Sermons tagged with Behavior

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Jordan, it is interesting to me that you think profundity is what's required to get up on the stage when they parade me out here every week, falling woefully short of the bar. This is the third part in our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at times in Scripture where we see a blow-up or a blow-out or people with with just big overwhelming emotions because that is so much a part of our life. That is something that we experience just as we go through life. Sometimes our emotions are too big for us and they're overwhelming. And so this morning I wanted to take a look at big emotions in our prayers and what happens and how does God respond when big emotions creep into our prayers, when our prayers really become cries. And to do that, I want us to think about prayer together. It's really, when you consider it, one of the more interesting passages in the Bible, one of the more interesting interchanges that Jesus has with his disciples. They're following him around. They're watching him do ministry. And at one point, they look at Jesus and they say, hey, Jesus, will you teach us to pray? Now, this is a really interesting question coming from the disciples. And many of you have probably considered this before. The disciples knew how to pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed their whole life. They had gone to synagogue every week, maybe daily at different points in their life. I don't know. They had seen a ton of people pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed many prayers before, but there was something different, so different about the prayers of Jesus that they had to stop him and say, can you teach us to pray like you pray? Because that's different than how we pray. And Jesus responds by sharing with them the Lord's prayer. You guys probably all know it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. And so in that, Jesus gives the model of prayer to the disciples and to us in perpetuity. And if you break that down, I've always been taught prayer and I've taught prayer this way in church, in youth group, in camps, in different places, in men's groups, small group, when we talk about prayer, something that's always been really helpful for me is the acronym ACTS. And you guys have probably heard this before. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. So the way that Jesus opens up the prayer. When we pray, the first thing we should do is adore God. God, you're great. God, you're good. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. God, you are wonderful for this. God, you blow me away for that. And when we do this, it really puts us in the right posture for prayer, you know? It really reminds us who we're talking to. I had a Bible teacher in high school who was also my soccer coach, who was also my administrator because I went to a small school. And when he would pray in class, he would say, okay, everyone, let's pray, bow your heads. And we would bow our heads to pray, and he would wait 20 or 30 seconds. And so finally, I asked one day, Mr. Dawson, what are you doing? Like, that's awkward. Why do you make us just sit there in silence? What are you waiting on? Because it's almost like, does he want us to pray? Like, should we? And he told me what he was doing. He said he was taking his mind, whenever he would pause before prayer, to Isaiah chapter 6, where the throne room of God is described. And it says that God is on his throne, and the train of his robe is filling the temple with glory. And there's these six-winged angels flying around him saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And it's just so overwhelming that he cowers in a corner. And Mr. Dawson said that when, he said, when I pray, I like to take myself there to put myself in proper posture before God to remind myself when I pray, where am I going? I'm going to the throne room of God, the King of the universe, and I'm addressing the creator of the universe. That's a serious, somber thing. That's a place for humility. That's a place for penitence. This is why when we teach our children to pray, we teach them to bow their heads and close their eyes. It's a sign of reverence. It's a sign of respect for knowing who we're talking to and where we're going. It's why I encourage you as much as you can to kneel when you pray. Because it's hard to put yourself in the posture of kneeling and not feel humble, at least a little bit. And so Jesus says we should start with adoration. We should adore God. We should praise him. And then we should go to confession. What are the things, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. How have we trespassed against God? What attitudes do we bring into this day and into this prayer? What sins do we carry with us that yet remain unconfessed before the Father? What do we need to confess to God before him? And then we move into this time of thanksgiving, praising Him. God, thank you for your goodness in my life. Thank you for my family. Thank you for a church that I love. Thank you for the rain. Thank you for the day, whatever it is. It's John's second birthday today. Thank you for a great two-year-old son and for friends watching him in the nursery right now. Thank you for all of those things. We praise God for things. And then, suffocation. Then we ask for what we need. And you guys know, and you've heard this, that the tendency when we pray is to skip act and go straight to S. Skip all the other stuff and just go, dear God, I really need blank. I really need you to show up here. I really need this to work out. I'm really worried about this. It's all the I need, I need, I need. And there's a place for that in prayer. But the way that Jesus teaches us prayer, it follows this pattern of first putting ourself in the proper place and then confessing our sins, which remind us of the humility we should carry into the throne room. And then thanksgiving, let's acknowledge all the blessings God's given us in our lives before we ask him for more, and then in that proper mindset, say what we need to say. That's kind of the proper way to pray. But sometimes we pray when our emotions are too big for propriety. Sometimes we pray prayers that become cries. And the emotions that we bring into that moment are too big for acts. I've shared with you guys before that the first time Jen and I got pregnant, we miscarried. And I'm not in the business of doing comparative pain for miscarriages and who has the right to the most sorrow. But for us, the pain was particularly acute because we had been praying for a child for years. For years. We had struggled mightily. Our moms and grandmas were praying for babies. We had the church around us at the time praying that we could have a baby. We knew that's what we wanted to do. On my mama's deathbed, a few years before we got pregnant, the very last thing she did for me was direct someone to the top of her closet to get a stuffed animal that she made to give to my child when we had them. She went ahead and made it, and I think my sister finished it up for her so that we would have that to give to our first child. So when we got pregnant, we were elated. And then we went to the checkup for eight weeks, and the baby wasn't there. I don't know how long it took me to pray after that. But the first time I did pray, it wasn't Acts. The first time I prayed, it didn't look very much like our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. It looked a lot more like God. What in the world? What the heck? I would say different words if I weren't on this stage and there weren't children in the audience. That's how I felt, and that's how I prayed. What are you doing? Because we, and we're not entitled to this. None of what I'm about to say really matters, but to us it did. Jen's a school teacher. She loves kids. She's teaching in a Christian school, leading people towards you. We still have relationships with some of the kids that she taught in those days. I was a school teacher. I taught high school Bible. And then I worked at a church. We had made good choices. We were good Christian people. We had checked all the boxes. We had done all the things. And there was people who were living lives way more rebellious than us who were just tripping accidentally into family. And then we get pregnant and then you take it? No, I'm not praying acts. I'm not following the pattern for this one. There are some prayers that we pray that become cries. When we hear of the terminal diagnosis and we go to the Father and we say, really? This one? Him? Her? Why not me in your jacked up economy? Why them? There's a girl in our community. She's a young woman in our community. Just last week or two. She battled cancer for five years and came to it a week or two ago. Beautiful family, young kids. I don't know when that husband is going to pray again. When he does, those prayers will be cries. We've all prayed prayers like that. Where we're walking through what feels to us like the dark night of the soul and we don't have time or patience for propriety. We just go to our God and we are raw and we are real and we cry out, what in the world? How is this right? How does this make sense? As parents that send their kids to school in that private school in Nashville, what do those prayers sound like when they start to pray again? We've all prayed those prayers that are so big and so raw and so emotional that they become cries. And so I think it's worth it to look and see how God handles these prayers in Scripture. Because we get to see some. God in His goodness left them for us in His inspired Word. And so what I want to encourage you with today is, I know that we've all prayed those prayers. If you've never prayed those prayers, I'm so happy for you. I hope you never do, but I think you will. And what I want us to know as we look into the scripture this morning is that God is not offended by our prayers that become cries. I don't think God in his goodness and in his grace and in his mercy is offended when I look at him after the deepest pain that I've felt up to that point in my life and I go, what in the world? That's not fair. That's not right. That doesn't make sense. I don't think God gets offended by those things. I don't think he's so small that our broken hearts offend our God. And I actually think that there's grace and space for those prayers because we see them in the Bible. We actually see Jesus pray one of these prayers, a prayer that is so raw and so real and so emotional that it becomes a cry. This prayer is recorded in all four Gospels. We're going to look at the account in the Gospel of Luke chapter 22. Beginning in verse 39. And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, speaking of Jesus. And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, this scene, many of you know it, Jesus has just left the Last Supper with the disciples. He's instituted communion. He's told them, my body is going to be broken for you. My blood is going to be spilled for you. He knows what is going to happen. He knows when he gets done praying, he's going to be arrested. And he knows that when he's arrested, he's going to be tried. And after he's tried, he's going to be flogged and beaten, and he's going to be hung on a cross and left there to die and then face death and hell. He knows that. And so he brings the disciples with him, and he says, remain here while I pray. And he goes off a distance, one would assume, so that they couldn't hear him. And it is interesting that they all ended up hearing him, because there's nothing in the text to indicate that Jesus subtly knelt and clasped his hands and said, my Father who is in heaven. No, these prayers from Jesus that we see, in Luke it says he knelt. In another gospel it says that he fell with his face to the ground. And the disciples are a stone's throw away and they can hear him clearly. And then he gets so intense in his praying that sweat begins to mix with his blood, which we know is something that can actually happen in moments of incredibly intense stress in our lives. So the prayer that Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane was not, Dear God, if there's any other way, would you please point me in that? It wasn't that. It was Jesus on his face prostrate, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please, is there any other way? Is there anything else I can do? I do not want to bear this. I do not want to be on the cross and hear you and see you turn your back on me. I do not want to say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I do not want the crown of thorns in my head. I do not want the nails in my wrist. I do not want to do this, Father. Is there any other way? Please, please take this cup from me. That's a prayer becoming a cry. That's Jesus sidestepping propriety and crying out to his heavenly father. And in there, he finds what we should find when we pray like this. No matter how deep, no matter how raw, yet not my will but your will be done. Please give me the strength to accept your will. So I know that God isn't offended by those prayers because his son prays one to him in full view and vision of the disciples. And then he tells us about it in all four gospels. And that made me wonder, where else in the Bible do we have prayers that are raw and real and emotional? Where else in the Bible do we have prayers that have become cries? And of course, I went to Psalms. And I just started reading them and flipping through and finding them, these things where people are just raw. I am weary unto death. I want to die. Take my life. And I put them in your notes, Psalm 142 and Psalm 13 and Psalm 77. I think of Hannah's prayer in the temple when she's praying so earnestly and fervently for a child that Eli the priest thinks she's drunk. I think of the book of Lamentations, which is a whole book of tough, raw prayers. And I was going to kind of bounce around between those prayers, but then I was reminded of another psalm that's really dear to my heart, Psalm 88. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to turn there. I encountered Psalm 88 when I took a trip to Israel several years ago. One of the things most groups do when you go to Israel is when you're in Jerusalem, you go to Caiaphas' house. Caiaphas is the high priest that had Jesus arrested, had him tried, and had him murdered. And in the basement of Caiaphas' house is this makeshift small dungeon. And a portion of the dungeon is a cylindrical room that they would tie ropes under the shoulders of the prisoner and lower them into this pitch black, dark room. Now there's stairs that lead down, but in Caiaphas' day, in Jesus' day, that was not the case. They lower you in and they pull you up when they're ready for you. And most people believe that this is where Jesus spent the night after he got arrested, waiting on his trial before Pilate the next day. And when you go to Jerusalem, you can go down into that cell. And our guide pointed us to Psalm 88. Psalm 88 was written by the sons of Korah, we're told. But it's also believed by scholars to be a prophetic messianic psalm. And many scholars believe that this is meant to be the prayer that Jesus prays after he's arrested. If it's not the prayer that he prays after he's arrested, Jesus knew the scriptures, he knew the psalms, this could very well be a psalm that came to mind that he quoted. But when I picture Jesus arrested and alone and reading, crying these things out, it brings fresh meaning to it for me. And when we listen to it and read it, I think you'll be taken aback by how very real it is. So I'm going to read a good portion of it. Beginning in verse 11. