of this persecution. And as a result of this persecution, the church scatters. They leave Jerusalem. In fear, they flee from Jerusalem. And this is the part that I think is fascinating. What is Saul doing? Saul is doing everything he can to stamp out this new movement. And as he seeks to stamp out this new movement with arresting and with cruelty and with beatings and certainly with some violations of some rights, the Christians in Jerusalem grow fearful. And what do they do? They scatter to the surrounding regions. And I read one time, what do they do when they scatter to these surrounding regions? When a family of Christians flees to another city in these surrounding areas, to Damascus or to Ephesus or to wherever else, and they get there, and they're in this new city, and they don't know anybody, and they're trying to figure out life. Who are they going to look for? They're going to look for people that have something in common. Who has something in common? Other Christians who just fled Jerusalem because of persecution. And in these cities that they scattered to, they began to band together in these small groups of believers. And what do these groups of believers do? Well, they're from the original church in Jerusalem. They devoted themselves to the apostles' preaching and to the breaking of bread and to prayers. And they invited one another in one another's homes and they took care of one another as any had need. They began to be the church. Don't you see that when Saul applied pressure in Jerusalem in fear, the Christians scattered to surrounding cities. When they got to those cities, they band together with other Christians that had things in common and began to exercise and express the church as a body there. And in doing so, started all these little churches all over Asia Minor that were there as seeds for Paul to come and water later when he's preaching the gospel willingly. Isn't that cool? Saul was doing everything he could to stamp out the church. And God said, great, I'm going to use your efforts to grow it. The very thing he was trying to avoid is the very thing that he caused. And God in his sovereignty knew that if the Christians are comfortable in Jerusalem, they're just going to keep the word there, and the spread of this gospel is going to be slower. So he allowed Saul to apply a little bit of pressure so that they might scatter and plant churches in the surrounding areas so that when Saul later became Paul and went out to preach willingly, that there was seeds planted and the churches that he was sent to grow were ready for it. What we see in chapters 8 and 9 of Acts and what was before the conversion, and in God's purposing of Paul after the conversion, is that God was going to do what God was going to do, whether or not Saul chose to do it. God was going to do what he was going to do, whether or not Saul chose to do it anyway. It was going to happen. Let me tell you something. If somehow Paul manages to reject the conversion, he sees Jesus, he's healed of the scales, and he still says, no, I don't want any part of that. I'm going to continue to persecute the church. If some reason Paul rejects that invitation by Jesus himself, do you know that the church is still getting built? Do you know that God's word and God's love is still going to prevail? Don't you understand that if Paul turns God down, that there's still a church today in Ephesus and Thessalonica and Galatia and Philippi and Tyre and Sidon and all the other places. Don't you understand that? The church existing wasn't contingent upon Paul. God simply invited him into the purpose of doing it. He didn't need him. If Paul doesn't rise up, then he rises up Barnabas or John Mark or Luke or Peter or James or John or some other unknown hero that gets to play that part. God didn't need Saul. He didn't need his talents. He invited him in to the joy of purpose. He invited him in to a life of meaning. He invited him in to a life of service that would matter for all of eternity. He invited him into this incredible joy. And the same is true of us. God's created us and designed us and purposed us in ways seen and unseen for things in his service and in his kingdom. His desire for all of his children is that we would be used in mighty ways to grow his kingdom. He's designed you and purposed you for that. In the same way that Saul was being prepared to go out and lead the church when he was growing up, not knowing that's what the preparation was for, so has God laid those tracks in your life to uniquely prepare you for what's ahead when you didn't even know what you were being prepared for in the past. I want you to understand that when God offers an opportunity for you to serve, for you to be used, for you to obey him, for you to walk with him, for you to live in submission to him, that he's not asking you to do this out of a sense of duty. He's not guilting you into it or twisting your arm so that we serve out of this sense of ought. I want us to realize that when God invites us into service, that you are invited into the joy of purpose. You're invited into this joy of purpose. God doesn't need you to do these things in his kingdom. He's inviting you in so that you might participate and sit on the front row and see the joy of people coming to know God. Paul himself is a testament to this. Paul suffered mightily in this ministry, yet he was invited into the joy of purpose. And he was able to write one of the most famous verses and misused verses in the New Testament, Philippians 4.13. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Preceding that verse, he says, I've learned how to be joyful when I have nothing. And I've learned how to be joyful when I have plenty. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Paul said, he's the one that said, to live is Christ and to die is gain. To live is purpose and great and wonderful, and to die is to be in the very presence of God. The only reason to be alive is to execute God's purpose for my life. He found great joy there. He found so much joy there, and we're going to actually preach a sermon on this in a couple of weeks. He found so much joy in the purpose of serving God that when he is arrested and in a prison in shackles in the middle of an earthquake in Philippi, he is singing praise songs to his father. That's how joyful Paul was, walking in the purpose of his God. And that's the joy that you're invited into. And listen, I think that the same is true today. God doesn't need us to get things done. He's going to do them regardless. I came to Grace in 2017, April of 2017. And when I got here, it really didn't look like the church was going to be a church for very much longer. But in God's goodness and in His sovereignty, according to His plan, He's flourished, Grace. Even in COVID, even in quarantine, we continue to flourish and just do remarkably well. I can't get over it. It's so amazing. But I firmly believe that God's hand is on this place. And that if I didn't raise my hand and say, yeah, I'll go, that sounds great. I'll do that, God. That if I didn't get to come up here and do this, that somebody else would have gotten to do it. If me and Jen didn't move up from Atlanta to become a part of grace and get to sit on the front lines and see everything that God's doing here, then somebody else would have had that experience because make no mistake about it, God was going to grow grace. God was going to flourish grace. God was going to do with this place exactly what he wanted to do with this place, regardless if I decided to come or not. I just got invited to participate in what's happening here. And it's a tremendous source of joy. For years, Grace has been building homes in Mexico. We send a couple teams down every year and build multiple homes every time we go almost. We've built dozens of homes over the years because God cares for the people in Mexico that they're getting built for. You know what I believe? Those homes get built with or without grace, man. Those homes get built with or without our teams, with or without our money. God's gonna take care of those people. You know what he let us do? He invites us into the joy of purpose. He invites us in to see and to build relationships and to be a part of what he's doing for our sake, not for his sake. He doesn't need us. He doesn't need our money. He doesn't need our teams. He doesn't need us to go down there and build the homes. We don't even know how to lay cinder block anyways. You know what he's doing? He's inviting us into the joy of purpose in Mexico so that we can experience a full life in him. Think of Steve and Lisa. Steve is our former worship pastor and our current technical director. And Lisa's his great wife, and they have a ministry called Side by Side where they partner, they come alongside couples who are struggling in their marriage and they seek to restore them to wholeness. And over the years, they've had the opportunity to walk many couples through that and see them restored to fullness in their marriage. But here's the truth. God loves those couples. And if he can't direct them to Steve and Lisa, he's going to direct them somewhere else. God's going to rescue those couples. He's simply inviting the Goldbergs in to participate in the joy of his purpose and what they're doing. That's what service is. That's what the Christian life is. God's going to do what he's going to do regardless of if we want to do it or participate. The invitation of the Christian life, the invitation of a life of service like Paul lived, is to simply participate in the joy of purpose. It's an invitation that I hope that you'll accept. I hope at Grace that we don't serve out of a sense of ought, that we don't obey out of a sense of duty, that we don't resentfully go along with these things that we don't desire, but that we would see in following God as an invitation to experience the joy of purpose. