Sermons tagged with Battle

Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kid stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along, and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. Today, pals, Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. That has to be the coolest Mr. Rogers. I mean, a little bit creepy, but mostly, mostly, mostly cool, right? Hey guys, if you are new visiting or we just hadn't had the chance to meet yet, my name is Aaron and I am so excited to be sharing with you today. If you weren't here last week, it was a really cool week, especially for me being the newbie at Grace. It was a ministry partner Sunday and we got to hear from some of our ministry partners and just kind of hear exactly what was going on. And then afterwards, we gave you tacos. And I kind of wish the tacos were this week, because if I do a bad job, but we give you tacos after, you're going to leave and say, that was pretty good, right? So no, no, Nate, man, thank you so much just for the opportunity to come up and share what's been on my heart. Really excited about it. So, to kind of get our minds going in the right direction, I just kind of want to gauge the audience, see if anybody is like me. Is it anybody else who is extremely frustrated and gets angry when something doesn't go according to plan, but because of someone else, right? Like somebody else doesn't do their job, right? Have you ever had a bad haircut? I realize some of you guys are looking at me right now and you're like, 15 years ago, and your wife's looking at you and giggling. I didn't mean to bring that up. I'm sorry. But you understand what I'm saying, right? That happened to me not long ago. And now I'm realizing that I thought of this illustration this morning, getting ready for church, and now there's a bunch of people looking at my hair to see if I'm telling the truth. And stop it. But no, it's the most frustrating thing that can happen, right? Because it's not just that moment that you walk away angry. It's every morning afterward, you're looking, you're trying to fix your hair, and he's like, are you kidding me, right? You go get a hat, go to work, and it's done and over with. But it's frustrating because I went in with a plan, right? I went in and said, hey, this is what I want to do. I talked to him about showing pictures. I didn't walk out looking like Brad, but I looked like one of the little creatures from the Where the Wild Things Are. It was terrible. And every day, I'm like, bro, you had one job. I did everything that I could possibly do. Is anybody else like that? But let me ask you a question. Have you ever had that experience with God? You do everything that you could possibly do, and at some point you kind of sit back and you say, I mean, God, are you going to do anything about this? Like, God, is there, like, I can't, how long am I going to have to keep going through this same thing day after day? God, are you going to step in at any point in time and change things? That's one of the things that I think is so inspirational about, have you ever seen people that just have this unshakable faith? Have you ever encountered that before? It's like it doesn't matter what they deal with. It doesn't matter what they go through, what happens to them in their life. There's this solid confidence in tomorrow. Well, not necessarily tomorrow, but more in the God who kind of controls tomorrow. It's like nothing can be thrown at people like, no, it'll be okay. And they're not void of emotion, right? It's not like they're walking around saying, oh, no, everything's whatever. No, they grieve, they hurt, they have pain, they do all of this other stuff, but there's still this confidence. If you ever have a chance to speak to somebody who is kind of like that, they just have this solid, unshakable faith, I want to encourage you to just ask a lot of questions. And what I believe you will end up hearing is some variation of this, this confidence that God is not simply an observer of our life. He is actively involved in our life. God is not simply up there watching and hoping you get things figured out, hoping things work out according to plan. He's actively involved in the shaping of who we are and the world around us. It doesn't mean everything is going to be perfect all the time, but it means we're never going to be alone in this. And if you ever encounter someone who just kind of walks with that bold confidence that regardless what happens to them, I know that God is not just watching. And that's one of the things that I loved this last week about studying through and reading through Joshua and the battle of Jericho. You're probably familiar with the story. We are going to be in Joshua chapter 6. Joshua is the sixth book of the Old Testament. You can turn there, thumb to it in YouVersion, or we'll put it in this fancy digital Bible in the sky, right? But to catch you up, make sure we're all on the same page, Joshua, where we pick up in the story is he is a newly installed leader for the Israelites. It has been for hundreds of years, not hundreds of years, but for years and years, Moses was the leader. It starts back in when they were in slavery to the Egyptians, right? Moses stepped in, God used Moses, freed them from slavery to the Egyptians, walked them on this extremely long journey, got to see God do some incredible things while they're in journey to this land that God has promised them. And because the Israelites are super creative, they called it the promised land, right? And so now they get to this place where the promised land is in sight. They can see the land of Canaan and it's like, okay, that's it. That's where we're headed. Like everything they had been hoping for, they see it with their eyes. Moses dies. Joshua is raised to be the new leader. And God says to Joshua, hey, listen, there it is. We're going to walk into that land, that land that I promised you, the thing you've been hoping for. You're going to go there. And you're going to go and you're going to conquer all of your enemies there. It will be your land. The very first thing in their sights is Jericho. And so in Joshua 6, 1, it says this about the city of Jericho. It says, Jericho was strongly fortified because of the Israelites, no one entering or leaving. And the Lord said to story, right? Because it's not just any normal boundary. You can see that they really weren't worried about fighting. That's not what Jericho was depending on. They were depending on being able to keep the Israelites out, and that's what was going to keep them safe. I've done a little bit of reading. Without getting too bogged down into the details, the walls are actually made up of two sets of walls. They have an outer wall that starts with a stone retention wall, keeping the resources in. It goes above ground about 12 to 15 feet. Then on top of that, you have a brick mud wall. And it just goes up. It goes up an embankment for a little bit, and you come to the second brick mud wall, and it's built up. A lot of archaeologists, and I've read some commentaries, and what they would end up saying is if you're standing at the base of this wall and you look up, it would be similar to looking up at a four-story building. And that's what God says. That's the first target. But did you catch what he said in verse 2? He says, look, I have handed you. That's past tense. That's already happened. And so God sends them to this place that says, the wall, you can do nothing about. Like, it is absolutely impassable. You cannot touch this. I'll take care of that, and you're going to take care of everything else. And in verse 3, he says, here is the plan. I'm going to try to read this, but it's small. My large print Bible is still in transport, and I'm from Kentucky, so there's that too. But it says this in verse 3. It says, That's not that funny. I mean, come days. Have seven priests carry seven rams horn trumpets in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times while the priests blow the trumpets. When there is a prolonged blast of the horn and you hear it sound, have all the people give a mighty shout. Then the city wall will collapse and the people will advance each man straight ahead. So to kind of flesh that out just a little bit, it's essentially this. This was the plan. He said, I want you to have your fighting men in the front. Right behind them, I want you to have seven priests with seven trumpets. And then I want you to have a couple of priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant. And behind those, pulling in the rear guard, have the rest of your fighting men. And then he said, walk. Like literally, God's plan was take a hike. Like that was what God told them to do. Now listen, I am not much in way, I don't know much about like military strategic battles, right? The extent of my knowledge with warfare strategy begins and ends with Call of Duty. And I'm really not good at that either. But I do know this, that's a bad plan, right? Like, if I'm Joshua, I've got some questions. It's like, okay, God, that was a great broad stroke about what's going to happen, but there's some details I really kind of need to know about. Like, just feel me. Like, so we've got these guys. We've got our swords. Anything at all you want us doing with that? You want us making a lot of noise while we're circling just to strike some fear? No, no, just walk. As a matter of fact, just be real quiet while you're walking, too. Okay, God? I saw Bob has a shovel. Like, we can dig around, build something, like, to make the walls a little... No. Just walk. You poke it with a stick. I mean, what? Just literally just walk? Yeah, just walk. And so we have a tendency when we're reading stories like this, especially if you're anything like me, we kind of dehumanize, right? Like we will pull all of the emotion out of the text that we're reading. So just to kind of put you in that, let's say Nate comes up next week and he says, hey guys, listen, I have a vision from God. The city of Raleigh is going to be ours. We are going to remove all things evil from this city, right? There will be no more cats in this place. Like everything, everything evil is going to be, we'll get rid of it. Like there's, there's nothing else. The first thing we have to do, we have to conquer the most evil place in all of Raleigh. So we meet at Walmart and he says, so what we're going to do is I want you to just kind of walk around. He was like, okay, okay. We walk around, we get excited. We're ready to go. Yeah. We walked around. What now? He said, well, go home, and then come back tomorrow. Okay, okay, we can do that. What, you want us to bring? No, no, you're really good. Just walk. As a matter of fact, guys, we're going to do this for seven days, and on the last day, we're going to walk around it seven times. Listen, I trust Nate. I'm not doing that, right? Like, I'm sending my text. Hey, man, shoot me a message after y'all scream, and I'll show up, right? Because it just doesn't make any sense. Like, maybe the first couple of days, the Israelites were excited. Again, they just saw the land that they had been hoping for. They just saw the place that they had been traveling. They just saw the place that their grandparents and their grandparents, that everyone has been telling them that we're about to walk into it. So maybe there was some excitement. Maybe there was some enthusiasm on day one, two, and three. But what about day four, when they walk around it again and nothing changes? Day five, they walk around again, They look up, and there's not a brick that's fallen. Six and seven, much the same. I mean, again, let's be real. They're not superheroes. They're people like you and people like me. I mean, have you experienced that before? Were you're doing exactly what God has asked you to do, and the end result just doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe it's in your marriage, right? Like your marriage hasn't been exactly what you would hope it would be. And so you try to be obedient to who God has asked you to be as a spouse. You love sacrificially. You put them first. You're consistently serving, but they're just not reciprocating. And at some point, do you step back and say, is it worth it, God? Are you going to do something here? Because the unchangeable thing, Jericho, I can't change their heart. God, you said you would do something. You gave me your promise. Like, I know you want this. Maybe it's with work, right? Like you try to be a hard worker. You are the first one there, the last one to leave. You're trustworthy. You're always looking out for your coworkers, but time after time, year after year, you get passed over for the promotion. Somebody else gets in like, God, what are you doing? Maybe it's with finances in general, right? Like you start saving, you stop eating out, you try to create some margin, you put a little bit of money into saving, except the thing you can't control, inflation just seems to keep going up. And it's like, God, man, I'm doing everything I can. Are you going to step in at some point? Like, what do you do when the right thing no longer seems like the right thing to do? What do you do when you're doing exactly what God has asked you to, but nothing is changing? That's where these guys were. Like, again, if you're anything at all like me, well, the wall starts to influence my behavior a little bit. That unchangeable thing starts to have a little bit of control in who I become. Think about how crazy that is. That the thing you dislike the most ends up influencing who you become. And I get it. I'm not up here talking at you. I'm probably doing more counseling to myself than I am anything. Because it's hard when you're doing exactly what God has asked you to do. You're stepping in the exact path that he's asked you to step, but nothing is changing. You take another trip and the brick doesn't fall. You take another trip. There's no rain to make the ground soft. There's no winds. There's nothing. It's like, God, all right, what's going on, God? But that doesn't seem to be what happens to the Israelites. I'm not saying that's not what they felt. Because I believe with all confidence they had to have those wonderings. But what we see Joshua say in verse 16 tells us that they consistently had a hope. That God was not simply an observer, that he was involved, that God's promise wasn't forgotten. And here's what he said in verse 16. After the seventh time, this is on the seventh day. Remember the seventh day they were supposed to walk around at seven times. This is after the seventh time. The priest blew the ram's horn, and Joshua said to the troops, shout, for the Lord has given you the city. Did you catch the tense that he used? He said, the Lord has given you the city. Joshua, the wall's still standing, bro. How is the city mine? But he had this confidence. And what he did was echoed God's promise. From the very beginning, God said, hey, listen, the city's yours. Don't worry. I'll take care of the walls. And there's something about Joshua. There's something in Joshua's world that allowed him to consistently do the same thing, consistently be the person God is asking him to be, consistently follow in the steps, consistently let his faith influence his steps versus the opposition. And he said, hey, we did it. We're there. We won. It's good. And it was simply the promise. There was something that he did that kept him gripped to the promise versus the not tumbling wall. It's that confidence that we were talking about. Joshua had a hope God would fulfill his promise by remembering the promises he fulfilled. That's what he did. So maybe that needs to happen kind of in your world, right? Hey, God, I'm having a hard time here. But Joshua encouraged his men. That's why I said, shout. Victory is won. And as I'm reading this, I'm like, okay, Joshua, that's not the problem. The problem isn't believing God can, or the problem isn't believing that God is able, but what is it when you're in that moment that makes it so hard to cling to the promise of God? And as I'm reading through, I come to this portion of the instruction that is right in the middle of everyone, the Ark of the Covenant. Now see, to everyone, to the citizens of Jericho and everyone watching, the Ark of the Covenant really represented who the Israelites were, who they were fighting for, exactly whose people they were. But to the Israelites, it was a little something different. To the Israelites, when they looked at the Ark, it actually contained three different things in it. The first thing was Aaron's staff, which was crucial in a big part of being freed from the Egyptian slavery. The second thing was the stone tablets, which Moses chiseled the Ten Commandments on. And the third thing was manna. Manna was something that as they were walking through the wilderness, they didn't have any food, they were starving, and it's where God provided food for them. All three of those things were sitting in the ark. And everywhere that the ark went, not only did it represent the presence of God, but it represented the promise of God. And I think it's by no accident, no accident at all, that when God said, hey, listen, I want you to have some guys up front. I want you to have some guys in the back. And right in the middle of everything, in the middle of everything you're doing, I need you to put the ark. I need you to be able to see the ark. When the wall's not falling quite as quickly as it needs to, I want you to be able to see the ark and remember how I've provided for you in the past. As the walls and you're walking around and something's not necessarily happening, I need you to be able to see the ark and remember, oh man, I remember whenever we were in captivity, God stepped in and freed us for no reason other than the fact that he loved us. I need you to be able to see the ark, and I want you to remember that when we didn't have a direction, he gave us a direction. I need you to see the ark, and I want you to remember as soon as you start thinking, I'm not going to come through for you, I want you to remember how the bread came from nowhere, and you had plenty of food. I need you to see those things. And it was right in the middle of everything that they were doing, in the middle of their frustration, in the middle of the waiting, in the middle of the, God, are you going to do something? Suddenly they caught a glimpse of something that was a reminder of God's presence and God's promise. And they held onto this hope because they remembered God's promise. Joshua said, shout. And is the thing in your world that cannot be taken away from you? What is your experience with God, your encounter with God, that when things aren't happening the way that you would like them to happen, when you're moving toward what you hope for the most and you aren't quite seeing it yet, what is the thing that catches your eye, that you can go back to, that you can remember? And hope. Hope comes in. Like there's hope in a tall obstacle. So, just to be very transparent, very honest, a couple of years ago, serving at a church in southeast Georgia as one of their pastors, and it was a dark, dark time. I grew up in a church where it was really very behavior and rules oriented. I'm not saying anything except for what I ended up taking away from that is that I had to be good enough in everything that I did. I'm grateful, in part, because it made me so awesome today. But no, there's another part of it that I kind of shifted that same type of approach to God. I felt like I had to be good enough for God. And from time to time, that would creep up in my world. And serving at this church, leading people, and I'm not saying that to elevate myself. I'm saying that to say, hey, listen, I, none of your pastors are any different. I was at a place that I felt like God didn't want me anymore, that I felt like God didn't care for me, that God kind of took his hand off of me, that God wasn't going to use me anymore, and he was just kind of done. Go. I gave you too many chances. I'm done. I'm over with. And I'm telling you, I was at a dark, dark place. And I remember, I'm an artist. I'm going to get emotional. Just deal with it. It'll be fun. I remember I went into the church one day, and I was so desperately, I needed to see a brick fall. And I'm saying, on my knees, I'm praying, God, listen, I need to know you haven't given up on me. I need to know that you're still here. I need to know that you still hear me. I need to know that you still care. I was so desperate for some type of a sign. After I would pray, I would look up at the lights and kind of hope for them to flicker. I needed something. I stayed there for 10, 15 minutes, glancing, looking at my phone. Maybe he would say, I love you or something. Just anything. Silence. Day seven. No brick. No lean. And I remember I stood up. I walked right down the middle of the aisle, headed out. And in my mind, I said, I guess I still got to be that good Christian kid, huh? I was angry. I went home. And I was about to sit down and just work on my call-to-duty skills, right? And before I did that, it hit me. I was like, I guess I got to, again, do my devotional thing. And I sat down. I don't need to read it. I sat down. Opened my devotional. And it was actually, it was Louis Giglio, an incredible speaker. He was probably good. I don't remember what he said, though. But I read the text with it. It was Isaiah 43. And it said, this is the Lord your God, and I love you. I chose you. I'll be with you. And I'm telling you, I got broke. Just like, there's my arc. I don't care what happens tomorrow. I can always look at that. I can always remember. He heard. He remembered me. He didn't give up on me. And I'm telling you, I suck really bad at remembering that. So much so I had to get it tattooed on my arm, right? And every day at two o'clock there's a notification that pops up on my phone that says, hey, remember how God is for you. Believe that he'll do it again. Every day, 2 o'clock. What's your arc? What is that encounter? What is that moment? What is that experience with God? Is it a car accident that should have killed you? Is it your spouse still loving you? Is it a home, being able to close on a home in 2022? Good Lord. What is your arc? How different, how different would those moments of walking around the wall be if you started and stopped your day with a journal? Like at the end of every day, sit down and write down, man, this was my God moment. This is what I saw God do in my world today. And then next week, recount back to the week prior. Read that, oh man, that was incredible. And you're sandwiching your day with your God moments, with your ark. How different would your world look if every night at dinner you sat down and you just asked your kids, asked your spouse, hey, what happened in your world today? What did you see God do? What was that cool thing? Not for any type of you have to to be good enough, but I'm telling you, you've experienced it. I've experienced it. The Israelites experienced it. This hurt and this heartache and this wall that kept me from having the hope that Jesus said he came to offer. What's your arc? In just a minute, I'm going to pray for us, And there's a new song. Maybe you're familiar with it, but I believe it's a newer song for here. And it comes right out of this text. And so what I want you to do, I don't want you to necessarily sing along at first. You're more than welcome to. You can read the words if you don't know it, whatever. But what I want you to do is take just a moment and find your ark. Like think back to those God moments, those God encounters that cannot be taken away from you because I promise you this, we need those in our journey because one of the things we were never promised is easy. Find your ark. And then we get to this bridge. The bridge of this song says, I've seen you move. You move the mountains. And I believe you'll do it again. You made a way when there was no way. And I believe you'll do it again. What I'm going to ask you to do at that moment, you've got your ark. I want you to stand up and do exactly what the Israelites did. Shout it. We declare praise to a God who is worthy of our praise. And I believe with all of my heart, right, he is involved in the world that you're living in. I can't tell you tomorrow is going to be easy, but I can tell you if it's not, you've got an ark that can still bring hope into your journey. Let's pray. God, thank you. Thank you for being a God who is good, a God who is kind, a God who is faithful, a God who has blessed us with encounters with you that we can take along with us for the rest of our life. And it's in those moments, I believe that's what helped your disciples ask and pray for boldness, to pray for moments of new experiences with you. Because it just strengthened their faith and it built them to a place of unshakable faith in you. So God, I know sometimes it's hard to remember, and again, you have this promise that your Holy Spirit will speak to us and guide us and lead us. What I ask you to do, Lord, is we sit in just a couple of moments and we reflect on our encounters with you. We invite your spirit to just come and flood our minds, God. Just pour these encounters with you, maybe even moments that we didn't give you credit for. Just flood our hearts, flood our minds with an ark that we can carry with us for the rest of our life. In Jesus' name.

Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid, and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic is those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark,, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long has it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Oh, this week is David and Goliath. Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for laughing along. Don't worry, we're not going to show you the full minute and 40 second version of that for the next 10 weeks. We can shorten it, but we'll let you watch it a couple more times. Thanks for being here this morning. Those of you who were able to make it in person, thank you. Watching online, wherever you are. I am excited about this series because I love these old stories from the Old Testament that many of us, as I said in the video, picked up when we were kids. Many of the stories that we're going to be telling over the next 10 weeks or so are stories that most, if not all of you could tell. I'm sure everyone in this room can tell some version of David and Goliath that wouldn't be wildly inaccurate. But the thing is about these stories that I'm willing to bet has probably been a long time since we've heard them, since we've read them for ourselves, since we've mined them for fresh details with a different perspective. And when you do read these stories and you look at the details of them and you look at the humanity of them, I think what you see is that the Bible really is unflinching in the details. That we teach these stories to kids. Here's a little secret in ministry. We teach these stories to kids because 1 Samuel 17 with the narrative story of David and Goliath goes over a lot better in the elementary school classroom than does a detailed theology mind out of Romans 8. Okay? So usually we teach kids stories because we put volunteers in there for the history of the church, and a volunteer just needs a story to tell because that's way easier to do than teaching theology to four-year-olds. So we tell stories, but make no mistake, these are not kids' stories. These are stories for everybody. And when you get into the details of it, you learn real quick, these are stories for grown-ups. So this morning, I get to tell you my favorite story to tell. It doesn't mean I'm good at it. It just means I really like this story of David and Goliath. So to set the scene, we're in 1 Samuel chapter 17. 1 Samuel is the ninth book of the Bible. It's sandwiched between Ruth and, you guessed it, 2 Samuel. So if you want to pull out the Bible in front of you and just kind of read along as I read, you're more than welcome to do that or grab your Bible at home and do the same thing. But the author of Samuel sets the scene at the beginning of chapter 17 and he says the Israelites and the Philistines are at war with one another. They're out for battle. The Philistines lived on what is now the coast of modern day Israel. So there was always tension and infighting and this battle between Israel and Philistia is pretty regular and pretty common. Eventually Israel wins because you've never heard of Philistia before and we all know where Israel is. But in this time they were big rivals. And so they assembled at a valley and drew up a battle line and the Philistines are on one mountain and the Israelites are on another mountain. And they're basically waiting for the other to get tired of waiting and come into the valley and give up the advantage. Neither army is going to go down into the valley and then try to fight uphill to a fortified enemy. So they're both just trying to wait the other party out. And in the midst of this steps a warrior named Goliath of Gath. And I'm going to read what scripture says about Goliath. This will not be on the screen, but I'm going to read what it says about Goliath and then try to sum it up for you because there's words like cubics and shekels and things like that, and we don't know what those are. So this is the description that we are given of Goliath. I'm in verse 4. Okay. So let me just paint a picture of what this actually describes. If you do the research and you look up the conversions and you try to figure it all out, I'm going to give you numbers that are in the middle, more conservative. Okay. Goliath was very likely between nine and nine and a half feet tall. Okay. That's really tall. That's almost a basketball goal tall, or it's about a foot and a half taller than a goal that I can dunk on. So however you want to think about that. I also instantly regret claiming that I can dunk on an eight-foot goal. I haven't done that in 15 years, and neglect and old age might have something to say about dunking on an eight-foot goal. So nobody put me to that. I'm crying uncle on that bet right now. But he was about nine, nine and a half feet tall. We'll call him nine feet tall. And if you're nine feet tall, just go with me on this, because I don't know. There's no guesses. But if you think about Shaq or a defensive lineman or these big behemoth dudes that we know of, and they weigh about 400 pounds or 350 pounds, and they're six feet tall, Shaq's seven foot tall. I don't know how much Goliath weighed, but 450? Five? 550? I don't think he was a skinny guy, nine feet tall and stocky. He was a heavy dude. And his armor, it says, if you add up all the shekels for his helmet, for his, for his breastplate that was made of chain mail and his bronze greaves, clocked in somewhere between 225 and 250. So that's like going to battle. I give my son John a ride on my shoulders and then you give us a piggyback ride. All right. That's what that's like. He goes into battle with an extra 250 on him. And not only that, he can walk down that hill apparently with ease. So he's walking down the hill. He's nine feet tall. He's somewhere around 500 pounds with an additional 250 pounds of armor, which makes me think that maybe Goliath was closer to 600, 650 pounds because of the ratios. Anyways, he is a walking giant tank. He's a bad dude. And it says that he's the champion. And when this tank gets down into the valley, this is what he says in verse 10. And the Philistine said, I defy the ranks of Israel this day. Give me a man that we may fight together. When Saul and all Israel heard the words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid. Now here's the challenge that he gives. And we see it in the verses above 10. I just can't read the whole chapter to you. But in the verses above 10, Goliath says, send me a man to fight. And it'll be winner takes all. You send me your champion. I'm the champion of the Philistines. Me and him will fight to the death. And if he wins, then all my brethren and all the people I'm fighting with and their wives and their children, we will be your slaves and servants. But if I win, if I defeat your champion, then all you guys up there on that hill and all your wives and all your children are our slaves and servants. So let's go. Who wants some? And this is what tells you that Goliath is a bad, this is how you know he was a bad dude. First of all, he comes down there and he says that to them. He says that to the Israelites. There's a whole army arrayed. They've been in a lot of battles. These are not new soldiers. They've all put their sword in something before. And he says, any one of y'all, come fight me. And if you win, then you win. The whole thing. Let's go. And all of them avoid eye contact like a kid in geometry class that's just been asked a question by the teacher. just straight down to the ground. They were afraid and greatly dismayed. When an entire army of men encountered another warrior, all of them and all their machismo and all their might and all their hoorah and all their battle cries and all that toughness, when push came to shove, they looked at Goliath and went, I think I'll just stay on the mountain. They were afraid and greatly dismayed. But what we don't think about that I actually think is pretty interesting is the response of the Philistines. Because if you're in the Philistine army and some dude walks out from amongst your ranks and goes down into the valley and yells up at the enemy, hey, if you got anybody who can take me, then you can have all them and their wives and their children as slaves. If you're in the Philistine army and you hear a dude do that and you think you can take him, are you going to let him say that for you? I'm not. If I'm in that army and somebody walks down and they say, hey, if anybody up there can defeat me, you can have Jen and Lily and John as your servants. If I can take him, no way. Not a chance I'm letting him say that for me. And let's just be real clear as I stand up here and be tough guy. Nate, I could take no one in either army. Probably in thumb wrestling, no way. But for the sake of argument, the Philistines just let him do it, which means they were just as scared of Goliath as the Israelites were. You got two full armies who don't want to mess with this guy. And the Bible says that he comes out every day and he offers that taunt every day for 40 days. It's interesting to me that the number 40 pops up in this story too. You've heard me say before, and my Bible scholars know, that the number 40 is pretty significant in Scripture. I don't know why. I'm not going to make any guesses. I just know it's significant, and here it is again in the story of David and Goliath. So while Goliath is coming out every day and challenging the Israelites to a one-on-one fight, there's this kid back home with his dad, Jesse, named David. And Jesse has some sons who are in the army, notably, and we'll see him in a minute, the oldest brother, Eliab. And so Jesse loads David up with cheese and grain and bread. And he says, I want you to take this to your brothers and to their commanders, which is interesting that the ancient world was into charcuterie. We thought that we invented it, but it was cheese and grains and bread. It was clearly arrayed on a nice wooden tray, and they all took pictures of it before they ate it, and it was great. So he takes that to his brothers, and while he's delivering it, he hears Goliath again. Goliath comes down. He does his daily taunt. And all the men of Israel are terrified. Except for David. David's response is different than the rest of their responses. Look at verses 24 and then 26. All the men of Israel, when they saw the man, fled from him and were much afraid. Then there's 25 and then in 26 it says, Okay, look at David's response. Every man there, again, hardened warriors, sees Goliath every day for 40 days and walks away dismayed and in terror. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? David, a shepherd boy, who we don't know how old he was, maybe between 14 and 16, so we'll call him 15. He could have been 12. I really don't know, but we'll call him a 15-year-old kid. Comes to the battle lines with his charcuterie, and he hears Goliath, and he sees him for the first time. And everyone else's response to Goliath is, please don't hurt me, Mr. Goliath. And David's response to Goliath is, who's that guy? Who does he think he is? You guys hear what he's saying? He's defying God. He's in trouble. I love that David's response to seeing Goliath for the first time in a sea of warriors is, who's that punk? Who does he think he is? God's going to be ticked. I would not want to be that guy. And then what follows, and I love this, is his oldest brother's response. Listen to what Eliab says to him. It's what every older brother in the history of mankind would say. It's also what all of us would say to David if we were in those battle lines and heard a punk 15-year-old saying this. Now Eliab, his oldest brother, heard when he spoke to the men, and Eliab's anger was kindled, yeah, no kidding, against David. And he said, why have you come down and with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your presumption and the evil in your heart, for you have come down to see the battle. I love it, I love it. I love it. And you got to kind of read stuff into the Bible sometimes to pull out the details and make it come alive. This is his oldest brother of eight sons, his youngest brother, who is the shepherd. He has the lowest job, the easiest job, the least respected job in the family. comes to the battle line with meat and cheese and then says, who's this punk? And his brother's like, shut up. Who are you? How are you here? Who's watching those three sheep that you tend in the wilderness, that big important job you're doing? Who's doing it now? Get out of here. You're just here to see a fight that's gross and disgusting. These men's lives are at stake. Go home. It's a totally reasonable response. But I think David's response here, the first time he encounters Goliath is the most interesting. And I think it kind of tips our hand to the question that underlies this entire story. This whole story begets this question. What made David different from all of Israel? What was it about David that upon encountering Goliath for the first time, he responded completely differently from his entire nation? What is it about David as we move through the story and we see him make different statements? What is it about David that makes him act and talk like that? What is it about David that gives him this sense of calm and confidence that God's going to take care of things. What makes David different? A lot of people, and it's how I was taught when I was growing up, would say it was his faith. David had bigger faith than everybody. He had more faith than everyone in Israel. He had more faith than all of his countrymen. I don't think that's true. Samuel was still alive during this battle. You want to tell me that 15-year-old David had more faith than Samuel? Maybe, but I don't think so. How about the praying widows in Israel who had been seeking the presence of God on behalf of the army for days and hours on end. He had more faith than them. He was a better Christian in our vernacular than everybody in the whole country. He had more faith than everyone at 15. Maybe, but doubtful to me. So let's hang on to that question. What makes David different? As we move into kind of the next scene of the story. So he's on the front lines and he says, who does that guy think he is? What's going to happen for the person who kills him? They're like, you know, King Saul, who by the way, is head and shoulders above everyone else, the Bible says, and therefore is the most likely candidate to go and take on Goliath. And lest you think that this was an army full of guys who just weren't skilled fighters, that they didn't really have a champion, they had Joab and they had Abner in their armies. And we see later their exploits, that they are great warriors and great fighters. David's mighty men, the people who have become David's mighty men are no doubt in this army at the time. So let's not pretend that there aren't capable fighters in the army. There's just a bunch of scared fighters in the army and David is not. So David goes to the guy who should be picking the fight and taking the challenge. And he says, and he goes to Saul and he's like, hey, I'll take care of your Goliath issue. I noticed you got this giant, seems really annoying. I'm gonna handle it for you. Just cool. And this is the conversation that they have. Saul asks him, why should I let you do it? And David's response to me is remarkable. I'm going to pick it up in verse 34, and then verse 37 is going to be on the screen when we finish. And Saul said to David, go. And may the Lord be with you. Good luck, kid. Now here's what we miss in this passage that we just breeze right through. Because the point of the passage is, David said, God's been with me before. He'll be with me now. Except you missed the fun part. Look at this. Read it again. Saul says, why should I let you, why do you think you can defeat this giant? And David casually says, well, I don't know if you know this, I'm a shepherd. And so when I've been out in the wilderness and a lion or a bear would come and take one of the sheep, I would take my shepherd's staff, my stick, and I would chase down that lion or the bear, and then I would hit it with my stick. And it would drop the sheep, and I would take it home. And then if he arose against me, if the lion bowed up and wanted a piece, then I would grab him by the mane and beat him with my