Sermons tagged with Church

Good morning. Thank you all for being here, for listening online. My name is Doug Bergeson. Thank you, thank you. It was my hope that I would get that. But to kick things off, I'm going to need a little help from you. The audience, congregation, flock, whatever you want to call yourselves. I need a little help. Who in today's culture, books, movies, TV, podcasts, or even real life would be considered a great detective, a master of deductive logic, one able to take the most cryptic clues, hints, and innuendo and figure out what's going on. I'm asking you all so as not to date myself and come across as a hopelessly out of touch boomer. So a little help, please. Just shout out some names of great detectives, masters of deductive logic from any realm of your experience. Sherlock Holmes. Okay, that's kind of a boomer response, but that's okay. Who else? I would have gotten that one. Who else? Columbo. That I had down too, and I wasn't going to share because it's so out of date. Anyone else? Axel Foley. Okay. Okay. In the first one or the one in the new release? Axel Foley. Okay. Who else? Ace Ventura. Okay. Okay. That's good. That's all I need. I really needed those names, and I appreciate your contributing to make this one point. When you see me being trotted up here to speak on a Sunday morning, you do not have to be a Sherlock Holmes, a Detective Columbo, an Axel Foley, or an Ace Ventura to know that we must be deep, deep, deep into the lazy, languid days of summer. When I plot up here on stage, you have the legitimate right to ask yourself dang why am I not on vacation but be that as it may I am here and I'm excited to share when Nate first reached out to me way back in March he wrote that he we'd be in the middle of our summer series which we started last year called 27 that covers the books of the New Testament and specifically the letters of the Apostle Paul and he said I could pick whichever one I wanted and build a sermon around its overall message. Now typically when asked to preach I deliberate, I agonize, hem and haw wringing my hands over whether I really want to do it or not. But not this time. I was excited and quickly responded to Nate, saying that I would leap at the chance to do the book of Colossians, as it is magisterial and soaring and easily one of my favorite books in all of Scripture. I was pumped. However, just moments later, Nate wrote back, and I quote, Doug, thanks for taking me up on the offer, though I have bad news that I hope will not dissuade you from your acceptance. Aaron preached on Colossians last year, and I failed to mention that to you in my request email. Kyle has also preached on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, so those are off the market as well. So remembering that old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, I went back to Nate, explicitly asking him to confirm in writing what books were actually able and available for me to pick. And thankfully for me, and hopefully for you, Paul's letter to the Ephesians was one of them. And that's the book we're going to look at this morning. This letter was written by the Apostle Paul, once among the fiercest and most formidable opponents of the early Christian church. But God, in his wisdom and grace, had chosen Paul, this fervent enemy of the church and most unlikely of all candidates, to be his chosen messenger in spreading the life-changing news of Jesus Christ throughout the known world. And for two to three years, they don't know exactly how long, the city of Ephesus had been base camp for Paul's ministry, for his missionary work, establishing churches throughout the region. Now, by AD 60, some 25 years after his miraculous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Paul is thought to have written this letter from a prison in Rome. Now, for those familiar with this letter, it is chock full of beautiful and iconic passages. Nate frequently has brought to our attention the last half of chapter 3, which is his favorite prayer in all of Scripture and one he prays over grace often. Ephesians also contains the verses that would shape and fuel the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 asserting that salvation is only found through God's gracious gift of Jesus Christ and is by faith in him alone. In other words, there's nothing we can do to earn or curry God's favor. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not fromesians, there are the frequently misunderstood, misappropriated, and sometimes even abused house codes, describing how the relationships between wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters, are to work in light of the Lordship of Christ. Finally, in a very famous passage near the end of the letter, Paul exhorts all believers to put on the full armor of God. And there are more, but this morning, our focus will be on the one overarching theme of this entire letter, our identity as believers, who we truly are now that we are in Christ. According to Paul, everything in both the individual and collective Christian experience, hangs in the balance, directly dependent upon the extent to which we can wrap our minds around this one transcendent and surpassing reality. At this stage of my life, if you were to ask me why I believe what I believe, my most honest and transparent answer would go something like this. I believe because everything I've seen, everything I've learned, and everything I've experienced in my life so far has validated the truth of Scripture. Not just some things, but literally everything has reinforced what the Bible has been saying all along. And despite being such an ancient book, I've for the most part stopped being surprised when I again discover another way in which the Bible is fresh and profoundly modern, relevant, life-changing, and most importantly, true. Here's one quick example from my long-ago past. In 1966, Professors Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn at the University of Michigan published a groundbreaking work in the field of psychology and organizational behavior. By the time I started graduate business school up in Chicago in 1980, Katz and Kahn's cutting-edge theory, only about a dozen years old, had swept through academia and was now all the rage at the elite business schools. What this theory offered was a sweeping transformational alternative to classical business management that up to that point had viewed organizations as machines. Now what this new systems theory proposed was that organizations should best be viewed not as machines but as living organisms. When I first heard this I was floored, blown away. What insight, what brilliance, so outside the box. I'd never in my life heard anything like that before. Oh, wait. Yes, I had. The Apostle Paul had made that very same point when he compared the church and how its members were to operate to a human body in his first letter to the Corinthians, written around A.D. 55. Turns out the Bible had beaten Dr. Katsakan and Kotz to the punch by just over 19 centuries. Much more recently, I was again struck by Scripture's remarkable freshness and relevance, revealing truth and wisdom long before the rest of us even begin to catch up. The occasion was this past fall when I listened to the book, The Coddling of the American Mind. And it has direct relevance and application to what Paul is trying to do in his letter to the Ephesians. Written in 2018 by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff, the book makes the case that our society and culture have gradually but steadily moved towards broad acceptance of three great untruths with terrible consequences, particularly for our young people. The three great untruths the authors cite are, one, always trust your feelings. Two, avoid pain and discomfort if you can. And three, life is a battle between good people on the one side and bad people on the other. Even if well intended, as they often are, the book asserts that these beliefs represent terrible and demonstrably false ideas whose adoption and embrace by large swaths of our society have contributed to an epidemic of anxiety and depression and overall decline in our mental health, to the intolerance and turmoil roiling our public discourse, and to the tearing apart of any semblance of social cohesion in this country, to name just a few of the disastrous consequences of these ideas, these patterns of thinking. The book went on to show how these flawed beliefs not only contradicted thousands of years of wisdom literature from a variety of traditions, but also fly in the face of the latest findings of science and modern psychology. That the Bible is prominent among wisdom literature debunking those three great untruths came as no surprise. What did come as a new revelation to me was when the authors introduced something I've never heard of, something called cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT, as an especially effective remedy and tool in combating these three great untruths. Why this is pertinent to Ephesians is that the Bible in its entirety, and the Apostle Paul in particular, espoused and practiced cognitive behavior therapy almost two millennia before it was even a thing. Some of you older folks, as well as any country music freaks out there, might remember the 1981 chart-topping duet by Barbara Mandrell and George Jones, I Was Country Before When Country Wasn't Cool. Does anybody remember that? Yeah, there we go. Well, tweaking that a little bit for my purposes this morning, it turns out that the Apostle Paul was doing cognitive behavior therapy before cognitive behavior therapy was cool. First pioneered in the 1960s, CBT is premised on the idea that how we think and what we think is what determines to a large degree both our emotions and our behavior. Rather than focusing on the origins of a problem as happens in traditional psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy works to change our current thinking. It is our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves and our world, what cognitive behavior therapy refers to as cognitive distortions that must be addressed and changed. In clinical practice over the last several decades, this has been shown to be true as CBT has been proven to be remarkably effective. But zoning in on just the first of those three great untruths, always trust your feelings. It's an important, even vital question to ask, to what extent should our feelings and emotions influence and shape what we think, what we believe to be true? If one has been paying any attention at all, we now live in a society and a culture which have elevated and anointed emotions and feelings to such prominence that they control the moral high ground. And in many instances instances assume ultimate authority, even to the extent of determining what is true and what is not. One simply doesn't question or challenge another's feelings in polite society. After all, that's what you feel. That's your truth, right? Well, no. Wrong. Wrong. Not according to cognitive behavior therapy, and certainly not according to what God has revealed in his word. It turns out that in many instances, God cares far less about our feelings and emotions than we do. It can be off-putting at first, even shocking. After all, if God's supposed to be so loving, how does that compute? But lest anyone here this morning or listening online misses this critical point, it's not that God doesn't care about our feelings and emotions, but that he cares more for those things that have the greatest chance to help us. And from God's vantage point, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, the mind is the key. The mind is the key because how we think determines how we act. Our behavior follows our thoughts and beliefs. And we intuitively know this to be true. If I care to know what you really think, what you really believe, there's no need for me to ask you or for you to tell me. I'll simply watch closely what you do. How do you spend your time and treasure? What you prioritize? What are you willing to stand up for, come what may? When are you quick to compromise and make exceptions? What sacrifices and trade-offs have you made? How do you treat people? How different are you in public than in private? Your actions are the tell. Even the old adage, follow your heart, which I love, is not so much an appeal to one's emotion as it is to what one truly believes is right and true. In actual practice, the heart doesn't do most of the leading. It is typically more of a follower. It is the convictions of your mind that set the wheels of action in motion. It's what one thinks and believes that does the leading, and our hearts then follow. That is why, whether we like it or not, it's a far greater concern to God how we think and what we think and why we think the way we do than how we might be feeling at any point in time. The priority on the mind rather than the emotion is found throughout scripture. Time and time again, the Bible asserts that our minds are the key. But you may ask, don't feelings and emotions greatly influence how we think? Absolutely they do. And therein lies the problem. God is obviously not against emotions, revealing in scripture his own deep emotions and feelings. Furthermore, he's imbued us, his treasured and loved creations, with gobs of both. Emotions can be wonderful and transcendent, an indispensable and indelible part of being human. But the downside to our feelings and emotions is that they are often fleeting and fickle. They can also easily deceive, mislead, and distort. Here's a simple case and point from real life. If we have any poker players in the house this morning, do we? Any poker players? Okay. It's probably not, I was hoping to get a little bit more, better response. Have to move to Vegas. But if you do play, well, if we have any poker players in the house, you're probably familiar with the term tilt. If you do play and are not familiar with the term, then my guess is you probably lose a lot. Always leaving the table a bit mystified as to why you have such bad luck. Tilt is when emotion knocks a player off balance, disrupting and distorting his objectivity and ability to discern what's really happening. Tilt most commonly occurs when a player suffers, is unlucky due to a bad beat, a hand he should by rights have won but didn't, as it can spiral into frustration and subsequent decision-making infected by emotion. But tilt can also happen to a player on a winning streak, where strong positive emotions lead to equally poor and distorted decision-making. In both instances, emotional reasoning, patterns of thinking unduly influenced by how we are feeling at the moment, leads to bad outcomes. But unless you're trying to make a living playing poker, that example might not strike much fear in you. But I think it should. Feelings are always compelling, but they are wholly subjective and not always reliable. For example, I might be thinking I'm absolutely killing it up here this morning, really giving Nate a run for his money. But just because I feel that way doesn't make it so, does it? We live in an age of emotional reasoning. Way, way too much importance is placed on how we feel, elevating our feelings to such a degree that they can overwhelm the facts and distort reality. It's not been good for our mental health. It's not been good for our public discourse. It's not been good for our social cohesion. And it just so happens it's not good for our faith either. The powerful and often pernicious ability of our emotions to distort reality and overwhelm our thinking, to convince us something is true that is not, or to convince us something is not true that really is, presents a clear and present danger to the vitality of our faith. Imagine being in a story in which you think you know what's going on. All your senses are in touch with that story. Yet, in fact, there is a much bigger story and a different reality at work. Guess what? We're all in that bigger story. And the challenge is that our feelings and emotions aren't going to be of much help as they often point us the wrong way. As the writer and pastor Eugene Peterson most famously known for his popular paraphrase of the Bible called the message states, my feelings are important for many things but they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. In other words, it's not so much the feelings we have about God, but the facts we know about God, what we are convinced of, that need to be right. Whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a raging battle going on for our minds, and the stakes couldn't be higher. The key to victory, in a nutshell, is to think right about the things that matter. Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. This task of renewing our minds is made even more difficult because influenced by both our own sin as well as the fallen world in which we live, we all begin our journeys of faith with a constricted and impoverished view of what's possible, of what God wants and has in store for us. And this is Paul's overriding message in Ephesians, to convince us of the things that are actually and eternally true. Paul knows that we all need a radically new orientation in our thinking. Because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And in Ephesians, Paul starts right up front. In the opening verse, offering a view of a reality that immediately confronts and calls into question my own. Addressing his readers as saints or holy ones. Those set apart by God. Paul is directly contradicting my feelings about myself. For I don't very often feel saint-like or holy or set apart. That's certainly not how I would describe myself. Yet Paul is asserting that it's true. I have been set apart by God for his purposes. That is who I am in Christ Jesus. In essence, Paul is conducting a master class in cognitive behavior therapy. Just like in modern CBT, Paul goes about combating our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves, our world, and our faith by laying out the facts and the truth. And as in cognitive behavior therapy, the goal is that the process becomes a virtuous cycle of sorts, slowly but surely changing the way we understand and interpret things, which causes a change in how we respond emotionally, which in turn causes our thinking to change a little further. And so begins Paul's full frontal assault on our small and constrained views of ourselves and our world that constitute reality as we know it. Like rapid, sharp staccato bursts of machine gun fire, Paul rattles off a whole slew of facts that we are in fact part of a massively bigger and grander story, one that began long ago and will continue for all eternity, that we were chosen by God before the creation of the world, an act rooted in the eternal purposes of God, to have a people, holy and blameless, set apart for himself, something only made possible through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and that now unites all believers as one, that although once dead, we are now alive, despite rightfully deserving the judgment of a just God, someone else has borne our guilt and suffered in our stead, And by and through that extravagant act of love, we have been declared not guilty. Once consumed, controlled, enslaved by our own sinful natures, the ways of this world, we've been set free and made new through faith in Jesus Christ. And that even now, all of God's spiritual blessings in Christ are available, active, and evident in believers' lives. These are the things Paul thinks we should know. This is who we truly are. We can't intuit them. We can't feel our way towards them. Our feelings and emotions offer little help in arriving at these transcendent and transformational truths. Only by repeatedly reflecting on these things, allowing them to seep into us, to question and challenge our existing patterns of thinking and emotional reasoning, will we ever be able to renew our minds. Paul is asking, he's cajoling, commanding, encouraging us to put on a completely new lens, a lens designed to color everything that we think about and all of our thinking. We are indeed part of a bigger and grander story. And as Paul writes in chapter 1, verse 10, this story will culminate when the times will have reached their fulfillment to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. So, though the world may often seem chaotic, mystifying, and out of control, a time is coming and is advancing already when all will make sense under the lordship of Christ. In the meantime, believers in Jesus Christ have been given the gift of God's Holy Spirit as the first installment and guarantee of our salvation, a magnificent promise and blessing. However, this has led to a tendency for Christians to sometimes describe their conversion process as inviting Christ into their hearts, as if salvation entailed a mini-Jesus or a little bit of Jesus being in us. While that, in a sense, is true, it can lead to a misconception that downplays the extent to which all believers are united together in Christ and whose identities are found together in Christ. Far more common in Paul's writings and conceptually more powerful and accurate is the idea that believers are part of a larger reality of God. We are now in Christ, not the other way around. In fact, Ephesians describes two separate and completely distinct realms, that of Christ and that of the world, which are polar opposites diametrically opposed to utterly incompatible spheres of influence. To be in Christ means we are moving from one sphere of influence to another, from the realm of the world to the realm of is in them due to the former way of life to put off the old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Putting off the old self and putting on the new is the process which happens as we move from the world's sphere of influence to that of Christ, a migration to a new identity that will define us for all eternity. However, again, we're not going to move very far unless this increasingly becomes how we view and understand ourselves and our reality. Paul insists that we must engage our minds rather than our emotions. Again, it is only when we change the way we think that we change the way we live. That's when transformation happens. Now, personally, I've often observed in my own life that if I really believe what I said I believed, my life would look a lot different. The great majority of the time, I don't feel like I'm a new creation or that I put off my old self. Far from it. On the contrary, I still struggle with the things that I've struggled with all my life. This has been convicting and has made me feel like a giant hypocrite at times. However, if my mind, what I think and what I believe, is decisive in determining how I act, then all this disconnect really means is that I obviously have a long ways to go in changing my thinking and renewing my mind. I'm still very much a work in progress. Fortunately for me, and for all of us, one of the most consequential and vastly underappreciated blessings of having been given God's Holy Spirit is that the Spirit helps us to make this transition by helping us to better grasp these truths, by purging our minds of those influences which distort, deceive, and mislead. In other words, by helping us to renew our minds. God's spirit in us seeks to shape us by reminding and teaching us who we are now in Christ. Only when we more fully know and believe can we authentically move and change. But we need to do our part. We have a role to play. Again, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, we need to deliberately, intentionally expose our minds to the truths of God and ourselves. If we were to have any chance of changing our thinking. It's simply not going to happen otherwise. And this is why worship, prayer, study, community are so vital. Christians, including myself, often act like these activities are certainly good things to do, but essentially voluntary ones, more or less. That we have times and seasons in our lives when they can have less prominence, be less of a priority, perhaps because we're so busy. And other seasons when we can allocate more time to them and really get our spiritual mojo back. The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians does not share that view. Being a believer, being saved, to use a nice evangelical expression, being a follower of Christ, having our identity found in Christ, are all descriptions of the process of moving from one sphere of influence, the world, to a completely new sphere of influence in corresponding reality, Christ. that requires a radically new orientation in our thinking because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And we can't depend on our feelings, emotions, and intuition to convince us of these things, for they often tell us something very different, which is why we're going to close by listening to Aaron sing a song from about a dozen years ago called Remind Me Who I Am. I personally find it so, so compelling because it captures my desperate need to be constantly reminded of the truth of who I am and who God is. I'd like to read a few of the lyrics. When I lose my way and I forget my name, remind me who I am. In the mirror all I see is who I don't want to be. Remind me who I am. In the loneliest places when I can't remember what grace is, tell me once again who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget, who I am to you, that I belong to you. When my heart is like a stone and I'm running far from home, remind me who I am. When I can't receive your love, afraid I'll never be enough, remind me who I am. Tell me, once again, who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget who I am to you, that I belong to you. Worship is how we are reminded. Spending time in scripture is how we are reminded. Getting down on our knees in prayer is how we are reminded. Being in community is how we are reminded. These ancient and timeless disciplines remain profoundly modern for when we worship together on Sunday mornings, when we open our Bibles, when we bow our heads, when we sit quietly alone in God's presence, when we spend time with others who share the same Savior and the same hope, we are working on and renewing our minds, implicitly acknowledging that we are part of a much grander story.

Good morning, Grace. While you guys are watching this video, I'll be on a plane to Ethiopia with some other people from Grace to support our team working in Addis Jamari over there. This morning, we have a special guest, Sarah Prince. She and her husband, Casey, have come over with Kieran and Keller, their children. They're based in Cape Town, South Africa. Years ago, Casey and Sarah were on staff here at Grace back in the old days, and then we had the privilege of sending them over there to be missionaries in South Africa, where they work with a football team called Ubuntu and are involved in their community in many other ways. So this morning, Sarah is going to come share with us a really important message from her heart, and I'm excited for all of us to get to hear from her. Good morning. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It's so good to be here. It's so good to see your faces. Many of you I know, and it's such a privilege to be here again. We were a part of Grace when it was over there. There, there, there, there. Yep, that way. And for many years, we served at Grace. I was an associate pastor. My husband was a youth pastor. And then this church community sent us 14 years ago, almost 15, if you can believe it, out into South Africa to do ministry. I have a picture of our family, if you haven't seen them walking around. My daughter, Kieran, is in kids ministry now because she loves the kids. That's Keller. And that's my handsome husband, Casey. Behind us is the street where we live. And we will be going back there tomorrow. Praise the Lord. Hallelujah. I'm so grateful to be here. And I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about all the other stuff that we do. But I did bring a few copies of my book. And I also have a few postcards. If you don't know us, I'm so excited to meet you. And we have some postcards and some... Can you help me put these out, Casey? He's already on his phone. Can you help me just set... Oh, he's taking notes. Okay. There's four points. That's all you have to know. But then can you just set those out? When you're done. Before, in the next 30 minutes. So we have some postcards and some info about our family if you don't know anything about us, but many of you do. And I just want to say, I was just chatting with someone outside and they were saying, I can't remember when you guys met and I can't believe this is happening. And you know, it's so crazy that you did this. And we always say the reason that we could risk what we do in South Africa is because we have this community to come back to. We've kind of like played, I don't know, poker, but like played all the cards or the chips or the things. And I'm a big gambler. So we gambled all the gambling stuff and we've just put it into South Africa. But we always know we have this community here that loves us, that supports us. And then we can always come home to. So we thank you for your love and support. But that's not what I want to talk about today. So I've been wrestling with something lately. This is the first time in a very long time that I have something that God is showing me, and then I'm like, okay, but God, where is that in Scripture? Usually I'm like really big into the Bible, and I'm like digging, and then that's the thing I want to focus on. But today with this topic, I've come to God curious. God, what is this thing that you've done in our world? Because in 14 years in South Africa, we have built a ministry called Ubuntu Football, where now we've sent 24 young men to America to study, one of who's here, hey-o. And we have a bunch of young men who are playing professionally, a bunch of young men who are studying in South Africa, a bunch of young men who are beginning their lives as incredible men. One of them is my son's soccer coach at his school. It's really beautiful. But as we've done all these other things, God has given us this very rich and vibrant community. This very unique group of people. Kind of different pockets of people that are very strange and very unique and very fun and very sacred. And so I've started to ask God, what is that? One story that highlights the weirdness of our community comes with a cake. So I have a cake here. Our son was diagnosed with autism