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for the story of your servant, Paul. We thank you for his humility and his service and what he left us and what we learned from him. Father, I pray that each of us would experience the joy that is found in serving the purpose that you created us for. May we walk in that joy. Let us throw off senses of duty and senses of ought and embrace this desire to experience what you're doing, to see it firsthand. Thank you for inviting us into what it is that you're doing. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. This has been quite the two weeks. We're supposed to, this morning, be in the middle of a series in the book of Acts called Still the Church. But in light of everything that's happened in our country, the elders and I universally and quickly agreed that we could not just continue on in the book of Acts like nothing was going on outside these walls. And as I've watched the protests and the demonstrations and the rioting and the looting and all the back and forth and been consumed in the news and social media and everything happening and all the voices being heard and all the things being said, I just became deeply convicted that we needed to stop and talk about this as a church. I became deeply convicted that I needed to prayerfully consider and address this as your pastor. And so I've talked a lot this week. Called people, I've sat in people's homes, I've met people, I've watched interviews, I've listened to discussions, I've read books, I've consumed podcasts, I wake up thinking about this issue of racial inequality and tension and injustice in our country. I go to sleep thinking about it. I scour the internet. It has consumed me, like many of you, for these past few weeks. And all of it, I think, has pressed on the church, has pressed us into this one singular question of what do we do now? What do we do? In light of everything we've seen, in light of what we're witnessing, in light of these demonstrations that feel different. We've seen protests before. We've seen rioting and looting even before, but these feel different. And I think it impresses upon the church the necessity to answer this question, what do we do now? What do we do as individuals? What do we do as a church? And for Grace, pointedly, what do we do as a predominantly white church in the face of the reality of the last two weeks? So as I've thought about how to answer that question, I thought it would probably be most helpful to start in this place of agreement. Every reasonable person that I know agrees that George Floyd was murdered by that police officer. I don't know any reasonable person, I haven't even actually talked with anybody, who would argue that what happened to George Floyd was justified and deserved, that what happened to him was anything short of murder. I don't know anybody arguing that. Conversely, I don't know anybody arguing for the morality and the rightness and the justification of protests that devolve into looting and rioting. I've not heard anyone make a good nuanced argument that people of color deserve the right to just charge into stores and white people deserve the right to just charge into stores and loot and take what they want and get violent. I've not heard anybody arguing from the morality of protests that devolve into looting and rioting. No one's supporting those. No one's saying that they're okay, and no one's excusing them away. So I don't think that it's worth our time this morning to further condemn the officer that murdered George Floyd or to decry the morality of looting and rioting. We all agree on those things. I think the more interesting question that we need to be asking, that I want to be asking as a member of the white community, is what is the message coming out of the protests and the demonstration? What is it that the black community would have us hear as a result of these protests? What are they using their voice to say? And if we listen closely, what should we be hearing? I've actually started thinking of the demonstrations and even the looting and the rioting in this light, kind of like this. Many of you are married. And if you're married, you know what it is to have a little spat with your spouse. You know what it is to have a little mundane day-to-day disagreement. And if you're not married, think about your relationship with a parent or with a sibling or with a close friend or with a child. We've all been in these discussions where there's a little disagreement, there's a little spat, there's kind of a flare-up, but then all of the sudden our spouse goes maximum angry. Whatever maximum angry looks like for your spouse, whether that's just like quiet, cutting comments, whether it's just getting silent and retreating, if it's throwing things, if it's yelling, whatever it is, we've been in these situations where all of the sudden at the drop of a hat, for reasons we don't all the way understand, our spouse is maximum angry with us. And we know that their reaction, that what happened that day in that instance does not warrant their reaction. If we are an unwise spouse, if we're bad at this, we will react to that overreaction. We'll point at him or we'll point at her, and we'll say, I don't deserve that. You shouldn't be saying that. What happened doesn't warrant your reaction. This isn't fair. You shouldn't do that. And we'll condemn the overreaction. And we'll heighten the argument. But what wise spouses do, what wise people do, is acknowledge. Yeah, that's an overreaction. But clearly, that's not a reaction just to what's happening in this moment. Clearly, there are things that have been simmering under the surface. There is a series of frustrations and disappointments that have led to this moment, that have caused this person to boil and bubble over in this way. So rather than reacting to the overreaction, let me be interested and listen and see what I can learn about the series of events that have built up in this person's heart to lead them to this place. Wise people want to understand what led to this response in the first place. And I think the best thing that I can do, the best thing that we can do in the face of these protests and demonstrations is to ask the question, wait, wait, wait, what is it that led to this moment? What are all the simmering frustrations and disappointments that you've experienced, that the black community has experienced that have led to this moment of demonstrations for the past two weeks? The most important question we can be asking, I think, is what is it the black community is trying to say? What are they trying to communicate? And as I think through that question, my belief is that the loudest message coming out of these protests is simply, will you listen to us now? Will you hear us now? Will you give us a voice now? I think what the black community is telling us is that, hey, racial injustice still exists. Racial inequality still exists. Racial oppression is still a very real thing in the United States of America, and we bear the brunt of it every day. It is still a thing that is happening. And I would be the first to tell you, I would be the first to argue that this country has made tremendous strides in racial equality and justice since 1968. We have come an incredibly far way in just a generation. But what these protests tell us is that we still have strides to make. We still have a ways to go. We're still not there yet. The black community is telling us we still experience injustice and oppression. And if you are a child of God, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, if you would call yourself a Christian, then when there is a group of people in your community that is telling you, hey, we feel like we exist in injustice, we feel like we are being treated unfairly, we feel like we are oppressed, that ought to perk up your ears. When there is a community of people saying, raising their hand and saying, hey, we feel oppressed. We feel like there's systemic injustice in our country. That perks up the ears of God. That breaks the very heart of God. And it ought to break our heart too, particularly as God's children, particularly as God's church. When there's a group of people in our community crying out that they feel oppressed, that life feels unfair, that it is unjust, as God's children, we ought to perk up our ears and listen intently and wonder at why and allow our hearts to be broken at that reality because that reality breaks the heart of God. Justice and correcting oppression are very near to the heart of God. I know this is true because the Bible says it over and over again. I know this is true because of passages like Isaiah chapter 1. Isaiah chapter 1, verses 10 through 18. