Sermons tagged with Christmas

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. If this is your first time here and you're wondering, do these people wear their pajamas every week? Yeah. Yeah, we do. You should see us in July. It looks crazy. No, we don't. Thanks for participating in Christmas Jammy Sunday. If you did, we said we were going to do a prize or we're going to acknowledge the most festive. And I really think there's only one way to skin this cat this week. Shane, will you do me a favor and stand up? There's about four families wearing those pajamas, which apparently were on sale at Target. So if you are wearing those pajamas today, if you would be so kind as to kind of collect your kids and maybe just hang out in this area after the service, then I'd love to take a group picture of just one big church family that wore the same pajamas today. So if you'll participate in that, that would be really, really great. Next week is our holiday hoot. If you spend any time at all around Grace, you know we like a good hoot nanny. If you don't know what a hoot nanny is, just stick around, you'll find out. Next week is just our church-wide Christmas party immediately following the service. We're just kind of asking everybody, just bring something to share, doesn't really matter what it is, and we'll have some tables set up. You can drop that off, and then after the service, we'll all hang out for just a little bit. We'll provide some stuff to drink, and we'll just have a church-wide Christmas party for as long as anybody wants to, although I know some people are going to be home before the one o'clock kickoff. I get that too. This week we are in part two of our series called Not Alone, where we are looking at the different ways that God reminds us of his presence through the Christmas season. Last week we talked about the silent generations between Malachi and Matthew, the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament. And we talked about that Christmas is a reminder that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So when we feel forgotten, when we feel alone, when we feel like we've seen God move for others and he's not moving for me, we, like they, in between the two testaments, cling to Christmas and to the promises of God. This week, I wanted to start us out by just diving right into Scripture. It's an obscure verse from an obscure book of the Bible, Micah. If you think you can find it, you can go ahead and start turning there. I see some people who are ambitious and eager. Good for you for knowing where Micah is in your Bible. The rest of you, get it together, man. This is church. Come on, memorize the books. No, I'm just playing around. Micah is tucked away in the middle of the minor prophets towards the back part of the Old Testament. And we're just going to jump right in and I'm going to the verse, and then we'll talk about it. But it's from an obscure book, from an obscure prophet, kind of tucked away, which makes it really appropriate for this morning. So this is what Micah writes in chapterah is what we call a messianic prophecy. It's a prophecy about Jesus. What Micah is saying is that God has told him, and now he is communicating to the people, and he specifically addresses it to Bethlehem, which is Bethlehem, not ham, just so you know, Southerners, it's Bethlehem, okay? So he addresses it to Bethlehem, and he tells them, from you is going to come what we know of as Jesus. From you is going to come my son. He's going to come a king and sit on the throne. It's this messianic prophecy. And he gives it to Bethlehem specifically because Bethlehem is unknown and insignificant. It says in the prophecy that Bethlehem is too little to be included amongst the tribes of Judah, which means it's really small. I probably should have gone and done the research. What did it take in ancient Hebrew and ancient Israel to become actually a clan within a tribe of Judah or any other tribe. And I just didn't do the research because if I did, the result of the research would have been that Bethlehem was insignificant and small. So I'm just skipping that part and telling you that Bethlehem was insignificant and small. One of you is going to do the research this week and be like, you were way off. I'll have to issue an apology next week. But let's go with that, that Bethlehem was just this small, nondescript, unimportant, insignificant town. And God says in the Old Testament, I'm going to use you in big ways. You're going to be really important. You're going to have a part to play in this grand story of Christmas and my kingdom. And I bring that up and I start our sermon there this morning because really and truly, Christmas has always been about the unseen, hasn't it? Christmas, the story of Christmas, maybe more than any other story, brings to light this thread throughout Scripture of God choosing the unnoticed and the unknown, the unseen and the insignificant. And in Christmas, we see this theme woven throughout the story over and over again. He chooses Bethlehem, a nondescript town from a nondescript place that hasn't even risen to the part of having its own clan within the tribe of Judah. And he says, this is where my son, Jesus, is going to make his grand entrance into the world. He could have chosen Jerusalem. He could have chosen Rome if he wanted to, but he didn't. God chose Bethlehem, this unknown and insignificant town, off to the side, in between, on the way down to the Dead Sea from Jericho. And when you think about the rest of the Christmas story, that's very on brand. Who did God choose to be the mother of his son? Somebody rich? Somebody influential? Somebody that everybody would know and trust? Somebody with a lot of clout from an important family in the nation of Israel? No, he