how many years ago now? He is 12, so about 10 years ago. And we're in the community of South Africa as this happens, not even knowing what autism is about. That's what my book is about, Anguish to Awakening, our journey with Keller, my journey. And I have this group of friends. And I think we got a diagnosis. And maybe the next day, I was at the gym. And I ran into Kate. And she's like, oh, how are you? And I was like, I'm, you know, and I just cried at the gym and told her what happened, and we had this group of women friends, and so she sat with me, she prayed with me, and then maybe a week or two later, she said, we want to get together with you. Come over this night. I show up at her house, and this is the cake for me, and she said, we can do hard things together, and so we're celebrating that. We're at the beginning of a very hard thing, and we will do it together with you. And they had this like key chain thing with quotes and cards, and they just sat with me and cried with me. And I look back at that, think that is so unique to enter into a really difficult time and have people come and just say, we're here in the hard. We're not here for the highlights. We're not here for the good times. We're here now, today, in the hard. And it struck me as so unique. And we've had these kinds of times, these kinds of instances over and over again. And I need to admit that it's not because we're so great at friendship or that we're so great at bringing people around. I think it's a God-given gift. And I think there are some things that God has taught us along the way to help cultivate that community. That's the title today. I can't have a simple, I kept, community doesn't work, initiating community, it's not rich enough. So today's title is Cultivating Koinonia and Orating as Oracles. Because sometimes American or English words don't do it justice. And I want to talk about this. What does it mean to cultivate not just community, not just friends, koinonia, I'll explain that, and how do we operate as oracles? Because I think that's where something happens. You know, I grew up all over the country. I moved a lot. And so only when I became a young adult, I got married, like right after college, three weeks. Don't recommend it, young people. It's worked out, 22 years. But it was crazy. So I jumped into adulthood, went to seminary to become a pastor, and all of a sudden realized many things. Another sermon. But one of them was that I had no idea how to make friends. But I thought I didn't need them. I thought I was like, fine. I was just happy. I was just doing my thing. I was just bebopping around. And I started to realize I needed friends. And it was in this church that I learned the power of friendship and koinonia. We used to have a retreat. Anyone go to koinonia? Koinonia. Yeah. See? We had this retreat and I was dragged to it. Okay, fine. I'll go because I'm like a pastor or whatever. And it was this beautiful time of friendship and connection. And through this place, I learned the importance, the need of koinonia. But you know, a lot of people have never learned this. They've never been in environments where this is pushed, where this is elevated, where this is celebrated. There's lots of statistics on this, but three decades ago, there was a poll that said 3% of Americans had no close friends. 2021, 12% had no close friends. Into the pandemic, 13% of women, 8% of men had lost touch with most of their friends. This is something happening a lot more. Nowadays, some 8% will say they have no friends at all. This is something that's been talked about here. I didn't hear about this because we're in Africa, and in Africa things are done a bit differently. But there's actually a pandemic, an epidemic of loneliness. It's everywhere. And that's a word that just means you're disconnected. You don't have people. You're not anchored. You're not moored by others. And you're just kind of wandering. And it's actually celebrated here. It's just kind of how we do things here. And actually, this epidemic, the Surgeon General says that it affects one out of two adults. And it doesn't just help your mood. It's about your entire body, your entire health. It actually predicts the longevity of your life if you're lonely or if you have people around you. And so when the Surgeon General went around the states, some of the things that he heard were people would tell me all again and again. They felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant. And they said, if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice. Now, if this doesn't feel a bit familiar, I'm glad you're here because I have a job for you. Some of us just have people around and we don't know how we did it or why it was given to us. For us, we were just super needy and having a child with autism was one of the big things. We just kind of were like, we're broken, help us. And people came around us, which is what I talk about in the book. But I think most people don't display their need in the way that our family did. We were very vocal about it. But if you feel like you have close community, if you don't know what loneliness feels like, then great. I have a job for you. Because many people feel very, very lonely. Many people feel very, very isolated. All over the world, people are saying that they want community. They want friendship. They want that in their world, but they don't know how to find it. All community is is a sense of belonging, support, shared purpose. And it's a place where the church should be leading. We've got this whole book that is people that did it. I mean, they fought a lot, and they killed each other some, and it was messy, but like they did it. This is the book about it, and yet we are doing it poorly at times. We have a friend who grew up, he grew up doing, his family was doing missions, their South African family, and he is South African, but has moved to New Zealand. He just recently flew from New Zealand to Amsterdam for what? Does anyone know who was in Amsterdam recently? Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. He has a beautiful family. He's very connected. But people all over the globe have been traveling in the, I don't even know, the millions, the trillions, to see this woman sing songs. Now, I hear, I know every song because of my daughter. I know every word. I know every syllable. They're good. They're fine. They're good. They're good. They're good. They're good. Did I say they were good? That is not why people are going to this concert. They are going because people have over and over and over said something like this. Entering the Erez tour was like stepping into an alternate universe where everyone was bursting with joy. I've never encountered such a warm, friendly, and kind crowd. People have called it transcendental. And it embodies love to people all over the world. It's not about the songs. It's this feeling thousands of people have when they're together. They're connected. They're a community. They're being seen and known. Now, I'm not asking any of you to be Taylor Swift, the next one, although my daughter might be. But I don't think we need a concert to create the sacred art of connection. It can happen anywhere. And God shows us how to do it. And it is a word that's more than community. It is that word koinonia in the New Testament. It's roughly translated fellowship, but it means to share together, to take part. And the same idea is found in another Greek word. That's metakos. And it means to have with or to have together. Now, I'm using sacred New Testament words to describe what those people are saying about Taylor Swift. And what I know God is desperate for people to describe about us. And again, if you don't know the feeling of loneliness, then it is your time. If you do, then I'm here to give you hope. Because it is possible among every single one of us. Being here in South Africa has highlighted to me not how special we are as a family to do what we do, but how God is really great because this group of idiots is running this incredible organization in South Africa because it's God's mission, it's God's dream, it's God's plan, and even we can't stop it with all of our fumbles and our foils and our missteps. When God has a plan, he will use the best of us and the worst of us. His plan is to be together. So I have four, I don't have a pamphlet, I'm from Africa. I don't have a pamphlet, but I do have four very simple points. If you're saying, I don't have that. I have people around, but I don't have a deep connection. Or if you're saying, I have it. This is for you. Because it's time to step into something sacred, something real. And none of my examples, I'm going to tell some stories, not a single one is a Bible study. I have the best Bible study. I want to start there. I have the best Bible study. There are these women, and my sister was just in South Africa, and she was with them. There are these beautiful women that I've known for years and years, and we get together, and we cry, and we laugh, and we pray, and we scream out to God, and it is holy. None of these examples are going to be a church or a Bible study because I want to inspire you to dream of where the church could go beyond this. This is holy, but that world needs this sacred thing. So I want you to dream. Okay, so step one. Step one of creating, cultivating koinonia. We'll end with orating as oracles, but cultivating koinonia. And actually cultivating is step three. So you're not ready for the first letter of this sermon. You ready? Step one, introspection. This sounds so simple, but it is so profound. We went to South Africa to help everyone and to save everyone and to do all the great things for Jesus. And then a few years in, we had a son who was diagnosed with autism. And we were like, no, God, not the plan. We're doing some other stuff. We have a lot to do. We have a big plan. We have a big mission. We're going to serve for Jesus. This has happened time and time again to me. It even happened recently where we have a plan and then God says, no, this is a plan. But we were in desperate need. We didn't even know what autism meant. We had to Google it as we started our journey. But this is the first step of community. It isn't creating a Bible study. It isn't finding people to play pickleball with. The first step is introspection. The first step is what is my need? What is happening in here? Number one, introspection. This came through hardship for us. But as we've walked through that hardship, we've had to be really honest. What is it that we need in a community? Who do we need around us? What does it mean to raise kids and to do this life with people in our world? What does that look like? And we've had to be very introspective. This is something people are talking about, not just Taylor Swift people, but all over the world. I recently heard an interview with this woman, Priya Parker. She wrote this book called The Art of Gathering. So I would have thought, I would never picked up this book. I would have thought it's been about like dinner parties, which I love, or like how to host something cute or how to find the Pinterest board. But for her, The Art of Gathering starts with assessing your needs. Because you cannot create a gathering of people where you are authentically a part if you don't know what it is you need in that group. Creating community begins with your own needs. What is my need here? How am I actually feeling? What do I need from other people? That sounds selfish, sounds maybe anti-Christian, but it's true because if I'm going to authentically show up, that means my needs are going to show up. My desires are going to show up. My dreams are going to show up. My brokenness is going to show up. So I need to show up first with my true self, not who I think I should be, not who I want to be, not how I want to save the world. Again, read Sarah and Casey's whole story. Me, just me. And so that starts with being honest. And as I've wrestled with this idea and asked God, where is this in scripture? I've gone to the early church, but I want to start with what I believe maybe the early church was praying. So in Acts, you see the early church and they are wrestling. There are these, talk about misfits. They were running around with Jesus, getting it all wrong, being on the top, being on the bottom, just being a mess. I love them. And then Jesus got killed on the cross. They all went in hiding. They were scared. They were confused. They were doubting. They were a mess. And then he comes back. He rises and boom, everything changes. What's fun about studying the Bible, this part of the Bible, is there is no proof that he rose. You have an empty grave. You have someone who people said they saw, and then he was gone. But here's the proof. Is this group of people something happened in? I love what Kyle was sharing about what is going to happen now with the youth. We don't need to know what happened at Infuge, although I was ready for like a video of like, Infuge, it was so cool, and here's the water slide, and here's when they raised their hands. I was ready for a video. We don't need a video of what happened in Infuge. We need young people who are radically different and on fire for Jesus. That's all the proof we need. We don't need to see the pictures. We don't need to, the dirty clothes, I'm sure, were also proof when you parents washed them. The proof is in the people, and I believe we'll see that. The princes will be praying for the revival here for the young people. And I pray that you adults will come along with them. That's the proof that something happened. So this early church, something happened. Something happened. And they were radically different. And they're walking around just being wild for Jesus Christ. But I wondered, were they introspective? Because you don't really see it. You kind of just see them like, boom, out there, you know, changing the world. What they would have been doing is reading the Old Testament scriptures. I love that. They would have been wrestling and thinking and praying and talking and saying, God, what is my part in building this new world? And so that would have started with introspection. And so we have a simple scripture that you've heard a million times, but I'm going to highlight a couple light. It says here, search me, God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there's any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. The first step for revival is introspection. And the two words to focus on here are search. And it was a word that was used if miners were searching for gold or if Israelites were searching for new territory. They were searching like their life depended on it. Like not a little devotion in the morning, not 101.5 Christian music as they came through on a Sunday morning, not that kind of searching. I mean, searching like your life depends on it. If you don't show up, I have nothing else. That kind of searching is what the first church was doing. And then they were saying, test me. Test me. What needs to be let go? What needs to come out? What needs to rise? What is my place? What is my message? What is my calling? They were saying, test me, show me, reveal in me anything that is going to keep me from you. And then reveal in