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. That's one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. I know I say that about a lot of passages. I really mean it for this one. I love Isaiah chapter one, 10 through 18. Those eight verses, those are the gospel. It's a beautiful passage. But I've never thought of it in the light that I'm about to explain it in until this week. If you look at that passage in verses 10 through 15, God is blasting Israel. Israel, those are his children, those are his people. They would have considered themselves the church or saved back in that time. And God is blasting them for going through the motions of their faith without really living it out. And he's saying things to them like, your solemn assemblies, listen to this, my soul hates. He says, when you pray to me, I will turn my back to this. I'm not there. I'm not listening. When you perform your sacrifices, I don't care about them. I don't want them. All the religious duties that you're doing, I'm not interested in those. And then in verse 16, after he blasts them, after he says, quit going through the motions, I'm not interested. In verse 16, it's almost as if he's saying, you want to know what I'm interested in? You want to know what's important to me? You want to know how I want my people to be defined? If you want to do the right thing, do you know what you need to do? This is what he says, verse 16. After blasting them, he ends 15 with the phrase, your hands are full of blood. 16, he says this, wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do good. So he says, listen, repent of all the things that I've just accused you of. Admit that you've been going to the motion. Stop doing that. Admit that you're living out this heartless faith and seek to do right. And if you want to do right, here's what you need to do. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Correct oppression. Bring justice to the fatherless. Plead the widow's cause. God says, you want to know what's near and dear to my heart? You want to know how I want my people to be known and what I want them to be marked for and what I want to be important to them? You want to please me? You want to make me happy? You want to know what God wants from me? Seek justice. Correct oppression. There's a community of people in our nation crying out that they are experiencing injustice and oppression and God's people should listen to that brokenheartedly and want to help. It's not just in Isaiah. In Micah, chapter 6, verse 8, a famous passage. Micah similarly ends a long diatribe of the ways that God's children have failed, And he says, if you want to do good, here's what we need to do. He says, he has shown you, oh man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you, but to seek justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Three things God wants from his people. Just distill it all down to whatever God would request. And what he leads with is seek justice. In the Psalms, we are told that we need to be a voice for the voiceless. It's the idea that when our voice is the loudest in the room, we ought to use it to help those with the weakest voice. Justice and the correction of oppression is near and dear to the heart of God. That's why I am firmly convinced that what is happening in our country right now is not a political issue. It's not political at all. And honestly, if you think it's political, you don't understand it. It's not political. It's a right and wrong issue. It's a gospel issue. Caring about this isn't about activism. It's about caring deeply about a manifestation of the gospel and the culture in which we live. What's happening breaks God's heart and it ought to break ours. It is our job as his people to diligently and fervently and generously correct oppression and to seek justice. This is a church issue. This is a gospel issue. This is a morality issue. So we have to talk about it. And even as I say that, even as I say that, there are those who I know and love who are good Bible-believing people, good moral folks, who would simply say, Nate, man, I agree with you that we need to care deeply about justice, and we need to care deeply about people not being oppressed. But I got to tell you, I just don't think that there is systemic oppression happening in our country. I just don't think that there is systemic injustice and racial inequality occurring in our country. I've heard statements like that even this week, and they're not statements from people who are racist or who mean ill will. They're just earnest, honest observations and thoughts from folks. But I would tell you if that's something that you might think, that first of all, that's something that I've thought too. But when you repeat that to black people, as I have this week, they went. I sat in someone's home and I said, hey, you know, there's some folks who would say that they just no longer see systemic oppression or injustice in our society. What would you say to them? They winced at me. It hurt them. And it wasn't a wincing of anger. They weren't mad. They didn't want to correct. It was a wincing of surprise and of disappointment and of hurt. That some people right around them don't even see what to them is so very evident. And if we don't believe that oppression is a thing, there's plenty of stories, there's plenty of examples of it continuing to happen in our country even to this day. As I spoke with people and listened and watched, I saw a lot of conversations happening between white people and black people. I was involved in some of those conversations. And in every one of those conversations, whether I'm watching them or involved in them or listening to them, the question would always come up, how have you experienced racism in your life? What are some instances where you've encountered, the white person's asking the black person, what are some instances where you've encountered racism in your life? And all of the black people had answers. They all responded with stories, sometimes multiple stories. Do you realize the power of that reality? Do you realize how condemning that truth is? That every black person you could go up to and find, even on the street, and just grab them and say, hey, I'm curious, how have you experienced racism in your life? When have you encountered racism in your day-to-day life? In the years that you've lived, what are the stories about your encounters of racism? Do you realize that they all have answers? You realize they can answer that question? That not a single one of them went, gosh, you know, I don't know that I have. You know how different that is from the white experience? I've never experienced a racial moment in my life. I've never been the victim of racism. I've never even asked my white friends, hey, when have you experienced racism in your life? Because we don't. Far and away, the vast majority of us don't even experience it. Do you realize the chasm and experiences there when they all have answers for it and we don't have any? One man shared his story, successful black businessman, went to a good college in the South, got involved in corporate America. He shared that in his office place, he often felt discriminated against. He shared some of that was probably imagined and some of it was probably very real. But what he knew is that the last thing in the world he could do is bring it up. The last thing in the world he could do is be honest about it or complain about it because you don't want to play that card and get that label. So he just kept his mouth shut. And after years of keeping his mouth shut, he gets promoted to their office in Manhattan. He moves his family up there. They find a great suburb in Connecticut where they decide to buy a home. They're walking through their neighborhood on the very first day that they're moving in. He's got his wife and his daughter in the stroller, and a car rides by them, and a white guy leans out the window and calls him the N-word and tells him that he's not welcome in his neighborhood and he needs to go home. In progressive Connecticut, a few years ago. It's still happening. I talked to somebody on the phone this week that confirmed an article that my wife, Jen, had read this week. She read an article. It wasn't an article. It was a post on Facebook that kind of went viral by a black man who just said, hey, listen, just so y'all know my experience, he loves to go on walks every day in his neighborhood. Kind of refreshes him like a lot of us like to go on walks. But he said, I'm very aware of the fact that I can't go on a walk without my wife or my daughter with me. I can't just walk through a neighborhood as a lone black man because I've gotten the cops called on me too many times because I'm seen as a threat in his own neighborhood. That story was confirmed this week when I was talking to somebody on the phone who said that they just bought a new house and they're about to move into this neighborhood. And he shared with me that his wife sat him down and said, honey, I know that you like to go on walks, but before you do that, for the first month or two that we live in this neighborhood, me and you and our kids need to go on a walk every day so that the neighbors can get used to seeing your face so that when you are out there by yourself, they don't think you're a threat and they don't call the police on you. I just