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? And then verse 13, They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. That's a real prayer. That's not a prayer you pray in church in front of other people. That's not how we teach our kids to pray. We see accusations in this prayer. You have caused my friends and my loved ones to shun me. It is your wrath that beats against me and waves and covers me. The person crying out to God in this psalm feels the darkness closing in in such a way that they don't know if they will see the light again. My companions have become darkness, he ends with. And that's it. I am grateful to God for choosing to include in his Bible and his inspired word prayers that are that raw and that are that real. Prayers that show us that when our emotions are too big for propriety, that our God can meet us in those places and hear us. He appreciates those prayers so much so that he recorded them and fought for them and protected them down through the centuries so that we could see them too. So when we pray them, it's okay. When we need to cry out to God, we can. He's not offended by those prayers. He hears those prayers. He welcomes those prayers. And here's what else happens when we cry out to God, when our prayers become cries, when we lose all sense of propriety and we're just trying to figure it out. Here's what else happens when it's literally the dark night of our soul and the darkness is closing in around us and our life is falling apart and our children are making decisions that we don't understand and our husband is making decisions that we don't understand and everything that we thought was going to happen, this future that we had projected is not going to happen. This person that I love is not in my life anymore and I see reminders of them all the time and I don't know how I'm going to put one foot in front of the other. I don't know how I'm going to do it. When we pray those prayers, this is what happens. If we look back at Luke 22, there's a verse that I skipped. Verse 43. In the middle of his praying, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him. In the middle of Jesus crying out, Father, please don't make me do this. Please let there be another way. God says, son, you're going to have to walk that path. But he doesn't make him do it on his own. He sends an angel to strengthen Jesus in the dark night of his soul. And I can't help but believe that God will send angels to strengthen you too. When you pray those prayers, I think God sends his angels to strengthen you as well. And I don't know what those angels look like. Maybe it's a hug. Maybe it's someone's presence. Maybe it's a text or a phone call or an email. I know in our family it's cardinals. Maybe it's a southern thing, I'm not sure. But we believe that when a cardinal shows up in your view, that that's a lost loved one who's just stopping by to say hello. Just to check in on you. And so sometimes God sends cardinals just when we need them. Another big one in our family is Mallard Ducks. You know that we lost my father-in-law a couple years ago. And Mallard Ducks were really special to him. And I can't tell you all the cool places where we've just kind of looked and there's a duck there that doesn't belong there. And it's just God kind of reminding us that he loves us, that he sees our pain, that he walks with us in that pain. Maybe, for some of us, God's using this morning to strengthen you, to buoy you. I hope so. Maybe this is just what you need. My hope for all of you is that you never need this sermon and you never have to pray those prayers. But my suspicion is you have a better chance of dodging raindrops on the way back to your car in a downpour than you do of living a life without tragedy. And so I think all of us, at some point, need this sermon and this reminder that when our emotions are too big for propriety, God can hear those prayers too. And in the hearing, in those moments, he sends his angels one way or another to strengthen us. I just got done reading a book. It's actually Beth Moore's biography. I would highly recommend it. One of the best books I've read in a couple years. And in it, she was talking to someone who faced incredible tragedy. And she asked her, how is it that you have kept going through these years? And she said, God opens my eyes every morning. I have no other explanation than that. There are nights that I went to sleep and I did not want to wake up and God opens my eyes. And so I get up that day and for us today I use the breath that's in my lungs and I praise him and I go. We will all in different times and seasons and for different reasons and in different ways walk through dark nights of the soul. But when we do, we can cry out to God. And when we cry out to God, He will hear us. And when He hears us, He will send His angels to strengthen us. I'll finish with this verse from Isaiah, and then I'll pray, because it's one of my favorites. We're taught in Isaiah that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and that he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. You're big, you're good, and you're gracious, and we are broken. We need you so much, and we have no right, we have no right to pound our desk and shake our fist and demand answers from you. We have no right to do that, and yet in your goodness, from time to time, you allow it, and you hug us, and you weep with us. I lift up the people today who might have recently prayed prayers like these, and I just ask that you would strengthen them, that they would feel your presence, they would feel your goodness, they would feel your love, they would be strengthened by you. Father, buoy us and tether us to you. God, we also thank you that Jesus did drink of that cup, that he did die for us, that he did conquer death and sin and hell for us so that we don't have to. And God, we look forward to a day when we understand things just a little bit better. But in the meantime, may your presence and your love be ever enough. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. A lot of you have chosen this morning to make this a part of your Sunday. So many so that Keith had to sit in the front with the good Christians. So this is going to be a great Sunday. I almost said the good Christians except for Alan's up here too. So you guys can be buddies together. Sorry, you're both excellent placeholders for that joke that I wanted to make. And if you're, listen, if you're new here and you're trying to, you're kicking the tires, what just happened in worship is just such a great microcosm for, I think, who we are as a church, where we are worshiping earnestly and singing and getting after it. And it was a sweet moment. And then we start the next song and there's a little whoopsie and then we all laugh at ourselves and we just get right back into it. And I just thought it was great. I actually got on my knees and prayed and I pray before every sermon. And I'm just, I was just praying that I'm just so grateful that I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors of a church that I just love so much. I just, I just, I love this place. I love you guys. I consider it a huge privilege. I've told a couple different people this week. It just came up in conversation that I just don't think there could be an easier church to pastor. You guys are so great to me and my family. But anyways, we're in part two of our series called Big Emotions. I think, is that right, Carly? Is that what we're calling this one? Okay. I never know. I always tell them what it's about and then they just name it and I go, okay. And then I get it wrong. But part two of big emotions. And basically what we're doing is looking at stories, instances in the Bible where the people in the Bible had these big emotions, sometimes a blow up or a blow out. We're looking at that. We're examining it. We're relating to it because we're emotional creatures. We have blow ups and blow outs sometimes. And we're trying to figure out what we can learn from it. And so this week, we're looking at a pretty unique instance in the life of Christ. When I was growing up, I don't have many memories at all that don't involve church. I don't have a memory that goes beyond my church involvement. And so growing up, I heard all the stories. And before I heard the stories about Jesus, I heard about him that he was perfect, right? That he lived a sinless life. That he never did anything wrong, which is remarkable. And so I knew that as a little kid, but there's two stories that I encountered when I was young that gave me pause. Like, wait, are you sure? Because that really feels like sin. That really feels like that guy did stuff he wasn't supposed to do. The first one is in, I think it's Luke, when it records that Mary and Joseph took the family to Jerusalem for Passover, as was their habit. And they left, and Jesus chose to stay behind as a 12-year-old to talk to the rabbis and the scribes and the Pharisees. And I always looked at that story and thought, like, listen, I'm not trying to accuse our Savior of anything. I just know that when I was a kid, pretty high up on the obedience priority list was when your parents say it's time to go, you go. Like you don't just be like, yeah, I opted in to just remain at Six Flags after you guys left. Like I'm just going to, or I guess here it's Bush Gardens. I'm just going to, I'm just going to stay there. You guys go ahead. I'll figure it out. Like that seemed like pretty egregious sin for a 12 year old to just say, you know what you guys go on. I'm going to talk to my new pals in the temple, but obviously he didn't sin. I still not quite sure how that worked out for 12 year old Jesus, just to start making decisions about where he's going to stay. But I don't think that it blemishes his perfect record. The other story that made me go, gosh, that really seems like there's a different way to do that, is the story of Jesus cleansing the temple. And I honestly think that even now, and we'll get into the story in a second, so if you don't know what that is yet, don't worry, we'll get there. But I think even now, if you made us contemporaries of Jesus, and we saw him do what he's about to do when he cleanses the temple, we probably would have pulled him aside and been like, hey, buddy, I don't know that that was the best way to handle that. There's probably a different way to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. It's pretty untoward to do that. We would probably tell him that he was wrong and that he owed some people some apologies. But we're going to get into the story and actually see why his anger and zeal in this story is pretty warranted. So this story is in all four of the Gospels. I think John gives the best account of it, and we find it in John 2, verses 13 through 16. So I'll read it to you, and then we can talk about what's going on. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changers sitting there. And then in verse 17, he says, So to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Wherever you were, you needed to get you and your family to Jerusalem to observe the holidays. Passover was one of those times where it's written in God's law and expected as you exercise your faith that you would be obedient and go supposed to go to the temple. And when you got to the temple, you were supposed to offer sacrifices in accordance with just your regular religious maintenance. In Leviticus, we see a ton of laws about what kinds of sacrifices are required for what types of grievances and sins. And so you had to offer those as well as your traditional Passover sacrifices for you and your family. This is all written into the law and required of good religious people. And so good religious people from all over Israel would go to Jerusalem on these high holidays and walk in obedience to those instructions in what we call the Old Testament. They're being obedient and living out their faith well. So if we picture this from the perspective of a family in Nazareth where Jesus was from, to get to Jerusalem, I believe is about 30 miles. Scholars believe that that journey is going to take three to five days depending on who you've got with you. For my family with a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, that's going to take seven days, and I'm going to not have any religion by the time I get to Jerusalem. Or I'll just have some serious sacrificing to do, right? To make things right. So whatever pace you go at, it's a three to five-day journey, a lot of people think. And you get there, you've got to find some place to stay. Maybe you stay in an inn. Maybe, I'm sure they had a commercialization set up and people would take advantage of people needing places to stay. Maybe you had friends or family in Jerusalem and there was one big house that you all got to stay at, but you've got to figure that out. And then you've got to go to the temple, right? But to go into the temple, you had to pay a temple tax. I don't know why you had to pay this temple tax. It feels a little bit like kind of Catholic indulgences, middle ages, like that kind of thing where the leaders of the church are just trying to extract more money from the people who come in. It would be like if I charged you $5 a seat to listen to the sermons and to worship with us. I don't think anything could clear this place out quicker than if I started asking for, that's right, than if I started asking for money to listen to me. But that's what you had to do when you went there. And so these money changers, they had these coins, and this is where the racket comes in. They had these coins that were made in Israel for Hebrews, and they did not bear Caesar's symbol. They had a real issue with coins with Caesar's symbol on them because Caesar claimed to be Lord, and that wasn't good. And so they couldn't accept the Roman currency that was ubiquitous in the country. Far more Roman currency going around than this particular, specifically Israeli currency going around. And so they would ask for you to take your Roman currency and exchange it for that Israeli currency or that Jewish currency. And some people think it's because of the issue with Caesar and other people think it's just that the Jewish coins were minted with more and better silver, and so it was of greater value. But at any rate, you had to take the coins that you had and exchange them. And you know, as well as I do, that the guy who's got the bucket of the Jewish coins at the temple and is exchanging them isn't doing that on good faith. He's making a little off the top because he's got a family to feed too, right? And maybe, maybe the family in Nazareth has its own cash of Jewish coins that are acceptable at the temple, and maybe they don't need that money changer. But my bet is they probably do. And my bet is he's scalping them. He's making some money off of that exchange. And we don't know for sure that the people in the temple who were selling animals and lending money, we don't know for sure that they were price gouging, that they were taking advantage of the populace. But we do know that Jesus said that they had turned his father's house and the other gospel accounts, that they had turned his father's house into a den of thieves or robbers. Which leads me to believe that they were taking advantage of their situation. You're a family from Nazareth. You're traveling three to five days. Who knows how many people are in your caravan. You probably don't want to or have the capacity to bring sheep with you, doves with you for the sacrifice, oxen with you for the sacrifice. You probably don't have that capacity. And even when you get where you're going and you've got to stay at the Hampton Inn, they probably don't allow sheep in there. Maybe you have a house that you can go to and they've got a stable or a barn and you've brought all your sacrificial animals and you're self-sufficient. But I would guess, and research bears this out, that most of the populace did not have that stuff to bring or the capacity to bring it to Jerusalem. So once you get to Jerusalem, to the temple, and you've got to get in the temple with the coin that they accept and you've got to perform the sacrifices that your God demands of you, you have to buy those animals once you get there. Do you see what I'm saying? This is like, this is a North Carolina zoo situation at the junction. This is Disney World. They've got you. You're going to get chicken tenders and you're going to pay $17 and you're going to like it. Nothing you can do about it. And again, we can't say with certainty that they were price gouging, but everything in the text points to the fact that they were. And so Jesus sees this and he's rightly angered by it. Because when you think about it, it's pretty appalling what they're doing. They are leveraging God's laws to line their own pockets. They are commercializing the sacred. And what's more, to me, the high priest is complicit in all of this. Because you don't get to set up shop on the temple grounds. And when we hear this story, please know that when we think about a temple, I think we think about this indoor structure. But at the Temple Mount, there was this outer courtyard that was the size of several football fields, and everyone's allowed in there, Gentiles and Jews alike. You're allowed in there, and that's where all of the tables and the moneylenders are set up. And then you have like this rectangle in the middle, and the rectangle is divided into two squares, and the front square is where Jewish men and women are allowed, and the back square is where Jewish that Jesus goes in and clears out. He goes in there. First of all, he sees what they're doing. And if you read the text, it says he fashioned a whip. He didn't go find one. He sat down and anger wove a whole whip. And then he took it and he started flipping over tables like a madman. And I assume hitting people with the whip. That's one of the scenes in Jesus's life I would have liked to attend. But when you understand what's going on, his anger makes so much sense. And to me, it's so very justifiable. These people are humble people trying to be obedient to their God, trying to do the right thing. And they're going to Jerusalem to take the pilgrimage like good Hebrews should. And listen, we know how faith works. We know how religious cultures work. I think we're kidding ourselves if we think 100% of the Hebrew people are taking a pilgrimage for all three high holidays every year. Some people had opted out. Some people didn't care. Some people couldn't make it. I'm sure a higher percentage of that population went than would go in Christian America in the 80s making some pilgrimage, but not everybody went. So the ones who are going are the faithful ones. They're the committed ones. To them, this faith matters, and they're trying to do the right thing, and they're trying to teach it to their children and their children's children too. And when they get there, they're being taken advantage of. We don't know this for sure, but I'd be willing to