me how you want to use me. Test me. Do heart surgery on me as you take me out into this mission. You better believe that that early church was on their knees looking at those Old Testament scriptures, begging God, because the Psalms are the Psalms of that. that's the prayers. That's the way they really prayed. Begging God, search me, test me, and lead me to where you have me. So the first step is very simple. Search me and test me. I have a really great quote about this and what we need to do. There can be no vulnerability without risk. There can be no community without vulnerability. There can be no peace and ultimately no life without community. If the revival stays in here, it will die with me. It might go my whole life. But if revival stays here, then it's not done its job. It's not for you. It's not for me. It's for everyone else. But it takes vulnerability. And it takes risk. And so we start there, which is hard, but important. Step two, take initiative. This is a step also. I'm not talking about church, but I love church. Keep going to small group. Keep going to Bible study. Keep going to youth. But start going out into this world. Because this world has an epidemic of loneliness. This world is on fire. This world is in pain. This world is in need. And there are tons of places for you to go into this world and bring the love of God and create a place of belonging. This year, as I wrote my book, I finished my book last year, I was just praying, God, how can I be your hands and feet? How can I go out? What do I have to give? What have I learned that I could share? And at the end of last year, I started at Keller School, this support group of just parents who had kids with special needs or extra needs. And I just said, come once a month, just come and show up. It wasn't Christian. It was just come. We've had it now for almost a year. Every single time people risk, they're vulnerable, they cry out in need every single time. And every single time people risk they're vulnerable they cry out in need every single time and every single time someone shares faith someone shares hope in a real spiritual way because they're sharing what where they are and we're together meeting that need all of us have something to offer someplace Some place we can step out. Some place where we can open up a hand, open up a place where someone can feel not alone. And it takes us going out. And again, the early church did this. Religion was there. The buildings were there. And the early church went out. And you've read this before, but I'm going to highlight one very simple thing. So Acts 2, 41 through 47. You've heard this before so many times. Those who accepted Jesus' message were baptized, and about 3,000 were added to the number that day. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. And it continues. I'm scared I have a different version. I'll keep going. 47 is all we have. I'll keep going. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. I love the early church. And I mean, in COVID, I found myself just, when we couldn't meet, just like, okay, well, what did that look like when they first started gathering? And what they did was they just went. They would gather and they would pray and then they would go and they would gather and they would eat and they would go and they would gather and they would sing and they would go. They were just going and going and going. And as they were going, there were numbers added daily, weekly, monthly, because they were going. I think God is calling us to go. We all have something in our hand. We all have something we've learned. We all have something we care about. Let's go into the world. It could be as simple as my husband this year, he started doing paddle. You don't do that here. It's like squash and tennis together. And we have this cool paddle place near our house. And he's decided I'm going to be a paddle person. This is a place where Casey is bringing the love of Christ, the light of Christ. He's creating community in this place. But it calls us to go and to create something new. A quote here is by a guy named Bell Hooks. One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone. I hope you come here and you know that you're not alone, but just know that there are a lot of people that might need to come somewhere else to know they're not alone before they can come here to know that they're not alone. And so God is asking us to go and to create that. Step three, cultivate. Here we go. So now we've been introspective. We know what's in our hand. We know we're going to go out. Now we begin to cultivate koinonia. So this is where we nurture connections. We have places of connection and we nurture, we care for each other, we ask how are you doing, how are you really doing, what do you really need? We really reach out to the people around us, to the people in our community. Through our story with Keller we saw this time and time and time again where people would go out of their way and come into our life in radical ways to love us, to serve us, to care for us. And again, it wasn't because we were deserving of that. It was just what people felt on their heart from God to do. Sometimes I didn't even remember that it happened. People would tell me later as I was writing my book that they came and they served us and they loved us. And this is what was happening in Acts also. As they're continuing to go out, God was beginning to cultivate something really special. Let's look at Acts 4 now. It's continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God's grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. From time to time, those who owned land or houses sold them, bought the money from the sales, and put it to the apostles' feet and was distributed to those who had need. Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas, would be son of encouragement, I'm going to talk about him later, sold a field he owned and bought the money and put it at the apostles' feet. I love this because it is action. It is the church going out. It is the church that starts in here going out in radical ways, in ways no one expected, in ways they weren't being asked to do, and just saying, what can we do? Who can we bring in? Who can we serve? How can we do this differently? That is what church is, and that is cultivating a koinonia that is different and deeper than I think people are used to seeing for the church. I have another verse that I think really highlights this, and this is in Ephesians 4. So this is when Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus, and he's trying to effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called. For one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. This is the God that we are seeking, and this is the places we are invited to cultivate. And over and over again in our world, we saw people come into our lives and just cultivate this oneness, cultivate this spirituality, just to say, we are with you. We are walking with you. We believe in you. We are coming alongside. They built church all over our world outside of church. Just one little way that this happened was on Keller's first day of school. So we'd walk a long journey with Keller and we get to his first day of school. I was terrified. I think he was okay, but I was terrified. And I reached out to our good friends who had kids at the school and said, Keller's starting school. Can you just meet us at the gate? And can we just all walk in together? And so his brother and sister, not from us, and his sister all met him there. And we walked into his school together. And it was a sacred moment of koinonia, of shared space, where we knew we were not alone, where Keller knew he was not alone. And he continued then building that throughout his life there. We need action to build koinonia. We need action to go into the world and build what God is asking us to build. I'm going to end this part and then finish with step four with this quote. Some people think they are in community, but they are only in proximity. True community requires commitment and openness. It is a willingness to extend yourself to encounter and to know the other. We have to enter in and create sacred places everywhere we are. From a very needy family, I can tell you it's life-changing to know that everywhere you step, when you feel alone, when you feel scared, when you feel uncertain, when people show up as the church around you in a terrifying world, it buoys you with a hope that God is with you. I want to finish with just a fourth question. And that is, who isn't here yet? Who isn't here yet? I used to have dreams before I became a pastor of what the church could look like, more than just the church I had experienced, more than just the people I knew. I wanted diversity, and I wanted different religions, and I wanted people who saw the world differently. I've always been just kind of drawn to that. I've always been drawn to just go as far as I could go and see if something sacred is there. And again, I find that in the New Testament. You know, we know now Paul wrote 14 of the books of the New Testament. When he first came on the scene, everyone knew who he was because he was the one who was persecuting Christians. He was the one speaking out against Christians. He was the one who was the dangerous guy. And even though we have this new religion, we're not too sure about this Paul guy. But there was one person who gave him a chance, and that was Barnabas. In the early church, Barnabas gave Paul a chance and created space for Paul to come in. I want to look at this scripture in Acts 9. It's saying Saul here, Acts 9, starting at the end of 17, at the end of 19, sorry. Saul spent several days with his disciples in Damascus. That's Paul. And once he began to preach in synagogues that Jesus is the son of God, all those who heard him were astonished and asked, isn't that that crazy guy who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call his name? And hasn't he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests? Yet Saul grew more and more powerful in baffling the Jews, the religious in Damascus, by proving that Jesus is the Messiah. After many days he had gone by, there was a conspiracy against the Jews to kill him. But Saul learned of their plan. Day and night they kept close watching the city gates in order to kill him. So it wasn't just a weird guy. It was someone they thought was dangerous to their faith. But his followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall. Good friends. When he came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles. He told them how Saul on his journey had seen the Lord and that the Lord had spoken to him and how in Damascus he had preached fearlessly in the name of Jesus. So Saul stayed with them and moved about freely in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord. This person who had to be given a place at the table because religion didn't accept him, didn't understand him, but he had a radical encounter with Jesus Christ. This person was given a space by Barnabas and went to the farthest places, the craziest spaces in all of the world to tell people about Jesus Christ. And I want us to ask, as we dream about Koinonia, who is not here yet? Who is not here yet? I love being here and seeing so many familiar faces, but God has churned in my heart this question over and over again, especially being in South Africa. Who is not at the table yet? Who is not in the doors yet? Who has not heard of Jesus yet? That is where we really begin to cultivate koinonia and the second part, where we begin to operate as oracles. And it's simply in this verse of Peter 4.11. This is my last verse. And it says in Peter 4 11, if anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides so that in all things, God may be praised through Jesus Christ to him be the glory and the power forever and ever. In other versions, it says that, as they, it says they should speak. It speaks of being an oracle. So if Jesus was the word, he then asked us to be the words of God. That's what an oracle means. That we would live as the words of God. And I want to encourage you that the way that we do this is go into places, exist in places where God isn't as clear yet, where God isn't always present in the way we're used to seeing him. As I said, I always prayed about this idea of being around people of other faiths, of other nations, of other backgrounds. And through Keller, who this book is about, he has brought us these friends who are the weirdest people you have ever met. And they are every religion. We say that we're a big joke because it's me, I'm a pastor, and they call me Pastor Prince, and then there's a Wiccan, and there's a Jew, and there is a Buddhist, and there's an agnostic, and there's just our friend Lisa. And so we are like this tribe. And we have a WhatsApp group, and it's called Pastor Prince's Free Range Women. And we are this weird tribe of people. And within this tribe, something holy happens. learned years ago this this idea called holy envy that you go to other people not to tell them what's right and they're wrong not to just change them but you just talk you just open up and you see where something holy is within them something sacred is within them and so now with this group of women, we have had many, many, many holy places. Even in just this past year, the agnostic couple, I married them in December and they were very happy for me to talk about Jesus as I was there officiant. My Jewish friend Emma, her mom died also in December. She asked me to spread the ashes and do a ceremony for her. And my Wiccan friend, her mom has Alzheimer's and she's slowly leaving this earth. And she has asked me to pastor her mom and to pastor her and to do the sermon and the service when her mom passes. And they asked me to tell their kids about Jesus because there's something about that Jesus and there's something about you guys and there's something here. And I ask about Buddhism. And I ask about the Wiccan faith. And I ask about the Jewish faith. But I know that within me is an oracle. And coming from me is an oracle. Not because I'm special. But because God is within me. And the scripture says we have the hope of glory within us. So we can go anywhere. We don't have to fear that our light will be diluted. We don't have to fear that our God will be tamed. We don't have to wonder if he will fully reign because he will forever and ever reign through Jesus Christ our Lord. But we are invited to go into the world as oracles and bring that light to all the places that are needed, and that's everywhere. God is saying go into the schools as oracles. Go into your workplace as oracles. Go into your home and your family as oracles. Be a light from within with what God has done within your heart. Nothing can diminish that. That's what I love again about the early church, and I'll finish here. The early church went into all these places, and they kept saying, you're wrong. We're going to kill you. That can't be. This Jesus can't be. And they said it again and again, all I can say is this Jesus who I've met is my king, and he's my Lord. And nothing could diminish that. One of my heroes in life is Desmond Tutu, and he says this, that we must be ready to learn from one another, not pretending that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God. Because here's what I'm learning. God is bigger and he's greater and he's more profound than what we think. And we have a broken world that's in desperate need of this God and this light and this community. But we need to dream differently and we need to see differently. We need to go differently. We need to cultivate koinonia and we need to operate as oracles. So I want to end here. What do you dream? Coming to America, people are always asking us like, what do you think? And what's your perspective? And what do you think's going on? I don't want to look at what I see. I want to look at what God still needs and what God still wants to do and what God wants to create. And again, that's what Kyle did this morning in just a few moments. We could have left after that. God is ready for us to dream about places of koinonia and us operating as oracles in a world that is in desperate need of his light and his love. So I want to invite us to dream what that could look like and see that revival that Kyle's talking about in all the places that need it most. Let's pray. God, I thank you that you are a great God, that you are not limited to our words or our songs or our prayers or how we've seen you before. God, you are greater. And I pray, God, that you would move within us to help us to dream of a new community, of new closeness, of a new connection, of new light, of new love. And help us to be your oracles. Help us to be as the early church who was pushing farther and farther to tell people of the love of you, Jesus Christ. May we not hold back in what we know you can do and how we know we can shine your light all over the world. We love you, God. It's in your name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see everybody. And it sounds like to me that only the singers come during the summertime. You guys were singing great. And that was really always love it when the church sings together like that. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby. After the service, you have dropped in. If this is your first time, you've dropped into the middle of a series called Idols that's loosely based on a book by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods. If you haven't picked up a copy of that, we are out, but they are competitively priced on Amazon and will be brought right to your door for ease of purchase. So I would encourage you to grab one of those and kind of read through that as we finish up the series. This is week four. Next week is the last week. Week five, we're going to talk about comfort next week, which I'm very excited to talk about that because I think it's something that every American alive needs to hear. And I think it's going to be an important one next week. This week, we're looking at the source idol of control. And when I say source idol, one of the more interesting ideas that Tim Keller puts forward in his book is the idea that we have surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are the ones that are visible to us and people outside of us, a desire for money, a desire for friends, a desire for a perfect family, for appearances, things like that that are a little bit more visible. Source idols are things that exist in our heart beneath the surface that fuel our desire for those surface idols. And he identifies four. Power, which I preached about two weeks ago. That's the one that I primarily deal with. And then approval, preached about last week that's what he deals with a lot that is not one that that's probably the one I worry about the least and then control this week and comfort next week so as we approach this idea of control in our life I want us to understand what it is and what it means if we struggle with this source idol. And again, an idol is anything that becomes more important to us in our life than Jesus. It's something that we begin to prioritize over Jesus and we pour out our faith and our worship to that thing instead of to our Creator. About four or five years ago, I was in my therapist's office. I was seeing a counselor at the time just doing general maintenance, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's probably time for me to get back in there and let them tinker around a little bit. But one day I got there and whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, what a cliche, but whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, he would always ask me what's been going on, what's happened since I last saw you. That was always the first question, so I knew that was the question. So in the car, in my head, I'm thinking, how am I going to answer him? I can tell him about this thing and this thing and this thing. I think that'll be enough. Well, I'll start the bidding there, and we'll see where it goes. So I go in, I sit down and he asked me the question, how's it been going for you? What's been happening? And so I told him my three things, five or eight minutes. I don't know. And I get done with it. And he just looks at me and he kind of cocks his head and he goes, why'd you tell me those things? And the smart aleck in me is like, because you're a counselor, because this is the deal? Because that's what I'm supposed to do? What do you want me to do? But I said, well, I knew that you were going to ask me what happened, and that's what happened. So I told you those things. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but he pushed back on me and he goes do you do you ever enter a conversation without knowing what you're going to talk about and what the other person is probably going to talk about and I said not if I can help it I always plan ahead whenever I have a conversation or meeting coming up I always think through all the different ways it could go and how I want to respond because I don't want to be caught off guard in the moment. And he said, how many times are you in a situation that's taken you by surprise and you didn't expect to be there? I said, very rarely. And he goes, yeah, I think maybe you've got an issue with control. Because you have a hard time not being the one driving the bus, don't you? And I was like, you have a hard time not being the one. And I kind of thought about it, and I said, my gosh, is it possible that this need for control is so ingrained into me that the reason I told you those stories is so that I could control where the conversation went and we would talk about things I was willing to open up about and I could steer away from the areas that I wasn't willing to talk about. He said some effect of, and circle gets the square. Good job, buddy. And so this need for control that some of us all have to varying degrees can be so sneaky. Sometimes we don't even recognize it in ourselves until someone points it out in us. So let me point it out in you. Some people deal with this so much that it shows up in every aspect of their life. For me, it's relational, it's conversational. I don't want to look dumb. If someone has something negative to say, I want to be gracious and not be caught off guard, whatever it is. But for some of us, we're so regimented and ordered that we have our life together in every aspect of it. We have our routine. We wake up at a certain time. We go to bed at a certain time. Our kids do certain things on certain days. If you have a laundry day, you're gaining on it. If you make your bed, you're gaining on it. Like there are things that we do. We have a workout routine that we do. We have the way that we eat. We have the places that we go. We have our budget. We have our work schedule. We are very regimented. And a lot of that can come from this innate need to be in control of everything. I think about the all-star mom in the PTA, the one who runs a better house than you, who drives a cleaner car than you, and who makes cupcakes better than you, that mom. And her kids are always dressed better than your kids. This is this need for control. And if you're not yet sure if this is you, if this might be something that you do in your life where everything needs to be ordered, and if it's not ordered, your whole life is in shambles. I heard in the last year of this phrase that I had not heard before. I'm in the last year of the Gen Xers. I think the millennials coined this phrase. You boomers, unless you have millennial children, you probably have not heard this, but maybe you can identify it. It's a term called the Sunday Scaries. Anybody ever heard that term? You don't have to raise your hand and out yourself, but the Sunday Scaries. Okay. Now for me, I have the Saturday Scaries because about three times every Saturday, I kind of jolt myself into consciousness and ask if I know what I'm preaching about in the morning. So that's, that's what I have for me. Sunday scaries are when you take Sunday night to get ready for your week. And on Sunday afternoons and evenings, you begin to feel tremendous anxiety because the meals aren't prepped and the clothes aren't washed and the schedule isn't done and the things aren't laid out and the laundry isn't all the way ready and you start to worry, if I don't, I've got this limited amount of time, if I don't start my week right, everything's going to be off, it's going to be the worst and so you get the Sunday scaries and you experience stress on Sunday night. If that's you, friends, this might be for you. And when we do this, when we make control our idol, when we order our lives so that we manage every detail of it. And listen, I want to say this before I talk about the downside of it. Those of us who do live regimented lives and who are in control of many of the aspects of them, that ability comes from a place of diligence and discipline. That's a good thing. That's a muscle God has blessed you with that he has not blessed others with, but we can take it too far. And we can allow that to become what we serve. And we can allow control over the things in our life to become more important than the other things in our life and to become more important than Jesus himself. And here's what happens when we allow this sneaky idol to take hold in our lives. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful of the control we try to exert over them. I'll never forget, it's legendary in my group of buddies. I've got a good group of friends, eight guys, and we go on a trip about every other year. And one year we were in another city and one of my buddies named Dan just decided that he was the group mom on this trip. And I don't really know why he decided that, but he was bothering us the whole time. Don't do that. Don't go here. Where are you guys going? What are you guys talking about? Come over here. Be part of the group. Put your phone down. Let's go. Like just bossing us around the whole time. And we got mad at him. He spent the whole trip anxious. He didn't have as good a time as he could. And we, we spent the trip frustrated with Dan to the point where whenever he starts it now, we just call him mom and tell him to shut up. When we try to control everything in our life, we make ourselves anxious and we make the people around us resentful. We make ourselves anxious because we're trying to control everything. Everything's got to go according to plan. And now that we've structured this life, we have to protect this life with all the decisions that we're making and see all the threats, real and imagined, to this perfect order that we might have. And then the people around us grow to resent us because we're trying to exert unnecessary control over them as well. And it's really not a good path to be on. And the best example I can find in the Bible of someone who may have struggled with this idol of control and made herself anxious and everyone around her resentful is Sarah in the event with Hagar. Now, I'm going to read a portion of this, Genesis 16, 1 through 6, to kind of tell the story of Sarah and Hagar and Abraham. A couple bits of context. First of all, I know that at this point in the story, technically, her name is Sarai and his name is Abram, okay? For me, it feels like saying the nation Columbia with a Spanish accent all of a sudden after I've been talking in southern English for 30 minutes. So I'm not just going to break out into Hebrew. Okay, so they're going to be Sarah and Abraham, and you're going to bear that cross with me. And then what's happening in the story is in Genesis chapter 12, God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was in the Sumerian dynasty. He says, I want you to grab your family. I want you to move to this place I'm going to show you that became Canaan, the promised land in modern day Israel. And when he got there in Genesis 12, God made him three promises. He spoke to Abraham and he said, hey, this land is going to be your land and your descendants' land forever. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. He made those three promises to Abraham. Can I tell you, the rest of the Bible hinges on those promises. If we don't understand those promises, we can't understand the rest of Scripture. But all of those promises require a descendant to come true. Sarah and Abraham were getting on up there in age, maybe in their 80s. And Sarah had still not born Abraham a child. She was barren or he was impotent. And she begins to get concerned enough about this that she takes matters into her own hands. She arrests control away from God's sovereign plan. And this is what happens in Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 through 6. We're going to read it together. I don't see any problems so far. Okay, a little recap here. I, for one, am shocked that the story went that way. After she said, hey, here's what you should do. I have an Egyptian slave. You should sleep with her. She'll carry a baby, and then we'll raise that as our own child. I don't know what Abraham's moral compass was at this point in his story, what laws of God he had been equated with and not. I don't know how aware he was of the myriad egregious sins happening in this one instance. But this goes exactly how you'd think it would go. After a wife, likely much older than her slave, says, why don't you sleep with my slave and you all have a child together? And then what happens? She gets anxious. She gets resentful. She sees that Hagar is haughty towards her. And then she begins to resent Abraham, blames it on him. This is your fault. Excuse me. I'm sure it was your idea. And then runs Hagar off. By taking control in this situation, she made herself anxious about everyone around her, and she made everyone around her resentful of who she was. You can see it in Abram's response in verse 6. He says, listen, she's yours. You deal with it. Don't come to me with those problems. He's tired of dealing with it. And as I was thinking about the sin of Sarah, and as I was thinking about what it's like when we take control of our own life, when we kind of take the wheel from God and we say, I've got it from here, you can ride passenger, I'm going to be in control and orchestrate everything. That what we're really doing when we take control is this. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. We just get in the way. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. What did Sarah do? She got in his way. He had a story that he was writing with Isaac. He knew exactly when he would, God knew exactly when he was going to allow Abraham to make Sarah pregnant. He knew exactly how the rest of the story was going to go. Ishmael doesn't need to exist. That root of Ishmael doesn't need to exist. If Sarah would have just been patient and waited on God and his timing, if she had just been patient and waited on God to write the story that he intended, if she waited on his sovereignty and his will, but she got tired of waiting, she thought it should be happening differently than this, so she took control. And as a result of that control, we have this split in the line of Abraham that has echoed down through the centuries that we're still dealing with today, over which we are still warring right now in Abraham's promised land because Sarah took control when she wasn't supposed to. She got in the way of the story that God was wanting to write. And the more I thought about that, what it's like to be getting in God's way when he's trying to direct our life the way he wants it to go, I thought about this. Now, you can raise your hand for this one. Who in here loves themselves a good cooking show? I love a good cooking show. Just me and Jeff and Karen. Perfect. Nobody else likes cooking shows. You're liars. I love a good cooking show. At our house, the things that are on the TV are house hunters, cooking shows, and sports. That's it. By the way, my three-year-old son, John, calls all sports golf. Yesterday I was watching soccer, and he said, Daddy, you watch golf. And in our house, we have a rule. When a kid is making a dumb mistake like that, we do not correct them because it's adorable, and we want them to do it as long as possible. Like the days gone by when, to Lily, anything that had occurred before today was last-her-day. Could have been last year. Could have been last week. Could have been a couple hours ago. It happened last-her-day, and it was great. At some point, she figured it out, and now we don't like her as much. But I love a good cooking show. And my favorite chef, no one will be surprised by this if you know me, is Gordon Ramsay. I really like Gordon Ramsay. I like watching him cook. I like watching him interact. I think he's really great. And so I watch most of what he puts out. And I was thinking about this, getting in God's way. And I think this fits. Let's pretend that at an auction, at a charity auction from Ubuntu, which would be a great prize, I won a night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. First of all, I was given a significant raise. Second of all, I've spent it all on this night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. And the night comes around. I'm so excited. I would be thrilled to do this. It would really, really be fun. I do like to cook. And so let's say that night finally rolls around and I go to his kitchen and I walk in and all the ingredients are out on the counter. And he hasn't told me what he's going to make, but all the ingredients are there. And what I don't know is he's planning to make a beef Wellington. That's one of his signature dishes. I've only had one beef Wellington in my life. I loved it. I would kill to have one that was cooked by him for me. That would be amazing. But the deal is, I look at the ingredients and he's going to teach me how to do it. So he's going to walk me through it step by step. First, you want to sear the loin. Get that, get the skillet nice and hot, sear it. Then you rub the mustard on it. Now dice up some mushrooms. And I don't know where we're going or what we're doing. I'm just following him step by step doing what I'm supposed to do. And his goal is to show me how to make a beef wellington that we've done together. Great. Except stupid me sees the ingredients, sees the steak, sees some green beans, and I go, you know what, Gordon? Actually, I've got this. It's your night to cook with Nate. What I'd like you to do is just go sit behind the bar on the other side. Let's just chat it up. I'd like to hear some of your stories. I'm going to make you steak and green beans. And I take those ingredients, and I get in his way, and I go make overdone steak with soggy green beans, and I slide it across the table to him. Having no idea what I just missed out on. Because I insisted on taking control and making what I thought I should make with those ingredients. I think that when we insist on turning all the dials in our life ourselves, taking control of every aspect of our life. That what we do is very similar to being in the kitchen with a master chef and telling him we've got this. We see the ingredients available to us and we make the thing we think we're supposed to make. Having no idea that he had so much better plans for those ingredients than what we turned out. And as I was talking about this sermon and this idea with my wife, Jen, who has a different relationship with this source idol than I do, she pointed out to me, she said, you know what they're trying to make? If your idol is peace, you're trying to make in that kitchen or if your idol is control. She said, we're trying to make peace. People with the idol of control, you know what they're trying to do with that control? They're trying to create a peace for themselves. They're trying to create rest for themselves. If this is your surface, if this is your source idol, and you try to control every aspect of your life, chances are that what's really motivating you to do that is a desire for peace in all the areas of your life. It's why your spirit can't feel at rest until your bed is made. And this is true. Why did I think of the things that I wanted to say to the counselor? Because I didn't want to get sidetracked. I didn't want to get surprised. I wanted to walk into that office with peace. Why do we prepare ourselves for the situations that we're going to face? Because we want to be peaceful in the midst of those situations. Why do we prepare for the week and get the Sunday scaries? Because we want to enter the week feeling at peace, feeling ready to go, feeling that we are in a place of rest and not a place of hurry. But here's the problem with the peace that we create with our control. It's fragile. It's threatened. It's uncertain. It's always at risk. We can do everything we can to create peace in our life with the way that we control every aspect of it. But the reality is we are one phone call away. We are one bad night away. We are one accident in the driveway away. One bad business decision. Two bad weeks of just being in a bad spot away from ruining all that peace. There are so many things that happen in life that are outside of our control that any peace that we have created for ourself is only ever infinitesimally small and thin and fragile. And when we live a life, even achieving peace, but when we live that life of a threatened peace so that now we have peace, we've done it, we've orchestrated, we've controlled, we have what we want, everything is ordered as it should be. Things are going well. Then where does our worrying mind go to? All the things that could possibly happen to disturb this peace. All of the threats real and imagined to my peaceful Monday. And then here's what we do. I know that we do it. I've seen it happen. Then we pick a hypothetical event that could possibly happen three months from now to threaten the peace that I've created, and we decide to stress about that today. And it's not even happened yet. But we're already jumping ahead because our anxiety monster needs something to eat. And I am reminded with this idea of a threatened and a fragile peace of the verse we looked at in our series, The Treasury of Isaiah, Isaiah 26.3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Isaiah says, and God promises, that he will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. And so what's our part in that peace? It's trusting in Jesus and not ourselves. And it occurs to me, I'm not saying this for sure, because it could just be poor planning, but I kind of believe in the Holy Spirit and the way that he times things out. I've seen over and over and over again how we've had a sermon planned for eight months, and I'll preach that sermon on that day, and someone will say, this is my first time at Grace. I'm so glad I heard that sermon. That's exactly what I needed. It's the Holy Spirit. I know that we just visited this verse. And I know that we just talked a couple weeks ago about a fragile peace. But maybe we're doing it again because some of us just need to hear it twice. Maybe some of us in this room need to hear this again and let the Holy Spirit talk to us again and be honest with God about what we're holding dear to our heart and what we may be idolizing without having realized it. Because what God promises us is a perfect peace. You know what perfect peace is? Perfect peace is an unthreatened peace. Here's what perfect peace is. Jen's family used to have a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And my favorite thing to do when I would go down there was to kind of separate from everybody, big surprise, and go and lay in the hammock right next to the lake. Because when I got in that hammock, and I could hear the occasional boat putter by several hundred yards away, and I could hear the waves slowly just kind of lapping against the wood at the edge of that lake, and I could hear the birds and the sound of the lake, that was all I could hear. It drowned out everything else. It never seemed to matter what was happening in life when I laid down in that hammock. Everything was at peace and everything was okay. When we trust in God's sovereignty and in God's peace instead of our own, it's like laying down in that hammock next to the lake. Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. God is in control. He knew this would happen, and I trust in him. I don't know what story he's writing. I don't know where he's going. This is not what I would have made with these ingredients, but I know that he wants what's best for me, and he wants what's best for the people that I love, so I trust him with the results of this. It's laying in that hammock and trusting in the sovereignty of God. Perfect peace is trusting in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness, in the truth that we know that he always, always, always wants what's best for us. And that he will bring that about in this life or the next. And we can trust in that. So, here's what I would say to you. My brothers and sisters who may struggle with control. I'm not here this morning to make you feel bad for your worry or your anxiety or to make fun of you for your Sunday scaries. I think all of those things are natural and a normal part of human life. It would be weird if you never worried about anything. I think it's a good goal to grow towards. But I'm not here to make you feel badly about that. But here's what I would say. If you're a person who's given to worry and anxiety and seeks to exert control, and when you don't have it, it starts to freak you out a little bit, that doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like laying in the hammock next to the lake trusting in God's protected peace rather than trusting in your fragile, unprotected, risky peace. You see? And so what I would encourage you to do is to see things this way. Excessive worry is a warning light. Excessive worry on the dashboard of your life is a warning light that should cause you to wonder what's really going on and what you're really worried about. A few weeks ago, I talked about those of us with the issue of power being a source idol and how that begets anger, and I said the same thing. Anger is the flashing warning light for us. When I'm having days when I'm excessively angry or frustrated all the time, I need to stop and pause and go, what is the source of this, and why am I so upset, and why do I have a hair trigger? What's going on with me? And wrestle that to the ground. For my brothers and sisters who who struggle with control maybe more than you realize before you walk in the door excessive worry and I don't know what excessive worry is I can't define that for you that's that's between you and God to decide how much is too much but here's what I do know excessive worry is a warning light and here's. And here's what it's telling you. It's telling you I am not existing in perfect peace. And what's our part of perfect peace? To keep our mind steadfast by trusting in him. So somewhere along the way, we've started trusting in ourself a little bit more to grab those ingredients and make what we want. Somewhere along the way, we've started taking control back from God, trusting in our sovereignty, not his, and beginning to create our own peace that is fragile and stressful. And so the question to ask yourself when that warning light starts to go off is simply this, whose peace am I trusting? I don't know what to tell you to do. Because I'll be honest with you. Like I said, I talked this sermon through with Jen. And she kind of said, yeah, all that's true. Okay, I get it. I agree. All true. What do I do? How do we not do those things? How do we not worry more than we should? What are my action steps? And I said, well, what advice would you give to so-and-so? She goes, I don't know. You're the pastor, so I'm asking you. Here's what I would simply go back to, is this question of whose peace am I trusting? Am I trusting in the peace that I've created? Or are my eyes focused on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, so that my mind is steadfast in him and I'm trusting in his peace? Whose peace are you trusting? My prayer for you is that you'll experience the rest of trusting in God's peace. And as I enter into prayer for you, there's a prayer that I found in a devotional that I have from the Common Book of Prayer from 1552. It's amazing to me how timeless the truths of faith and spirituality and Christianity are. And how this could be written today and still every bit as accurate. But I'm going to read this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. And then we're going to enter into a time of prayer together and then we'll worship. Oh God, from you all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works proceed. Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our heart may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Father, we love you. And we thank you that through your Son, we can have perfect peace. God, we are sorry for not claiming this gift that you offer us more readily. God, we are sorry for grabbing the ingredients and trying to make our own peace and write our own story. God, we are sorry that we sometimes trust in our wisdom and our sovereignty more than yours. Lord, I pray that no matter where we sit with this idol or how we might wrestle with it, that we would leave this place more desirous of you than when we came. And God, for my brothers and sisters that do struggle, that do find it difficult to give up control, that do find themselves battling that demon of worry sometimes, God, would you just speak to them? Would you let them know that you're there, that you love them, That you have a plan for them that they don't see but that they can trust? And would you give us the obedience to just do the next thing that you're asking us to do, not worrying about what the result is going to be, but worrying about just walking in lockstep with you? Father, make us a people of peace so that we might give that peace to others and that they might know you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here and making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're new this morning, I have great news for you. You've picked an excellent Sunday to begin attending Grace. I realized in this last week, we're constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better. And I realized in this last week that we have been using one-ply toilet paper in the bathrooms. I did not know this, but that is completely unacceptable. So I found out who was in charge of these purchases, and I said, we've got to do better, and they said, what should we do? And I said, go to the store and find the most expensive kind and get it. That's what we deserve at Grace. So if you're here for the first time, I got good news for you. This is a luxurious experience in the children's hallway. We did make that improvement. I'm not just making that up. This is the last part of our series in Isaiah called the Treasury of Isaiah, where we're kind of acknowledging it's 66 books. It's a ton of stuff that really would bog us down if we tried to go through the whole thing exhaustively. And so I've done my best. Jacob, don't go to the bathroom right now. It's too tempting, he says. I can't wait for him to come back in. I've already got a joke loaded. All right. That was quick. All right. Let's get it. Let's pray. Let's get it together. Okay. So we can't go through the whole book exhaustively, but we can pull out some of the more impactful scriptures and reflect on them as a body. And this was actually supposed to be a six-week series, but I wanted to extend it by a week so that I could talk about this verse in Isaiah with you. It's a short and simple verse that we'll get to in a minute, but I think it's such a hugely impactful concept, and I know of several folks in our body, in the church, who very much need the truth of this scripture today. But as we approach it, I want us to think of a memory that most of us probably have. Some of you may not have this memory for different reasons. This was something that Jen brought to my attention as I was kind of talking through this concept with her. Jen is my wife, for those that don't know. And so she was talking about when she was a little girl and they were taking a road trip and she's in the back of the car. And they did, you know, they were, she grew up in Birmingham, or Birmingham, that's how you're supposed to say it. And they would go down to Dothan for Thanksgiving. They would travel over to Memphis for Christmas. They did road trips a fair amount as children. They drove down to the Florida Panhandle every year. And so road trips were a thing. And sometimes on those road trips, you'll remember from when you were little and still now, it starts to rain, storms roll in. And sometimes it's what Bubba from Forrest Gump would call big old fat rain. It's coming down in sheets. You can't see anything. And when you're a child and you're in the back and you're peering over and you're looking, you can't see anything. You can barely see the car in front of you. And you don't know how your mom or your dad is still driving. In this case, it was her dad. And you start to get scared because it's coming down heavy and it's hard to see. People even have their hazards on, which just isn't a sign. I want to be as nice about this as I can. If you're driving in heavy rain and you put your hazards on, we're in the same rain you are. We know, okay? We know it's a treacherous condition. Just throwing that out there for you to consider, hazard people. All right. You're in the back. It's scary. And you're worried. It feels tense. It's the rain that's so loud that you can't hear and you can't talk anymore. You're just trying to weather the storm. And Jen remembers looking at her dad and seeing the placid, nonplussed expression on his face, and she was fine. He is at peace, so I am at peace. I'm looking at my dad. He's not worried about the storm. I'm not worried about the storm. And as a dad, those of you who have driven through those storms, you've done it plenty of times, you know. I've driven through storms before. I'm going to drive through storms in the future. This one's going to be fine. Even if it's the worst one, this one's going to be fine. And so his peace gave her peace, right? And what it got me to thinking about is what if we could go through life and the storms of life with the type of peace that your dad had when you were a little kid and the storms came and we're driving down the road. Well, God offers us this peace a few different places in scripture, but he talks about it first specifically in Isaiah. In this short, I think very powerful verse where Isaiah writes this about God. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. I really like that descriptor there, perfect. Not just any peace, but a perfect peace, a kind of unthreatened peace, a kind of restful peace. And when I think about that kind of peace, the way to understand it, I think about, because you guys know, I've told you before, I enjoy history. Last summer, I had the opportunity to listen to a biography on Julius Caesar. I try to always be reading a physical book and then listening to a book. I read the fun ones and I listen to the boring ones. It's the way that I get through them. So I'm listening to a biography on Julius Caesar. And they talk about within that biography this idea of Pax Romana, Roman peace. It was a thing that the Roman Empire offered to the conquered peoples. And it kind of worked like this. One of the places that Julius Caesar, he became famous in the Gallic Wars. So he went up into what we understand as modern day France and Belgium and Switzerland and that area. And there was different Gallic tribes. And the way that we think about nations and states is pretty new in the span of human history. Most everybody, particularly in Europe at that time, existed within tribes and clans. And those tribes and clans would bind together, sometimes under a successful warlord, sometimes just out of mutual desire for protection, and they would create these pacts. If you get attacked by another neighboring tribe or clan, then we will come in and we will protect you, and you offer us your protection as well. It was these agreed upon truces. We're not going to attack you, but if anyone attacks us, we'll attack them on our behalf. But these allegiances and alliances would change on a whim. Every five years, every decade, every year, there's different alliances and allegiances to keep up with. This one's attacking us, that one's attacking us. So even while you're in a peace, it's a fragile peace. It's a threatened peace. If you existed in those tribes in that day, even if it wasn't a spring when you were watching your husband or your brother or your son go off to war to defend the tribes, you were still on the lookout. You still knew that any day someone could bring word that the peace that you had has now been broken. It was a fragile peace. And so what the Roman Empire offered is to come in, and now they've conquered all the tribes. And you are now under their protection. So if someone attacks you, the weight and the force and the might of the Roman army is going to defend you. It's not just these inter-familial clashes anymore. Now they're messing with the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, once they conquered you, which sounds bad, one of the nice offshoots of that is you now have a protected peace. You now have a peace that there is no force strong enough to compromise. As long as you like pay your taxes and stuff. But Pax Romana was this kind of empire-wide protected, unthreatened peace. And I think that that's a profound idea for us. Because we understand what it is to exist in a fragile peace. If you have young children, you understand what fragile peace is because you send them to the playroom to give you two moments respite. And they're up there and they're fine. And then they start yelling. Someone's upset. And you go and you broker a peace. You stop playing with that. You give that back to them. You start using your head. You quit being a jerk. Everyone's fine. Okay? And then you leave. And you have five more minutes of a fragile peace until it's broken again by someone's scream. If you exist in a marriage, you know what a fragile peace is. I don't mind telling you because I can't say honestly they're infrequent, but I don't mind telling you that a couple Saturdays ago, Jen and I were enjoying a very fragile peace. Just for whatever reason, on that particular day, with other things going on in our lives, there was just something simmering under the surface all day long. Neither of us could do anything right. We were just kind of, we're at each other's throats, then we apologize and start forgetting, man, I don't even know why I'm mad. It doesn't even make any sense. And then five seconds later, someone pauses in a conversation too long after a question, and now let's get them. So it was a fragile peace. We know what fragile pieces are. And what God offers us is this protected peace, this perfect peace, this peace that is unthreatened and unmoved by forces both within and without our control. It's really this profound peace that allows us, as we go through the storms of life, to think, been through storms before we will go through storms again and this one will be fine even if it's the worst one and what's really profound about that piece is that God is the one driving we are in the back seat looking at the face of our Father who is unmoved by this storm too. This is the kind of peace that God offers his children. However, he doesn't offer it to everyone. We're going to look at who has access to this peace. But before we do, I have just a couple of reflections on what it means to have perfect peace. What is perfect peace and what are the implications for us? And if we think about it together, how can we better understand this idea of peacefulness? Well, the first thing that I would bring to your attention, the first thing that sprang to mind for me is that God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. It's not going to make any sense. Paul writes about this peace in Philippians, famous passage, Philippians 4, you have the peace. When you watch someone walk with this amount of peace and clarity and tranquility, it defies understanding and logic. I think of this great story in the Old Testament in the early chapters of 1 Samuel with the high priest Eli. He's the high priest of Israel, and he's just taken in Samuel to live in the temple who's going to dedicate his life to service to the Lord. And Eli has two sons. I believe their names are Hophni and Phinehas. And they're jerks. They're absolute jerks. They're using their political power for all of the wrong reasons. They're taking advantage of taxpayers, taking advantage of the poor. They're taking advantage of women. They're doing all the despicable things that we hate when people in those positions do them. And one night, God gives Samuel a dream. And the next morning, Eli insists that Samuel tell him what that dream is. And so Samuel finally tells Eli the worst possible news any father can receive. And he says, in my dream last night, God told me that your two sons are going to die soon and they will not be in the priesthood anymore. One of them is not the next high priest. And so in one comment, in one answer, Eli learns the worst thing that any father can possibly learn. You are going to lose your children and you are going to lose your legacy. There's nothing worse than that. And Eli's response, very next verse, doesn't miss a beat, doesn't go pray about it and come back with a prepared statement. Very next verse, Eli says, it is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him. That's a pretty remarkable piece. To receive the worst news any father can possibly receive and the response out of the gate, it is the Lord. do what seems good to him that is a peace that passes understanding that is a peace that can't be explained that is a peace that we would marvel at and it is a peace that we should be jealous of the other thing i would say about god's perfect peace, and I think that this is really important. God's peace provides rest for the soul. God's peace provides rest for our souls. There are those of you in here who came in tired this morning. You woke up exhausted. You slept eight hours and it wasn't enough. There are those of you who go to bed being kept up by the things you're worrying about. And when you wake up, your mind is racing just as fast. And when that issue gets settled, the worry monster that exists in your head finds another thing to attack and push into the forefronts of your thoughts so that you never get any rest from the anxiety that you feel and from the things about which you are worried. Some of us have carried burdens of relationships. Our marriage is cruddy. Our children are estranged or drifting. We've received a tough diagnosis. We're watching a loved one walk through a hard time and there's nothing that we can do about it. And we are exhausted. We are exhausted with worry. We're exhausted with worry about things that are outside our control. Which is why it's so important to understand that God's perfect peace gives our soul a place to rest, to stop and to shut it down and to be okay and to not worry about the next thing and to be realistic about what is within and without our control. God's perfect peace offers us rest. And for some of you, that's what I want for you this morning, is to move towards a place where you can finally slow down and rest and tell that worry monster to shut up. But God does not offer this peace indiscriminately. It is offered to everyone, but we have a part to play in the reception of this peace. If you look back at the verse, it says, you will keep in perfect peace who? Those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. God's peace is only for the steadfast and can only come through trust. God's peace is only for the steadfast, for those who persevere. Persevere in what? Persevere in their trust of the work of Jesus Christ. And we're going to talk more about that trust and exactly what we're placing it in and how that's helpful to us. But we have to understand that though this peace that God offers is offered to everyone equally, it is not offered without discrimination. There's a part that we have to play. And the part that we have to play is to trust God, is to place our faith in him. And when we do, when we truly trust, when we truly see ourselves as the little kids sitting in the back seat watching our heavenly father drive us through life, when that is our posture and we trust him and we can sit in the back and we don't have to worry about it, when that's our posture, he will give us perfect peace. And when that is your posture, the peace that you can have goes beyond understanding and is unfathomable, I believe, to the non-Christian mind. And I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. Someone that we've