stick until he died. And I've done that multiple times because the Lord has delivered them into my hands. And I don't see any reason why this giant would be any different. And listen to me, if you don't think that's a big deal, go to the zoo. It's like an hour and a half. It's a wonderful drive. It's really worth it for your kids. Go to the zoo. Go to the lion's exhibit and choose a stick, any stick you want. Do research about it beforehand and buy one on Amazon for maximum density and flexibility so it doesn't snap the first time you hit the lion. Do whatever you want to do. Jump in the habitat and hit it, and then you see what happens. Hit a girl one, see what happens. And then David says, the Lord has delivered those into my hand and this giant will be no different. And I love the humility there of David. Takes no credit at all for it. If I did that, if I killed a lion with a stick, I would take a picture of the lion and me with the stick. And I would put it on 14 different colored t-shirts. And it would say, I killed this lion with this stick. And I would wear it every day. And I'd be Nate, the lion killer. But I'm not. I'm just Nate. I've killed zero lions. He's so humble about it. He gives the credit right to God. And Saul says, okay, all right, go ahead. And then there's that famous scene where he tries to put his armor on David. And David, if we had to guess based on archeological data, because I wanted to know the height comparison, so I did the research one time, 5'4", 5'6". Saul was probably closer to six foot. Saul's armor is not going to fit David. Saul has grown man strength. That strength you have when your wife has your first baby, your strength grows by 10. It just happens. It's old man strength. It's just a thing. David didn't have that yet. He's just a 15-year-old kid who later we hear is ruddy in complexion. He was a good- kid and ruddy, we think, some Hebrew scholars indicates ginger, redheaded. So for my redheaded friends, you and David, y'all are pals. So he tries on the armor, it doesn't fit. He's like, no, I'm good. And he goes to battle in the equivalent of a t-shirt and jeans. On his way, he goes down to the brook and he grabs five smooth stones. And there's a lot of ideas about why he grabbed five smooth stones. Goliath had five brothers, so it was one stone for each brother. Maybe, I don't know, it's fine. He was being prepared. I've heard pastors make this a lesson on preparedness. Even though you have faith, do all the work. I don't think that's true, which is nice because I don't like to do all the work. So he just, he got five stones and I don't know why, but he got them and he goes. And by the way, the sling that he's using is a leather strap with a pouch in the middle of it. You put the rock in there and you sling it around and then you let go of one end of it and the rock comes flying out at 90, 95, sometimes a hundred miles an hour or more. And this weapon, the sling was a common weapon and is the precursor to the bow and arrow in ancient battle. So it was not uncommon to have slingers as units in your army. So David had a sling and that's what he was going to use. So he goes into battle with Goliath. And this is where the good stuff happens. He goes down into the valley and approaches Goliath as Goliath is there issuing his daily taunt. And when Goliath turns and sees him, he responds in A, the most predictable way possible, and B, the stinking scariest way possible. Look at what Goliath says in verse 42 when he sees David. And when the Philistine looked and saw David, he disdained him, for he was but a youth, ruddy and handsome in appearance. And the Philistine said to David, am I a dog that you come at me with sticks? Which is a fair question. And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. The Philistine said to David, come to me and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. That's ancient smack talk. I don't know if you know that or not, but that's ancient trash talk. The large tank of a man, Goliath of Gath, turns and he sees a 15-year-old snot-nosed punk walking at him. And he says, this, this, this is what you're sending me for your country? This, this kid? What am I, a dog? Are you going to hit me with your stick? And David's like, it's worked before. You're going to hit me with your stick? And then he says, I am going to kill you. And then I'm going to watch the birds of the air and the beasts of the field pull apart your carcass. And we're going to have a party. It's going to be great, David. Let's go. To which 100% of us, if we were in David's shoes and Goliath said that to us, would immediately lose control of our bodily functions and scamper back up the mountain just as quickly as we could. I'm sorry, Mr. Goliath, there's been a big misunderstanding. I've got to tell you, from up there, you really look a lot smaller, and this is a huge mistake. I don't know what I was thinking. My bad. Listen, the one advantage David has over Goliath is that he's very likely quicker. So just go back up the mountain. That's not what he does. David's response is epic. And I get chills every time I read it. Verse 45 and 46, then David said to the Philistine right away, he responded, you come to me with sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day, the Lord will deliver you into my hand and I will strike you down and cut off your big fat head and I will give the dead beast, I will give the bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel. You done boogered up, Goliath. You've been defying the wrong God for too many days. And it's time to pay the piper. Goliath says, what am I, a dog? Are you going to hit me with your stick? And David, unflinching, unflinching, he says, you come at me with weapons that man made for you? I come at you in the name of the Lord God Almighty, and he's not happy. And I'm going to kill you, and I'm going to cut your head off, and then this army is going to run down the hill and kill everyone in this army. And then we're going to have a party while we watch the birds pull their carcasses apart. How do you like them apples, big fella? Goliath, it turns out, liked those apples as much as you would expect and enraged, charges at David to kill him. David, in this moment, as the story goes, puts the rock in his pouch, whips the sling around, and sinks it right in between the eyes of Goliath as he charges. And I know that he charges because the Bible tells us that after he got hit in the front of the head, that he landed on his face. He fell face first in a big dusty thud, I imagine. And how else could he fall face first unless enraged at David's response? He just grabbed his spear and started to yell and charge directly at David, who couldn't have been further away from me than the back of the room. And David calmly, confidently, puts that rock right between his eyes. And then David did what he said he was going to do. He walks up to the shield bearer, and he says, give me Goliath's sword. Give me the sword. He takes the sword. He cuts off the head. I bet that took a few swings. And then the armies of Israel rush down, killing the armies of the Philistines all the way back to their village. And when David gets done with that, he carries the big, fat, ugly head of Goliath into Saul, and he says, here you go. I told you what God would do. That's the story of David and Goliath. But the question remains, what made David different? What was it about David that at every turn allowed him to respond differently than everyone else around him? And really the question is, is there anything that David did there that we could possibly emulate in our life? And I said that I doubt that the answer is that he was the most faithful. I really think, and this is my opinion, you chew on it, you do with this what you like, but my opinion is that what made David different was his perspective. David's perspective made him unique amongst his peers. It was David's perspective that made him unique amongst his peers. And here's what I mean by perspective. The armies of Israel, they would gather every day and every day Goliath would come down and he would challenge them. And they would look at Goliath, and they would look at themselves, and they would go, that problem is too big for me. That is, my skill cannot handle that, my ability cannot handle that, my just natural genes cannot handle that. I cannot take that guy. I cannot overcome this. I cannot climb that mountain. I cannot get past that obstacle. I cannot solve that problem. I cannot fix that situation. I can't do it. I'm not big enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not bright enough. I'm not young enough. I'm not old enough. I'm not enough. I can't handle that. It's bigger than me. So I'm scared and I'm dismayed and I'm going to avoid it. That was their perspective. David's perspective was, you are nothing compared to Almighty God. See, everyone else, when they looked at Goliath, they saw a problem and compared it to themselves and knew that they weren't enough for it. But when David saw Goliath, he compared the problem to God himself and thought, oh my gosh, God is overwhelmingly going to destroy you. He is so much bigger and mightier and smarter and capable than any one of us are. God is sovereign. He is all knowing. He is all powerful. And what he wants to happen will happen. So Goliath, you're in trouble. Everyone else, when they saw Goliath, compared Goliath to themselves and got scared. And David saw Goliath and compared him to God and had faith. His faith didn't come from just doubling down and being more determined that he was going to love God and trust God more. His faith came from his perspective. When he encountered lions and bears in the wilderness, he didn't think, I'm going to take down this animal. I've got what it takes. He thought, I think God wants me to have that sheep. He's on my side. I'm going to go get it. When he saw Goliath, he didn't think, I think I could put one between his eyes. I think I'm a pretty good shot. I've done this a couple of times. He thought, God has helped me before and he will help me again. God is not happy with that. He's bigger than Goliath. He's going to handle it. And if you think about it and you go back to the story, what else could it be besides perspective? The very first time he sees Goliath, who's this guy? He goes to Saul, how are you going to kill him? Well, you know, God's done this stuff before. He'll do it again. And then he's down on the battlefield in the heat of it, and he says, you're going to come at me with man-made weapons? I'm here as God's representative. It doesn't matter what weapon I use. At no point did David compare Goliath to David. It was always a comparison to God. And God wins every comparison. He made sure of that when he sent Jesus to conquer death and sin. And if that's not the biggest victory in the history of the universe, I don't know what is. He's already proven to us that he overcomes everything. And if this sermon sounds familiar to you, it's because I did it five years ago with most of the same jokes. I didn't have charcuterie in there, but the rest of them. And it was about my fourth or fifth Sunday at Grace. And we put rocks underneath all the seats. And then we had markers up front, which apparently in five years, my preparation has slacked. I'm sorry, you have no rocks under your seats today. Just this one. And the encouragement was to get that rock and whatever you have going on in your life that feels too big for you, as cheesy as it is to say, whatever your Goliaths are. If it's raising your children, if I had these rocks today, I would write Lily and John's name on them. It's too big for me. I don't know how to raise kids that love Jesus and want to hang out with me who I respect. I don't know how to do that. Maybe it's your career. Maybe it's an illness that you or your family is facing. Maybe it's a tough decision or a broken relationship or just a big task that you've got in front of you and it just feels too big. Or maybe you're in a period of grief and you don't know how you're going to pull out of it and how life is going to feel the same and the sun is ever going to shine bright enough again. Maybe you just don't know, but everybody's got something in their life that when we look at it and we compare it to ourselves, we know that we know that we know that we are inadequate for it and that we cannot overcome it. And whatever that is, I would encourage you to take something that can remind you of that. I did five years ago. I took and I wrote grace on this rock. It was five weeks into being a senior pastor. I knew and still know it's far too big for me. I don't know how to lead a church. I don't know what we're supposed to do all the time. And every day I see this rock. It sits on the shelf right above my computer screen. And every time I see it, I'm reminded, yeah, this place is too big for you, man. So just worry about following God and God's going to handle the church. Just worry about pursuing him and loving people well and treating people right and having a heart for God and letting him inflame it more and more. Most of the time when I pray before my sermons, I'm really not praying about my sermons. I'm just praying that God would fill me up with a desire for him. It's just a weekly reminder that God, I want to want you more. That if we do that, if we just pursue him, God's going to take care of everything else. So the big problems in our life that feel insurmountable, that keep us up at night, that stress us out, that give us anxiety, maybe part of the problem is we're just comparing those things to ourself and admitting our inadequacy, when what we need to do is compare those things to God and admit His supremacy. And what we don't need to do in these moments when we feel overwhelmed is just double down on being better Christians. I've got to have more faith and then everything's going to work out. No, that's not fair. You need to change your perspective. And when you change your perspective and you have the perspective of David and we compare these things in our life not to ourselves, but to our Father, that brings us a peace and a confidence that in turn builds our faith. A few minutes ago, Aaron made the great point that David declared that he would always worship God. Even in the valleys, he would worship God. We said your praise will ever be on our lips. The only way we can possibly mean that is if even in the most dire of circumstances, we compare those circumstances to God, we have the perspective of David and we know, somehow we know that God is going to make a way. And so even though we don't feel the emotion of crying out in praise, we will go through the act of crying out in praise in faith because we have the perspective that God can handle whatever comes up in our life and we hand it over to him and we exist in that peace. And because we exist in that peace, our faith grows and we want to worship God more. So I hope that moving forward, when you remember the story of David and Goliath, that you won't think of a young man that had more faith than the rest of the country, but you will think of a young man who had a different perspective from everyone around him, who had the wisdom to compare his problem to God's ability, and that you'll be reminded to have the perspective of David. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the stories that you've chosen to share with us down through the centuries. Thank you for the bravery and courage of David. But God, I pray that we would always be well aware of where that bravery and courage and faith came from. That it came from comparing his obstacles to you instead of himself. I pray that you would give us the strength to do that. That we would see through your eyes our sin that we don't think is possible to overcome. Maybe be convinced for the first time that it is possible to overcome that. That we would see our grief, our desires, the decisions that we have to make, our careers, our children, our marriages through your eyes and know that you are more than capable of piloting us through any circumstance. And God, thank you for overcoming death and sin for us and winning the greatest victory that could be won. It's in the name of the winner of that victory, Jesus, that we pray these things and we praise you. Amen.