chose Mary, a girl who was probably in her early teen years, who had not yet gotten married, who was from a small, nondescript town called Nazareth. That in the New Testament, when somebody hears that the Savior is from Nazareth, their response is, has anything good ever come out of Nazareth? They talk about it like we talk about Mississippi. Nothing good comes from there. How could that be possible? It's a little nothing quarry. It's a rock quarry town. It's a workaday town. It's in the backwoods. It's in the country. Nobody of any renown comes from there. And yet God chooses Mary to bear his son. Not somebody known. Not somebody influential. Not somebody with status. Somebody with nothing. And then to have his son born, he directs Mary and Joseph to go down to Bethlehem. They tried to stay in Jerusalem. They tried to stay in the important place. There was no room there. So God makes a way for them to end up in Bethlehem in a manger. He doesn't bring him into a noble estate. He brings him into a manger. And I don't know what you think of when you think about a manger, because we hear that in the Christmas story a lot. But I've had the opportunity to go over to Israel and to be in Bethlehem and to see what their mangers are, and they're basically caves. Bethlehem is rocky and hilly, and so on the side of a mountain, there's a little cave. They'll dig that out a little bit. They'll build a couple stables in there, and that's where they would rest. That's where the animals would be. So there's sheep and goats and maybe a donkey back there, and who knows what else, maybe a llama. I don't know. We got a Christmas llama. So a Christmas llama was in there on the sweater over there. Y'all should see it. It's great. It's got a little thing to hold water bottles. And that was the manger, just this little nondescript place where God says, this is where my son is going to come forth. And then God does a birth announcement. He has the angels go and they sing. And it was a little bit different than our birth announcements, right? We do birth announcements and he could have had Mary and Joseph hire a photographer, dress in their business casual wear, and then take off their shoes and get in their bed like they do every day, and then just have the light pouring through and post on Instagram like white people do. That's what we do when we have children. But instead, he had the angels sing. And to whom did they sing? The rich and the wealthy in Jerusalem? No, the poor and the unknown shepherds who meant nothing to anybody. That's where he announced the birth. There were some dignitaries that came, but they came from the east. That's all we know. They came from the east. And they showed up a long while later. Everything about the Christmas story is God choosing the unknown and the unseen to bring about his will. And I happen to think, I don't know if I even believe in the phrase, the spirit of Christmas, and I feel really cheesy saying this to grown adults, but if there is a spirit of Christmas, certainly it is wrapped up in noticing the unnoticed. Certainly it is wrapped up in bringing significance to those who feel insignificant. Certainly it is wrapped up in seeing the unseen. And Jesus lived his life this way. Jesus, the Son of God, born into this obscurity, lived his life noticing the unnoticed. He carried on that tradition and that ethic throughout his life. Think about the disciples that Jesus called. I don't have time to go into the cultural significance of what it was to be a disciple, but I can tell you, and you can take my word for it if you like, that to be a disciple, that was still like being in an Ivy League school. That was to really have accomplished something. Pretty much every little boy hoped to be a disciple. That's what the athletes were back then. They didn't have anything else to aspire to. That's what they aspired to. And so to be a disciple was a big deal. And so those who were in their adolescence, those who were in their late teens, like the disciples may have been when Jesus called them, and not actively following a rabbi, not actively being a disciple. And we need to understand that Jesus didn't have the only disciples in the New Testament. John the Baptist had disciples. Respected rabbis had disciples that they trained for ministry. And so to be going about your business after your education and not be a disciple of a rabbi was for the system to have told you, you're good. There's nothing left for you to pursue here. Learn a trade. We're going to train the more excellent ones. And so for Jesus to go and call his disciples the way that he did tells us that he chose people who had felt rejected. He chose people who had been told you're not gonna be good enough for this. And Jesus goes to Peter and says, yes, you are, follow me. He goes to James and John, yes, you are, follow me. He goes to the tax collector who sold out his people to make money. And he says, Levi, follow me. He goes to different people that are unknown and unnoticed that are cast aside. And he says, follow me. And I think it's really interesting because if I were trying to start a movement in the ancient world or any world, but in a small country like Israel, I would go to the affluent, right? I would go get the sons of the rich people. I would go find the sons of the ones who had the most influence and the most sway in the country. And I would try to, if I were Jesus, win them over to my cause and he saw them when they were unseen. And he noticed them when they were unnoticed, and he gave them significance when they felt insignificant. And then he modeled for them what it was to see the unseen throughout his ministry. We can think of miracle after miracle. He's walking through the pool at Bethesda, and he sees the man who's