moved into Falls River in April. I go on walks all the time. Never a single time, not once have I thought, gosh, I hope my neighbors don't see me as a threat. I hope they don't see my whiteness as a threat and call the police on me and I have to explain myself to them. I haven't once even considered that. It blew my mind that they still have to care about that. I was talking to another person who is very successful, who has degrees from colleges that I can't even imagine going to. He has brothers and they're all successful. And I asked him, growing up in a black home, clearly you would point to your parents as the reason for your success and your brother's success. But what was it about the way that they parented you that made you successful? And he told me that his parents always told them that they have to hold themselves to a higher standard than anybody else around them, that they have a smaller margin for error in their life than anybody else around them, that they're going to have to work harder than the other people around them if they want to achieve the same things. And they were incredibly hard on their boys for their sake because they knew that the margin for error for their children was slimmer than the margin of error of a house full of people who look like me. Then I started hearing about the conversations that black parents have to have with their children when they start to drive. They have to tell them that they're black and what their blackness means and how they should be sensitive to carry themselves. They have to walk them through protocols. If you get pulled over, do these things. Do not do these things. And they have to do this for the safety of their children. When I got my keys, my dad just handed me the keys. And he said, don't speed. And if you do speed and you get pulled over, just say yes, sir, to the officer. Be nice to him. That was it. There was no conversations about my whiteness. There was no, I've never thought to have a conversation with Lily, my daughter, about her whiteness. It's different, you guys. It's two different Americas. It's two different experiences. This points to an injustice and an oppression that still exists. This points to the reality that Martin Luther King's dream has not yet been realized. And if we want to see it come to fruition, that even though we've made great strides, we still have more to take. If the stories aren't enough, if those are anecdotal, I could point to evidence. I could point to statistics. I could point to how poverty skews greater in the African-American community. I could point to schools and how they lower in quality in African-American communities. I could point to a loss of the father figure in black homes. I could point to joblessness in the black community that's greater than that in the white community. Statistic after statistic that would lend itself to this understanding that the playing field is not level in our country. And yet even as I say that, even as I share those stories and those statistics that we all know, there are those of us who would say, yeah, but there's other factors, Nate. This is not easy. This is nuanced. There's other things going on there. There are those of us who would look at those statistics or look at those anecdotes and point to systemic issues within the black community and say, they need to get those taken care of too. They have some things that maybe they need to think about a little bit differently that they should correct as well. And I would tell you honestly, that I agree with you. This is not a one-sided issue. No conflict, no disagreement, no misunderstanding, no matter how great, is 100% one side's fault and 0% another side's fault. We all have things that we can own within the discussion. But even though I would agree that both the white community and the black community have a ways to go to achieve racial equality. I've begun to think of it like this. You know, when I was growing up, if there was somebody at school mistreating me, somebody in my life doing something that wasn't fair, treating me in a way that I didn't deserve. If I were to complain to my dad, hey, so-and-so's treating me like this, it's not fair, I don't like it, I don't appreciate it, he would say to me, son, when they act that way towards you, I want you to be gracious. I want you to be kind. I want you to forgive them. I do not want you to respond to them on the level that they are acting towards you. And I would get upset and I would say, but dad, that's not fair. They're doing this and they're doing that and they treat me in this way and I want to get back at them and I want to do this. And my dad would say, son, you're a rector and I'm not worried about them. They're not my children. You're my son. And this is how rectors act. I'm not worried about that house. I'm worried about my house. I'm not in control of that house. I'm not a voice in that house. I don't have authority in that house. I have authority in this house. And so I'm gonna worry about my house. And as long as you're a part of my house, then this is how you're going to behave. So in the issue of racial inequality and injustice, I've adopted the posture that I'm not going to think about that house. I'm not going to think about what other people need to do. Frankly, candidly, I'm not gonna think about what the black community needs to do. I'm gonna think about my house. I'm gonna think about my responsibilities. What are the mindsets and mistakes that I've made over my 39 years that I need to repent of and correct? What do I need to do? I'm not going to worry about that house. I'm going to worry about my house. Other voices will speak up in that house. They're responsible for that. That's not my responsibility. I'm worried about me. I'm worried about grace. And grace is a predominantly white church, so I'm worried about our house. What do we do? And it's because of that mindset and just focusing on myself and what I should do that I've come to really think about my role, however small it is, in racial reconciliation to really parallel the story of the Good Samaritan. A month or two ago, we were going through a series called Storyteller, looking at the stories that Jesus told to make a moral point. And one of the stories that we covered, one of the parables was the parable of the Good Samaritan. So we know this story, right? There's a man, he's on the road to Jericho, he's going from Jerusalem to Jericho. He gets injured. A priest and a Levite that we would expect to know how to do the right thing see him injured, see him dying, and they just cross over him and continue on with their day. Then a Samaritan shows up, the one that you wouldn't understand to be the moral exemplar in this story. He shows up. He sees the injured man. He kneels down. He tends to his wounds. He picks him up. He puts him on his donkey. He takes him to a hotel. He swipes his credit card, and he tells the innkeeper, whatever this person needs, you charge it to my account. That's the story of the Good Samaritan. And the point of that story, Jesus tells us, is that we're supposed to love our neighbor like the Good Samaritan, loved the injured man. And I think the current situation relates to that parable in that the black community is depicted by the injured man on the road who is crying out and saying that they are hurting, that they are in pain, that they are experiencing injustice. And every time I've heard one of those stories in my life, the first one I remember was Rodney King in the 90s. And every time it bubbles up again and every time the black community cries out and says, hey, it's still not fair. Hey, Martin Luther King's dream is still not realized. Hey, pay attention to us, please. Listen, every time that happens and every time I see the suffering of the black community, I always take the role of the priest and the Levite. And I look at them and I see them hurting and I continue on with my way. Because I think, I'm so sorry that you're there. I'm so sorry that you're hurting. I hate that this has happened to you. But I didn't do it. It's not my fault you're there. I don't hate you. I'm not racist. I don't hate people who look like you. I would never do this to you. As a matter of fact, I hate the people who did that to you. But I didn't do it. Not my fault. I'm not going to feel bad about that. And I move on. And then sometimes in my moving on to justify walking past this suffering brother, I'll begin to wonder, what could that victim have done to have prevented getting robbed like that on the road to Jericho? How late was he out? Who could he have brought with him? When he started to get robbed, did he mouth off? Did he resist? How is he to blame for what's going on? And usually, if I'm being honest about myself, those questions are asked out of a motivation to quell my own guilt. And I should confess to you that I'm, this is not figurative for me that I've played the role of the priest and the Levite. I'm a very flawed messenger for this sermon. I'm not good at this. I don't have black friends. In fact, all the arguments that some of you may have made to refute the things that I'm saying, I can promise you I've made those to my friends. So please, in my words and in my voice, don't hear condemnation, hear confession. I've been the priest and the Levite, and I'm ashamed of