proffer a guess that the people exchanging those coins had a higher net value than the people who needed the exchanging done. I bet the people selling oxen had a higher net worth than a majority of the people buying the oxen from them. The rich were likely getting richer while the poor were getting poorer. And the galling thing is it's all in the name of God. They're taking advantage of the sacred to line their own pockets, and it's gross. And Jesus won't have it. He goes in there, flips tables, drives them out, and the disciples are reminded that it was said about him that he would have zeal for his father's house. So there's a lot of things that we can learn from this story as we look at it and we pull it apart and we analyze it. There's a lot of things we can learn from this story. I think one of the things, and I almost preached about it, but I'm just going to set it here and let you guys consider it later in your own time. Maybe you can talk about it in your small groups. But this story pretty heavily indicates that justice matters a lot to Jesus. And fighting against injustice matters a lot to Jesus. I think what galled Jesus was the fact that these people who in good faith were trying to be obedient to their father were being taken advantage of for their very faith. It's remarkably unjust and it ticked them off. But I think more than that, more than that, was what they were turning his father's house into. And what I see glaring like a bullhorn from these passages is that Jesus will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Our Jesus will not put up with, he will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. I don't know where you draw lines in your life. I don't know what you feel like you can't put up with, what really gets your ire going. I know for me, when I see someone who is, believe it or not, when I see someone who is willfully unkind and hurtful to someone else, I write that person off. I have a really hard time with someone who is willing to be unkind and hurtful to someone else. I just can't tolerate it. I don't know what your thing is. Jesus' thing is, one of them, you will not sully the sacred while I am here. Because the temple, the temple was sacred to the Jew. It was sacred to Jesus. Do you understand that the temple was the place of the presence of God for thousands of years? In that back rectangle where the Holy of Holies sat, in the Holy of Holies behind a veil sat the Ark of the Covenant. And on the Ark of the Covenant, there's two angels, golden angels, and their wings touch in the middle. And where their wings touch is called the mercy seat. And on the mercy seat rests the very presence of God, making that temple and that city and that nation unique in all the world. Do you know that every synagogue built outside of Israel is built to face Jerusalem and that every synagogue in Israel faces Jerusalem. It's all about the Holy of Holies and what's in there and the presence of God being in that place. The temple was a sacred space. A space that when you go into it, it's different than any other experience in your life. A space where you take your children and you teach them the way that you were taught. The space where when you become the matriarch or the patriarch of your family, you sit your grandchildren down and you tell them about the pilgrimages that you used to make. And most importantly, it's a place of worship where we assign worth to God. Not just praise and worship, not singing like what we did a few minutes ago, but worship where you declare with every breath and with every action and with every thought and with every deed that God, you are Lord and I am not. That was a place where you went to lay yourself down prostrate and say, God, you are amazing and to stand in awe of God. The temple was a space for the sacred and they sullied it with their selfishness. And so Jesus said, no, I will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Now here's why that should matter a lot to you and I, because of what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians chapter 6. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul tells us this, or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. The New Testament teaches us that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And I used to hear growing up, I would hear Baptists say that you shouldn't drink because your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and alcohol is not healthy for you. And then you just look at them and be like, do you eat fried chicken? And then that clearly is a misapplication. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Meaning, Paul tells us in other writings, I think it's Ephesians, but I'm not certain on that. But I am certain that what he says is that when you become a Christian, that you receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment on your salvation. And again, to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He came to deliver the world. That he did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he is who he says he, that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day and he's going to get us and take us home. To be a Christian is to believe those things. And when we believe those things, the Bible teaches us that God gives us his Holy Spirit in our hearts. And what does that language mean? We don't know. We just kind of feel that language. But he gives us the Holy Spirit in our heart as a seal of the promise that one day he's going to send his son back to take us to him, to take us home. And that because of that, because this is the place where the Holy Spirit dwells, we have now become the temple. Our bodies are the temple. Our bodies are where the presence of God sits in this earthly place. Because when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, many of you know this, the veil that was hung in the Holy of Holies that separated the presence of God from everyone else was torn in two from top to bottom and the presence of God exited that place. And then we learn at the end of the Gospels and at the beginning of Acts that that presence actually returns to us in the form of God's Spirit and that we are the houses of God's Spirit. We are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And what are temples for? Temples are for worship. Temples are sacred. Temples are where we meet with God. And when we talk about temples being places of worship, I am reminded I'm reminded that Paul wrote that we are actually called to be living sacrifices. That going through life as a living sacrifice, Paul calls it, this is our spiritual act of worship, holy and acceptable to God. He tells us as Christians that we are to live our lives as sacrifices. God, we wake up every day, God, what would you have me do today? How would you have me use this instrument for your glory today? And that is our spiritual act of worship. Not praise, but worship. And our spiritual act of worship, if what happens in the temple is every thought, every action, every deed declares implicitly, Lord, you are Lord and I am not, then what he calls us to do, what we are called to do when we understand the theology of the New Testament is to live our lives as the temples of the Holy Spirit, to live our lives as spiritual acts of worship. Meaning, when we go throughout our day, every thought, every word, every action, every deed ought to declare, God, you are God and I am not. Now that is pretty high bar. And I'll be the first to admit to you, I do not think I have yet accumulated a day where every thought, deed, action, emotion, reaction I had that day declared, God, you are God and I am not. But here's what we're not going to do at Grace. We're not going to back off of the high bar that Scripture sets for us to make it more attainable for ourselves so that we become something that we're not supposed to be. We're going to sit in humility and brokenness before the incredibly high bar of Scripture and say, Jesus, I can't. You have to help me. But when we are told that our bodies, the temples of the Holy Spirit, the way to live our lives is living sacrifices. This is our spiritual act of worship within that temple. We are told that every thought and deed and action and word needs to declare that he is Lord and we are not. And that's a very high bar. We are also reminded that Jesus does not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. And Paul has declared us sacred because we are temples. You guys can see where I'm going there. All of you, I'm certain, walked in here this morning with something in your temple that's sullying the sacred. All of us in our lives have trampled on Jesus. All of us in our actions and our thoughts and our deeds and our words have sullied the sacred, have prevented our bodies from being used for worship. And so, to me, the story of Jesus cleansing the temple is in all four Gospels because it is a continuous reminder when we examine it and consider it and reflect on it that we ought to be people of repentance. That we ought to be people who invite Jesus into our life and say, turn over my tables if you need to. Show me where I am sullying the sacred and help me to get rid of those things. I don't need to enumerate the possible sins and the possible attitudes that you walked into this room with. And when I say you, I mean me too. I don't need to list those for you because you already know what they are. Because you have the Holy Spirit and he's getting after you about them right now. So I believe that this story calls us to repentance. Calls us to a moment where we plead with Jesus, would you please clean out this temple? Would you please turn over these tables? And when we talk about repentance, most of us in this room know what repentance is. I've done a sermon or two on it, but just so we're on the same page. Repentance means 180 degree turn. So it's not just confession. Confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yes, I see that. And it definitely was wrong to cuss at that six-year-old in the store. And I'm so sorry. That's wrong. Repentance is to move away from it and never do that again. Okay. So confession is, I'm sorry that I disappointed you in this way. I can see why that was disappointing. I agree, I would be disappointed in me too. But if we just keep doing it, then it doesn't matter. We just stop it, I'm sorry. So repentance is to apologize and then move in the opposite direction, away from sin and back towards the Father. That's what repentance is. And I think that when we think about repentance, we think about repenting of actions, things that we did. And so we repent and we say, God, I'm sorry that I did this. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry that I looked at that. I'm not going to look at that anymore. I'm sorry that I drank too much that time. I'm not going to drink too much anymore. I'm sorry that I lost my temper. I'm not going to lose my temper. I'm sorry that I worried too much. I'm not going to worry. We tend to repent of actions, things that we did. I'm sorry I did blank. I'm not going to do blank anymore. But I would actually put in front of you maybe a new way of thinking or a different way of thinking about repentance that was put in front of me a couple of weeks ago and I'm just so grateful for it. I think that we should repent of what we allow in our hearts, not necessarily how we behave. We should repent of what we allow to take up residence in our heart. The attitudes and the motives behind the behaviors are far more important to repent of than the actions themselves. Can I actually, can I tell you something? I mean, I know I can. That's a stupid question. I'm sorry. I'm gonna. I actually had an interesting conversation recently with a couple of my friends where we were asking, is God really even that interested in our behavior? Does he even really care about our behavior? And I increasingly think the answer is no. I increasingly think it's just he doesn't really care about our behavior, not because it doesn't matter to him what we do, but because out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. Because our behaviors will follow our attitudes and motives. So he's far more worried about cleansing our heart than making our behavior good. And I think that the way it works to repent of attitudes over actions can go something like this. You could pick a sin. I'm not sure what it is you struggle with. I can make some educated guesses, but I know for sure what I struggle with. And I shared one of those with you last week. I got angry. I lost my temper. I slapped the center console. I raised my voice at my daughter. She cried, and it was a moment that I wish I could take back. And I do that. I have a shorter fuse than I'd like. I can get angry or frustrated quickly. Hopefully, I deflate quickly too. But that's one of the things that I deal with. And so last week we talked about how when we lose our temper and we lash out, we looked at the story of Peter in the garden and they were coming to arrest Jesus and he swung his sword and he cut off the ear of one of the guards arresting Jesus. And Jesus picks up the ear and he puts it back on the guard and he mouthing us and he says, go on your way, Peter, stop doing that. And so we kind of talked about this language of sometimes we will lash out and we'll cut off people's ears. And so if anger is a thing that you deal with, like me, then I don't think it's really helpful to say, God, I'm sorry I cut off that person's ear. I'm never going to cut off ears again. I'm going to take a deep breath and count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my daughter. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my coworker, at my wife, at my husband, whatever it is. I'm going to count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't think that's super helpful. I think what's more helpful is to stop and think, well, why was I angry? Just in general, I'm going to step over here. This is not biblical, okay? I hesitated to even say anything about this, but when you ask why you're angry, you'll almost always find that you're not entitled to it. And most anger comes from unmet expectations. And some of those aren't very fair. Okay. When I reflect on when I get frustrated, what I find at the root of that, 98% of the time, is just unmitigated selfishness. It's just a bratty nine-year-old kid who doesn't want to do what they don't want to do. I don't want to get up and take the dog outside. I wish we didn't have one. I want to sit on the couch. So I'm angry. A lot of my anger has to do with me just wanting to sit on the couch. I don't want to get up and go do that. I don't want to clean. I don't want to go follow after a two-year-old. I want to sit right here, and I want to watch the Masters. That's what I want to do. I don't want to be going this slowly on 540. I'd like to be going quicker than you, and you're prohibiting that. I don't want to be in this conversation. I don't want to hear that story. I don't want to have to go there. I don't want to have to go stand in a field with sunshine and get my picture taken with my children who will not smile. I don't want to do that. My anger, my frustration in my life almost always is stirred up by poor Nate being made to do something he doesn't want to do. What a baby. You are too. So for me, rather than praying, God, help me not lash out at people anymore. A much better prayer is, God, help me to become a more selfless, patient person so that I might better love those around me. Help me to become, I've identified that I get frustrated because I'm selfish, so help me to be a more patient and selfless person. And here's the best part, so that I might better love those around me. Because those sins and attitudes and actions that exist in your life, who do they hurt the most? They hurt the people you love the most. And when we carry those through our lives, we actually love them more poorly than we could and should. So a helpful thing when we repent is to think, how was this attitude? How was my selfishness? How was my greed? How was my anxiety? How was my stubbornness? How was my pride? How was that hurting the people around me? And then you apologize to them and you repent of that too. But we don't repent by praying that God would take away actions. We pray that he would come into our hearts and take away attitudes. And I think that this mindset of repentance sheds light on what David writes in Psalm 139. It's a passage that's vexed me for most of my life. I'll tell you why in a second. But in Psalm 139, David says, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. I usually joke when I mention that verse that that's a prayer I've never had to pray. I've never had to be like, dear God, can you just show me where I'm sinning? Because I don't see it. And I would like you to help me. I've never had to pray that prayer. I know where I'm messing up. I see it. And if I don't always see it, I have a wife. She sees it. She'll tell me. She's not here today. I can say that. Lily's sick. She's got a cold. But the more I think about it, I don't really think that's what David meant either. I don't think maybe he did, but David was so very human. David was a terrible father. He had so many cracks in the facade. It's difficult for me to believe that David had a season of his life when he was writing Psalm 139 where he