blind, who has no hope of getting into the pool before the other people do and earning the miracle. That was the myth around that pool at the time. And he goes up to him, and he heals him, and he makes it possible for him to see. I think of the woman who's caught in adultery in the act and drug through the streets to the feet of Jesus. He didn't have to have anything to do with this woman, but he chose to give her dignity. And he chose to give her respect. And he chose to defend her. And he chose to see her for who she was when everybody else just saw her for what she did. I think of Jesus' interaction with the woman at the well that Kyle preached on a few weeks back. This woman who is on her fifth husband, she's not respected in society. She's kind of ashamed of who she is. She goes to the well in the heat of the day so that no one would notice her, precisely to be unnoticed and unseen. And Jesus shows up and he sees her and he gives her living water and he speaks into her. He makes a habit throughout his whole ministry of noticing the unnoticed and seeing the unseen. Zacchaeus, the tax collector, who's rejected by everyone around him, climbs up in a tree just to get a glimpse of this savior. This famous person as he walks by and the crowds are gathered around him. And he looks up and he sees Zacchaeus, the last person anyone there wants to talk to. And he says, hey, I'm gonna come to your house for lunch, all right? I would love to know what Zacchaeus made, short notice for Jesus. At every turn in the life of Christ, you see Jesus living out this Christmas ethic of seeing the unseen, noticing the unnoticed, of giving significance to those who felt insignificant. And then he captures it for us, this ethic and this desire and this command for us to do the same thing towards the end of his life when he's speaking to the disciples in a story, in a parable, or in an example in Matthew chapter 25. We're going to put verse 40 on the screen, but I'm going to start reading in verse 35 when Jesus says this. Then the righteous will answer him saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you? And the king will answer them, truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me. This is the Christmas ethic. This is what's woven all throughout scripture. This is how Jesus lives his life. And this is what he leaves us with as we are tasked with seeing the unseen and noticing the unnoticed and loving the unlovable. And Jesus himself tells us, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. And so as we sit here in the middle of festive Christmas season, I can't help but think what better way to honor the arrival of Jesus than to continue in his example. What better way as individuals, as families, to celebrate Christmas season than to honor the example of Christmas, to honor the example of Christ, and to be intentional about noticing the unnoticed and seeing the unseen, about doing for the least of these. What better way at Christmas than to do for others, right? And I think that when we think about this, when we think about this idea of doing unto others what we would have them do unto us, when we think of this idea of doing for the least of these, and in that way we're actually serving Jesus. And this is a concept that almost everybody in here knows and has heard. And I think that when we think of that concept, doing for the least of these, we tend to think of people who are down and out. We tend to think of people who do not live in our blessing. Who do not live necessarily in our financial status. We tend to think of people who are poor. I think that we tend to think of soup kitchens. Or the homeless. Or maybe that tent community that's right around the corner. And our minds say, what can we do for them? The least of these. I think that's who we think of when we think of the least of these. Or we think we can walk out and we can grab a card off of the angel tree. And these are some people who are in need. And I want them to feel seen and significant. And so we get that. And we participate. And Jen and I, we've participated. And those things are good. And they should be done, and those are the least of these, and we should love them, and we should see them, and the church should be first in line to go love on those people, all the people that come to mind when we think of, quote unquote, the least of these. As a matter of fact, just as an aside, parents in the room still have kids at home. And I have to be careful here because I'm perfectly happy to share with you the things I'm terrible at. I'm perfectly happy to tell you what I'm bad at and to run myself down because we're all bad at something. I don't really have a lot of insecurities around that. Everybody stinks, so get on board. I never want to run down my kids, right? But I think that this issue is so ubiquitous that I'm really not running her down. All I'm doing is saying that Lily is seven. One of the things that we're starting to notice in Lily is this entitlement for Christmas, right? What she wants for Christmas. She starts working on her Christmas list in like May. She'll just tell us what it is. Like it's just gonna arrive. And you with young kids like yours do this too, I'm pretty sure. They all do it. They all go through it. And we start as parents to think like what can we do for the entitlement of our kids? How can we kind of show them so that they can be more grateful? And then we all toy around with that idea, don't we? Like, this is the year. I'm not getting them anything. Then they're going to learn. They need to learn some gratitude. But you don't because you're chicken. You're totally chicken. You're not going to do it and scar them for life. They're going to be in therapy because of it. But I do think that a good way to