it. And God calls me to be the Samaritan. The Samaritan, even though it wasn't his fault, knelt down and he bound up the wounds of this person who had previously hated him. We presume that the victim was a Jew. There is racial tension between the Samaritans and the Jews. And the Samaritan ears to be perked up with what I think perks up God's ears as he encourages us, admonishes us to seek justice and correct oppression. I want to be one of those agents. And I am acknowledging and admitting, not just to myself, but publicly, hopefully, so that some of us can make the same admission that I have been the priest and the Levite stepping over the black community because I felt like it didn't have anything to do with me. I felt like because I'm not racist, because I didn't do that, it's not my fault. It's not my problem. But now I'm convicted that God himself told me to love others as the Samaritan loves others. To be a neighbor to everyone. To care about everyone's suffering and hurting. And I have been moved in the last two weeks and my heart has been broken that I want to be a part of the striding forward. I want to be a part of the healing of the racial divide. I want to help my hurting brothers and sisters. And hopefully you do too. And some of you, to your everlasting credit, you've been way ahead of me on this. I hope there's room at the party for some more. If you want to help, if we want to do more, if we want to help heal the divide, what can we do? And that's really the million-dollar question. As I've had conversations with people this week, really, people to varying degrees will say, yeah, we agree with that sentiment. We agree with that. We're with you. We want to do something. What do we do? That's the big question. So as I've wrestled with that this week, I've come up with three things that I think we can all proactively do. For those of us who want to be a part of the healing, I think we can proactively do these things. The first one is that I think that we should diversify our life. Diversify our lives. Make some black friends. I was on a call with a pastor, Albert Williams, from Dothan, Alabama, this week. And we were talking about all of these things, and I was telling him all the things I wanted to share with my church, and he said, Brother Nate, let me ask you a question. And I so love his boldness in this question. He said, let me ask you a question. You ever have black folks over to your house for dinner? And I said, well, you know, Albert, we just moved into a new house in April and it's been in quarantine. So I really haven't had much of a chance. And he laughed. He said, come on, Nate, you know what I'm asking you? No, I haven't. I haven't. And he got on to me. He told me the truth. And he didn't use these words, but he basically said, man, you don't have a leg to stand on then. You don't have any right to preach this. You're not even doing it. How are you going to go tell your people what they need to do and you're not even doing it yourself? And he's right. I'm a flawed messenger. But I'm going to diversify my life. I'm reaching out to other black pastors, not to build bridges between churches, but to build friendships between men. And I want people of color to be regular visitors in our home. I want Lily to grow up around that. And honestly, I think that this could bring about maybe a more profound change than anything else to just diversify our lives, normalize it for our children, learn empathy as we hear their stories and what they're walking through. And if I'm just being candid with you, at the risk of offending some people, there are very few people that I know who think that oppression doesn't exist who also have black friends. It just changes your viewpoint. So I think we need to diversify our lives. The second thing I would encourage us to do is to adopt a posture of listening. Adopt a posture of listening. I was talking to another person this week who agreed with me on everything and said, yeah, there needs to be a discussion. We need to talk. There needs to be some back and forth. But both sides of the party, both the white community and the black community, have some baggage to own. And there needs to be some give and take at this table. One side can't just take all the blame. And I said, yeah, you're right, but why don't we just listen for a minute? Why don't we just give? How about instead of yeah, but, instead of arguing with the statistics, instead of finding nuanced ways for that to not all the way be true, how about instead of searching for the one exception or the one article that makes us feel right about ourselves, how about we just listen to the voices and the messages coming out of the black community? We don't say anything. We don't argue. And some of the things, I'll be honest, some of the things I've seen coming out this week have just been completely illogical and nonsensical. But we don't have to respond to those. Just sweep those aside. Let's listen for the deeper messages. Let's be receptive to what our black brothers and sisters are saying. And then the third thing I would encourage us all to do is to develop a muscle for empathy. Develop that empathy muscle that you have in your heart. Learn what it's like to be a black person in the United States. Read some books. I thought about having books to recommend to you, but the truth of that is that we have all had books recommended to us. It's not hard to find them. Read a book that opens your eyes. Listen to a podcast. Seek out interviews. Listen to the voices. Seek to be empathetic and to understand. And even as I say those things, what can we do? We can do those three things. Even as I say those, there may be some of you that hear that and think, come on, Nate, like those are wispy, kind of mamby-pamby, like what real things can we do? Those feel insufficient to me. I would say to you that, respectfully, if you're doing all three of those things, if your life is diverse, if you're listening to the voices coming out of the black community, if you're developing that muscle of empathy intentionally in your life, and you still find those three steps to be inadequate, then please please let's talk and find some more adequate steps. But honestly, if you're not doing all three of those or none of those at all right now, how about we just do those and then talk about if they're empty? How about we just take those steps and then assess if they're insufficient and inadequate? Let's do the work first and then find out if what we're doing is working. I would finish by saying this. There are those of you, I believe, who will hear this sermon this morning and get fired up. You'll be excited, feel refreshed. You'll wanna be a part of the solution. You'll be happy we talked about this. Let that fire burn in a sustainable way. In a few weeks, the energy of the protest will be done. COVID will be back in the news cycle and our culture will have moved on to something else. And if we allow our fervor and our conviction to pursue racial equality and justice to fade along with the cultures, then we're gonna be right back here again. So let's let the fire burn in a sustainable way. Let's stick with it and let's mean it and let's make meaningful, lasting changes in our lives. There are others of you who may be offended by different things that I've said or disappointed in the way that I've handled this. And I understand that, I really do. This is a difficult issue. It's a nuanced topic. It stirs up emotions that we don't even understand how they got there. And it's not right of me to experience a conviction and then expect everyone else to be okay with that conviction being impressed upon them. So I would simply ask you, if I've offended you or upset you, to have some grace and some patience with me. And I would invite any one of you in response to this message or what's been happening to email me and let's start a dialogue. My email is at the bottom of the screen. It's nate at graceralee.org. Reach out to me and let me know and let's continue this discussion. I think it can only be helpful. But I know that for me, I want to be the good Samaritan. For grace, I want us to be a part of the healing. I want us to take seriously what grieves the heart of God. Would you pray with me as we pray for our city and our community and our country and our role and what God would have us do to bring about a very necessary healing? Father, you continue to be good. We know that you love us. We know that you love minorities and majorities with equanimity. We know that your heart is that we would love one another. God, give us the strength and the desire and the vision and the grace to overcome these differences in our race that are beautiful differences. Give us the strength to embrace one another. Bring people who don't look like us into our lives that we might befriend and understand them. Help each of us do what we believe is our part to heal this divide. God, I pray that you would work on our hearts. I pray that you'd speak to us even now. I pray that we would be moved by what moves you. And God, I pray for an America that's the same for everyone. Somewhere there's a four and a half year old girl running around that is in a black family. She's the same age as my daughter. God, can they be adults in the same country? Can they raise their children in a place that is void of oppression and injustice? Would you help us be a part of that reality? In Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.