The Yo, good to see everybody. Thank you again for being here. This is the sixth part in our series going through the book of Revelation. I have really very much enjoyed going through Revelation with you all. And honestly, you guys have been more enthusiastic about it than I expected because Revelation can be a slog. It can be tough. We just took three weeks working through the tribulation, talking about the wrath of God and all the mechanics of the tribulation best we can. And to me, that feels tedious, but you guys have been incredibly supportive and incredibly kind. And it seemed like y'all have enjoyed going through this with me. As folks have asked me, how is Revelation being received? I say, it seems universally good. However, no one's going to tell me it's bad. No one's going to email me and be like, just so you know, really are looking forward to when this series is over and we can talk about something else. So that might be out there. And if that's you, I'm so sorry. Thank you for hanging with us. But for those of you who have enjoyed this, thanks so much for the encouragement because it's been really, really neat to get to go through it with you guys as a church. This morning, we arrive at Christ's return, the return of Christ. And I said last week that this needs to be the best sermon that I've ever preached in my life, to do adequate justice to the grandiosity of what's happening in Revelation 19. This will not be the best sermon of my life. I just wish that it could be, okay? So let's temper our expectations now. This is a B minus, all right? But in this sermon, we arrive at Jesus' return, at kind of the culmination of God's wrath, the final nail in the coffin. I said we've been walking through the tribulation. We've kind of looked at it through three different lenses. We looked at it in the first week to understand the wrath of God that's poured out in the tribulation, and we defined it. We defined it that week when we looked at Revelation 4 and 5, and Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, qualified to open up the seals and begin to open up God's wrath on his creation. We said he's beginning the seven-year process of tribulation. Now, what is tribulation? Well, we define that as the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on his creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. And this week, he reclaims it. This week, he does the last part of the tribulation. Then we looked at kind of the flow of it, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, and then we looked at the figures of it, and we'll talk a little bit more about the beast, the Antichrist, today. But where we're at in the narrative of Revelation is we're at the end of the Tribulation. God has poured out his wrath. We've had this great battle. There's been a great earthquake. God has sent darkness onto the kingdom of the Antichrist. And then he sends his son to finish up the work. He sends his son to answer the voice of the martyrs that cries out in Revelation chapter 6, the fifth seal. The voice of the martyrs below the throne of God that say, how much longer, God, before you avenge our death? You know who killed us. You see us suffering as your children. How much longer will you let this keep going? And we talked about in that week how we cry out with the martyrs, that every time something in our life happens that seems difficult or hard to understand or seems unfair, every time there's a school shooting, God, how much longer are you going to let this go on? Every time we lose someone too soon, God, how much longer will you let this world be broken? Every time we see something that we can't understand, we cry out with the martyrs and we say, God, how much longer, oh Lord, will you put up with this? And when he begins to open up the seals and begin the process of tribulation, he says, no more. And when he sends his son Christ, when we see Jesus in Revelation 19, that is God putting the final nail in the coffin of evil and saying, now I will make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Now I will rectify things. Now I will restore creation. Now I will answer the groanings that Paul talks about in Romans chapter 8 when we are told that all of creation groans for the return of the king. When we're told that we yearn inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters to experience eternity in the marriage supper of the lamb, we wait for this. We long for this. This is the hope that persists in our faith and keeps us anchored to our savior because we believe that revelation 19 is going to happen one day, that he's going to come get us, and that when he comes back, you guys have heard me say this before, he's not coming back as the Lamb of God. He comes back as the Lion of Judah. And we see this description in Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. So if you have a Bible, you can read along with me. I love this description of my Jesus. Every time I read it, whether it's out loud or just in private, I get chills. I love this picture of him. And I don't know, I don't know if everybody can relate to this. This may just be silly. This may just be me being a dummy, and that's fine. I'm familiar with this territory. It's not unfamiliar. But when I read this passage about my Jesus, that part of me as a little kid that loved to see the hero win in movies, that teenage boy that loved to watch Braveheart win, that loved Gladiator and seeing Russell Crowe's character stick it to him, that little boy that loves Star Wars, that loves to see the hero win against evil, against all odds, that part of us, and I'm sharing that with you because I think that God lays that in us intentionally. I think we love the hero because the hero is a shadow of this reality that Jesus becomes. We grow up learning to love when the day is saved and when the hero makes an appearance because God wove that, I think, into our hearts to appreciate the appearance of his son when that hero returns and appears once and for all. So it's with that preamble that we'll read the description as Jesus comes back to reclaim his creation. This is the description of him that John records. Chapter 19, verse 11. And behold, a white horse. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Gosh. That's Jesus, man. That's Jesus. That's our Savior. When we think of Jesus, when we pray to him, when we sing to him, when we think about him, when we think about being reunited with him in heaven, I believe that it's our tendency to think about the gospel of Jesus, to think about the crucified Christ. And I don't think that's anybody's fault. We have four gospels. We spend time there all the time. I revisit a gospel every spring with you guys. We focus on Jesus at Easter. We focus on Jesus at Christmas. And we see the teachings from Jesus come out of the gospel. And so it's right and good to think about our Jesus as the crucified Christ. It's right and good to think about our Jesus as gentle and lowly. We're actually reading a book, as the staff right now, called Gentle and Lowly, and what it tells us, and I did not know this, but that the only time that Jesus is ever asked to describe himself in scripture, or rather the only time that he actually does it, he describes himself as gentle and lowly. And I think that when we think about Jesus, we think about a humble Nazarene from the country. And that's fine and that's well and good. But that's Jesus in human form. Revelation 19, that's Jesus. You understand? That's who's waiting on us. That's who's coming to get us. That warrior king written on his robe and on his thigh, king of kings and Lord of lords as a callback to Isaiah so that we know exactly who it is. And when you read through this passage, it's unbelievable to me how rich it is with allusions to other parts of scripture so that there is no doubt about it that this is Jesus coming from the very beginning. It says that he was called faithful and true, capitalized. This is a deity. This is Jesus coming. And then it says that only he knows his name, which is, that's Exodus chapter three and four, when God refuses to share his name. That's a throwback to that. And then he says that he was called the word of God, which John is referencing his own writings at beginning of John, the gospel, when he says that the word was with God in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God through him, all things were made without him, nothing was made. And then at the end, king of kings and Lord of lords. John, in this description of Jesus is weaving together all of the scripture to point us to our savior. This is the Jesus, the one who has fire coming out of his eyes and a sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations. The one who rules with the rod of iron, who has the armies of heaven arrayed in linen, following down as he thunders down to conquer the beast and the dragon and the antichrist. That's the one that sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you. That's the one that rules for all of eternity. That's the one that we pray to. And that's the one who's coming to get you. So I want to at least take some time this morning to encourage you. When you sing to Jesus, when you pray to him, when you think of him, when you anticipate meeting him, anticipate the conquering Christ. Anticipate this Jesus. Anticipate the warrior king coming down to settle the score. Anticipate the lion of Judah coming down to wreck shop. To once and for all sweep evil off the face of the planet. And when you do that, when you focus on the conquering Christ, to me, it really caused me to think about this a lot this week, that the conquering Christ renders the crucified Christ all the more miraculous. The conquering Christ, Christ conquering renders Christ crucified all the more miraculous. Because this description in Revelation 19 with a robe dipped in blood and a sword coming out of his mouth and a rod of iron that he rules a nation with, he's gonna tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God with all of heaven's armies arrayed behind him, thundering down to wreck shop. That Jesus hung on the cross for you. That Jesus walked away from all of that, condescended to take on our form, walked with us for 33 years, nurtured disciples to birth a church that would become his true kingdom that he's coming back to rescue so that you and I can sit in here 2,000 years later. He did all that, meek and mild. And when he describes himself as gentle and lowly, yeah, you're not kidding, man. Because look who he is in earth and look who he could be this whole time. This description, this guy, this God, this warrior king, he hung on the cross for you. Not just some sage from the hills of Israel. God condescended for you. He chose to hang on the cross. So I love that moment with Pilate. He's like, are you really a king? And he's like, don't worry about it, Pilate. If I wanted to, this whole place would be smashed. At any moment in Jesus' life, he could have called down these armies and just crushed anybody who opposed him. Caiaphas, the high priest, is sitting there thinking he's got Jesus right where he wants him, and Jesus is just thinking, you have no idea who I am. He dies, he's separated from God. Satan thinks he's got Jesus right where he wants him. Jesus says, you have no idea who I am. Christ conquering, to me, renders Christ crucified as all the more miraculous. And when I think about my Jesus, this is who I think about. He comes to get us and to take us back up to heaven and to start off eternity. And when he comes to get us, he takes us back, we're told, to what's called the marriage supper of the Lamb. He's defeated the beast. He's defeated the Antichrist. He locks them up. It begins the thousand-year reign. We're going to talk about that next week. There's an encore of evil, and then Jesus once and for all throws them in the lake of fire, and that's it. But he comes down. He captures the beast. The armies conquer. He takes his children, he wipes evil off the face of the earth, he purifies his bride, and then we have the marriage supper of the Lamb. And I feel bad for how I'm covering the marriage supper of the Lamb in this series. Because I'm not gonna do it justice. I'm not gonna adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this series. Because I'm not going to do it justice. I'm not going to adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this way of false humility, like, oh yeah, I'm really not doing that good of a job with it. Like, no, I'm not. We just don't have enough time to sink in to everything that's here and even all the symbolism in the marriage supper of the Lamb. But a simple way of thinking about it is the marriage supper of the lamb is the greatest celebration feast of all time. It is the greatest celebration feast that ever was and ever will be. And this should hit home with us. Because what do we do? What do we do when we want to celebrate? I got a little bit of good news last week. Such good news that I went straight to the butcher's market. I bought myself a big old ribeye and I had that for dinner when the kids went to bed. I had myself my own personal private celebration feast. When your team wins, what do you do? You have a feast. When something good in life happens, when you graduate, you have a feast. When people come into town, what do you do? You have a feast. What are we going to do this week? We're going to get together with friends and family. We're going to reflect on the blessings that God has given us, and we're going to have a feast. This is what we do to celebrate. When your kid gets married, and you celebrate kind of transitioning into that season of life. This one has passed. We've formed a new family. What do you do? You get all your friends together and you have a feast. This is what God is doing. It's the greatest celebration feast of all time. In the days of old when kings would conquer and they would come back from conquering another king, what did they do? They feasted. And Jesus is bringing us back to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Why is it called the marriage supper of the Lamb? Because Jesus is getting married. Who's he marrying? Us. The church. His bride. We see throughout Scripture that the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. We see in Ephesians that God purifies his bride. He prepares us. We are made pure for Jesus so that we might marry him in eternity. I don't know how all that works out. It's a word play, but we are made pure by our savior. How are we made pure? By the crucified Christ hanging on the cross. He died for us. He covered over you in righteousness, made you good, purified you, prepared you for this very moment, for the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the church and Christ are united for all of eternity and perfect bliss. And so it's right and good to have a feast to celebrate the marriage. And this feast, man, it's going to be a good feast. The ones that you've lost, they're going to be there. I don't know for certain. I can't find it in Scripture. But I'm pretty sure they're going to serve catfish at this feast. Because my papa is going to be there. He loves catfish. And I know he's got some waiting on me. Your loved ones are going to be there too. Your dads are going to be there. And your moms. And the children that you never got to meet because you lost them too early, they're going to be there. All the saints who have come before us, all the saints that you've loved, they're going to be there. And listen to this. They're going to be the best versions of themselves. They're not going to be sick. They're not going to be unhealthy. They're not going to be unwell. They're going to be the perfect versions of themselves. They're not going to have all the brokenness that hurts us sometimes. Do you understand what I'm saying? Your dad, who you loved, but man, that guy had a temper. In heaven, he doesn't have a temper anymore. He's just love. He's just all the best parts of him. The people who we love, who made it sometimes hard to love them. Jesus has prepared those brides too. Their brokenness is wiped away. And they love you with purity. And you're made perfect too. All the crap in your life, all the stuff that you wish wasn't true of you, all the things that you hope nobody finds out, all the brokenness that spills out of you and hurts the people around you when you don't want to hurt them and you hate that side of yourself, that side's gone at the marriage supper of the Lamb. You're made perfect there. You're made your ideal self there. You're made your eternal self there. And you can love other people finally with the purity that God loves you with. We see the best versions of the folks we love. I am convinced of this. We finally walk in the best versions of ourself and don't have to wonder what it would be like to not have to walk through life as a selfish, egotistical jerk. That one's just for me. I don't know what your thing is. That feast is going to be remarkable. And everybody's going to be there. And Jesus is coming to take you to that. And I think that's pretty great. And as I thought about these things this week, the triumphant return of Christ and the marriage supper of the Lamb and all that it represents and what Jesus really won with that victory. What does it mean for us? Yes, evil is smited. Evil is gone and all the wrong things are made right and all the sad things are made untrue. All that is very true and God wins once and for all and that part of us that loves a hero gets to see the actual hero come storming out of the clouds. He wins those things for us. We see our God claim victory and that's great. But there's something else that occurred to me too. I was prepared. I knew this was going to happen. We're not even to the hard part yet. Jeez, old Pete. Something else occurred to me as I kind of asked the question, what has Jesus won? And what are we celebrating at the marriage supper? And I was reminded of this idea that I have long carried with me, but I've not heard too many other people talking about it. I've actually never heard a pastor talk about this. It doesn't make it a unique idea. It's just one that I've not heard other people mention. And maybe it's because pastors aren't supposed to say things like this and the other ones know better and yours doesn't. But I've long carried with me this idea that faith and hope are burdens. Faith and hope are hard. We celebrate faith and hope in our belief system. We're told that the greatest of all these things is faith, hope, and love. We celebrate faith and hope. We want those. We name our children faith and hope. They are good things. But I, in my life, in my most honest moments, experience them often as a burden, as something to be carried, as something to be chosen. Because faith is a belief in things that you can't see. Faith is what we choose when facts fall short of certainty. Do you understand? There's things that we can know about the universe and about our God and about scripture and about the claims and about life. There's things that can be scientifically proven and broken down and rendered as factual. And then there's what we choose to put our faith in. Then there's certainty. And when facts fall short of certainty, we fill that gap with faith. Whether you're a Christian or whether you're an atheist, there's no way to be totally certain of what you think's going on in the universe. So when we reach the end of facts and we have to arrive at certainty, we fill that gap with faith. So faith is a choice. We choose it. We exercise it. We learn it. We let God speak into it. We let him strengthen it over the course of our life. The longer you walk with God, hopefully the stronger your faith gets, but it gets stronger because it's been tried and it's been tested and it's been a burden that you've chosen to continue to carry. Hope is a burden. Hope is a belief that one day something can be true that I want to be true. Hope, to even have hope, is an admission that right now things are not the way that I want them to be. Right now things are less than ideal. Right now things are not what I want, but I hope, I believe that one day