chisel away at some of the entitlement of our kids is to expose them to the least of these. I remember going down and serving in downtown Atlanta around Christmas season, I believe with my dad, but I know with folks from my church. So just as an aside, those of us with kids still at the house, it's probably not a bad idea to take a field trip this year somewhere and go help in a way that exposes them to another portion of life that they may not see in the circles that they run in. So I do think that when Jesus talks about the least of these, he does mean those people, people who are in different socioeconomic categories than us, people who have less than us, people who need in different ways than we do. But I also believe that the unseen are in and around our lives every day. The unnoticed, the unseen, the people who feel insignificant, I think they're on your row. I think they work in your cluster at the office. I think they're on the Zoom calls and in your neighborhoods. I think those people are everywhere. And I think that we should ask God for eyes to see them and hearts to hurt for them and wills to do for them. I think of my mother-in-law, Terry. Many of you know that part of the story of our family is that now two Christmases ago, December 29th, we lost Jen's dad to cancer. And Jen's dad was highly involved in the church. John and Terry went to church every week. Jen's dad was really, really close with his pastor. The pastor is a good family friend of theirs. And so the church was a big part of John and Terry's life. And because of that, it was really difficult after John passed for Terry to want to go again because it was such a painful, difficult thing. The idea of going to church just made her want to cry because she'd have to do it without John, and she wasn't sure if she would be strong enough to do it. And so a few months go by from essentially January to Easter, and Terry decides, I need to go to church. I need to go to church. Those are my people. I need to go. And so she gets up on Easter, drags herself out of bed, gets herself ready, and she drives there. And she's terrified. She's terrified because she's going to be sitting alone. She can't even bring herself to go to the side of the church that they normally sit on. She goes to the opposite side. And she knows that people are going to see her. She knows she's going to be sitting by herself. And she can already feel the pity in the stairs as she sits down as she's going through this. And she hates all of it. And she's scared of all of it. But she knows she needs to go. So as she's sitting down, a good friend of theirs sees her and says, hey, gives her a hug, tells her he's glad to see her. And he wasn't going to be sitting in that service, but he knew some people who were. And so he introduced this couple over here to Terry, and Terry and this couple had met before. They weren't friends, but they had talked. They were friendly. And they got to talking to Terry. And that couple invited Terry to sit with them at Easter. And as soon as they did, all the tension left Terry. She was good. She was comfortable. She was safe. And she felt seen. And she felt loved. But she was also going to get up from there, and she was going to go home to an empty house with no Easter celebration. And at the end of the service, the couple looked at her, and they said, hey, we're going to go to lunch. Would you like to come with us? And so she went to lunch with this sweet couple, and they talked for hours. And as soon as Terry got done having lunch with this couple, she called her girls. She told them all about this couple that loved her so well, that made her feel seen and made her feel important. I don't know who that couple is, but I know that they rescued Easter for my mother-in-law. I know that they made church a safe place for my mother-in-law. I know that their act of just simple hospitality and inclusion. Let her know God sees you. God loves you. God cares about you. He's going to take care of you. And even you can extrapolate that out to this path theory that you have to walk is difficult, but I'm going to send you little angels along the way. And I can't tell you the difference that it made for her to be seen that day, to be loved that day, and to be noticed that day. And you have those people in your life too. You have people who this year, their life changed tremendously. A diagnosis, a loss, a divorce. And you know that they're facing an uncertain holiday season, or maybe it's certainly going to be very difficult. You have them in your life. You have people in your life who are hurting, who are lonely, who are struggling with mental illness or newfound depression. You have folks in your life who have been praying for something and they don't have it yet. You have people in your life who on their social media feeds, there's less and less pictures of them with their spouse. And you see less and less of them at church. And you can read between those tea leaves. And we know that a phone call would probably be really good. We know that a lunch would probably be really timely. I could make a longer list, but we all have those people. We all have the people in our lives right now who are unseen and unnoticed and hurting. What better way to honor Jesus at Christmas than to make sure those people know that they are seen? Than to make sure those people know that their God loves them, that their God sees them. So why don't we do that? I was talking to Jen about it this week, and she made the point, and I think it's a great one, that we all think it, but it only matters if we actually do it. We all think about the nice things to do, don't we? We see them, we know we should call them, but it only matters if we actually do it. We can't be like me and Kyle. Kyle, our