thought, you know what? I know I used to mess up, but I've been pretty much nailing it lately. God, I think I'm perfect for the last month, so if you could just tell me if I'm not, that'd be great. I don't think that's what David was doing. I think what David was doing is what we're talking about this morning. Jesus, can you come in my heart and search out those motives? Can you come in my heart and start flipping over tables? Some of us are people pleasers. We bend over backwards to make everyone around us happy. And sometimes that makes us be people that we're not. It's an interesting prayer to say, God, can you show me why I do that? Can you help me understand why I want those people to like me so much? Can you help me understand why I'm getting so angry? Can you help me understand why I seem to be so motivated by success? Can you help me understand why I don't like many of the people in my life right now and I know it's my problem? We start praying motive prayers, idols in heart prayers, sullying the temple prayers. And true repentance, the kind that we need, really, we can't do that on our own. If we're not repenting of actions, and we can't just white-knuckle our way back to holiness, but we have to repent of attitudes and things that we've allowed to take root in our heart and sully the sacred, then we need the kind of cleansing that only Jesus can offer. We need to pray the prayer of David in light of the story of Jesus cleansing the temple and say, God, wherever the tables have set up in my life, wherever there's money changing going on, wherever I'm taking advantage of people, whatever is in here that's sullying the sacred space of the temple of your Holy Spirit, God, would you show it to me, and would you give me the courage to pray that it leaves? And I'll help you with this too. Maybe you know exactly what it is. I don't need God to divine my attitude. I don't need to go to counseling to help suss this out. I don't need to talk to advisors who love me and can tell me what my attitudes have been. I know exactly what I need to do. But I don't want to do it. I like that sin. I like that sullying. And I'm not going to listen to one sermon by some guy and then walk away from that. Okay? I've been there too. So let me just encourage you to pray this. God, I don't want this to not be in my life. Would you help me to want to want it to go away? I'm not ready to let go of this sin, but God, will you move me closer to wanting to get rid of it, to hating it like you do? Because right now I don't. Right now I like it. Will you just help move the needle a little bit today and tomorrow and next week on not being happy with this in my life? But for a lot of us, the prayer today is a prayer of repentance, which should be a regular thing in our Christian life. God, show me what attitudes and idols I have in my heart and what things I have motivating the sin in my life that you might turn them over and force them out just like you did in the temple that day. Because if Jesus has a zeal for not sullying the sacred in that temple, then I can promise you that he is zealous about your temples too. Let's invite him in and let's be places that are places, let's be people that are places of worship every day as we learn what it is to repent of the things that are sullying the sacred in our lives. Let's pray. Father, God, we love you so much. We thank you that your kindness leads us to repentance, that it's not something you force onto us, that you don't run into our lives with a whip and start turning over tables and just cause all kinds of pain and hurt and dishevelment, but that your kindness, your love, your invitation, your grace, your patience and forbearance with us leads us to repentance. That the more we learn about you, the closer we want to be to you. And the less patience we have for the things that prevent us from worshiping you. God, I pray that we in this room would repent of sins big and little. That we would repent of attitudes egregious and simply unholy and unhelpful. And that God, even today, all of us in this room would take a step towards being cleansed. We pray the prayer of David and invite you into our hearts to clean things out so that we might be instruments of worship for you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We find ourselves at the end of a series called Known For where we're examining this idea of reputation. What are we known for as individuals? What are our families known for? Last week we talked about what our church is known for, and this week we want to talk about what our faith is known for. And this is a sermon for me that really means a whole lot to me. It's really very important. This is a message that when we set up this series and when I started writing the sermons each week, in the back of my head I wasn't really writing the other sermons. I was thinking about this one and what I felt compelled to say and what I felt needed to be said. When I go to write a sermon, I write down, I just sit down and I just write all of my thoughts that I have until there's one that seems good and then I go with that one, which sometimes doesn't take very much time at all. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but I wrote down more stuff for this sermon than I've ever written down for almost any of them, because the reputation of God's church matters very much to me. I love the church. I love this outpost of an eternal kingdom that we get to participate in with our lives. We are, we're told, the ambassadors of Christ to a lost and watching world. And so it is our job to carry that flag well. It is our job to be highly regarded in our culture and in the public square. And how God's children are perceived and how his kingdom on earth, the church, is perceived ought to matter very much to a believer. And so for me as a pastor who's dedicated his life to the church, who loves the church very much, it matters very much how we are perceived. And if we were to ask ourselves, how is Christianity in the American church perceived by our culture, the answer is not great. The answer is that for my lifetime, and for most of your lifetimes, we have been on a slow decline. Where the percentage of people over 60 who attend church and claim a faith has gotten lower and lower, and that's the highest percentage of our population that attends and prioritizes churches until you get down to people under 25 years old, and it's as low as 18% of people that claim of faith and attend church on any sort of regular basis. We are on a slow slide towards a post-Christian culture where the church has lost its position of prominence in our country. And the hard part is it's our fault. It's not them. People leaving church, rejecting church, are people who grew up in it. So what are we doing to make a bad name for our Savior? It's really the question that faces us, and it's an important one. To answer it, if you'll humor me, I would like to do a brief overview of all of Christian history. Also, I'm not kidding. So in the new church, after Jesus died, I almost wore, I used to teach Christian high school, and to make myself feel like more of a teacher, Jen remembers this, I bought a houndstooth blazer, and I wanted to wear it for you, but that thing don't fit, man. That would have been flapping open all day. That would have been bad news. So I couldn't do it, so I went with coral. Some people have called it salmon. I don't know which it is. But here we go. Humor me on this. I will try to move as quickly as possible. And I promise you, I'm getting to a point with this. And another reason I'm sharing this with you is because I'm assuming that most of us in this room are Christians, but that the vast majority of us didn't go to seminary and probably haven't taken a personal interest in exhaustive church history. And a lot of this might be new information for you, and I think it can be very helpful information to you. So the church began, obviously, in Jerusalem at the death of Christ. And then we see Pentecost and Acts. The disciples are the leaders of the church. Saul is converted to Paul and commissioned to plant churches throughout Asia Minor. He does this over four missionary journeys. And we see Christianity begin to flourish in the ancient world under the umbrella of the Roman Empire. Because Christianity claimed that there was a Lord who wasn't the emperor, it was reviled as a rebellious and revolutionary religion. And it was persecuted and attempted to be stamped out at every turn, sometimes really bad under Nero, sometimes a little lighter, but it was consistently persecuted in the early centuries of the church. Incidentally, the church always, always flourishes when it's persecuted and always messes things up when it's in power. We'll see that. So the church begins to flourish and grow and grow in prominence and God is blessing it. And in the midst of this flourishing in 313 AD, an emperor named Constantine decided to legalize Christianity. Many of you probably know that. What you may not know is that he did not legalize Christianity because he was a convert and was favorable towards it. All the evidence points to him continuing in the pagan faith that he claimed before he legalized Christianity. He simply legalized it to ingratiate himself to elements of his empire and political leaders and figures that were close to him whose power he needed so that it would be easier to be the emperor. He married the Christian faith for political expediency while feigning a faith that he didn't really have for the sake of his own political career and efficacy. And I would just like to say that I'm very grateful that only happened in 313 and definitely does not happen in the United States for any reason. So Christianity moves into this place of cultural power and primacy. And in the midst of this, eventually, while Christianity, and it's the Catholic Church, but I'm not picking on the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church was the only church until about 1050 when we had the Great Schism and that born Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. So in that time, what we see is the crumble and the fall of the Roman Empire. And all of Europe is basically made up of Frankish and Germanic clans and tribes and nation states. The only transnational power in this time is the Catholic Church. And so the Pope, most pointed, Pope Gregory, becomes kingmaker. He decides who's going to be king of what tribe. He decides who's going to get promoted. And the Catholic Church decides what all these tribes have to believe and what they're going to think favorably of and what they're not. And so this is really historically the very height of power for the Christian church is the pope as kingmaker, as the most powerful force on the planet, single most powerful person on the planet. And out of this place of great power comes our worst and most egregious sins in history. Comes the Spanish Inquisition, where inquisitors are commissioned to go to towns and suss out the heretics and kill people who claim a Christian faith, they just don't articulate it like all the nuanced ways the Catholic Church insisted that they should, and so they kill them. This is when we started indulgences. Indulgences are some of the greatest evil to me in the history of the church. The church had this doctrine of purgatory, where you were taught that even if you're saved, even if you're going to heaven when you die, that since you've sinned here on earth to differing degrees, you have to pay penance in purgatory. Basically, we got to burn all the bad stuff off of you in purgatory before you can go to heaven. That was the idea. But there was this great system that they invented that's called indulgences. And what they said is you're probably going to burn for that for a little while in between this life and the next. But the more money you give to the church, God actually deposits that to your spiritual account, and you burn less. So this is just keep giving. And then they would tell you we're very sad that your mother just died died and we know you're grieving, but also she's on fire. So the more money you give, the quicker you can put out that flame. And there's this phrase, I'll never forget it. There was a guy who was the right hand of the Pope. I forget what his name was, but he used to go through small towns in Europe to collect money for indulgences. And he would ring the metal coffer and and he would say, for every coin in the coffer rings a soul from purgatory springs. And it is an egregious evil on a poor, illiterate populace. But it also paid for the Vatican City, so... And then the worst of our sins, the Crusades. Raping and pillaging our way across Europe for a holy war in the name of Jesus to try to conquer Jerusalem from the Muslims for what reasons I do not understand. Telling these young men who are again illiterate and uneducated that if they die in this holy war that they will go straight to heaven and skip purgatory altogether. At our time of greatest power, we committed our greatest sins. In the midst of these sins, towards the end of the 1400s, there was a guy named Ulrich Zwingli. He started to ask some questions. He was followed by John Calvin and then ultimately by a guy named Martin Luther, who we probably know, and you may have heard the 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Church door, where he says, hey, this church seems corrupt. I've got some questions. And out of their questions and in the corruption that they saw began the Great Reformation. And so that's when the Protestant church sprung off of the Catholic church. And in that Reformation, that was very necessary. And in asking those questions that did need to be asked, and in holding the powerful accountable, we see a spiritual flourishing again, where we have the Scottish Reformation and the English Reformation and the Swedish Reformation. And all of this was born out of Germany. So there's large reform going on in the German church. And so across Christendom, things start to get better, and churches start to be filled with more grace, and things get less corrupt. And so we kind of start to pick ourselves up again. Except what happens in the midst of this flourishing and this spiritual awakening? Well, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin decide that what they need to do is establish a Christian nation state in Geneva where it's going to be this perfect society where all we do is follow God's laws. And if you don't follow God's laws, you're not allowed to live there. And what they do, they killed heretics. John Calvin had one of his closest friends burned alive. He pleaded with the authorities that it could be just beheaded, so it would be a quicker death. But they said, no, we've got to burn him alive for his heresies. He was a believer. John Calvin killed other Christians. Martin Luther was anti-Semitic and was responsible for the death of thousands of Jews, and he would go around commissioning people to kill Baptists. If you would baptize somebody, Martin Luther didn't agree with that, and so he'd just have you killed for your heresy. So at the height of their power, what did they do? They used it to try to get people to behave the way they thought they should behave, and they tanked it. And so Europe, in response to the Reformation and the behavior of the Christians of the Reformation, in response to the behaviors of the Christians from the Catholic Church, wholeheartedly began to reject religion and move away from it. And the church in Europe goes into atrophy. About this time, some people seeking religious freedom from the oppression of Europe come to Jamestown, and they start the American experiment. The American experiment, we found this country on Christian principles, and the church occupies this place of importance in our country. And then the 1700s, we have figures like Jonathan Edwards who led the Great Awakening. And Christianity begins to flourish again in good and wonderful ways, in ways that led to missionary journeys across the world, that led to the church in China and many churches in South Africa or in South America and Central America. There was a good movement of the Spirit that poured out of this great awakening. And then eventually, the church and Christianity moved into this place again of cultural prominence and primacy for all of our lives who are in this room. Christianity has occupied this position of cultural primacy and power where we have a lot of sway in the country in which we live. And I want us to see these historic ebbs and flows because I want us to understand that in the scope of history, and this is very important, that for Christians, cultural primacy always produces corruption, hypocrisy, and abuse. Always. Without fail. In the span of history. And you can take cultural primacy and you can just make that power to make it a little easier. In the span of history, when you put Christians in power as a group over a country or a people, that power always, without fail, produces hypocrisy and corruption and abuse. Always. Now, why is that the case? Well, I think it's largely because when we achieve that power, we start to take our eye off the ball. And we forget the kingdom and we forget what got us there and we just start to focus on maintaining power. Very, very often, almost without fail, what Christians do with that power is we