Grace, this week there's a man named George Floyd who was killed by a police officer. George was a black man, and you can't help but think that his race was a white woman who, in a racially fueled fear, weaponized the black man's race against him in a threat. And those instances are the most recent that have come into the national conscience. But there are just more instances in a long string of events that have happened that have pointed to the fact that we live in a culture with simmering racial tension. We live in a place where racial inequality is real. And I didn't think it would be right to get up here and just start preaching about Acts as if those things hadn't happened this week. I didn't think it would be right to meet together as together as we can be on a Sunday morning now and not acknowledge those things and pray for the racial divide and the wounds in our country to heal. And I didn't think it would be right to start this Sunday as a church and not earnestly ask our God together, what can we do, what can grace do to be a part of healing this divide? What portions of it as a greatly and majorly lily-white congregation can we own? And how can we contribute to closing the divide that exists in our culture? So I wanted to take a minute as we begin and pray for George Floyd and his family and pray for the racial divide in our country and pray for wisdom, for grace, as we seek to find how the Lord would have us be an active part of the healing of these wounds. So would you please pray with me? Father, our hearts are broken that we live in a place where things like this happen. Our hearts are broken that these incidents are not isolated. They're just the ones that we see. We know that you see all the incidents. We know that you have seen all the injustice. And we know that your heart breaks over injustice far more than ours ever could. So Father, first we pray for your heart in the face of these things. Break ours with yours. Father, we pray for the family of George Floyd. We ask that you would bring a healing that only you could bring. We pray for the attitudes that underlie the fear of Amy Cooper. And ask that you would solve those and bring those to the fore so that we might confront them and deal with them with equanimity and with justice and with grace. And Father, we ask that you would guide the partners and the leadership of grace and show us how we are to contribute to closing this divide and healing these wounds. Show us the path forward as we grieve, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. This morning is part two of a sermon that I'm calling Early Church Distinctives. Last week was part one. Hopefully you have your notes and you've got them numbered one through three. This week is going to be four, five, six, and seven. And last week I opened up with a short fictional story, really a parable, about a boy that was firing arrows at a barn and the arrows would land in the midst of a sea of red and then he would walk up and paint a target around the arrow and go, look, I hit the bullseye. And we talked about how, you know, this happens and this is applicable in a lot of organizations and institutions. It's a good parable about the dangers of mission drift. And often we start things without even knowing what we're going for, without even knowing what the goal is, without even knowing what the target is. And so we are asking last week as a church, how do we know that we're hitting the target? Another way to think about it is if Jesus and Paul were to come into the church on a Sunday morning when that's allowed, would they look around grace and everything that we're doing and say, yeah, you guys are nailing it. This is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. This is the target that we painted for you. So last week we asked the question, how do we know that we're hitting that target? How do we know that what we're doing as Grace is right? That Sunday mornings and small groups and children's ministry and student ministry and the philanthropic ministries that we do, how do we know that all that is right and good? Well, in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, we have a seminal passage that defines the early church. It paints the target for us. It shows us these are the things that the early church was characterized by. What's going on in the passage is Jesus has gone into heaven. He's left the disciples with the keys to the kingdom. They've received the Holy Spirit. They went out and they preached to thousands of people this gospel of repentance. Repent of who you thought Jesus was when you killed him and accept and walk in faith in the fact that Jesus and when he challenged them to repentance, it says about 3,000 were added to their number. And then those 3,000 formed the church. And right after that, we get Acts 2, 42 through 47, and it tells us the very things that defined the church. So last week, we looked at the first three distinctives that we see as defining the early church. This week, I want to look at the next four, four, five, six, and seven. And we said last week, there's different ways to group these together. You could pull out four distinctives or nine, but we're doing seven. And so last week we talked about the fact that they were devoted to the apostles' teaching, meaning they were eager learners. They were devoted to fellowship, meaning they were devoted to Christ-centered time together, and they were devoted to prayers, meaning that they were committed to the spiritual disciplines that they expressed in that day. So this week, as we continue to ask, how do we know if we're doing it right? What does God expect of his church? I want to continue to look at these distinctives that define the early church. By way of review, I wanted to take a minute and read the breaking of bread at the prayers. This week I want to start out by looking at that phrase that they sold all that they had in common and gave to any who had need. And we want to sum that up by saying that the fourth distinctive, if you're keeping your list there, is that they were known for generosity. They were known for their generosity. And it's interesting what's happening in this passage because what's literally happening is as the church is formed, everybody is selling whatever they have and giving it to the church leadership and saying, here, this is for the greater good. You guys use it for whatever you need to use it for. Obviously, my family's going to have some needs, but we trust you to provide for those. Here's everything that we own. Please use it to provide for everyone here, which is a super high bar. That's really daunting. Can you imagine if when we had our new members class at Grace, when we did Discover Grace and we talked all about Grace and who we are, and then we got to the end of it and it was like, okay, if you want to be a partner, here are the requirements. You know, you need to commit to Sunday morning attendance. You should be a believer. We'd like to see you in a small group. Also, small thing, if you could just kind of sell everything that you have and write a check to the elders, we'll take it from here. That would be a pretty tough sell. That's a pretty tall order. But to understand what's happening here, we need to feel the freedom to apply the principle and not necessarily the practice, because the principle is far more important. First, we need to understand what's happening in ancient Israel, in Israel at the time of Christ. Israel is what we would think of as a third world country. There's lots of joblessness. There's lots of poverty. There's lots of hunger. There's lots of suffering. There's no medical system really to speak of. And so suffering and need and want in Jerusalem was great. And while it was great, there was no infrastructure to provide for those who had fallen through the cracks of society. And what we understand is that God has intentionally designed the institution of the church to undergird society as a safety net to catch those who have fallen through the cracks of familial care. God first assigns to care for others. He first assigns family to care for family. This is why over and over again in Scripture, God makes a point of saying that if you love me, if you want to express true religion, then you'll care for the widows and the orphans. We see this in James in the New Testament, that true religion is to care for the widows and the orphans. We see it in Isaiah in the Old Testament, where God says, if you really want to please me, then plead the cause of the fatherless and take up the case of the widow. And what he's saying there is, and even in Deuteronomy when he says, look out for the sojourners, for the aliens, for the ones that don't have a family and can't support themselves, what he's saying in all that is, the church needs to serve in society as a safety net to care for those who fall through the cracks of familial care. We're supposed to be there and be helping them. And when there is a need, we are supposed to meet it. God has designed the church as an institutional safety net for society. And so in that time, there was no government. There was no Medicare. There was no welfare. There