the things that I want can be brought about. Hope is an admission of a shortfall. People who are not yet parents and desperately want to be hope that one day this can be true of us. We, as believers, we read scripture, we hear the stories of Jesus coming down out of heaven, and we hope in that day. We place our faith in that day. We believe that there's going to be a marriage supper. We place our hope in that. We place our hope and our faith in the idea that our prayers are working, that they get to God, that they are powerful and effective and they're not just bouncing off the ceiling. But sometimes, life makes hope heavy. Sometimes life makes hope heavy. When you lose someone too early and your Bible teaches you that your God could have done something about it and you have to be confronted with the fact that he just simply didn't. In that season, you choose hope. And in that season, it's heavy. And sometimes, when life gets hard, and when faith and hope become burdens, and they become heavy, we see people put them down and walk away from them and say, I can't carry this faith anymore. I don't know how to believe in a God that would let that happen, so I'm gonna set down this faith. I don't know how I can still cling to hope when I've been disappointed in these ways, so I'm going to set down this hope. Sometimes faith and hope get heavy, and they get hard to carry. When you grow up in church, being taught a simple faith, and then you become an adult adult and there are things that happen in your world that just don't align with what you were taught when you were a kid and you have to learn how to find this new faith. You have to cling to it and you have to hope and you have to choose hope and you have to find ways to make what you were taught and what you're experiencing mesh and you have to find a whole new way to understand scripture and understand God and to understand how he speaks to you. In those moments, faith can get hard and hope can get heavy and we have to choose them. And I am convinced that the Christian life is simply a series of the decision to choose faith and to choose hope in Christ over and over and over again until we make it to the finish line. My prayer as I prayed before I preached this morning was that if there is anybody in here that's carrying heavy hope that it would get lightened just a little bit today. That we would have the strength and the faith to continue to carry it for a little bit longer. Just get down the road just a little bit further. Because sometimes faith and hope get heavy. And I hate that we don't talk about that as much because we should. And if that's true, if I'm right that they can be burdens, then one of the best things that Jesus wins when he comes sweeping out of the sky is on this day, he lays to rest faith and hope forever. And he says, here, you don't need these anymore. You don't need faith and hope anymore. Maybe that's why Paul writes in Romans 8, he says, for in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. When Jesus shows up, we don't need hope anymore. When he shows up, we don't need faith anymore. There's no more gap between facts and certainty. There's just Jesus. There's no more hoping for one day. There's just Jesus. One day has arrived. Do you understand that when Jesus sweeps down out of the sky, that he lays to rest for us for all eternity, faith and hope. And he says, you can set them down, weary traveler. You're here now. Let's feast. And I think that's a remarkable blessing. Because to be a Christian is to believe that one day these things will be true. To be a Christian is to believe that one day God will set all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. One of my favorite songs in the world is this song called Farther Along. Farther Along, I like the version from a guy named Josh Gerrels, and it opens up. And he says, I wonder why the good man dies and the bad man thrives and Jesus cries because he loves them both. And the chorus is, farther along, we'll know all about it. Farther along, we'll understand why. And it's just this acknowledgement, I think, that faith and hope are hard. Faith and hope are hard, but one day, I won't need those anymore. I can lay that and everything else down at the feet of my Savior. And on that day, when Jesus comes back, there are no more one days. On this day, Revelation 19, marriage supper of the Lamb, on that day, there are no more one days. It is one day for all eternity. There's no more wondering, there's no more hoping, there's no more struggling, there's no more pain. Because on that day, he puts an end to waiting on one day. And I kind of wonder now if that's why Paul didn't say what he said in Corinthians. When he gets to the end of talking about all the spiritual gifts and he says, but now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these, Paul says, is love. And I've always read and accepted that teaching, and it's made sense to me. Love binds. Love is the very nature of God. Love is what unites us together. It makes sense to me that love would be greater than faith and hope. But now I wonder, in light of what I've thought through this week, if maybe love isn't the greatest because when Jesus comes back and lays faith and hope to rest, that love is the only thing that exists for all of eternity. Maybe love is the greatest because it's the only thing left after Revelation 19. And we live in an eternity of perfect love that God designed us for, finally. As I was thinking through this sermon this week, I was pacing in the lobby. And as I was out there, just kind of walking back and forth, thinking through these things, asking myself the question, what has Christ won for us? I noticed on the information table, a bracelet, like a little ringlet. And I picked it up and I saw an inscription there. And I thought, oh, what is this? God, are you talking to me? Let? Speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm working on the sermon. There's a bracelet here. You've got to be working in this. So I reach over, and on the bracelet, it just says, it is well with my soul. Also, if that's your bracelet, it's right out there. It just said, it is well with my soul. And I thought, oh, I love that song. But that's not really helpful. Okay, God's not speaking. And I just kept pacing. And I got done and I kind of had a fully formed idea. And sometimes on Tuesdays when I get a fully formed idea, I get a little bit excited about the sermon and I'll go and I'll tell Kyle because Kyle's always up for a conversation. I said, Kyle, I got it. Listen, I told him about this idea of faith and hope being burdens and that Jesus is going to put those to rest for us. And Kyle started to get a little teary eyed. And he said, he said, that just reminds me of my favorite song, my favorite line from my favorite song. And he quoted me these lines from it as well. And I was like, oh my gosh, God is speaking. I'm just dumb. I always say God speaks in stereo. And Kyle quoted these lines. And he started crying. And I got misty, and I knew that this is what we were supposed to share, and I knew that we were supposed to end the service today with it as well. Because in these lines, we see the author of this song admitting what we've just talked about today. The faith and hope are burdens, and so it is well with my soul. We often sing this song in a response to grief as an admission that I am going to choose faith and hope even though it's heavy today. Now let's sing it looking forward to the day we can lay those things to rest and Jesus has won the final victory and forever we will say it is well with my soul. Stand and let's sing together.

The Pretty epic, huh? I mean, looky there. The sermon is half as good as the video. Y'all are going to leave here with your hair on fire. This is great. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. So thanks for being here. I thank you for watching online or catching up during the week if that's what you're doing. This is clearly the start of our series in the book of Revelation. I have been studying and prepping for this as far back as the summer because Joseph was a fun series. I loved doing Joseph. I love narrative series where we're just telling stories and seeing what we can learn from the story. The prep time on a Joseph sermon is about two and a half or three hours. The prep time on the Revelation sermon is 10 times that for each one. So you got to start those early. But because I've been doing so much studying, I'm very happy to tell you guys that I have all the answers for you. I'm going to tell you very clearly what happens in the book of Revelation. You can't ask me a question that I won't be certain about. And this is going to be a very productive time for the church. So I'm very much looking forward to it. Revelation, for some of us, has a lot of baggage. For some of us, it doesn't have very much at all. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s. And when you grew up in a Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s, Revelation was a big deal. I don't know if you guys realize that or what your church contexts are, but there was a season in church life when having strong opinions about the tribulation and the rapture was just a part of church. I actually talked to a church one time in a former life. I was a teacher at a private high school, and one of the churches was a small country Baptist church. And they said, hey, we're looking for a pastor if you know anybody. And I said, okay, well, you know, I'll keep my eyes out. And they said, but we're only going to hire people if they believe in a pre-trib rapture. That's a non-negotiable for us. And I started laughing. He's like, why are you laughing? I'm like, oh, you mean that? Like, that's really important to you. And they're like, yeah, absolutely. Well, are you not pre-trib rapture? Because if you're not, I don't want you teaching my daughter Bible. I'm like, rapture is not coming up. All right. We're not covering that in 10th grade Bible. Don't worry about it. I wonder how many of you though have had, like, when I say pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, 1260 days, the four beasts, the man, the eagle, the lion, the ox, the 144,000 Jewish males from the tribes. How many of you know what I'm talking about? You've heard those things before. Okay. And then I won't ask the rest of us, how many of you are like, I got no clue, man. Like, no idea on this. You don't have to raise your hand. But yeah, so like, how do we approach like that wide of a swath of information and knowledge about this book? Because there's some of us that have been a part of really in-depth Bible studies and there's some of us who we've avoided it all together. So in thinking about how to approach the book of Revelation for these next seven weeks, I really thought it was worth noting the tendencies that we kind of tend towards as we approach the book of Revelation. Because again, some of us are very experienced with it, and some of us have never opened it because it's scary or intimidating or whatever. So as we begin, I kind of wanted to begin the series with this thought as we think about how do we approach the book of Revelation. I would contend that most people either overcomplicate or oversimplify Revelation. Most people in their approach to it have a tendency to either overcomplicate it or vastly oversimplify the book. And what I mean is we can overcomplicate it so that we miss the forest for the trees. We can overcomplicate it so much and drill down on things so much and ask so many questions about it. When is the rapture actually going to happen? Because of this verse, I think it's going to happen in the middle of the tribulation. When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? Are people, can you still get saved during the tribulation? What are the four creatures and the beasts and the angels and which angels have which wings and what do they represent and what's going on with the dragon trying to eat the baby and all these different things? what is the mark of the beast? Is it the vaccine? What is all that stuff, right? And so we can kind of drill down and the answer is no, stinking no, that's not the thing. The vaccine is not the mark of the beast. Anyways, we can get so concerned in drilling down on these details that we kind of miss the message of the book. And the thing about all those details that we'll talk about in a little bit and throughout the series is many of them are really not knowable. So to try to figure out what is the creature that comes out of the abyss that has a tail like a scorpion and stings you and it ails you for five months? Is that an attack helicopter or is that a scorpion? I don't know. And you don't either. And there's no way to know. So let's stop worrying about it, right? So we can overcomplicate it and get so mired in the details of the book that we miss the message. But we can also oversimplify it. I had somebody in my men's Tuesday morning Bible study who he's involved in a study in Revelation right now with another small group. He's cheating on me with another small group and it's hurtful. But he said, we were talking about Revelation and he waved his hand and he goes, Jesus wins. That's all you need to know. And listen, that's true. And this is a man who clearly he cares about Revelation and I don't mean to disparage him, but in that moment of just going, meh, Jesus wins, I would tend more towards that camp in my own interpretative approach of it, but that's not enough either. What happens when we overcomplicate or oversimplify the book of Revelation is that both approaches cheapen the message of the book. Both of those approaches really end up cheapening the message of the book in general. If we get so caught up with the details that it matters to us deeply who the 144,000 are and we search through the Bible to try to piece that one together, and we miss the overarching message of the book because of it, then we cheapen the message of the book. If we just dismiss it and say, listen, Jesus wins, that's all you need to know, then we cheapen the message of the book as well because there's a reason that Revelation exists. There's a reason that God called John up to heaven and gave him a vision of what's going to happen at the end of time. There's a reason he told him to write it down. There's a reason that people have died for the preservation of Scripture over the centuries. There's a reason that this book was canonized, was put in the Bible as part of every Bible that's ever been printed. There's a reason that God ends His revelation to us with this book. There's reasons for that, and so it's worth studying. And I would contend that the book of Revelation matters very much to God. And I would actually base it on the way that he starts the book. This is John writing it. Revelation chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. Listen to this. This verse, particularly the third verse, tells us that revelation is important to God. This book is important to God. And it says, blessed are those who read aloud, because this was a letter. It was written to the churches. And so there wasn't a bunch of copies. Gutenberg hadn't showed up yet. So there was just one letter and one person would read it aloud. So it's basically blessed are those who read it, blessed are those who study it, blessed are those who invest time in it. So God says that we will be blessed by doing this. And, you know, I was talking to Erin Winston, our great children's pastor, I think a year and a half or two years ago when we were talking about series ideas. And she just mentioned to me that she can't remember Grace having ever done a series in Revelation. And I thought, well, goodness, our church needs to know about this. Our church needs to know this book. We need to kind of demystify it and walk through it and see what we can learn from it. And we wanted to do it for a long time, but then the pandemic hit and this didn't feel like what I wanted to do strictly over video, right? I wanted this to be in person because some of the stuff that we have to talk about in the book is hard. That's not this week, but it's coming. And so I thought that it would be worth it to do this series together. And it'd be worth it to not overcomplicate things, to try to train ourselves to focus on the message of portions of it, rather than get mired in the details, but also get into it enough that we feel like we can understand it. So as we approach Revelation, we do need to do some background work to really understand why it was written. It was written by John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. He was in exile on the island of Patmos about 90 AD is what we think, is when we think it was written. So about 60 years after the death of Christ. He's the last living disciple. All the other disciples have died a martyr's death. He is the last stalwart of the disciples and the bastion of the early church. John really lived a remarkable life. And so God calls him up to heaven and shows him a vision and he writes it down and that becomes Revelation. And what we need to understand is that Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. To be a Christian at this point in history is to take your life into your hands. To be a Christian is to put yourself and your family at risk. It's to go into the catacombs, into underground graveyards, to have your Easter worship service because you cannot be seen in public doing this because you will be killed. It's to know friends and loved ones who have been dipped in tar and used as live torches to light the path into Rome. It's to watch your friends and loved ones get taken and thrown into the gladiator arena with animals that rip them apart. It is a tough time to be a Christian. And so John wrote this letter to them from God to give them hope, to encourage them, to help them hang in there, to help them see a path to a better day. And so when reading Revelation, we can never separate our understanding of it from how the original audience would have understood it. We can never make it mean something that it wouldn't have meant to them. But that also means that it's right and good for us to approach it, mining it for hope. That's the best reason to approach Revelation. It's not necessarily to know what's going to happen at the end of times with great detail, but to cling to the hope that the book offers us throughout it. This is why I love Revelation. If you've heard me preach any messages for any time at all, you've heard me say things like there's coming a day when Jesus is gonna make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. You've heard me talk about Revelation 18 and 19 where he comes down with righteous and true tattooed on his thigh. He comes back not as the Lamb of God, but now as the Lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop. You've heard me talk about that because I take great solace in that in my personal faith. You've heard me talk about Revelation 21 when God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping and crying in pain anymore. You've heard me talk about that because it's in Revelation and it's hopeful and it's what we cling to. So when we read it, our top priority, our first priority ought to be to mine it for hope and to let it encourage us in our faith. That's far more important than some of the other details. And it's important enough to dig in and to see how it might offer us hope the same way it did the early church. As we seek to understand and interpret the book of Revelation, a couple rules of thumb for us as we walk through it together. The first is, it's not completely linear, but sometimes it is. It's not completely linear, but sometimes it's linear. And when I say linear, what I mean is just event after event from start to finish. The gospels are linear. The gospel of Mark starts at the beginning and moves through the story of Jesus to a crucifixion and then ascension. That's linear. It's just, it's all happening on the same timetable, right? Well, Revelation's not like that. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it moves through and it moves, this event happens, and then the very next thing he talks about is the event that follows the one that he just described. But sometimes he jumps. He says, I turn and I saw. And I'll show you in a second what I'm talking about. He says, then I turned and I saw, and it's something else is going on. And the thing that he's talking about over here happened before the thing he just got done talking about. Or it happens years after the thing he just got done talking about. And then in the next chapter over, he's going to talk about the stuff that happens in the middle. And then the next chapter over, he's going to talk about stuff that happened before that. So sometimes it's linear. Sometimes it's not. So you just have to know as you're reading it that he's not presenting us from chapter 1 to chapter 22 all the things in order. Another thing you should know is that it's not completely literal, but sometimes it is. It's not completely literal all the time. Sometimes it's figurative. Sometimes it is literal. Sometimes the words that you're reading are actually going to happen. They're descriptive of a thing that really will take place. Sometimes you're reading it and it's figurative language to describe to you in the best way that John can what it will be like. Or because God is intentionally using powerful imagery, it's a picture of other events that have already happened. So as we're reading it and as we're studying through it, and there's a reading plan that will be, it would be on the, is it on the table this morning, Kyle? Okay. It's there and it'll be online as well beginning tomorrow morning. I hope that you'll read through Revelation with us. I hope that you'll be talking about it in your small groups together. But as you read and study, we need to be asking ourselves as we look at the text, is this literal or figurative? Is this linear? Is this happening in order? Or have I jumped back or to a different place? We'll need to know this as we read. Now, some examples of where it's figurative and nonlinear or literal and linear are easy to find. So I'm going to read a passage from Revelation chapter 12. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to my words as I read. This is a famous scene in the book of Revelation. Just listen. I don't know what diadems are. I think maybe crowns. Cool. Let's just go on to the next thing, right? What's going on there? Well, what's happening there is that John is neither being literal, nor is he being linear. Most scholars agree, and it's not certain, so I don't say it with certainty, but most scholars agree, believe it or not, that this is a picture of Christmas. What if I preached that this December 25th, right? What if I made that the Christmas message? Boy, that would be something. Most scholars believe it's a picture of Christmas. It's figurative. It's powerful imagery that God is using to drive home a point. And that in this depiction, the woman very likely represents Israel. The baby is Jesus. The red dragon is Satan. And Satan is trying to thwart Jesus, thwart the efforts of God. But God rescues Jesus back up to his throne, which means God's throne and Jesus' throne. And then Israel is nourished in the wilderness, which could be a reference to their exile in Egypt as slaves, or it could be a reference to the flight of Mary to the wilderness once Jesus is born and they have to go to Egypt for a couple years because Herod is trying to find and kill baby Jesus. The tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the heaven down onto earth, that's a reference to the fact that when Lucifer was kicked out of heaven and became Satan, that he took a third of the demons with him. So this isn't linear because it's Christmas. This happened 90 years before John even wrote it. And certainly not in order with the other things going on in the book. And it's not even linear within its own depiction because it's talking about fleeing to the wilderness and it's talking about the demons falling from heaven, which happened thousands of years before any of this stuff and the rest of the story was ever happening. And then the 1260 days at the end of it is a reference to half of the tribulation period that Revelation divides in half often in months or in days. So it's literally, as far as the time frame is concerned, it's covering thousands of years in a paragraph. It's got a ton going on there. And it didn't literally happen. It's figurative imagery. So that's neither literal nor linear. But sometimes Revelation is those things. Listen to Revelation 21. At the end of the book, John is given a vision. He's carried to another place where Jerusalem begins to descend. A new Jerusalem begins to descend out of the sky. God is setting it Its length the same as its width. And measured the city with his rod. 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall. 144 cubits by human measurement. Which is also an angel's measurement. Which is nice to know. If you're measuring in cubits. You're measuring as the angels do. So well done. The wall was built of jasper while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, then sapphire, a gate, emerald, onyx, chameleon, chrysolite, beryl, and he goes on and on. And then he says, and the 12 gates were 12 pearls, each of the end of the book. It happens at the end of the story. It happens at the end of time. We can read that, see where it's happening in the book, and know that that's how it's going to happen in time. And it's literal. That's not figurative speech about the specific jewels that are going to be the foundation of the wall or the way that the city is going to look or the size of the city. That's a literal interpretation. So again, as we read, we need to ask, is what's happening here, is it literal or is it figurative? Is it linear? Is it happening in the order in which it's presented? Or in its proper context, should it go in another place? When I was explaining this to Jen this week, she was asking how I was going to approach it, and I was kind of walking her through portions of the sermon. And Jen, she's my wife, for those of you who don't know her, not just a lady I talk to sermons about, but that would be cool. I have one of those. When I told her what I was going to do and how it sometimes is literal, sometimes linear, and sometimes it's not, she said, yeah, but, and she's asked the question that you guys all should have by now. She goes, yeah, but how do you know? How do you know when it's supposed to be one and not the other? Well, that's the tricky part. And the only possible answer to it is you have to work hard. How do I know when it's literal and when it's figured if you have to study? Listen, some books of the Bible are really easy to understand. Proverbs. You don't need to study Proverbs. Just read Proverbs. And it says that we should consider the ant and work even when we don't have to. There's no mystery going on there. That's pretty simple. When it says whatever you do, get wisdom, that's simple. Revelation, not simple. If you want to understand it, it takes hard work. It takes discussion. You have to read a lot of sources. You have to listen to a lot of people. There's no easy path to understanding Revelation. I can't stand up here in seven weeks and explain it to you in a way that will make sense and get everything right. I just can't do it. And people who claim that they can are dumb. They're just being intellectually dishonest. Which is why I think it's important for me to kind of share this idea with you, not just for this series, but as you encounter Revelation as you move throughout the rest of your life, which is simply when it comes to Revelation, be cynical of certainty. When it comes to the book of Revelation, when it comes to who you're listening to and what you're reading and how you're talking about it and how people are presenting ideas to you in whatever form you would consume them, we are wise when it comes to Revelation to be cynical of certainty. Now there are some things in the book of Revelation that we ought to be certain about. Jesus is there. He's in heaven. God is sitting on his throne. He's surrounded by angels. There's going to be a new heaven and a new earth. Satan's going to be dealt with. People are going to be judged. We're going to be called up there. Like there's things that we can be certain about, but there's other things you simply can't be certain about. And for someone to present you information in a way where they are certain, where they don't even acknowledge that there's other theologians, there's myriad other views of this particular passage or this particular idea, and they don't even acknowledge that those exist, well now, I don't know if I believe you about anything. I was listening to a pastor that I really like a lot. He's been one of my go-to guys for years. And his church did a series in Revelation last year. And I thought, oh, well, shoot, I'm just going to listen to his and then steal it. That'll really cut down on the prep time here. This is going to be great. But as I listened, he got to a portion, I think it's in chapter four, where there's these four creatures, these four beasts that are really mysterious. And one is like a lion, one is like an ox, one is like an eagle, and one is like a man. And there's this incredible description of them. And the same four creatures are described in Ezekiel, in an Old Testament book of prophecy, with stunning accuracy and similarity to the four creatures in Revelation. There's very little doubt that both authors, that both John and Ezekiel saw the same four creatures. Now, what are they? And what do they represent? I don't know. But the pastor that I really liked when I was listening to him, he said, well, the ox represents this, the lion this, the eagle this, the man this. Does it not? And then he moved on. And he said it as if he was certain of it. And he said it as if there was no other possible explanation than the one that he just shared. When the reality is we only see them in Ezekiel. We only see them in Revelation. Very little explanation is offered about them in either place. So to presume that we know who they are, what they are, what they represent, and why they exist is not fair. It's not intellectually honest. The most intellectually honest thing to say about them is, they're pretty cool. That's it. They matter a lot to God. They're going to be neat when we see them. They're probably going to be scary. It's going to be awesome. What do they represent? I don't know and neither do you. And don't act like you do. We can make educated guesses. There's plenty of room for that. But we ought to be cynical of certainty as we move through this. And I'm saying that, hopefully, not for your benefit in this series, because hopefully I don't get up here and start teaching you things with certainty that I don't understand. Hopefully I'll teach them honestly and present the sides that exist and are merited. But I say that to you as you move throughout your lives and as you encounter other Revelation studies. Be cynical of certainty. So that's how we want to approach the book. I told you that we would mine Revelation for hope. And there's an incredible space to do that in the first chapter of Revelation. And that's where I want us to focus as we finish up the sermon today. I will also say this for those who know your Bibles well. Chapters 2 and 3 in Revelation are the seven letters to the seven churches. They are wonderful letters. They're hugely important. They're incredibly informative for us, not just of the ancient church, but what our modern churches ought to look like. They're a hugely impactful portion of the book of Revelation. They are so important and so impactful that we're going to skip them. Because I'm not going to reduce them to a week and preach them to you like that. So we're going to skip them. I'm going to set them aside. At some point in the future, we're going to come back and we're going to do a seven-part series as we move through those letters together. But if you know your Bible well, and next week we just open up and we get to chapter four, and you're thinking, why didn't we do the seven letters to the seven churches? That's why, because they're too important to reduce to a week. And Revelation would get too boring to expand to 14 weeks. All right, so we're going to do those later. But as we look at chapter one and we begin to move through the story, I wanted to bring us to what I believe is maybe one of the most poignant moments in all of Scripture. And we find it towards the end of the first chapter. We're going to start reading in verse 12. This is John writing. He says, And these are the words of Jesus now, which will always show up in red during the series. and I have the keys of death and Hades. I get chills every time I read this. John is swept up into heaven. He's told, you're gonna see some stuff, write it down. And he looks and there's someone who is white like snow, who is shining in brilliance, who has a voice like raging waters. And he sees him and he's so terrified that he falls on his feet. He falls at his feet. He collapses in fear. And we learn from those words in red that it's Jesus. And Jesus places his hand on John's shoulder, presumably. And he says, Behold, I am the first and the last. I have died and yet I live. Other translations say the Alpha and the Omega. And I have the keys to death and Hades. I've conquered them. Which is a remarkable moment. But it's more remarkable when we reflect on who John was and what John did. Do you understand that John calls himself in his own gospel the disciple whom Jesus loved? You should probably be pretty certain of your standing before Christ if you want to go around touting that nickname. This John is the John that was the disciple whom Jesus loved that may have been, some scholars think, as young as 10 years old when he was following Jesus. He was so close with Jesus. They were such intimate friends that at the Last Supper, Jesus was close enough to John that he was able to whisper in John's ear that Judas was going to betray him before anybody else did. He was able to communicate with John that closely at the Last Supper because John was, of course, next to Jesus because he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. When Jesus was hanging on the cross dying, when he's watching his savior and friend die, Jesus looks at John and Jesus only said a few things on the cross because you had to push up on the nails to do it. And he looks at John and he says, will you care for my mother? John, this is your mother, Mary, now. That's quite the commission. Can you imagine Jesus himself putting the care of his aging mother in your hands? And if you yourself knew that the end was near and that someone needed to care for your aging mother, who would you choose? Your most intimate and trusted of friends. And John went on from that moment and he cared for Mary. He went on from that moment and he led the church and the council. He saw them through this conversion of Gentiles, this difficult period in the book of Acts. He preached the gospel. He spread the word about his friend. And this whole time, he was promised by Jesus. You see it in the gospels when he tells the disciples, where I'm about to go, you can't go. And they said, we want to come with you. He goes, you don't understand. Jesus is telling them, I'm going to die and I'm going to ascend into heaven and you can't come with me. but where I'm going to go, I'm going to prepare a place for you and it's going to be great and you'll be with me there one day. Do you understand that John, he clung to that hope. He trusted his friend Jesus. He trusted his Savior and he spent the rest of his life caring for the mother of Christ. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming the message of Christ. He spent the rest of his life building the kingdom of Christ. But John eventually ended up as the head of the church in Ephesus, and there he discipled a man named Polycarp and Erasmus, who were the early church fathers that we begin now the church history that leads down to us. John is the linchpin in this. He watched all 11 of his friends, all 11 of the disciples die a martyr's death. And now he's an old man on the island of Patmos writing the last thing that he's going to write. And he's missed his friend Jesus. And he's looked forward to seeing his Savior again. And he spent every day living for his Savior. Every day building the kingdom for his Savior. Every day pointing people towards his Savior. And when he gets to heaven, he sees a figure that he doesn't recognize and he falls to his knees. And out of that figure comes the voice of his Savior, Jesus. Out of that figure comes the assurance that John has waited for and longed for his entire life. Out of that figure rushes the peace that only Jesus brings. He gets his reunion moment. He gets his welcome home. And it tells us that meeting Jesus is the best promise in the whole book. Meeting Jesus face to face, hearing his voice, seeing his eyes, feeling his embrace, that is the best promise in the whole book, man. There's other stuff that happens. We get to be with God. We get to spend eternity. There's going to be loved ones there. It's going to be perfect. There's no more weeping or crying or pain anymore. We're going to experience all of that. It's going to be an incredibly peaceful, joyful existence. But none of it, none of it is better than seeing Jesus in person. None of it is better than your welcome home moment. When he hugs you and he says, I've prepared a place for you. And he invites you to the marriage supper of the Lamb. I was thinking about it this week. What it would be like to finally meet my Savior. And how I would probably feel compelled to say I was sorry. And how he would probably just say, don't worry about it. I've covered over all those sorries. And how we would be compelled to say, I'm sorry, Jesus, I should have done more. And he would say, that's okay. I did enough. I did it for you. And I've thought about that moment when the burdens of hope and faith don't have to be carried anymore. When we can cast those things aside because our Savior is looking us in the eye. After all the stresses and all the struggles and all the triumph and all the worry and all the anxiety and anything else that we might experience, the loss and the pain and the sufferings and the joy, whatever it is, after all of it, we as weary travelers will end our spiritual pilgrimage in heaven at the face of Christ and he will say, welcome home. And maybe he'll even say, well done, good and faithful servant. But that's the best promise of the book. That if we believe in Jesus too, that one day we will see our Savior face to face and we can rest. And if you love Jesus, and that's not the part of heaven you're most excited about, I don't know what to do for you. I hope this series can change that. But more than anything else, as we move through this book, that's what we cling to. That Jesus is there waiting for us. And we'll get that reunion moment too. Where we get to meet our Savior face to face. Now, before I close, I never do this because if I tell you guys that I won't be here for a particular weekend, then what I've found is you don't come, which is mean. That's just mean to whoever is preaching that's not me. But I'm going to tell you this time that I'm not going to be here next weekend. I've got a bunch of my buddies I've talked about before. A bunch of us turned 40 this week, so there's going to be seven of us in a cabin in North Georgia making questionable decisions. We planned this back in the spring before I knew that this would be week two of Revelation, which is a week I'd rather not miss. So when I was thinking about who should I get to preach it, Kyle's great, Doug Bergeson's great, we've got plenty of folks here who would do a fantastic job with it. But there's one person who I know that knows more about the book of Revelation than anybody else I know. I'm not saying he knows the most about the book of Revelation, just more than anybody else that I know, and that's my dad. So dad's going to come next week and he's going to preach Revelation 4 and 5. And you'll get to see half of the equation of where all of this came from. To give you a literal picture of how deeply he loves this book, I wanted to take you to Israel with us. Dad and I had the opportunity to go to Israel, maybe about 2013. And we did the tour. We're up in Galilee. We were there for a whole week or eight days or something like that. And we get down to Jerusalem and we're in the Garden of Gethsemane. And from the Garden of Gethsemane, which is where Jesus prayed the night that he was arrested and then crucified, you can actually see the walls of Jerusalem, and you can see the Temple Mount. And so this is what you see from the Garden of Gethsemane. And you can see in kind of the bottom right-hand corner of the portion of the wall is a gate. That's the eastern gate. And when we were just walking along and we saw that, my dad said, that's the eastern gate. And I said, oh, cool. And then I looked at him and he was crying. And I said, dad, why are you crying, man? It's a gate. And he says, that's the gate that Jesus is going to walk through when he returns. And it moved him. And he doesn't get moved to tears very often. But he was moved by that. Because one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to walk through that gate. And he knows it. And he believes it. And he knows his Bible. And he knows it so well and he believes it so much that it moved him to tears. So I couldn't think of anyone better to come and teach us a portion of the book of Revelation next week. So I hope you'll come. I hope you'll be kind to him. I hope he tells you some stories about me that make you laugh and like me a little bit less. And just you're thinking, oh, he must be an experienced teacher and have done this before for Nate to be asking him to do this here. No, he's an accountant. He's taught Sunday school a bunch of times, and I think it's going to be really, really great. So I hope that you'll give him a warm welcome when he's here next week and know that I'll be beaming from ear to ear watching him online with my buddies. So with that, let's pray, and then I've got an announcement for you guys, and we'll worship some more. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for how you love us. God, thank you for this book of Revelation. I pray that we would see clear and simple messages coming out of it. God, I pray that you would give us wisdom as we move through it. Give me wisdom as I teach it. Wisdom that I have no business having. Maybe just a special blessing for these next few weeks. God, I pray that we would always find the hope in it. That we would always see the justice in it, that we would always see the good news that we can cling to, God. Be with us as we go through the series. I pray that it will enliven our hearts to you. I pray that it will increase our passion and desire for you. And I pray that it will give hope to folks who might need it really badly right now. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. This morning we finish up our series called Faithful where we've been looking at stories of faithful women in the Bible and we are wrapping up with a who, she was just a bad joker, man. Like, I really, really liked getting into the story of her this week. She's a woman named Deborah, and Deborah was a judge and a prophetess. I think she is this underrated hero of the Bible. I think that her name kind of echoes down. She is one of these great women that did incredible things and that it's very much worth taking a weekend and focusing on her because her story, even though we really only see it in Judges 4 and 5, we see the story in Judges 4 and then her song in 5 that basically retells the story in poem form. But that's where we find her. So if you have a Bible and you want to turn there, you can go ahead and turn to Judges 4. If you don't have a Bible with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But that's where we're going to be today. And whenever I kind of recount a story for you guys, I like for you all to be interacting with Scripture too so you know that I'm not making this stuff up. There's something in particular that I'm excited to share with you that I'm going to just read because it's so outlandish that I want you to know that I'm not making it up. But Deborah, Deborah, she was a cool lady, man. She was a judge. And just so we're clear on this, before we kind of jump into the story, I want us to understand what a judge was in Israel, because I think that's something that we hear in church. Maybe you've even heard it referred to as the time of the judges or the period of the judges. And that's something that I think church people kind of nod along with sometimes without really knowing what that means. And so the period of the judges in Israel is the period of time between when Joshua conquered the nation of Israel and all the 12 tribes set up camp. And now they're claiming the nation of Israel as their own. And then years later, they got their first king in King Saul. And so the period between that is known as the time of the judges. And during the time of the judges, when the government was actually set up as God intended it to be set up in Israel, God was the king. He was their eternal heavenly king sitting on the throne. And eventually, the people of Israel were like middle school girls, and they wanted to have what everybody else around them had. And so they stomped their foot until their face turned blue, and they demanded a king. And And they gave him, and he gave him a king and Saul. And he said, and these bad things are going to happen when I do this. And they did. But that time before that is the period of the judges. And a judge was somebody who was a military ruler who also presided over legal matters. So what was going on in the period of the judges is the Israelites were God's chosen people. He gave them some rules that he wanted to follow, the Ten Commandments, and he wanted them to honor him. And at times they would throw off that rule. They would dishonor God. They would forget about him for a generation. And when that happened, God would allow a foreign oppressor to come in and subjugate them until they cried uncle and said, God, we're sorry. We realize we've ignored you. Please save us. We're going to follow you again. And God would say, okay. And he would appoint a judge to rise up from among them and be a military leader that would overthrow the oppressing surrounding nation. Okay. But they would also settle disputes, settle legal matters. You owe them money, they owe you money, or however it would go. So that was the role of the judge in the Old Testament. And Deborah was a judge and a prophetess. Deborah was awesome. And listen, this is just an aside, okay? You can't look at the story of Deborah in the Old Testament and see that God entrusted her to be a judge and a prophetess and lead his people and think that women are incapable of leading the local church, okay? We can't look at the story of Deborah and say, God here trusted a woman to lead all of his people, but now in 2021, we can't trust a woman to be an elder. It's just an aside. But we look at Deborah, and Deborah has a tree. She's got a tree named after her. It's the palm of Deborah, and she sits under it, and she just makes rulings all day. She's like ancient Israel's Judge Judy, okay? That's who she is. Whenever they have a dispute, they're like, well, let's go talk to Deborah about it. Like, I lent you my ox. You gave it back to me. It has a limp. It doesn't plow as quickly anymore. You owe me an ox. The heck I do. I'm not buying you an ox. All right, we're going to talk to Deb. All right, that's what they would do. So they would go and they would talk to Deborah under the tree that was named after her. So she had been doing this for a while. And it's under this tree that she summons a general named Barak. And that's kind of where we pick up the story. I want to read to you what's going on in Judges chapter 4, because we get from these two verses, I think the biggest mom energy in the Old Testament. We don't see mom energy quite like this until we get to John chapter 4 when Mary tells Jesus to turn the water into wine. When she's like, do the thing that you do when you do the miracle stuff. Like, go ahead. When Mary starts ordering around the Savior of the world, the Messiah incarnate, that's the next time we see energy on the level of what Deborah does here in this passage. Listen to what she does in Judges chapter 4, picking up in verse 6. So here's what's going on. Deborah is a judge, and judges are appointed when there's a foreign oppressor. In this case, the foreign oppressors are the Canaanites. And the general of the Canaanite army is a guy named Sisera. And we're told over and over again in the chapter that Sisera had 900 chariots of iron. I have no idea or perspective about how big of a deal that was. I don't know what that means. I just know that whoever wrote this chapter of Judges thinks it was a big enough deal to mention a bunch of times. So the Israelites are pretty scared of these 900 chariots of iron. And Deborah somehow knows that God has told Barak, the general of the Israelite armies, to gather 10,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun and go out and face Sisera and his chariots. She knows this. I don't know how she knows this. She was clearly close with God. I don't know if God gave her a message and said, hey, you know, I told Barak to go do this. He's dragging his feet. If you could kind of get after him for me, that would be great. I don't know if some messengers told her. I don't know how she knew, but she knew. And she knew that this is what Barak was supposed to do. So she summons him. And let's not miss that. She's a lady in the hill country in northern Israel. And she sent word, presumably to Jerusalem, for the general of the armies to come see her. Now listen. In the ancient world, there's no badder dude than the general. Especially in a nation without a king. He's the man. You do not tell the general what to do. But when Deborah summoned Barak, he was like, well, I guess we got to go. He went. Like, that's some big-time mom energy. She summons the general. We got it. We got it. I don't have a choice. Deborah called me to the tree of her name. I've got to go. And so he goes, and when he gets there, she moms him. And she says, didn't God tell you to get 10,000 troops and go fight Sisera? What are you doing, man? Like, didn't God tell you to do this? Why aren't you doing, why aren't you being obedient to God? He gave you clear instruction. You're not doing it. What gives? And I think that it's easy to read the Bible and see details like that and then just keep on reading without pausing to think about what's going on in this conversation. Do you realize the amount of faith that it takes from Barak to go do this? He's got to go to these tribes. He's got to look mamas and daddies in the eye, and he's got to say, I need your son. He's got to say, I need your husband. We've got to go fight Sisera, the dude with 900 chariots. Yeah, we're going to go fight him. You know that we're not strong enough to beat him, right? Yeah, I know, but God said that he was with us, so we're going to go and we're going to kill him. And it's the type of fighting that we both put sharp objects in our hands and we swing at each other until one of us dies. That's really hard fighting. But I need your son. Let's go. And then he's got to go out there and he's got to risk his own life as he leads these men into battle. So when he gets this direction from God, take these 10,000 people and go fight Sisera, it's pretty natural to be like, you sure? Maybe we should just wait. And so Deborah calls him. He's like, dude, what are you doing? God told you to go fight, go fight. And I like Barak's response and I like Deborah's response to him even better. We pick it back up in verse 8. Barak said to her, if you go with me, I'll go. But if you will not go with me, I will not go. And she said, I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman. Again, let's look at that. She calls him up to her palm tree and says, didn't God tell you to amass an army and go fight Sisera? And his response is, yeah. Easy for you to say, Deb. You're up here at your tree. You're deciding who owes who an ox, all right? You want me to go recruit young men and go watch them march to their death, potentially die while I do it. Easy for you to say, pal. So then he says, I'll tell you what, he did say that. And listen, if you come with me, I'll go. If you put your money where your mouth is, big talker, we'll go do this thing together. And I don't know this for sure, okay? There's not enough in the text to tell us positively. It's just my opinion. If I get to heaven and I find out I'm wrong about this and many other things, I'm comfortable with this error. But I think that Barak responds this way because he thinks it's going to shut her up. Because he thinks that's going to stop the conversation. Yeah, he told me to. You want to come too? You want to put your money where your mouth is, big dog, then we can go together. And I think that he thinks she's going to be like, well, no, I mean, this is for armies. I got, you know, I got, I got all these people. I got to settle these disputes here. I can't go. And instead, Deborah doubles down, right? Deborah's like, all right, where can I ride? Is that horse good? Is he taken? Let's go. I will surely go with you, she says. She didn't care. She doesn't miss a beat. All right, I'll go watch the slaughter. Let's roll. And you got to know the Barak's like, oh, shoot. Okay, well, I guess we're doing this thing. So they go, and I love that she says that you're not going to get the glory for this either, just so you know. Like, this is kind of a woman's story, so you're an auxiliary character in this Barak. And sure enough, they go, and they have the battle, and God is with the armies of Israel, and he delivers victory into their hands. They rout the army of the Canaanites, and Sisera is left fleeing. The army is in disarray, and Barak is hot on his trail. He wants to kill this guy, or capture him. He wants to get the glory. And while Sisera is running away, and I'm just telling you this part of the story just for gratuity, because I think it's great. I'm not going to make a spiritual point from this point on. I'm telling you this part of the story because it's awesome. While he's running away, there's a woman named Jael, and she's married to a guy who's friendly with his king. And somehow it seems like she knows that the army's been routed, everyone's trying to get away. So Jael goes and she sees Sisera fleeing. And she's like, Sisera, come stay in our tent. I'll hide you in here until, you know, the heat is off a little bit. And he's like, okay, thank you. And he comes into the tent and he lays down and it says that she covers him with a rug and that he was exceedingly tired. He's exhausted from battle and from fleeing, and he's just tired out of his mind, right? And so he says, will you get me some warm water? I'm thirsty. And she goes, and instead of water, she gets him warm milk because she wanted him to be good and tired. And he tells her, when Barack comes by with the armies, you tell him that I went that way. And she's like, got it. You sleeping good? And so when he goes to sleep and he's good in the sleep, this is what happens. And I'm reading you this from the Bible verbatim because it's not going to be up there. So you're just going to have to listen because I want you to know that I'm not making this up and how great it is. Verse 21, but JL, the wife of Heber took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand. Then she went softly to him. Apparently, you don't survive tent peg impalement. That's not a thing. And she didn't just get it in there. She drove the peg into the ground. She was mad for some reason. And she gets the glory. And here we are, thousands of years later, telling the story of JL. I shared that story because I've always just, I love that little detail. I love that little nuance in the Bible. I love knowing the story of Jael. And listen, these kinds of things are tucked away in all sorts of places, particularly in the Old Testament. And sometimes I want to do little more than on a Sunday, make the Bible come alive for you a little bit so that you get curious about it and you want to start finding this stuff for yourself. Go home and Google Dinah and her brothers, D-I-N-A-H and her brothers and see if you don't get a laugh out of that story. There's so many good ones in the Old Testament. Sometimes I just want to make it come alive for you a little bit so that you go home with some curiosity and read it on your own because there's really some great stuff in there. But the reason we're covering this story this morning is to talk about Deborah and what we learned from her. Because I think there's a lot of lessons that we can pull out from Deborah, but the one that I see the most, the one that I'm floored with and impressed with the most, is this. When you are certain of the Lord's direction, you can walk with confidence. When you are certain of the Lord's direction, of the clarity that he is giving you, then you can walk with absolute confidence. Deborah somehow, and I don't know how, Deborah knew with clarity that God had given that instruction to Barak. She knew it. And so she had the confidence to summon him and say, didn't God tell you to do the thing? And then when he said, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and come with me, she didn't miss a beat. She didn't hesitate. She wasn't a warrior. She didn't know how to do this. She was a judge. She was a prophetess. She didn't go out on the battlefield, but she didn't hesitate to go with Barak because she was so certain of God's direction that she was able to walk with confidence and follow that direction. She was able to walk in obedience because she was so sure of God's direction and of his providence and sovereignty to see her through that direction. And so in our lives, when we're clear about what God wants us to do, about the step of obedience that we are supposed to take, we can walk with confidence. And I think about it this way. First of all, I believe that every one of us here has the next step of obedience that God is placing in front of us. I think that's what discipleship and spiritual growth is, is simply taking the next step of obedience. Sometimes it's a relatively small one. I want you to develop a habit of a devotional life. I want you to develop a habit of getting up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. Maybe that's yours. Maybe it's a bigger one. Maybe it's beginning to tithe or give or be generous. Maybe it's to have this conversation. Maybe it's to reconcile this relationship. Maybe it's to finally shed some light on some of the dark places in your life, to bring those out into the light and share those with some trusted friends and say, I need help with these. Maybe it's time to actually get some help for some other thing. Maybe it's time to lean on other people. Maybe it's time to offer forgiveness. Maybe it's time to ask for forgiveness. Whatever it is, maybe it's time to watch your mouth and stop looking at stuff you don't need to look at. Whatever it is, I believe that God has for each of us the next step of obedience that he wants us to take. And then when we take that one, he's got another one waiting on us and it's going to be lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of our lives. So we better get used to it. And sometimes I feel like that when God asks us to take a step of obedience, that there's like a fence between us and where he wants us to be. That we're in this yard, we're in this area and there's a fence and it's a walled fence. We can't see on the other side of it. And he says, hey, I want you to jump it. And part of our hesitation is, I want to, but I don't know what's over there. I don't know if I'm going to be met with forgiveness. I don't know if I, I feel like you want me to take this job, but if I do, I don't know what's going to be in that city. I don't know what's going to be at that move. I don't know what kind of co-workers I'm going to be with. I want