try to make people who don't believe like us behave like us. And when they won't, we punish them. And when it's real bad, we kill them. And I just wonder if in your experience in our American culture, if you could pick out some examples of where Christianity in its place of power in our country produced hypocrisy and corruption and abuse. I'm not going to list any because I'm pretty close to the line already, but I'm pretty sure you can think of them. Those instances of corruption and abuse of power where we leverage everything we can to try to make people who don't believe like us behave like us. How do they make us look in the public square? How do those advance the kingdom we live for? So, if that historic cycle is accurate, how do we make sure we're not a part of it? How can grace make sure that we are not participants in this terrible historical cycle of being persecuted, rising to power in a position of prominence, using that power in ways that are inappropriate, that produce corruption and abuse and hypocrisy, and then watching Christianity fall from prominence. Because let's be honest about where we sit in history. We are on the downside. We have existed in prominence in this country, and now we are on the downside, where based on the statistics I told you at the beginning, where the younger you get in this country, the less likely you are to go to church. We are on the tail end of our cultural dominance. So in this moment in history, as we sit as a church, as you sit as Christians, what do we do? How do we act? How do we respond? What do we admit to and own? And how do we try to chart a path moving forward as Christians within a culture that is beginning to reject us because of the way that we have behaved? Not because of them. What do we do? Well, this will be the least controversial thing I say this morning. We focus on Jesus. And we ask how Jesus engaged with culture. What did he do when he came? Because he entered into a time and place that had its moral bankruptcy, that was rife with oppression, that saw more tragedy than we see, that saw more blatant corruption than what we see. He entered into a world with myriad cultural ills. And when he entered into that world, what did he do about the damaged culture that he saw? Well, how did Jesus interact with culture? He ignored it. He ignored it. He just almost acted as if it weren't there and it didn't matter. I've got some examples of this that I will share with you. The first is in Luke chapter 5, verses 29 through 32. This is when he's calling the disciples at the beginning of his ministry. There's a disciple named Levi that we also know as Matthew. And Levi was a tax collector. And tax collectors in ancient Israel were persona non grata. They were no good because a tax collector is someone who had turned tail on his own people and now worked for the oppressive Roman government and took your money and then a cut of that and then gave the other money to the Roman government. So he was by accounts, a traitor. This was a job that you took and you said, I'm going to be morally bankrupt, but I'm doing it for the money and it's going to be fine. He was that guy. And Jesus, not caring about any of that, calls him to be a disciple. And this is Levi's response to that call. And Levi made him a great feast in his house. And there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples saying, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answered them, those who are well have no You can't be, we don't do that. Our type, we are religiously proper. We don't interact with their type. We don't go to their house and have feasts where there's food and beverages. And Jesus says, yeah, but I do because that's who I came for. I actually came to spend time with them. I'm not really that concerned with your cultural norms. I'm going to go love on them because they're the ones who need my love the most. So I'll see you later. Another instance, in the book of John at the beginning, we see Jesus talking to the woman at the well, and maybe we forget sometimes that the woman at the well was a Samaritan. And the Samaritans to the Hebrew were an ethnic cultural mutt. They were unacceptable. And there was wildly accepted and agreed upon racism amongst the Hebrew people that the Samaritans are the worst. It is right and good to hate them. They have intermingled with other countries and other religions. They are not like us. We are better than them. We should disdain them. It is okay. It is rampant, agreed upon racism by God's people, a lot like the late 1860s in the United States. And Jesus, supposed to avoid Samaria, just walks right through it, goes to the well in the middle of the day, encounters a woman who's basically known for her life of what we would think of as sin and impropriety, and has a conversation with her. Part of the conversation goes like this, John chapter 4, verse 9, the Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? The Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. And Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. So he goes to the Samaritan, and she says, Why are you talking to me? You're not supposed to be talking to me. Culturally, this is not allowed. And Jesus says, yeah, I don't care. I'm actually here for you. You're who I came for. I love you. And if you'll ask me the right question, I'll love you forever. I'll offer you living water. Touched by his love, the Samaritan goes back to her village, tells everyone who she's met, brings them all back out to Jesus, and they all convert. And he reaches a Samaritan village that would have culturally never been reached by a Jewish person because of the norms that he was expected to uphold. Another interesting time we see the Samaritans show up in Scripture is when this rich young guy comes up to Jesus in the public square, and he says, I know that the Bible says that I'm supposed to love my neighbor, but can you tell me who is my neighbor? And Jesus tells them a parable of a priest and then a Levite who walks past a dying man on a road to Jericho, And then he says there was a Samaritan that came up. And the Samaritan healed him. Or paid for him and cared for him. Covered his bills at the hotel. Made sure he was squared away. And then he looks at the rich young guy and he says, and who was his neighbor? That is not dissimilar at all from Jesus showing up in Birmingham, Alabama in 1958 and talking with a group of white churchgoers and them asking him, who is our neighbor? And Jesus tells a parable where a black man is the hero and the moral exemplar over the pastor and the doctor that's respected in town. It's noteworthy to me that though this rampant racism was present in his culture, he did not seek a large audience to decry it, nor did he tacitly approve of it. He just called it out in instances where it made sense. Not really caring who was around and what they thought and what the culture expected of him at the time. We see Jesus greatly concerned with the behavior of others, but first he was concerned with loving others. The adulterous woman that's brought to his feet. Caught in the act of adultery. Asked in front of Pharisees if she should be stoned. And Jesus says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And then I am convinced began to write the names of ladies in the sand. And all those guys went, oh, okay, see you later. And so he shows her great grace, but does he in that grace approve of the behavior? No. He looks at her and he says, your sins are forgiven. Now go and sin no more. There's another example that I have here that we'll just go through really quickly. Luke 5, 12, there is a leper that came to him. While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, I will be clean. I will be clean. And immediately the leprosy left him. This is a big deal because if you've got leprosy in the ancient world, it was because of a sin that you or your family committed and you deserved it and you deserved the death that you were going to die. So they isolated them into communes where no one of any righteous standing would go. Because it was culturally incorrect to do so. And Jesus didn't care. He went and he healed the lepers. When I look at Jesus' life and I understand that he existed in a culture that had its ills, and I think about what he came to accomplish. Listen, if Jesus wanted to, have you ever thought about this? If Jesus wanted to, he could have come and established a nation state. He had the horses to do it. He could have overthrown the Roman Empire. He could have sat on the throne of David. He could have made Israel the moral exemplar for the whole world. He could have established a nation state and made people behave the right way within that nation state if that's what he really wanted to do. He could have done what Zwingli and Calvin and Luther tried to do. He could have done what the Catholic Church tried to do. He could have done what we in America sometimes tried to do, but he doesn't do that. He establishes a church, an eternal outpost of an eternal kingdom and a temporal world. And he didn't get all caught up in the culture wars of his day. Because Jesus fought kingdom wars, not culture wars. Jesus came to fight for a kingdom, not win over a culture. And he died on the cross to lay the cornerstone, to lay the foundation of that kingdom. And in a little bit, we're going to have communion and we're going to celebrate the establishment of this kingdom in which we get to participate. But if we want to encounter our culture like Jesus does, and if we want to care about the reputation of our faith within our culture, then I would contend very simply that we need to love as Jesus did. And that we need to concern ourselves with the things that concern Jesus. And that we ought not think that it is our job to fight culture wars to try to convince people who don't believe what we believe to behave how we behave. But instead, we build God's kingdom. And we build it the way that Jesus did. He fought for his kingdom one opportunity, conversation, and person at a time. That's what he did. When I say opportunity, sometimes Jesus had ministry opportunities or opportunities to love where he fed 5,000 or he gave a sermon, like the Sermon on the Mount, to thousands of people. And so not every interaction that Jesus had was isolated to the individual, but what my point is, we all have opportunities to minister. We all have opportunities to love. God gives us all a chance to show his love to our neighbor and to people within our culture. And when he does, we should seize it. And so Jesus fought for his kingdom, one opportunity, one conversation, and one person at a time. Very simply, Jesus loved. He didn't seek a bully pulpit in the Sanhedrin and try to convince all the Pharisees that they needed to go to Samaria and do ministry. He just went to Samaria and he did ministry. He didn't argue for time in the synagogue and try to convince them that they should care deeply about the lepers. He just went and loved on the lepers. He didn't enter into a debate in the public square about the validity of racism against the Samaritans. He just set them up as a hero and a parable to make a very clear point to the few people who were around him. It's not as though Jesus doesn't care about bad behavior. He just knows that the right behavior is never going to follow the wrong beliefs. And so as Christians, the most important thing we can do is fight for God's kingdom, which as we defined it in the fall, was to strengthen and add to the souls who are following Jesus. So what can grace do in our culture to make sure that we are not a part of the terrible historical cycle of abusing power and producing corruption and abuse and hypocrisy. I think that we can examine long and hard the culture wars that we feel like we need to fight as Christians. And start wondering what it might look like to fight kingdom wars like Jesus did instead. To fight for individuals and their souls, not principles. We can carefully and prayerfully consider the value of trying to get people who don't believe like us to behave like us. And we can ask, when we do find ourselves in a situation where we can legislate them to behave like we do, does that push them closer to or further away from our Savior? And if it's further away from our Jesus, did we really win anything? Or have we just perpetuated the historical cycle? So Grace, let's be a church that fights for God's kingdom. Let's fight for it one person at a time, one conversation at a time, one opportunity at a time. And if we do that, you know what I think we'll see? In this little outpost of God's eternal kingdom? Revival. Revival in our hearts. Revival in our neighbors. Revival in our friends. Let's pray for that. Father, we love you. We are sorry for making your good name look bad. We are sorry for the times that we, as individuals, have carried your banner poorly. We are sorry for the times that we have been a part of churches that have carried your banner poorly. God, we know that grace has not always displayed you perfectly in our communities, and we know that we will fail you again, but God that we would see it and that we would care and that we would try and that we would be like your son and try to win people to your kingdom one person at a time. God let us see and be very afraid of the potential damage that can be done when we are put in positions of power. Let us hold it well and honorably. Let us honor you in our interactions. And let our biggest priority, God, for everyone that we encounter be that they would know you, that they would love you, and in turn, eventually, they would begin to love others as you love them. Be with us in our small groups this week as we discuss this. Be with us as we drive and we think and we pray and we reflect. And God, for what it's worth, we really want this church to be a place that you're proud of. Would you give us the courage to be that? In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you on this Sunday. As your pastor, I should tell you that if you attend church on Spring Forward Sunday, you do get an extra jewel in your crown in heaven. That's just scriptural. It's in Revelation. You can look it up yourself, particularly if your basketball team lost last night and then you got up anyways. Boy, howdy. That's two jewels. Well done. Good for you. The love of Jesus is strong in you. That's great. Or maybe after your attitude, you just needed some church. I don't know. One way or the other. Before I just launch into this, I don't do this very often, but I kind of thought it was pretty sweet, and I wanted you guys to be able to just, I don't know, celebrate it, know it too. But Jeff, he's standing up over there, so we can all look at him again. He led us in Amazing Grace. He shared with me before the service that that was the first time that he led Amazing Grace since his dad's funeral. So we're grateful for Jeff. Thanks, man. All right, that's good. Just relax. It's tough enough as it is. Yeah, so we're in the middle of our series called Lent. We're observing Lent as a church for the first time since I've been here, and I sincerely hope that you guys, if you're a partner of grace, that you have been following along, that you've been participating. We've got the devotionals available. There's still some on the information table and they're available on the website in PDF form if you prefer that way. But hopefully you're following along and reading those every day along with the rest of the church. I love all the different voices that speak into it. And as an aside, what a gift when you're a pastor to get to, for me, I write sermons on Tuesday. So what a gift it is on Tuesday to sit down and be like, okay, I'm preaching on this topic this week. Let me open this handy book and see what five wise, godly people in my church think about this topic and then steal their ideas and make it my sermon. Like, this is fantastic. We're going to do a lot more devotional writing, I think. But it's been really cool to let other voices speak into us, and I've really enjoyed that. And I hope that you're fasting as well, that you picked something to fast from during this period. And just by way of reminder, if the fast to you never gets past just grinning and bearing it, like I've given up sweets or I've given up Coke or I've given up whatever it is, and all you're doing is getting through another day and going, yes, I didn't do the thing I wasn't supposed to do, then it's really, the fast isn't really serving you spiritually because a want for that thing is supposed to take us and put our eyes on Jesus. It's supposed to remind us that this is how we should long for Christ. So there's a second place to go when we fast, and I hope that you're going there as you're experiencing your fast as well. Now this morning, as Kyle said at the beginning of the service, we're focused on stillness. We've been talking about stillness in the devotionals this week. That's what you have read this week to kind of prepare our hearts for this service. And that's where we want to put our focus is simply on being still. And so as we put our focus there for the sermon, I would bring our attention to the same place that one of our devotional writers brought it, to Psalm 62. Kelsey Healy wrote this devotion, and I loved the psalm that she kind of used as her launching point, and so I thought I