student pastor, we joke around a lot, but neither me nor Kyle really love pranks. We just love the idea of pranks. And so very often, with some degree of regularity, like at least weekly, somebody will do something and the other one of us will be like, dude, I was going to when you left, I was gonna do this to you. I thought to do this. Wouldn't that have been funny? And then we laugh at it. Yes, that would have been funny. Like a couple weeks ago, staff was going to Gonza for lunch because we take about three and a half hour lunch every day. So we're going to Gonza for lunch and we were supposed to leave at a certain time, and I just, to be an idiot, because I'm like this, I just walked out of my office. My door had been shut all day. I hadn't talked to anybody all day. I was writing a sermon, and then I just, I left, and I walked out the door, and as I opened the door, I said, later, losers, and I got in my car, and I drove to Gonsa's, knowing that they would have to drive together, right? So then they all arrive at Gonsa's a few minutes after me, and Kyle comes up to me, sure enough, and he's like, dude, I really thought it would have been funny to convince everybody not to come to lunch with you and just leave you here by yourself. And I was like, I know. I was actually pretty worried that's what you guys were going to do. And then we laughed about it, but we don't actually ever do anything to each other. We just joke about how it would have been, right? We can't do this when it comes to loving people who need it so much. What if that couple, months later, the next time Terry went to church was like, Terry, listen to this. We thought about inviting you to sit with us, but, you know, we just didn't do it. And then we thought, we should invite her to lunch, right? This is her first Sunday back. It's Easter. I don't know if she has any plans. Let's just invite her. But, you know, Terry, we just, we had stuff going on, so we decided not to do it. It doesn't work the same way, does it? We all think the things. We need to do it. I was talking to a dear friend of mine yesterday, who when I think of people who see the unseen and notice the unnoticed, I think of her. And I was talking to her about the sermon. And I made the comment to her, I bet the more you do it, the more you see. And the more you see, the more you want to do. And she said, yeah. And I thought about it more. And it really is true that when we become those agents, God's hands and feet, God's hugs, God's presence, God's attention, God's smiles for the people who need it so desperately. We really do meet Jesus there. We really do find our Savior there in those moments. We really do get a glimpse of what it's like to love like he loves. So that when Jesus says, whatever you do for the least of these, you do it for me, it's not hyperbole. It's just true. And so my simple encouragement for you this week is to go do it. Let me just challenge you to think of one person, one family, one neighbor, one coworker, one person sitting on your row right now who might feel unnoticed or unseen, who might be hurting. And allow God to use you. And maybe you get to be the angel that rescues Christmas for them this year. Maybe God allows you to participate in his good and perfect will in that way. Maybe you'll be the one that other family members that you don't even know will be telling stories about to their friends two and three and five years from now because of a simple act of love this December. And I'll be the first to admit I'm the king of thinking about things I should do. I'm just letting them float off and not do them. So when I say do it, like actually do it, I'm talking to me more than anybody. But what could happen in our little community? What stories could come out? What ways could God be seen if just everybody in this room decides, you know what, when I go to school, when I go to work, when I get home, I'm going to make it a point to ask for eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to feel. And I'm going to love somebody that needs to be loved. I'm going to notice somebody that needs to be noticed. I'm going to see somebody who doesn't feel seen. What could God do with that in just this room right here? Let's find out. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. Thank you for always seeing us when we feel unseen. Thank you for always loving us when we feel unlovable. And God, thank you for the opportunity to participate in your word and in your will. I pray that you would give us eyes to see the people around us who need your love. And that you would give us the will and the courage to express that to them. Let us this week, Father, write the email, make the phone call, extend the invitation, buy the gift, reconcile. Give us your heart for the unnoticed and for the unseen so that when we go and love them, we might find you there. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace, and I'm so excited to once again be able to be up in front of you getting to preach. I hope you had an awesome Christmas. I hope you had an awesome New Year. Shout out to everyone who's in the building right now. It's January 2nd. We are on the back of the other side of two pretty big holidays. So the fact that you're here, even though it's quite icky outside, shout out to you. But also, good morning or good whatever time of day it is that you may be watching online, whether it's live or whether you're watching it sometime in the future, or everyone in here who loves it so much that you're going to go back and watch it later on. Shout out to you as well. But it's also particularly exciting this morning because we're kicking off a new series that we are calling Consumed, and the ultimate goal is to take a look at where in our lives we might be