was no food stamps. There was no health care. There was none of that. And so the church was the only hope for the person who didn't have a family and was in need and couldn't support themselves. But now in our culture, thankfully, we have another safety net, which is the government. We do have a societal infrastructure to watch out for people who fall through the cracks of familial care. But still, the church undergirds all of that, and people who cannot be cared for by their family and cannot be cared for by the government, God looks at us, the church, and says, now you, you care for them. So we're still there, and it's still our responsibility, which is why the point from this part of the passage is that we need to be generous. We need to be conduits of God's generosity. We need to have a grieving heart for those who hurt and reach out to help those who can't help themselves. We need to be glad providers for those that are not provided for by their family or provided for by the government. We need to rally around them and be generous in spirits and be conduits of God's generosity. Another way to think of it perhaps is like this. When I became a senior pastor, I learned eventually about a thing called a designated giving fund. I'd really never heard of that before. It might shock you guys to know that I'm not a financial titan. I don't really know all the ins and outs of all that stuff. It's all news to me. I just try to spend less than what I make. That's pretty much it. But I found out that there's these things called designated giving funds. And how this works is you have money and you give a portion of that money to this fund that a company or an individual manages. And a lot of people will give money to this individual and they manage all the money in a fund. And that money is earmarked for charitable donations, charitable causes. And whoever you give your money to, they just sit on it and they hold it for however long you want to. And then when something pricks your heart, when something touches you, when you see a need that you'd like to meet, you pick up the phone or you type the email and you let the person managing your money know, hey, I would like you to send this much money to this person because they need it. This matters to me. I'd like you to allocate my resources to that person or that institution for those people. That's how a designated giving fund works fundamentally. And what it's made me realize is that we're all God's designated giving funds. That's what stewardship is. We've heard about this idea of stewardship before, that everything we have is God's and not our own. We've heard about that. But the more I thought about it this week, I've realized we're all God's designated giving funds. He allocates a portion of money to us. He entrusts it to us. And every now and again, he picks up the phone or he writes the email and he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this thing matters to me. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to them. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to these people. That's the principle of what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, is they're expressing the Lord's generosity. And I think increasingly, and I know that that's a tall order, and I know that you may be very far away from viewing everything you have as really belonging to God. And that's, I think, a progressive revelation as we understand God. But I think one of the marks of spiritual maturity in a church and in an individual is when the church and when the person understands that we're really just designated giving funds for God. He's allocated a portion of his resources to us as individuals and to us as a church. And every now and again, he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this matters to me. I'd like you to shift some of those resources over there to them. And that's how we're to serve. It's the mark of the church to be generous. The fifth distinctive that I see in this text is that they were committed to gathering. It says they gathered day by day in the temple courts. It's this old school way of church. You know, when I grew up, we were there every time the doors were open. We went Sunday morning, we went Sunday night, we went Wednesday night, every week. That was the deal. The doors were open, we were there. That's kind of old school church. Now, increasingly, if someone is a regular church attender, it means they come to church maybe twice a month. But the early church was committed to the gathering. It mattered to them. It mattered to them to come together when they were able to be in the temple learning and praising and fellowshipping together. The early church intuitively and instinctively understood the power and efficacy of being around one another, the power and the efficacy of the gathering. This is why in Hebrews we're told to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together. Because there's something special about being in the same place. And if nothing else, that's what this time of pandemic and isolation has taught us. Across the board, across the country, almost universally, church engagement and virtual attendance is declining. And as we've talked about that as a staff, and I've talked about that with the elders, I've just made the point that, you know, online church, this ability to participate in church in our sweatpants and the comfort of our own home, that's been a thing for at least 15 years, maybe longer. And there's a reason why it hasn't taken off. There's a reason why it hasn't overtaken in-person church. Because even now in the 21st century, we understand that there's a power and an efficacy that's difficult to capture in simply being together, in experiencing the teaching together, in laughing together, in and worshiping together and sharing together in the lobby, we understand that that is important. It's why at Grace, if you do come to a Discover Grace class, that one of the things we do ask our partners to commit to is to prioritize Sunday morning service. Because we believe that the gathering matters. And I can't wait until we are able to gather again. It's a distinctive of the early church and it ought to define our church. The sixth distinctive is the one that, of all of them, probably fires me up the most. I get so excited about this, and I think that it defines the early church. They were defined by communion and community. They were defined by communion and community. We see in verse 42 that they were devoted to the breaking of bread. And then again in 46 that they gathered in one another's homes and they broke bread together. It happens two times. And then all throughout this passage, we see they, they, they, collective, collective, collective. It's always about others. And the church is a fundamentally communal institution. It is fundamentally involved with others. I've said often it is impossible to live out the Christian life on an island. It is impossible to grow closer to Jesus void of the influence of others in your life. We absolutely, our souls need to be surrounded by godly Christian community. That's why at Grace, our mission statement is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people because we believe that we cannot deepen our connection with Jesus void of connections with others. And I believe this so fervently that I would say to you, if you're listening this morning and you're not sure that you have Christian community in your life, ignore everything else that I'm saying. Put it all on the back burner. Just take it and set it aside for a later date and get Christian community in your life. Stop right now. Quit listening to me and pray that God would provide for you a community of faith who supports you, who love you, who have permission to tell you the truth about yourself and to tell you what Jesus says about you. We desperately need Christian community in our life. And the early church was a communal thing, and that persists to this day. But it wasn't just about community. It was about communion. We see that phrase, the breaking of bread, and we automatically think that this is an expression of community and hospitality, and it is. And for all of history, for all of history, that has been how we've expressed hospitality. Food has been the fundamental way that we've expressed community. Once you get to know somebody a little bit, maybe you have a common activity or something, but eventually you're going to say, hey, let's grab lunch. Let's get the wives together and let's go to dinner. Let's get the families together and y'all come over. And increasingly that means we go somewhere and we experience a food together, but the most intimate time, the most special times are when people are invited over to the home. When you invite people into your home, there's a special care taken. You clean up the house. You let them know that you care about them, that they matter to you. You try to think of the special thing that they like, of the appetizer that they went nuts over the last time, of the dessert that you can remember in conversation that they said they like. If you're making steaks and there's somebody who doesn't like steak, you make sure and you have chicken to make them feel thought for and cared for. You make sure that there's something for their kids so