would start us here as well this morning. But in Psalm 62, the psalmist writes this, And I think that that struck me this week as I considered this message and this topic because of that word silence. And I thought to myself, and I wanted to pose to you guys this morning, when is the last time you experienced silence? When is, like, seriously, when is the last time you comfortably and by choice sat in silence? And I don't mean lack of audible noise. I also mean lack of mental noise, lack of distraction, in silence with nothing else, simply waiting on the Father and inviting him to speak. I started out the devotion, I wrote a little note to kind of set up this season of Lent, and I use the passage from Samuel when he says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. When is the last time in our lives we sat in silence with no noise or clutter to distract us, and we said, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Like, God, talk to me. I'm listening. I'm here. I'm waiting. Whenever you're ready to speak, I'm ready to listen. Because there's a waiting there. I think sometimes we go, okay, God, I'm ready to hear from you. And then it doesn't happen right away. We don't look up and see the sun shining on a particular bird that tells us a thing that we were wondering about. And so we just go, well, God's not speaking to me today. And we go on with our day, and we didn't sit in silence. And it just made me wonder, when's the last time you chose silence? When it was quiet. And to stifle the quiet, you didn't pick up your phone. You didn't let your mind start to race about that thing that's making you anxious. You didn't start to solve the unsolvable problem and start to try to control the uncontrollable events. When is the last time we sat in silence? And here's the other thing that occurred to me about the effort to sit in silence and stillness before God and wait for him. We exist in a period of time in all of human history where it is incredibly difficult to choose silence. It has never, ever, ever been harder to avoid distraction than it is in 2022. And I mean, I kind of think about that and just the clutter and the noise that exists in our life and how it would be processed by someone who was around in the time of the Bible, by someone who was part of an agrarian society 2,000 years ago, and how they would process all the noise and clutter in our life, I think it would be a little bit like taking them on a tour of a gym. Whenever I go to the gym, which is all the time, I chuckle a little bit because I look at all the contraptions that we have set up and they're really just set up to simulate ancient life because we don't need to do any of that stuff anymore. And I've thought about how fun it would be to take like an ancient hunter-gatherer and bring them to lifetime and just let them look around, you know? And be like, what's that over there? Well, that's a treadmill, man. Well, they're just walking. Like, yeah, that's what you do on a treadmill. Well, why didn't, like, they don't live here, do they? Like, no. Why don't they just, like, walk here? Well, we have, dude, we have cars. What do you think, man? Like, we got cars, buddy. We drive here so that we can walk in place around other people. We don't need to do that anymore. What's that guy doing over there? Well, that's called the bench press. Why is he doing that? Well, so he can develop muscles in his chest. Why doesn't he just like hunt? And like, doesn't his life require him to pick up heavy things? No, never. We pay people to pick up heavy things. We don't do that. Basically, if we don't come to the gym and simulate your life, we waste away as frail and fat, like just fragile people over the course of time, if we don't try to simulate your life. I think it would be so foreign to them what happens there that I think similarly, trying to explain to a person who would have originally read Scripture, to whom Scripture was originally written, trying to explain to them the clutter in our life would be equally challenging. Before electricity, you put the kids to bed, and what do you do? They didn't have books. Only the most wealthy people had scrolls. And if you do, I mean, you've only got a couple. How many times are you going to read that scroll, man? Like, what do you do? You can't pick up your phone and scroll Twitter. You can't turn on the TV. You can't grab a magazine. You can't call a friend. What do you do? You sit there. You just be still. You think about your day. Talk to your spouse. When you're on the hills shepherding all day and the sheep are eating and you can't pick up the phone, what do you do? Well, you sit. You're silent. You wait. And it's worth, I think, pointing out this unique challenge that we face for stillness and silence in our lives. Because it is so vastly different from a large swath of human history. And it makes me wonder, can this possibly be good for us as people, for our spiritual health, for our mental health? Can it possibly be good for us to be so distracted and so diverted all the time? Can it possibly be good for us to cure our boredom this quickly? That can't possibly be healthy. Surely, surely the enemy looks at our devices and is delighted with the distraction that they provide. And surely the Father looks at the clutter and does not marvel at the fact that he struggles to make it through that clutter into our hearts and into our lives and into our ears. And so, I think that the point that my wife Jen made this week as she and I were discussing this is a good one. That being still requires an action step. Now more than ever, if we want to be still, if we want to be silent, we're not going to stumble into it. It's not going to happen by default. It's not going to happen while we're watching the sheep, right? We're not going to stumble on it. We have to choose stillness. It requires an action step. It requires us to actually do it. And this is modeled for us by Christ. Jesus models for us this choosing of stillness. And I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus in ancient Israel. And every city you go to and every little town you go to and every street you walk down, people are clamoring towards you and they want and they want and they want and they need and they need and they need. So the only way for Jesus to just take a breath was to do what is said in Mark 1 35 that Doug read for us at the beginning of the service when he says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed. Jesus models this choosing of stillness for us. And that's not the only place it shows up in the gospels. He does it over and over again where he goes away to pray. And without fail, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's just worth pointing out about our Jesus. I marvel at the fact that he would go and pray and be still. And as soon as he would say amen and take a step back towards civilization, he was covered up with people who wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. And to me, I don't need anything else to prove to me the moral perfection of Christ than to see his relentless patience and grace with the crowds that swarmed him. Because let me tell you, who would not have that patience? I marvel at that. But Jesus models for us this need to choose stillness. And so I wanted to put in front of you this morning the thought exercise. Let's take a minute, and actually I'm inviting you into this thought with me. You answer this question in your head, not to one another, because that would be distracting to me as I try to preach, but answer this question of what would it look like for you to choose stillness? What would that require of you? What kind of action step do you need to take to choose stillness, to join God in the stillness that he's created for you and invited you into? Is it a quiet car ride? Maybe there's a consistent car ride throughout your week. To work, back home from work, to lunch, something. Maybe there's a daily time when you're in the car and maybe for that car ride, you could choose to put the phone in the center console and refuse to look at it and not be notified about anything and not turn on the podcast and not turn on the music to just drown out the noise, to distract you from the silence, but choose to sit in silence and talk to God and wait on him to speak to you. One of the things that I've tried to start doing with varying degrees of success is that this helps me have a moment of stillness in the middle of my day. When I have a lunch meeting, I usually try to get to the lunch meeting early because I don't like to be the pastor that shows up after the people with real jobs, all right? So I feel like I need to show up early and look good and get a good table for us. And so I'm usually, I've got about 10 to 15 minutes to spare. And I try to sit there and not pull out my phone during that time. And just say, okay, God, I'm here. What do you got? Is there something in this conversation? Is there something in this meeting that I need to listen to or lean into? Is there something coming up? You know, my heart's restless about this. Help me trust you. Whatever it is. it's just a little pocket of stillness that I've intentionally chosen. Like, okay, here I can be quiet and not invite other noise into my life. When I was running, past tense, I would, I looked forward to the runs because I would put in my AirPods and listen to a book. And there were good books. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, anyways, I thought of 12 jokes there that I was like, nope, nope, no, no, can't make that joke. So anyways, they were good books, all right? They were helpful books. But one day I forgot my AirPods. I think I went home from church to run and I left them here. I was like, oh shoot, this is going to be the worst. But I ran in silence with my thoughts and it was great. And so then I started picking one run a week where I'm just going to do this one with just me and God and no other noise. And it was a good time. Maybe for you, you get up early. You go to bed early, earlier than you normally do so that you can get up earlier than you normally do, which I realize is a particularly cruel challenge on Spring Forward Sunday, but let's just consider it. Maybe when we eat lunch in our office, we don't turn on the thing that we normally turn on or read the thing that we normally read. Maybe we just sit and we invite God into that space. What does it look like for you to choose stillness? And as I contemplated stillness this week, it also occurred to me that you don't have to be still to be still. You don't have to be still to be still before God. You can be still before God while you do your yard work. You can be still before God while you go on your hike, while you go on your run, while you fold clothes, while you do the mindless things that life requires of you. We can all choose pockets to be still before the Father, to crowd out the rest of the noise, and to invite him into that space. And to say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm listening. What do you have? And in that silence, as we're told in the psalm that we started with, wait. Wait for him. Focus on him. Wait. Allow God in his time, in his way, to speak into you. Don't rush him. His timing is perfect. He will move when He wants. The Spirit will move when it wants. But we need to choose these moments of stillness because we need to acknowledge that they will not happen by default. They will not happen by accident. God ushers us into them, and we should respond to that. All through the Bible are calls to stillness. The most famous instruction is Psalm 46.10, right? Be still and know that I am God. Just calm down. Just stop. Just quit thinking about all the other stuff. The stuff that your mind is racing on, the things that you can't control. The things that you're anxious about. The unsolvable problems that are keeping you up at night. Be still and know that I am God. Trying to figure out Christianity and all the things and what to believe and where to go and what to do and what's going to please God and how do I even navigate this and am I doing it right? Be still and know that he is God. Let's start there. There's a reason that God throughout scripture invites us into stillness with him. There's a reason that Jesus throughout his ministry intentionally seeks that stillness with his Father. And I think that there are more reasons than this, but the three reasons I would give you are this. Stillness tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God where we wait for him in silence. Tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God tunes our heart to his. It aligns our heart with God's heart. It sets us in the morning. It sets us in midday. It sets us in the evening where we are aligning ourselves with God's heart, where we are making space for him to speak into us, where he reminds us that we are his child. The psalmist writes that if we delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord, that he will give us the desires of our hearts. And that doesn't happen. That makes it sound like if we just love the Bible and we love God and we delight ourself in God's laws and he's going to give us what we want. We're going to have yachts and like lots of money and sweet golf course memberships. If we just delight ourselves in the laws of God, then we're going to get all the things that we want. And that's not really how that works. The way that works is the more we delight ourselves in the laws of God, the more we delight ourselves in the presence of God, the more we take joy in the things that bring joy to the heart of God, the more our hearts begin to be attuned with God and beat with God for the same things. And so by delighting ourselves in God's law and in God's love and in God's presence, he aligns our hearts with his so that our will becomes a mirror of his will. And we know that sovereign God brings about his good and perfect will. And then lo and behold, all the things that we want because we've delighted in him and allowed him to attune us to him, they happen. He gives us the desires of our hearts. Why? Because we are attuned to him. Because we are aligned to him. Through making space. Not because we pursued him. Not because of something we did. Through simply choosing to make space for God to speak into us. And I think, for what it's worth, that this is how we be obedient to all the verses that I kind of think of as consistency verses. The instructions in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. How do you do that? How do you go through your whole day in a conversation with God? Well, I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God. I bet it starts with making some stillness and seeking his presence and setting that as the beginning of our day and setting a midpoint and setting an end of our day. I bet it starts with pursuing the presence of God. Philippians 4.8, you know, finally, brothers, whatever things are true or noble or trustworthy or praiseworthy or of good report, think upon these things. How do we do that? How do we think upon things that only honor God and none of the garbage that doesn't honor God? I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God in stillness and in prayer. I think being still intentionally and regularly is something that begins to tune our hearts to God's heart and makes us grow in who we are as believers and walk in obedience to those consistency scriptures that seem so challenging to us. Stillness not only tunes our heart to God, but it settles our heart before God. You know, there's, this has been for the Rector family a little bit of a stressful week. Not for anything extraordinary, just life stuff, man. Just stuff going on. And it's been stressful. And I went to bed last night thinking about things, and I woke up this morning thinking about things. And I was thinking about everything but the sermon. And I got to my office, and I sat down, and I was having a hard time focusing, and so I just prayed. And it occurred to me, I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or just me actually drinking enough coffee to think, but it occurred to me, why don't you, like, just for once, practice what you preach and be still for a second? And so I was still. And in the stillness, I was reminded, hey, the things that you care about, I care about too. The things that matter a lot to you, they matter to me. And guess what? I'm God. So I'll work it out, man. And the things that are supposed to happen are going to happen. And you can't control them. So why don't you just rest easy in me? Because I've got a plan. And then it's like, cool. Great. Sorry. Sorry about all that. The last 12 hours were dumb. I apologize, God. And then you can just preach and go and do. When we seek out stillness and invite God into our space and wait and listen, the things that seemed such a big deal, the things that seemed so heavy, God takes from us. It settles our hearts. He says, you don't need to carry that anxiety. I've got it. You don't need to try to solve the unsolvables and conquer the unconquerables. I've got it. Why don't you just be still and know that I am God? When we choose stillness, it settles our hearts before God. It offers us that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians. When he tells us in prayer and in stillness, don't be anxious for