able to transition from being consumers to being consumed. And so this morning, I have been tasked with diving into what might it look like for our lives and our hearts to be consumed by Christ. Now that sounds like a very easy topic to preach on because it's like, hey, that's kind of the point, Kyle. But I felt myself a bit overwhelmed by this because as I take a look back and as I was thinking through this, what I knew was this, that the last series that we just did was a Christmas series. The entire goal of our Christmas series all through December was to take a look at Jesus and to make much of what Jesus came on earth to do. We celebrated for four weeks or however many weeks or however many Sundays we had, literally going through and talking about, look at this Jesus who came down from heaven to earth. And we celebrate the fact that he came to earth for us. That ultimately his goal and his mission was to live a perfect life as a human and eventually take and bear a cross, dying to put our sin to death. Later being raised to life, signifying that as our sin has been put to death, that death will not be the end of us, just like it was not the end for him. And as he's raised to life, signifying that one day we will be raised into eternity, into heaven. That as we come to the end of our days on earth, that that is not the end, but instead, just as Jesus was, we will be lifted up into eternity. And so that's a lot of really good news to be talking about. That's a really great way to talk about Jesus if I want to talk about being consumed with Jesus. But we just did it for an entire month. Not only that, but if you look even further, it's like, okay, let's look at a different picture of Jesus. Well, here's another picture of Jesus as we went through Revelation. And in Revelation, the ultimate goal of Revelation is as much as it is to learn and to gain knowledge about what does all of this mean, ultimately the purpose is to look and to see how unbelievable, how incredible our God is and how incredible Jesus is. It was to make much of and to bring as much glory as possible to Jesus. That not only in the past was Jesus this human who made himself like us in order to save us, but in the end, ultimately, he becomes this great and mighty and glorious warrior who is coming down to, as Nate likes to say, to wreck shop, to make the sad things untrue, to make the wrong things right, all of those things, that is another picture of Jesus that might be able to go, hey, we should be consumed by this Jesus. This Jesus is awesome. This Jesus of eternity that one day he's going to come down and he's going to get his people. And even if we don't get to experience that from heaven, ultimately at the end of our days, we look forward to eternity where we get to meet that Jesus and be in the presence of that Jesus. And so basically for the past like two or three months, we have been going through the premise of uniting with Christ, of making much of Christ, of giving pretty good descriptions as to why we should be consumed with Jesus. And so here I am sitting and I'm like, what in the world am I supposed to be talking about this morning that is at least anything different than what we've been doing for the last 10 weeks? Well, as I was sitting and working on my sermon and tasked to do so, I was also working on a devotional. I was writing a little devotion and it was actually for something for grace. So get excited. I'm not going to tell you about it right now, but to come, there's going to be some awesome devotions and mine won't be one of them, but some other people wrote some great ones that you get to read in the near future. But as I was writing this devotion, the premise behind it was a role of Jesus that I feel like often gets overlooked. Or maybe not even overlooked, because I think overlooked may be on the side of people who are teachers or preachers that maybe we don't talk enough about it to where maybe some people don't even know about this role of Jesus. Because if I were to sit down with you guys and I said, hey, what is the role of Jesus? Or what are, what were, what will be the roles of Jesus? I imagine that most of our answers would look similar to all the stuff I just got done talking about. He came to earth. He left heaven being fully God. He came to earth to be fully man, to sacrifice himself for us, ultimately buying our salvation and buying our entrance into the promise of salvation that we get to have eternal, we get to be in an eternal relationship with God the Father. Maybe you'll quote me John 3.16 because that's a great way to do it. For God so loved the world that he gave us one and only son, whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. God sent his son Jesus to die for us. That was his role, was to bring about our salvation. And then his role is eternity, right? He gets to be in eternity. And one day we get to spend eternity with him. One day we get to see and rest in his glory. Or one day he gets to come down in his glory and bring us up to him and win our salvation once and for all. That's what I was trying to say. Once and for all of our faith. Our faith is in the fact that we are nothing, we deserve nothing. Our sin makes us in this place where we deserve nothing but eternal separation from God. But because Jesus came to earth, made himself man, and was killed on a cross, that his perfect sacrifice gives us eternal salvation. And I have to be honest with you, when I used to read this verse, the other thing I would have said is, hey, you know what Jesus gets to finally do? He had to endure the cross. He had to do all this stuff, but what does he finally get to do? He finally gets to sit at the right hand of God, the Father, who sits on the throne. He gets to rest, and he gets to wait to