that they know that their kid is important to you as well. There's this special power of hospitality, of welcoming people into our homes and expressing community in that way. And when the tradition of communion started, that's where it started. It started in someone's home as Jesus and the disciples sat around and broke bread together. They sat around and they were having a meal together. They were expressing community. It was the Passover supper. And you know, we observe communion in our churches. Most churches observe it like grace does. At grace, we do it once a month in the service. The elders stand on either side at the end of the sermon. I'll go through the story of communion and when it started and we'll have a particular thought that we go with. Then we spend some time in prayer and then we line up and we get we get the bread, and we dip it, and we go back to our seats, and it's an austere, respectful time, and that's right and good. But communion didn't start that way. Communion started in community. Communion started around a table. When Jesus took the bread, and he looked at the disciples, and and he broke it and he began to hand it out. And this was not an unusual practice. Every home didn't have a knife. The way that you serve bread was to take the loaf and tear off a portion of it and give it to your guests. So what Jesus did was not a new thing. This wasn't unusual to the disciples or anyone else who could have seen it. It was a ubiquitous, common part of the meal. And in this moment, Jesus takes the thing that we do every time we express community and he imbues it with purpose. And he says, every time you do this, do what? Line up in church and get in the line and tear off the bread and dip it in the wine and spend some time praying? No, not that. Every time you do this, every time you gather in community with me as your focus and you break bread, you serve the bread to the people who are in your house. This common activity that was mundane until this moment. Jesus says, every time you do this from now on, I want you to remember me. I want you to remember that I'm the bread, that I'm the bread of life, that my body was broken for you. Similarly, he takes the wine and he pours it. It's a totally common mundane activity. It happens in every dinner party ever where the host takes the glasses and pours the drink. And Jesus says, whenever you do this, whenever you do what? Gather in church and dip the bread in the wine? No, whenever you experience community together and when you serve the drinks, I want you to stop and remember me and feel that and see that as my blood that is poured out for you. Remember my crucifixion and that I am the tie that binds here and that I am what brings you in common with one another and that I am what reconciles you with the heavenly Father. Remember that. Communion didn't start in church buildings. It started at dinner tables. It started in community. And Jesus took these mundane expressions that are a part of every communal gathering around the table, and he said, from now on, when you do these things, don't just let them be a passive thing where you just serve the bread and you serve the drinks and you move on. I want you to stop and I want you to remember me. That's communion. Communion is always an expression of community. Communion always draws us into community and community should always focus on communion. So I think the challenge for us at Grace, who love community very much, we're real good at community. That's one of my favorite things about this church. We love having people over. We love getting together. But the challenge for us is when we do, when that bread is served and when it's broken, when the drinks are poured, it is right and good and obedient to pause and to pray and to say, Jesus, thank you that you are this bread. Thank you that you are this drink. Thank you that you make tonight possible and that you make our relationship with you possible. We're having fun here tonight, Jesus, but we want to pause and we want to say thank you for making this possible and we want to remember you because that's the instruction of communion. Not once a month when you're in church, come to the front and take the bread and dip it in the wine. That is a shadow. That is a mimicry of the actual communion. And it is right and good to do it in church. But it is forgetful and wrong if we don't do it together in community. So let the challenge be to grace as we commune, as we gather, as we express hospitality and we all begin to fling our doors back open and have people over. Can we please take a moment in those times and do things in remembrance of Christ and make communion more a part of our community. Finally, the seventh distinctive is that this church had a contagious joy. I want to read for you the last portion of scripture so that you kind of know what I'm talking about. It says, They gathered together every day. They invited people into their homes. It's not a stretch to think that they would just invite their neighbors in too because there's a meal and you should come have fun with us. They gathered in the temple courts. They pooled their resources and gave to anyone who had need. No doubt that brought people in who had need, who experienced this genuine community and love for the first time in their life. And then in all of that, as they met with glad and happy hearts, they praised their God and it said that they won favor with all the people. Not just the people of the church, but the people around them, which means that the people of Jerusalem at large began to take notice of this infectious community of joy that was the early church. And because they began to take notice of that, because they won favor with the people surrounding them simply by being an expression of the church and exuding that contagious joy, because people saw that, this passage ends with, and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Their contagious and infectious joy led to the salvation of souls. It's really interesting to me that two weeks ago I talked in Acts 2 about the fundamental and foundational repentance of the church. It's a confession that I've been wrong about who I thought Jesus was and I'm going to walk in the belief that he is who he says he is. And out of that confession and repentance, 3,000 people were added to that number. And now in Acts 2, 42 through 47, we see more people being added to their numbers. And the confession and repentance is what drew people in at the beginning, but now at this point in the church, what's now drawing people in? Now what's drawing people in is the favor that their infectious joy is winning with all people. Now what we're seeing is the church cranking on all cylinders. We're seeing the results of what happens when people are devoted to the apostles' teaching and are eager learners, when they're devoted to fellowship in Christ and their time together, when they're defined by community and communion, when they're known for their generosity, when they're experiencing joy, and all of that is working together to cause the people of Jerusalem to look at the church and go, what's going on over there? That's different. I want to be a part of that. That's why when we have Grace's big night out, whenever we can do that again, I cannot wait. I always tell Compass Rose where we have them. They say, do you want to just rent it out? Should we shut it down and just invite Grace people? I always say, no way. I want the other folks of Raleigh to see our community because I believe our community is infectious. This is how the church ought to work. This is how we draw people in. And I believe, Grace, I absolutely do, that even though we are in a time of trial right now because we can't meet together, that as soon as we can fling the doors open and as we move forward, I think grace is going to be stronger than it ever has. And I think if we will commit ourselves to these seven distinctives, that if we will be eager learners, that if we will devote ourselves to Christ-centered time together, that if we will be known for our generosity, committed to spiritual disciplines, if we will be committed to the gathering, if we will see the importance of community and communion, I think if we will do all those things, it will produce in us an infectious and contagious joy that the people of Raleigh will notice and come to. And I hope that's what we will be. I hope that we will be a church in the 21st century that embodies all the distinctives of the church of the first century. And I'm so excited to see where we get to go from here when this season of quarantine is over. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so good to us. We can't fathom how you love us. We can't fathom how you look out for us. We are collectively thrilled that we get to be participants in your church, in your kingdom, in your bride that you came to rescue. Thank you for Jesus, who is the tie that binds us together and reconciles us to you. God, I pray that we would be every bit as unflinchingly the church in the 21st century as they were in the first century. Give us boldness to go where you would have us go. Give us zeal and energy to get there. Give us a devotion to you to sustain us. Give us an infectious joy to draw others in. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.