anything, but through everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Where is that found? It's found in stillness before the Father. It tunes our hearts. Stillness settles our hearts. And stillness anchors our hearts. The world will send us a lot of messages about who we are. You're attractive or you're not. You're valuable or you're not. You're successful or you're not. You're loved or you're not. It'll tell us a lot of things about who we are. But in the presence of God, we are reminded, no, no, no, you're my beloved child who I dearly love, who I sent my son to die on the cross for, to rescue you and claim you into eternity with me. I love you so much that I wanted to share my perfection in heaven with you. And even though you're so broken that you can't get here on your own, I sent my son to die for you, to claim you into my kingdom. I love you. And when we sit in the presence of God, he has a way of reminding us, you're enough. You don't have to perform. I love you as much as I possibly could. Yeah, I know you messed up. I forgave that already. Just sit still and be easy with me. He reminds us that we are a beloved child. We are a beloved child of the Father. He reminds us that we're good, that we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that we are enough. He reminds us that he has a plan for us. And in experiencing that, we're ready to go out and our cup is filled and we're ready to go out and pour out for others, but we are anchored in the knowledge that God loves me, that God invites me into his presence, that it doesn't matter where I've been, that he always is waiting on me like the father of the prodigal son, anxious for my return, that he is always seeking after me, that he is relentlessly pursuing me with his spirit. And when I sit in his presence and allow myself to be caught and held, I am reminded that he loves me. So stillness before the Father anchors us in the knowledge of his love. It settles our hearts when we are anxious about things. It reminds us of his sovereignty and it tunes our heart with his heart, and aligns our will with his will, and allows us to walk as we are called to walk. I would tell you that I believe it is fundamentally impossible. See what I'm talking about? I mean, they're everywhere. It is fundamentally impossible to flourish in our Christian life if we do not choose stillness. If this is the closest semblance to stillness you get every week, worship and my sermons, and then until next Sunday, you can't possibly flourish in your Christian life. And I'm not saying that to convict anybody, make anybody feel bad about the noise and the clutter that exists in all of our lives. I'm just saying that as a friend and a Christian. How can we possibly grow if we don't seek out stillness, if we don't intentionally choose it, if we don't invite God into that space with us? And then here's the thing, and I love this point that Alan Morgan made in his devotional this week. God creates a stillness and invites us into that stillness because he's waiting on us there. He is waiting to meet us there. He's waiting for us to slow down and to settle down and to calm down and to put everything else away in a stillness that he created, that he invites us into, in which his presence is waiting on us. And unless we allow ourselves to sit in that presence and be tuned and be settled and be anchored, how could we possibly expect to flourish and grow in our love for the Father and in our experience as Christians. So this morning, Grace, I just want to press on us to choose that. And normally, when I press on something, I kind of finish a sermon and I say, so this week, focus on blank. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say, so this week, Grace, let's focus on stillness. I'm gonna say, so for the rest of your lives, all right, as long as you've taken in air, make this a priority. Not this week. Not today. Forever. Make this a priority. And choose stillness. And sit with God. And be comfortable in silence and just sit there and invite him in. So I'm gonna pray and we're gonna sing and worship together. As we worship and as we sing, I wanna invite you to do whatever feels most appropriate to you. Stand and sing if you want to sing. Kneel and pray if you want to do that. Sit in silence and invite God into that moment. And then at the end of the song, we're going to have a chance to be still together before we launch back into our weeks and all the things waiting for us outside those doors. Let's take a minute in worship and then in literal stillness to invite God into this space with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the way that you love us. Thank you for sending your son for us, to claim us, to die for us, to love us, to show us, to model for us, and your spirit to empower us. Father, we live such noisy lives. You cannot possibly be pleased by all the access to screens and information and distraction and diversion that we have that cannot possibly make you happy. So God, I pray that we would be people who choose stillness. That we would be people who identify and abhor distraction. And I pray for fresh life breathed into us this week by simply choosing to sit and wait on you in silence. Would you please do that for us, God? Would you meet us in the stillness that you've created for us and invited us into? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this cold February morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope everybody's got fun plans, or if you don't care about the Super Bowl at all, I hope you have a nice dinner planned for yourself. This is the third part in our series going through the book of Colossians. And this week, as we approach it, I wanted to approach the text with this kind of idea in mind. We're going to be in Colossians chapter 2 and then on through chapter 3 in some different portions of it. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. And then if you're at home, please turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. I would also call your attention to the bulletin. The bulletin looks a little bit different this week. There's no place for you to take notes. So note takers, you're going to have to get creative. Instead, I've put a prayer on the bulletin that we're going to pray at the end of the service together. You'll pray silently as I pray it aloud. And by the time we get there, hopefully the prayer makes a lot more sense and is meaningful and is something that you will carry home with you. But we'll talk more about that at the end of the service. If you're watching online, this bulletin is attached to the grace find that you should have received this week. So you can download that if you want to, or you can just email someone on staff and we'll be happy to send it over to you if you find it helpful and want to pray it throughout your week. But as we approach the text this week, I wanted to start here. I'm not sure if any of you have ever tried to eat healthy, okay? By the looks of most of us, this has been an effort at least at some portion of our life, but there have been a lot of times in my life when I have decided that I'm going to begin to eat with some wisdom. I'm going to start to eat well. I'm a person who's had a lot of day one workouts, and I've had a lot of day one diets. Okay, there's more in my future. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Not today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. This is not the day to start a diet, but tomorrow is fresh and hope springs eternal. But whenever I decide that I'm going to eat well, right? I'm going to eat responsibly, which is like a rabbit. Whenever I decide I'm going to do that, I feel like I am a person who is at war with myself. I feel like I am two separate people. I am one person who wants to eat well, and I am another person who just loves food so much that he's angered by me who wants to eat well. Because I love food. I don't know about your relationship with food. Mine is probably not healthy. If I know that I'm going to have a certain dinner that night or that we're going somewhere like a restaurant or something like that, I already know what I'm getting and I wake up thinking about it. Like I look forward to it throughout the day. That's how much I love food. For the Super Bowl tonight, we're going to have pigs in a blanket. I'm going to dip them in spicy mustard. I'm going to eat more than I should. I'm already excited about it, okay? That's just how I am about food. So when I decide that I want to eat well, it's really difficult for me. And I don't know about you, but I have certain stumbling blocks. It's pretty easy for me to eat well around the house. I kind of do a good job not snacking when I'm not supposed to. I don't drink the soda and stuff when I'm not supposed to. I drink black coffee and water, and that's pretty much it during the day. That's not very challenging. But what is challenging is when I'm trying to eat well, and my sweet wife on a Friday or Saturday will say, you want to go Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do, okay? I always want to go to Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit. That answer is never no, okay? You ask me, Nate, do you want a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. But you just had three. I don't care. You're offering me one. I want another biscuit. I like biscuits in the morning. So that's tough, all right? The other time it's tough is when I go out to eat. Because I'll go out to eat. I'll go to places that I like, and they have food there that I like. And one of the places I think of is Piper's. I go to Piper's because I meet people there for lunch with a lot of regularity. That's kind of my default spot. And they have salads, like I see them on the menu, right? They got grilled chicken and some fruit or some whatever, some balsamic whatever, less delicious thing that they have there. And I know that I need to order it. And I have girded my loins. I'm ready for this choice. And I go in there and I don't even look at the meat. I look at just the salads. I don't look at the other things. But see, here's the thing. This Piper's has one of the best Reuben's in the city. They really do. It's delicious. And that's what I want, right? I want the Reuben. And I've been thinking all day about how I shouldn't have the Reuben. And I've made the decision, I'm going to get the salad. I'm going to eat the thing that I don't want. But then it's like Satan's working against me or God's just giving me a special grace and telling me it's okay. I'm not sure which sign. And the table next to me will receive a piping hot, crispy toasted Reuben. As I'm sitting there trying to muster up the discipline to order my salad. And I look at that Reuben and I look at those fries and I look at that ketchup and the waitress says, what do you have? That! I want that Reuben. I did not want a salad. And I cave, right? So for me to be on a diet is for me to live at war with myself. I bring that up because I think that you'll know that this is true. Those of you who have been a Christian for any amount of time, to be a Christian is to be at war with yourself. To be a Christian, to be a believer, is to know the good you ought to do and yet still struggle to do it. I even think, and this is a sad reality, it should not be the case, and hopefully God can deliver us from this, and hopefully this sermon moves the needle on this a little bit, but I even think that to be a believer is to be constantly disappointed with how spiritually mature you are and how spiritually mature you think you should be by now. Because we know the good things we're supposed to do. We know the kindness we're supposed to show. We know the greed we're not supposed to have and the pride that we're supposed to iron out. And we know all the different things and our hidden sins and the stuff that we look at and whatever it is, the stuff that we consume. We know what we're not supposed to do and we know what we are supposed to do. And we try like heck to be that person, but we are a person who feels at war with ourself because there is the person within us who wants to eat right and there is the person within us who really loves a good Reuben, whatever that might be for you. And they exist at war with each other. I am convinced that to be a believer means to live in a state of tension within yourself of who you know you should be, of who you know God created you to be, of who you know God designed you to be, and yet not being able to walk in that. There's a verse that's super challenging for me where Paul tells us that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And I don't know about you, but I don't get to the end of too many days, much less weeks, where I look back on that week and I go, yeah, this week I was obedient to that verse. And if we're honest as Christians, it gets tiring to know that that's true. It gets exhausting to constantly fall short. Paul actually describes this tension in one of my favorite passages. It's one of the most human things to me that's written in the Bible, particularly by Paul in Romans chapter 7. In Romans chapter 7, Paul writes specifically about this tension in the Christian life when, in my inner being, but I see in my members another regenerated person as God has rescued my heart and claimed it and one day will whisk me up to heaven. He's given me eternal life and I'm living as a new creature that we're going to talk about more in a minute. I feel in this inner being a desire to live the righteous life that God has called me to live. And yet, also in my body, is a desire to revert back to my old self. It is a desire to revert to who I am without Jesus. It is a desire to indulge the flesh. It is a desire for the things that I used to consume that I know I don't need to consume anymore. That exists within us. And then he exclaims at the end of it, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Who will finally give me victory? How will I finally live the life that I'm supposed to live? And so that's where we arrive this morning. In Colossians, is this age-old question that all Christians face, that Francis Schaeffer, an author in the 20th century, framed up in a book entitled, How Should We Then Live? Meaning, in light of the gospel, in light of what we talked about in week one, the picture of Jesus that Paul paints for the Colossians, remember, they're facing pressure from within and without to go back to rules and aestheticism and to be legalistic and add on more rules than what is necessary so that they can live a righteous life, and then pressure from the more liberal part of their community to say none of the rules matter, how we live doesn't matter at all. You have total grace to do whatever it is you want to do. And so Paul, to that pressure, paints a picture of Christ as the apex of history and the apex of hope, as the connection point and nexus between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, how he is the creator God over everything, this majestic picture of Christ. And so the question becomes, how do we live in light of that picture? How do we live in light of the gospel? I am saved. I am a new creature. God has breathed new life into me. I am no longer a slave to sin, as Paul describes in Romans, but now I have this option to move forward with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in me and to live a life worthy of the calling that I have received. Now, how do I do it? How do I do it? That's the question that we come to in Colossians. And it should be a question that matters to each and every Christian. Father, how do I live a life worthy of the calling that I've received? How do I grow into spiritual maturity? What do I do practically? How do I live the Christian life? And it's an important question because it dictates how we pursue God. And to this question, I think we often answer it in the same way that we're trained to answer any other question in our life about how we get better at a particular thing. If you want to get better at exercising, what do you need? You need more discipline. You need to wake up. You need to do it. You need to be more disciplined in the way you pursue exercise. If you want to eat better, what do you need to do? You need to be more disciplined. You want to do better at time management. You need more discipline in time management. You want to be more focused. You want to be more productive. You want whatever it is, however it is, you want to grow and be better. What is the fundamental requirement of that pursuit of better? It's discipline. We need to do better. We need to come up with structures and systems that we follow, and I'm going to white knuckle my way to success here. And the most disciplined people within our field, they achieve the most success. The most disciplined people at the gym look the best in a t-shirt. The most disciplined people, when they go out to eat, they have the healthiest hearts. Like discipline is the root to how we accomplish success. And so, because that's true, and so very many areas of our life, even though we could philosophically talk about whether or not that's true, because we think that's true in so many areas of our life, we also just by default apply that to our spiritual life. If I want to be more godly, then I need to be more disciplined. I'm going to set up more rules, more regulations. I'm going to get up at this time. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the type of person that is defined by these things. We focus on our behavior and our self-discipline. And I think when we are faced with the question of how do I then live? How do I become the Christian that God has created and designed me to be? I think that in our culture, our default answer is to attempt to white-knuckle discipline our way to godliness. And here's what Paul says about that knee-jerk reaction that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Listen, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom and promoting self- we be the people that God asks us to be? And their response, it seems, at least initially, was white-knuckle discipline, aestheticism, following the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more God loves you. It's a very simple exchange. That's what legalism says. And so they're just going to be try-hards. They're just going to be do-betters. That's just what they're going to do. And to help them try really hard, they set up all these rules and parameters around their life. And they say, whoever can follow these rules the best is the greatest Christian. But Paul says, that's fine. Set up your rules. Have all your standards. Set the boundaries really far away from the actual boundary. He says, but all those rules and all that, the way that it looks, the way that you're living, just dotting all the T's and crossing all the I's and really, really, really having these policies in life that keep you on the straight and narrow. Paul says, yeah, those have the appearance of wisdom. And I would add in our vernacular, godliness, but they do nothing. They do nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh that is the reason for the sinning that we need the rules for. For instance, let's say that what you struggle with is pride. Okay, I'm having to make some assumptions here because I don't have the struggle, but if you do, let's say that something that you struggle with is pride and you go, you know what, God, I gotta get rid of this. I gotta be better. I'm gonna be better at being more humble. I'm gonna try to push out my pride. And so we take intentional steps. Maybe we're people who will maybe kind of fish for compliments sometime, or maybe we'll ask people what they thought about something. And really all we want them to do is tell them that we did a good job or that we're good at this or that we're good at that. And there's ways, if you're a prideful person, there are ways to go through your life and get the people in your life to affirm you. And if you are this person, you're exhausting, okay? I've exhausted others. I say that as a friend. That's not a good road to walk. But let's say that you're a prideful person, and so you need other people to affirm you all the time and the things that you're good at, but you realize in light of the gospel and in light of God's word that pride is not good, and so we need to iron this out of our life. So we go, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to ask other people for compliments. I'm not going to ask other people to affirm me. I'm not going to seek my value in other places. And then once you get really good at that and you haven't done that in a couple of weeks and you still feel good about yourself, then what do you do? Boy, I am proud of myself for not needing other people to tell me I'm good. Now we're taking pride in a new thing. What Paul says is there is this part of our flesh that is going to manifest negative things in our life, pride, greed, selfishness, lust, whatever it is. And we can put parameters around those things, but they're going to leak out somewhere. You can follow whatever rules you want to follow. You can white knuckle yourself into some good discipline. I've seen some people who can keep themselves on the straight and narrow for years, but those negative traits that exist within you, those things are going to leak out somewhere else. And I know this because I've met a lot of people who can follow the rules really well, and they're jerks. It's just their flesh leaking out in other ways. So what Paul says is we cannot white knuckle our way to godliness. Discipline, self-control, more rules, more standards. Those do not get us to spiritual maturity. Those do not put us in a place where we can live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. That's not the answer. In chapter 3, thankfully, I believe that he gives us the answer. And I think it's a refreshing one. Because when we try to get to godliness by white-knuckle discipline, just I'm going to be a try-hard, I'm going to be a do-better, what happens is not good. Because if you have ever in your life decided, yeah, I'm going to be a better Christian, and I'm going to do it by taking these steps. I'm going to do it by instilling these standards in my life. I'm going to do it by my own effort and me trying hard. And maybe we pray a prayer, God, I am never going to do this again. God, I am always going to do this moving forward. God, I swear that that will never be a part of my life again. And we make these big promises and we make these big claims. And listen, we mean them. But here's what I know about you. If you've ever promised God that you will never or that you will always, then you have failed. That's what I know about you. If we ever have promised God, I will never do blank. I will always do blank, we have failed in those promises because we can't keep those commitments, because we're broken. Because of Romans 7, the things that I do not want to do, I do, because it's part of our nature to fail in that way. And because that's true, after we make up our mind enough times that God, I'm never going to, or God, I'm always going to, and then we fail, we get to a place where either we just feel like this broken, wretched Christian, and we're thinking, God, I'll never be good enough for you. I don't think I'll ever be good enough for you. Just please let me be saved. Just please let me just hang on until I get to the end of my life. Please usher me into heaven. I know I'll never be who I'm supposed to be. I know that I can't pursue those things, but please just accept me as I am. And we kind of just live this broken down, hopeless Christian life where we feel like we're limping our way to heaven. Or worse than that, we try so hard and we fail so many times that we get so tired of trying that we can't find it within ourselves to do it anymore. And then we conclude, God, your word says that I'm a new creature. Your word says that you will help me. Your word says that you will empower me. And yet I fail over and over and over again. So I can only conclude that you don't keep your word. And then we just wander away from the faith and we give up on God because righteousness is too hard because we've only ever tried it by ourself and we've never invited God in in the way that he needs to be invited in, and our white-knuckle disciplining to try to be better and more godly to pursue the faith that we want so earnestly ends up costing us our faith. So that's not the way. We find the way in Colossians 3. And I would sum it up like this. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving, by focusing on who we are rather than how we behave. And here's what I mean. In this chapter, we're going to see this idea introduced here by Paul, but introduced in plenty of other places by Paul in the New Testament, of the old and the new. The old you and the new you. The old you is who you were without Jesus. The new you is who you are with Jesus. The old you, the Bible says, was a slave to sin. I had no choice but to do things that displeased God. I had no chance at all. But the new you infused with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit does have the chance every day when you wake up to walk that day according to the life that God has called you to. We have a chance when we wake up to live today in honoring God and actually finish the day living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day. We've got a chance. There's a new us. And the new us desperately wants to please God. And so this is what Paul says about old self and new self in Colossians chapter three. This is what he says about being versus behaving. Look at Colossians chapter three, verses five through eight first. Put to death, Paul says, therefore, what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idol rules. But here's what we need to do. We need to put to death these things, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, covetousness, anger, slander, all these things. And at first, it sounds like that's a little bit in tension with what he just said. He said, if you want to be godly, if you want to be who God created you to be, it's not about following the rules. It has an appearance of wisdom, but that's not really helping any indulgence of the flesh. And then the very next chapter over, he's saying, put to death these things, which feels like rules and standards that he's giving us, except he's not giving us behaviors. He's telling us to put things to death. Remember how I said that if you follow rules, if you're trying to break yourself of pridefulness and you put rules around your pridefulness and then it just leaks out and into another area of your life. Jesus is, Paul is acknowledging that. See, it's not about trying to follow the rules because those unhealthy things just leak into other portions of your life. It's about actually putting the pride to death. It's about actually putting greed and lust to death in your heart so that in your heart there is no place for them to dwell. And if there is no place for them to dwell, then they will not produce the behaviors that you're trying so desperately to control. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we don't need to put parameters around our old self. We need to put our old self to death. And we do this by focusing on being. How do we put those things to death? This is what Paul says in Colossians 3. I'm going to read verses 12 through 17. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, we live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? In the phrasing of Hebrews 12, verse 1, What the world do I live the life that you want me to live? I think what Jesus would say is, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Jesus, what rules should I follow in this new life that you've called me to? How do I run the race that you've set before me? Jesus says, just look at me. Just keep your eyes on Christ. This is actually in complete harmony with Romans 12 that tells us that we should run the race and that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles us by, in verse 2, focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. So how do we live the life that God calls us to live? We daily make ourselves aware of Christ's love for us. We daily make ourselves aware of what God has done for us. If we will daily reflect on the fact that Jesus in heavenly form condescended and took on flesh and lived amongst us for 33 years and put up with everything that we have to offer and continues to walk with us and continues to love us and continues to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you as an individual, leans into God's ears and says, she's good. She's with me. She loves you, Father. I died for her. If we will let that reality wash over us daily, how could we not put to death the pride that exists in us by walking in humility at the love of God that we receive? If we are struggling with anger towards other people and frustration and impatience, how is it possible to spend a portion of your day every day focusing on the reality of God's patience with you? Focusing on the reality that as many times as you've said, God, I will never, or God, I will always, and then you failed, that God has been right there to help you clean up the mess every time. How can we not grow in forgiveness of others when we constantly remind ourselves of how forgiven we are? How can we not grow in patience to others when we constantly are focused on the patience that God has to us? If we will focus on God's overwhelming grace, that he died for us while we were still sinners, that he pursues us while we run away from him, that even though we fail him over and over again, he continues to love us with a reckless love, that God loves us while we were unlovely, that God sees us fully and knows us completely and still loves us unconditionally. If we let those things wash over us every day, how could we not look at other people and be more loving and patient towards them in light of how loving and patient God is towards us? Do you understand that these things that we clothe ourself with in Colossians 12 through 17 necessarily put to death our old self that Paul tells us to rid ourself of. So if we want to get rid of malice, what do we do? We focus on Christ. If we want to get rid of pride, do we put parameters around our pride? No, we focus on Jesus and who he is and realize that we have no right to our pride. If we want to be more gracious people, what do we do? We focus on Jesus' grace to us. Say, Jesus, how in the world do I live the life that you call me to live? Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And Jesus says, focus on me. Focus on me. So I would tell you, if you are a Christian who lives at war with yourself, you do not have a discipline issue, you have a focus issue. If you are someone who struggles with greed, you don't have a greed issue. You have a focus issue. If we try to be more godly and more pleasing to him by focusing on the behaviors that we need to do better, we will fail over and over and over again. But if we can put our focus on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith and let his grace and goodness and mercy and love wash over us daily, then those things will necessarily put to death the very root of the behaviors that we do not like. So again, if we are struggling in our walk with God, we do not have a discipline issue. We do not have a sin issue. We have a focus issue. We need to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We need to pursue him more with more urgency. We need to let the truths of how he loves us wash over us more. And those will necessarily put to death the elements of our character that we do not like, that produce the behaviors that we do not want to do. You can think of it this way. Our old self cannot survive where our new self thrives. Our problem is we have a new self and we have an old self and we feed them both the same amount of food. We give in to them both equally. And so they both just exist in this tension and if we ever want to put to death our old self, then our new self has to thrive. And our new self thrives by clothing ourselves in the characteristics of Christ and we clothe ourselves in those characteristics by focusing him and daily letting his goodness wash over us. So it's very simple. How should we then live? How do we get to the end of a single day? Living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day? By focusing our eyes on Jesus on that day. By looking at him that day. And letting everything else fade away and take care of itself. Because it's that simple, and because that's what we need to do, I wrote a prayer for us as a church. In a few minutes, I'm going to read it and pray it over us as a church and invite you to read it along with me. If you find it helpful, I would love to invite you to put this prayer somewhere where you can see it, where this is a thing that you will pray daily. Put it on your desk, or in your car, or on your mirror. If this is helpful to you, I would encourage you to pray this every day until it's not helpful to you, until the principles of this prayer are so ingrained in you that it is part of your daily prayer. But if we want to live a life as Christians that we are called to live, then I am convinced that this needs to be a fundamental prayer that we focus on very regularly. Not necessarily the words that I've chosen here, but the ethos and the attitude and the posture that's presented in this prayer and the acknowledgments of the truths that are in this prayer that are from Colossians chapter three and other portions of scripture as we seek to live the life that God calls us to live. So I'm gonna pray this over us and invite you to pray it along with me. Father, I know I am your child and that in you I am a new creation. Though I know this, I struggle to believe it. Because I struggle to believe, I struggle to walk as you would have me walk. So Father, help me learn to walk in this new self. As I put on the new self, I ask that you would help me see others through your eyes and so clothe me in your compassion. Help me regard others as your beloved children as you clothe me in your kindness. Remind me of the way you love me when I am unlovely in order that I might humbly love others in the way I am loved. Remind me today, Father, of who I am in you. As you clothe me in these things, let them put to death in me the remnants of my old self. Let your humility drive out my impatience, my anger, and my pride. Let your compassion and kindness suffocate my jealous and selfish heart. Let the way you see me overshadow and obscure the way I see myself. Help's name, Father. Amen.