just get to meet his people. And I love how it says, for the joy that was set before him, that it's his joy to take on the cross. And therefore, it's his joy to be able to be in heaven, seated at the right hand of God, simply waiting to welcome his people into eternity. Waiting to welcome these people who he died for by name and by sin. But as I've done a little bit more research and as I've dived a little harder into Hebrews, what I realize is that is a very inaccurate reading of what it means that one of the joys set before him is to be seated at the right hand of the throne of God. As he is seated at the right hand, he's not being inactive. He's not sitting lazily by. He's not waiting expectantly to meet his people. Is that ultimately true? Yes. He can't wait to welcome you in. But while he is there, he right hand of God, is not twiddling his thumbs. It says that he is our high priest. Now, I know some of you guys are like, oh yeah, high priest, that's great. Other of you guys may have no idea what a high priest is. So the short version of what a high priest is, is he did a couple of things. He was this person who was appointed to be able to go into the presence of God and offer sacrifices for his people. Before Jesus, before the ultimate and perfect sacrifice, he would go and he would provide these sacrifices to God saying, Lord, let these sacrifices be enough so that my people can remain in your glory and in your presence. Well, we know and we just talked about that we don't do that anymore. And we don't do that anymore because we don't need to do that anymore. Because Jesus came down and was the perfect lamb that was sacrificed. That because of this perfect sacrifice, we don't need these small, insignificant sacrifices anymore because Jesus bought our salvation through his sacrifice for eternity. Well, the other thing, and what's basically completely linked to the first thing that a high priest does is he intercedes for his people. Basically, he is a go-between between his people and God. He was appointed to this place so that he could go into the presence of God, and while he's giving his sacrifices, he's also bringing about the pleas of his people. He's bringing to the Lord our sins, the things that we have told him, the ways that we have fallen short in the sight and in the eyes of God. And our high priest, and a high priest is to go in between us and God, praying to God and saying, Lord, as I sacrifice this, will you please forgive my people? Well, once again, what we know now, post-Jesus, is that since we have the Holy Spirit inside of us, when we say yes to Jesus, the Holy Spirit enters inside of us. What that means is we no longer have to have a go-between. We no longer have to go to this person on earth and say, hey, here are these things. Will you please take these things up to God? Because I could not be caught dead trying to talk to God because he's too holy. No, because we have the Holy Spirit within us, that means that we have the right and that we have the ability to go before the Father. But what gives us that right is Jesus. What gives us that right is not simply what happened in the past, not simply the fact that Jesus was sacrificed for us, but because Jesus is now sitting at the right hand of God. And what is he doing? He's our high priest. He's not currently living idly by. He's actively living as our high priest, actively pleading for us, is interceding for us, that he is always living to take our pleas to the Father, that his entire goal and his entire existence in heaven right now is to do everything he can to bring joy, to bring peace, to shower upon you hope and grace and mercies every single second of every single day. As we go to him, as we ask, Lord, please forgive me for this, or Lord, I just want to give this over to you. Jesus's joy is being able to accept that and to look to the father and say, Lord, that one's ours. And so he is forgiven. Lord, I died for that person right there, and therefore they are holy and they are blameless in your sight. Every single time we go to the Father, Jesus is interceding on our behalf saying, hey, you remember when I died? I died for that one. And as Hebrews 12, two says, it is his joy to do so. His joy is not simply his sacrifice in the past, but it is the current ability to be able to shower these mercies upon his people. Any person who is drawn near to his father. I love the way that Thomas Goodwin puts it when he says, Christ's own us, as he is able to comfort us, as he is able to relieve us, as he is able to comfort us, as he is able to shower grace and mercy upon us at every single turn, every second, every minute, every hour, every day. It is his joy, it is his comfort, it is his happiness, and his glory is ultimately greater and higher if his people would come to him for those things. And guess what? If you've drawn to him, if you have drawn near to God, if you have said yes to this faith, yes to this salvation that was authored by Jesus, then not only are you unlocking this eternal redemption, this eternal redemption that is brought to you by Jesus, but you are unlocking this ever-present redemption while you're here on earth. And that's good news. And the goal of this morning isn't simply for you to add to your checklist, oh, here's another role of Jesus. The goal is that it might impact us because I think that oftentimes when we look at Jesus, if I were to ask you to look at Jesus, then we would look at him as somebody of the past, somebody who was a human and died for us and died for our sins. And then, therefore, we look for him for the future. Because since he died for my sins in the past, that means my future is secure in eternity. And when we do that, and when we skip the middle part, when we skip the fact that Jesus is