you to go full in on this relationship, but I don't know what's going to be in that city. I don't know what's going to be at that move. I don't know what kind of coworkers I'm going to be with. I want you to go full in on this relationship, but I don't know what's going to happen when I get there. That's the thing with obedience. There's a fence between us and the step, and we don't always get to see how it's going to go. There's a pretty big fence here for Deborah. I want you to amass an army and go defeat another army that you have no business defeating. She doesn't know how that's going to go when the swords get unsheathed. But when we know with certainty God's direction, we can jump that fence with confidence every time. Now this actually brings us to the question I want to spend time answering today. This is a question that I think every Christian ever has wondered. This is a question that as a pastor, I get asked this with a great deal of frequency. This is a question that I think Christians wonder no matter how long they've been walking with the Lord, no matter how fresh their faith is, no matter the depth of their faith, no matter the breadth of experience of their faith. I think that this is something that all Christians wonder about. And so I wanted to take the rest of our time today and do my best to answer this question, which is, okay, listen, Nate, I understand. When I have certainty of God's direction, I can go to the next thing. When I'm certain about it, I know that I can go with confidence, but how do I know when I've clearly heard from God? How do I know? How do I know with the level of confidence that Deborah had to go risk people's lives that I can jump that fence? How do I know that I know that I've actually heard from God? I think that's a really tough question to answer. And so I wanted to offer you a couple suggestions this morning as to how we can be clear that we've heard from God, that we have clarity on his direction. The first thing I would mention is actually not in your notes. It's probably the most important one. When I was making the notes up, I should have included this one. I thought it was kind of a given, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was important to mention here. God's direction will never be in opposition to his word. Okay, God's direction in prayer and in counsel is always going to be in harmony with scripture. You're never going to pray away a teaching in scripture. You're never going to pray enough to make theft okay, right? Like the Super Bowl is coming up. You're having some kids over. They're in the youth group or they're in the kids ministry. And you're having some families over from the church and you want it to go really well. And your TV is kind of cruddy. So you go to Best Buy and you buy a big, nice one. And you know that you're going to return it on Tuesday, but you were doing this for Jesus. Like I'm doing this for the church. It's for the children, right? We prayed about it. This is what God wants me to do. No, that's theft, man. You're stealing a portion of the use of that object and you're returning it at Best Buy and now they have to give you your full money back and they have to sell it as an open box item and you've stolen from them. And they're a big, huge corporation and they deserve for us to steal from them. Maybe, all right, but that's not what we're talking about. The Bible doesn't make space for those exceptions. That's theft. You're not going to pray that away. You're not going to pray away loving your neighbor as yourself. There's no situation where you can say, I really feel like I should be able to treat this person like a jerk because they're a jerk for me. So this is what I'm going to do. You can't pray that away. You can't pray yourself into an affair. You can't pray yourself into something that runs contrary to Scripture. So the first thing about hearing God's voice is when you think you've heard it, it will never run contrary to this. If it does, you need to fix your ears. Okay, the other reasons. And this, I think, is the biggest one. It's the toughest one to swallow, but it's the most important one. How do I know when I've clearly heard from God? You learn his voice over time. You learn his voice over time. Jesus says that my sheep know me and they know my voice. We recognize when the Father calls to us. We recognize when Jesus is speaking to us. And what this means is the more times I wake up in the morning and I spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer, and I've talked to you guys before about listening prayer, about prayer not just being where we spout off things to God and then we go, okay, amen, and we walk away, but where we try to sit quietly and listen with our soul. And if that sounds mysterious and weird and wispy, it is. I can't explain it to you better than that. You just need to start doing it and trying. But we listen to God. We listen to him speak to us in scripture. We listen to the spiritual leaders in our life. The people that we trust and we hear from them and we start to learn more and more what the voice of God sounds like and when the voice of God is showing up, we start to learn things. Sometimes I'm in a conversation and I'll just hear this little whisper. Lean into this. Put down your phone and listen. Be present here. And it's like, oh, oh, this is a God conversation. God's using this person to speak to me right now. I need to hear this. The more we listen for God, the better we get at hearing him. I always think of it like when I was a kid, my dad had a whistle, just a classic dad whistle. Just, hey, get over here. And I will recognize, I could be in a park and 25 dads could whistle in unison. And I would know which one was my dad's and where he was. Like, I remember being in the church parking lot. I hear the whistle. I go to the car. Like, I just know I'm out playing in the neighborhood. I hear the whistle. I know that's my dad's whistle. Oh, I heard that whistle. That was your dad's whistle. Sorry, sucker. I'm still playing. But when I heard my dad's whistle, I knew you'd go. I just heard it so many times that it just resonates with me, right? That's how the voice of God works. So often, people will come to me frustrated because they're praying about a thing and they don't feel like they have any clear direction. Or it seems like God speaks to other people, but God doesn't speak to me. And it's a hard question to ask, but it's the best one to ask, which is, well, how long have you been trying to listen? How many years have you invested in trying to learn his voice? This is the thing that over time and through dedication, we begin to learn the voice of God. We begin to learn the voice of God so much that we get stories like Elisha. I've mentioned this before, but Elisha in the Old Testament, the book of 1 and 2 Kings, he's somewhere off on a mountainside and someone comes to him and they said, hey, the son of so-and-so just died. They're calling for you. And his response is to look at God and go, this is how you're letting me find out about this? You didn't want to tell me yourself? Like, when has something happened and you've seen it on your Facebook feed and you've gone like, God, you didn't want to mention this to me? Like, who of us are that close that we hear his voice that regularly that he speaks to us with such clarity that we would turn to him and we would say, this terrible thing has happened to someone in my life and you didn't tell me. Why didn't you tell me? I would never do that because I would just assume that I missed it if you tried to tell me. The only way we get that close to God and know his voice that well is by a consistent pursuit of him. So if we're frustrated that we're not hearing the voice of God, we don't have clarity about something, I would ask you, how long have you been trying to listen? The next thing I would say is this. How do we know that we've heard clarity from God? The voices in your life will speak in stereo. The voices that God has placed in your life will speak in stereo. It's awkward for me to say this, but if you go to grace, he's given you a pastor. He's given you other things to compensate for his lack of wisdom in your life, but he's also given you a pastor. He's given you parents, kids. He's given you parents. And if you have parents who love you and love God, they have been placed, you are lucky, and they have been placed in your life for you to listen to. When they speak, we need to hear God speaking to us. And that doesn't go away when we move away. They're still our counsel. They're still placed in our life to shepherd us. Our small group leaders, our small group people, our friends, the people that we look up to, God has placed people in our life who love us and love Jesus, and they are there to be his voice when we need it. And I have always found that these voices speak in stereo. They speak together. They speak in one accord. We go around and we ask people, what do you think about this? I think God wants me to take this step. What do you think about it? What do you think about it? What do you think about it? They're going to speak together in unison. It's going to harmonize with scripture. And when all these trusted voices in our life agree that this is what we're hearing and this is what we need to do, that's a sure sign that that's a step that we can take. I think the mistake that some of us make sometimes is we have a thing that we want to do and we're praying to God and asking permission for it. I think this is what God wants me to do. And we're going around and we're asking all of our friends and all of our trusted friends say, no, that's a bad idea. Gosh, I'm not sure I would do that right now. I don't know. They seem a little bit crazy. You might not want to get into that. And then you find the one person that's like, do it, dog. Go. That's what God wants. And you're like, see, they told me. And we ignore everyone else. And we follow the one piece of advice that we wanted to hear. God's voice often speaks to us in stereo through a multiplicity of counsel. Proverbs tells us that where there is much counsel, there is much wisdom. So if we want clarity in hearing the voice of God, ask people who we know, listen. And this is important too. Maybe you have somebody that you know who prays constantly. I think of Miss Ginger, Miss Ginger Gentry. She is a prayer warrior. She prays all the time. She was our Grace Raleigh Partner of the Year last year. No big deal. We started handing out that award. That's a huge deal. That was the most weird, tepid applause. I hope you heard that, Ginger. If I really needed to know some direction, you know what I would do? I would go to Ms. Ginger, who I know is a prayer warrior, and I would say, hey, I'm thinking about this thing. Will you please pray about this and tell me how you feel God's directing you? Use those voices in your life. The people that are a little bit further down the path, the people who have listened for longer than you, who you trust to hear the voice of God, go to them and say, will you pray about this for me and tell me what you think God is directing you to do? Listen to the voices that God's given us in stereo. The last thing that I would tell you to do if you want clarity on God's direction in your life, and this isn't the best or first option, but it is often a clarifying one, is to ask for a sign. Ask for clear direction. We see this happen in the story of Gideon and the judges. Just a couple of chapters later, God says, hey, I want you to go do this crazy thing. I want you to take 300 men and go fight this big, huge army with it. And Gideon's like, are you sure? And God says, yeah. And Gideon goes, if you're really sure, I'm going to put a doormat out in front of my tent. When I wake up, I want that to be wet and the rest of the ground to be dry. And God says, all right. So Gideon wakes up and the doormat is wet and the rest of the ground is dry. And he's like, I guess I really need to do the thing. But one more time, God, this time I want to wake up tomorrow. I want the ground to be wet and my mat to be dry. And he wakes up the next day and the ground's wet, the mat's dry. And he's like, all right, I guess we're going to do the thing. It's okay to ask for signs. I've actually done this twice in my life. It was such a big decision that I just felt like, God, I need something from you so that I know I can grab onto this if things get hard. And in February of 2016, Jen and I were outside of Atlanta, and we made the decision together that it was time for me to start looking for a job as a senior pastor. That seemed like the next thing to do. And so at the onset of the search, I was outside one night. I was letting the dog out. I went outside, and whenever I go outside, I always look up at the stars. I've always loved the stars. I've always loved the sky. And so I was just looking up at the stars, and I was praying. And I remember my prayer that night was, God, I know that this is going to be tough, and I'm not going to know what to do, and I'm going to have to make a hard decision. So can you just, when I find the right place, can you just make it clear? Can you put Jen and I on the same page on this? I don't want to take her to a place where she doesn't want to go. I don't want to go to a place where I'm not supposed to go. Will you please just make this clear? This is a big choice. And as I was praying that, I looked up, and I saw a constellation that I'd never seen before. And I thought, huh, must be a message from God. I wonder what that is. So I pull out my phone, I download this constellation app and I look at it and it turns out it was a constellation of Taurus. And so I'm reading about the description of the constellation of Taurus, like it's these three systems and they're combining this one thing. Okay, three and one, God, I'll be looking for that. And I'm trying to like piece together what are the tea leaves of this constellation that I need to be paying attention for in the search? And finally, I just gave up. And I put it down. I said, all right, God, I got you loud and clear. I'll keep that in the back of my mind. That'll make sense to me when it needs to make sense to me. And then we get to looking, right? And I got to tell you, you're 36 years old with no senior pastor experience. It takes a church that is pretty dumb or desperate to be willing to give you the keys to the place. That's what I learned in that search. I interviewed a bunch of places. I finished second a lot of times. There was a lot of doubt in there. I began to wonder, is this ever really going to happen for me? I don't have any experience. Everybody says they want somebody without experience. And then they hire the guy that's been doing it for 15 years. So do they really? and is this ever really going to happen? God, do I need to start looking for different things? It was hard, but I felt like I needed to hang in there, right? And then in December of 16, I came across Grace and had my first interview on December the 8th. And then that process kind of went into the next year. And at the end of February, early March, I had come up here on a weekend visit. And when I came up here for a visit and I got to spend time with the people, and I don't know how this happened because, I mean, look at this place. I fell in love with it, okay? I don't know how. I mean, polling all, I was like, I'm all in on this place. I fell in love with it and I really felt like this is where I wanted to be. I felt like it fit. I felt like it was good, and this is where I wanted to be, and I felt like Raleigh was going to be a good place to raise a family. But I also knew after my visit that there was another guy coming up the following weekend, and he probably thought the same thing. God's probably giving him the same direction because you never quite know how that works. And then I knew that after his visit, they were going to have an elder meeting. And then in the elder meeting, they were going to decide who they were going to offer and they were going to give somebody a call. And so it came that night. It was a Tuesday night, I think. And I knew, I think, that they were going to meet at like 6 or 6.30 and that they were going to decide who they wanted to offer and then they were going to make a call. And so, you know, I'm trying to hang in there. I'm trying to not be stressed. 7 o'clock rolls around. I'm like, you know, it's just been 30 minutes. I've got to get into the process a little bit. Then it's 7.30 and I'm like, well, what in the world is taking them so long? Little did I know they had marathon elder meetings back then so they would probably all laugh at that. 8 o'clock hits, 8.30, and I'm like, oh no, this is taking too long. I'm so clearly better than the other guy. How can there be this much debate? And then nine o'clock happens, and I'm like, well, shoot. They offered it to the other dude, and now they're going to call me tomorrow and offer me condolences, or they're waiting to see if he takes it, and maybe I'll be plan B when I'm not above that. And then I just kind of start to spiral. I kind of start to just get anxious and think this isn't going to happen and I'm going back to the place of this is never going to work out. This is never going to happen. I'm going to be a small groups pastor for the rest of my life. That takes work like four a year. And then I'm just bored. I didn't want to do that. And so to try to lower my anxiety, I just went outside to pray. And I go outside to pray. And y'all, I had totally forgotten about Taurus. I hadn't thought about it. I hadn't looked for it. I hadn't read about it. It was not in my mind. And I looked up. And for the second time in my life, I saw that constellation. And I thought, okay, I hear you. We're good. And I stopped praying. And I went inside and I told Jen, everything's going to be fine. She goes, what? And I was like, yeah, I saw some stars. It's going to be good. A few minutes later, Bert called me and they offered me a job. And, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like it's been a pretty good fit. I feel like what was on the other side of that fence has been pretty good. And so sometimes we're not quite sure, but we need a little bit of assurance. It's okay to ask for a sign. It's okay to say, God, I need some clarity here. I need some direction here. But if we want to have the clarity of Deborah so that we can walk with the confidence of Deborah, we need to start learning to listen to God, start giving him opportunities to speak into our life. We need to learn to tune our spiritual ear to his voice so that when he whistles, we hear it, so that when we're in a conversation and he's speaking to us, we slow down and we engage. We need to learn that God speaks in stereo through the voices that he has placed in our life. And we need to learn that sometimes the proper spirit, if we ask for a sign, God and his goodness will give us one. And then we can walk with clarity and confidence into the step of obedience that I know he's asking all of us to take. So let's have the confidence and clarity of Deborah as we go into our week this week. Let's pray. Father, you're just so good to us. God, I pray that we would be better at hearing your voice. We know you're speaking. We know you're guiding. We know you're directing. We know that you're influencing. We know that you're there. We know that you're calling to us even now. That even now you're speaking to our hearts. Even now you're showing us the next thing. Would you please give us ears to hear? Would you please give us eyes to see? Would you please give us the clarity of Deborah? The remarkable knowledge of your voice that Elisha had. Help us to know when you're speaking. Help us to hear when your voice is in our life. Surround us with good counsel. And God, for those this morning who need a sign, I just pray that you would give it to them. Whatever step of obedience that we might be facing, Father, would you give us confidence that whatever's waiting on the other side of that fence is better than where we are now. Give us the courage to take it. It's in your son's name we ask for these things. Amen.