currently living and active as our high priest, consistently doing everything he can to draw us closer and closer to the Father, when we forget that step, I think that our faith starts to look about the same. When we begin to look at our faith, I think we look at it as an event of the past, that over here, we said yes to Jesus. We were bought and we were redeemed by his blood, and we've said yes to Jesus. And that is an incredible thing that we did in the past. And therefore, we get to go all the way over here to the end of our days and in eternity, we get to be with Jesus forevermore. We have this eternal, indescribable joy that we get to experience for the rest of our days. But when we forget the middle part of who Jesus is and what Jesus is doing, then we go from here and saying, you know what, for the rest of this time, I'm just gonna struggle through the rest of my life by myself. And then I'm gonna experience this incredible joy that I'm super excited about. And the problem is we fail to recognize that Jesus's current and active role is to make it to where that eternal joy is being realized in new and different ways every second of every day in our hearts while we are living on earth. That we don't have to wait for this joy. Jesus is just sitting at the right hand of God saying, why don't you just turn to me? I'll give you this joy right now. A quote that Nate has used a few times in his sermons that I'm gonna use again is by C.S. Lewis when he says, we are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased. To put it a different way, imagine that you're living in poverty and you win the lottery one day. And this winning of the lottery is the amount of money that's not going to run dry. It's going to be there as long as you're using it. And so you have this huge celebration, this huge party. I did it. I won the lottery. I am victorious. And then you live the rest of your life out in the same poverty, never using any of your winnings to bring you the joy that it could bring you. And then the end of your day, as you start using it, and you're like, this is unbelievable. I love this. I love this so much. This is awesome. That's not a one-to-one comparison, but I mean, in the same way, when we simply see Jesus and celebrate Jesus as someone who saved us in the past, and we look forward to say, hey, at some point he's going to bring us joy in eternity, and that's what we're doing. When we forget that his current existence is literally consumed, he is wholly consumed with bringing us this indescribable joy more and more every single day. And we're just chilling with mud pies. And like, you know what, this is fine for now. I'll get the real joy later. Jesus just wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake you and say, what are you doing? I have this joy for you now. I would have called you later if I wanted you to experience the joy later. And when we shift our understanding of Jesus' role from one of the past and the future to one that is current and one that is active, then I believe that our faith begins to shift as well from a faith that is simply looking upon the past and looking upon the future into a faith that is current and active. And when we recognize and we understand that Jesus is wholly consumed right now with bringing about the greatest possible joy that you can experience on earth, not simply of the past, but of something right now, always. Bringing about new mercies and new joys and a new peace every single morning. That is his role. That is what he is consumed with right now. Why would we not want to consume ourselves with those joys? When we read Hebrews 4, 14, I want throne of God through Jesus. And we have a complete freedom to come exactly as we are because Jesus knows exactly what we went through because he experienced it on his time on earth as well. And the sins, the ugly stuff, the bad stuff that we don't want God to know about, the ugly stuff that is within our lives is the exact reason why we are welcome to come to Jesus. Those are the exact qualifications that allow us to get to come to Jesus, because Jesus only came to heal hurting people. He only came to redeem a fallen people. And it's his joy to redeem. It's his joy to be able to redeem you, to make you new, to make you whole, to shower upon you joy and grace and mercy and peace and forgiveness every single day. And so I want to return to Hebrews 12. We read Hebrews 12 too, and this time we're looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that is set before us. Today, may we not be a people who settle for mud pies. May we not be a people who have won the lottery but choose not to cash in on the joys that it produces. Let us run our races. Let us be consumed and let us step out into our faith, drawing closer and closer to Jesus as he is drawing us closer and deeper into the ever abounding peace, joy, and love of the Father. As we close out our service, we're gonna sing a song. And the song was placed here for a reason because the words are absolutely beautiful and do far more than I could ever do on this topic. But I just wanted to read a couple verses for you of the song, and if you will read with me before we sing it. The second verse actually goes, when Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward I look and see him there who made an end to all my sin. Because the sinless Savior died, my sinful soul is counted free. For God the just is satisfied to look on him and pardon me. The first verse says this, before the throne of God above, I have a strong and perfect plea. A great high priest whose name is love, who ever lives and pleads for me. My name is graven on his hands. My name is written on his heart. I know that while in heaven he stands, no tongue can bid me thence depart. Amen.