seen in our lives or in history go through a remarkably difficult time and yet maintain this consistent, faithful peace despite all the circumstances. And I was reminded of the story of a man named Horatio Safford. Horatio Safford lived in the late 1800s in Chicago, and he ended up writing It Is Well, the famous hymn that a lot of us know. And a lot of you may know the story or bits and pieces of the story surrounding the penning of It Is well. It's the most famous story about how a hymn was written. But I bet that you don't know all the parts. And for some of you, you still have no clue what I'm talking about. Horatio Safford was a Christian man who lived in Chicago in the late 1800s. He was a successful lawyer. He had five children, a boy and four girls, and a wife named Ann. And in the Chicago fire of 1871, Horatio lost a vast majority of his net worth. He lost his practice, the building where his practice was. He lost his home, and he had several properties and holdings throughout the city of Chicago. He lost those too. The fire ruined him. In the wake of the fire, his four-year-old son fell to scarlet fever. So now he's lost a child. Believing that his wife and he and his daughters needed a bit of a respite, they said, let's go to England and take a deep breath over there. As they were planning their trip to England, his plans changed. Something in the States was requiring him. And so he sent his wife Anne ahead with his four daughters and said, you guys go. I'll be there in about three weeks. On the way to England, the ship carrying his family sunk. All four daughters were lost. He received a cable upon Anne's arrival in England. I alone survived. Horatio gets that news. He boards a ship, and he goes to be with Anne. On the journey over, the captain of the ship was aware of the tragedy that had befallen Horatio, and he called, he sent for him, and he said, hey, we're at about the same spot that your family was when they sank. Just wanted you to know. And Horatio sat down in the midst of that tragedy, of being a modern-day Job, where in seemingly one fell swoop, he lost his possessions and he lost his family. And he sits down and he writes the hymn. At the time it was a poem. Years later someone put it to music and it became a hymn. He writes the poem. It is well. It's the famous hymn that we know. And with that context, when you know that he's writing this on a boat over where his drowned daughters rest, having lost a son and everything he owns, going to see a wife that is as crestfallen as him, he sits down and he, listen, he writes these words. This is the first verse of it as well. He writes this, when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Cindy, leave that up there, please. Look at that. Look at that and put yourself in his shoes and think about your ability to sit down and write, when peace like a river attendeth my way and when sorrows like sea billows roll. Oh, you mean the same sea billows that just claimed your daughters? The same sea that just cost you your family? That your God created? When you feel like you have every right to be so angry, and yet you choose to sit down and say, when peace like a river attends my way, and when sorrows like sea billows like the ones that claim my family's role, whatever my lot, you have taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. How does someone write that? How is that the response to trials and to tragedy and to the storms that threaten your peace? I can only tell you how by pointing you to the second verse because he explains it to us. Though Satan should buffet. Those trials should come. Let this blessed assurance control. I love this. That Christ has regarded my helpless estate. And has shed his own blood for my soul. How does he maintain perfect peace? Because his mind is steadfast in his trust in God. How does he maintain his perfect peace? Because he knows that Jesus died for him. And what he writes about that death of Christ is so important. And I think so profound. He says, when Satan should buffet, again, a reference to the sea, buffet like the waves on the ship when it sank. When Satan should buffet, when trials should come, the ones that he's been walking through for two years, let this blessed assurance control that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and shed his own blood for my soul. And I love that word that he chooses there. I love that word helpless. Because when we think about our helplessness before God, particularly as it relates to Jesus Christ, I think we tend to put it in the context of this myopic view of the gospel in which Jesus only died to take my soul up to heaven. And so when we think about our helplessness, we think about the helplessness, what it means to be helpless to get our soul to heaven. We think about what it means to be helpless to go from dead in sin to alive in Christ, from in this temporal body to in my eternal soul. We think about our helplessness to make that jump to a perfect eternity with God, and so we need God's help. We need Jesus' help to get us there. But what I want us to think about is that is far from the only way in which we are helpless. We are, every single one of us, every single person in this room can get a call today that changes your life forever. We are one vibration in our pocket away from a profoundly different existence. And let me tell you something. You are helpless against that phone call. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. We may act like a big, tough, civilized society with an important pharmaceutical complex and the most advanced medical equipment in the world. And we can act like we can fight cancer. But we are helpless with who gets it and when they do. Even the most fastidious of us are sometimes helpless against the onslaught of that awful disease and its acquiring. As parents, we are helpless when our kid is driving down the road. Do you understand? Our fortunes could be taken. Our families could be taken. There's so many different ways that life can buffet us. There's so many different trials that could come. And we exist in part because we're Americans and we're the most independent, individualized civilization that's ever existed. We exist as if we're driving down the road, facing the storms of life on our own with the wherewithal to get through them. But listen, you're helpless if a tornado comes along and sweeps you off the road. There is so much in life to which we are rendered helpless. And I don't think we go through life understanding that. We are not grown adults capable of handling the buffets of life. We are newborn babies that are vulnerable to this world and this universe in ways that we don't understand. And so when Christ regards our helpless estate, it's not just our soul's inability to get itself into heaven. It's our inability to protect ourselves from the seasons of life. And it's for that that he shed his blood. It's for that that he died. And that's something that Horatio knew. That it wasn't just the helplessness of his soul, but it was our complete lack of agency to prevent ourself from suffering in the first place. And it's this simple truth, I believe, that won the day for him and wins the day for us. When Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. It's the knowledge in the midst of our trials that when Jesus conquered sin and shame by dying on the cross and raising from the dead, when Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. Whatever this is for you, he conquered this too. There's this great passage that I refer to a lot, Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 4. I won't belabor the passage here, but there's a phrase there, there's a promise that the former things will have passed away. There will be no more weeping, no more crying, no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And I love to ruminate on what those former things are. Cancer, divorce, abuse, despair, orphans, loss, tragedy, awful phone calls, relational strife, being born to broken parents who hurt you because they're hurt. All that stuff is the former things that's passed away. And what we know is those former things, those things that will pass away, the things that exist in your life that are wearing you out and making you tired and making life so difficult right now, the things you go to sleep worrying about, the things you wake up worrying about. Whatever's waiting for you on the other end of that call one day. We can have perfect peace in those trials. Because we know that because Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered that too. We know that because he offers salvation to those who believe in his shedding of blood for them, that even when we lose them, and even when the trial claims them, that we will see them again in eternity. We know that this life is but a mist and a vapor compared to what awaits us on the other side of passing. We understand that. And so in a few minutes, in a few minutes, we're going to sing it as well together. We're going to stand and we're going to proclaim these words back to God. And so my prayer for you in preparation for this and even this morning as I've been praying about the service is that you'll be able to sing that with authenticity. That you'll be able to sing it as well. And if there is something in your life that is so hard that it's hard for you to muster the singing, that it's hard for you to muster the words, then listen to the people singing around you and let them sing on your behalf. And know, know that we can say that though peace like a river attends, when peace like a river attends our way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever our lot, God has enabled us to say, it is well, it is well with our soul. I want to finish by reading you this fourth verse. This fourth verse is not one that is often sung. But as I was reviewing the lyrics in reference to our my soul. I pray that God will whisper his peace to you this morning. Let's pray. Father, we need your perfect peace. We need your protected peace. Everyone in this room is walking through a storm of one sort or another. Everyone in this room will walk through more. And so God, when we do, I pray that we remember that you are driving and that we are resting. Help us find our rest in your perfect peace. Help us remember that whatever it is we're facing, that Jesus has conquered that too. And God, give us the courage to sing and to proclaim and to believe that even if it isn't well with us now, that it can be, and you will make it so. God, whisper your peace to us this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Some mornings worship is so sweet that I feel like I ruin it by getting up on stage, and I just want to keep doing that. That was one of those mornings. So thank you, best band in the city of Raleigh, apparently. Happy Mother's Day to everyone. It's a good day to celebrate moms. I hope that you are married to a mom worth celebrating. I hope you have a mom worth celebrating. I hope it's a special and happy day for you. And for many of us, it is. But I would be remiss, and I don't let a Mother's Day go by without acknowledging that for some, Mother's Day is very hard. For some, Mother's Day is mixed. It's exciting and it's painful. For some of you, it reminds you of a mom that you had, and she's not here now. For others, a mom that maybe you never had a great relationship with. For others, as it did for Jen and I for so many years, it just reminds you of what you don't have yet and what you hope for and pray for. And so if that's you, and today is hard, we see you. We love you. We care about you. And I'd like to start the sermon by praying for you, and then we'll move on with the sermon. Father, thank you so much for those who, like me, are fortunate enough to have a remarkable mom who loves you and shows us you. Thank you, God, on behalf of the men like me who are married to remarkable mothers that outpace us and cause us to marvel with their patience. But God, I also know that among us are people who are hurting because of loss, because of want, because of hurt. And I just pray, God, that they would feel your presence in a special way today. I pray that you would use your body, use the people, your children, to wrap their arms around them and comfort them and let them know that they're seen and cared for and that you are caring for them. So we pray these things in your son's name. Amen. Now, as we begin and we jump into the sermon, I just want to give this disclaimer. I know that we have an unusual population of people who are here who do not normally go to Grace because you're here to support your families and people getting married. There's also another demographic. You're here because your mom asked you to come to church with her once a year, and so you're going to grit your teeth and do it right now this morning. So I'm aware that to many of you, I exist as a speed bump to babies and brunch. So we're going to try to get you there quick. All right. I'm not long winded today. I just have just a short, simple message to the people of grace and what I consider to be the family of grace. So as I was planning out this sermon and this service or the series, rather, excuse me, as I was planning this out, this whole series was my wife Jen's idea. She's in there momming the fourth and fifth graders right now. This was her idea. She loves the book of Isaiah. And so I kind of sat down and I mapped it out. I looked at the passages that I wanted to cover while we went through Isaiah together. And then I went to her and I said, hey, here's what I have. Am I missing anything? Is there anything that you love that I haven't seen, I haven't thought about? And she pointed me to this verse. She said, I've always loved, especially as a mother, I love this verse in Isaiah. So I want us to look together at Isaiah chapter 40, verse 11. It's a short, simple verse. And it simply says this, he being God, he tends his flock like a shepherd. He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart. He gently leads those that have young. I love that verse. That's a verse that I had read before, but I had never noticed before until Jen pointed it out to me that day. And I love the message for the moms on Mother's Day. I particularly love the message for the young moms on Mother's Day. That God is a good shepherd and he leads gently those with young. And I was thinking about why this is special. And if you think about, I mean, I'm clearly not a shepherd, all right? I don't know anything more about shepherding than you do. I didn't even do any research to make this point. I'm just guessing that when a sheep herder is trying to move the herd from one field to the next, the young moms go slower than the rest. They can't keep up with the herd in general because they have babies that they're trying to herd themselves and they're trying to watch after and they're trying to go and they're trying to bring along. So young, young moms in the herd cannot move as efficiently as they would like to, as quickly as they would like to, because the demands of motherhood, and for fathers, the demands of fatherhood, cause them to lag behind and try to keep up as they wrangle their babies that are inefficient and slow and needy and disobedient and mouthy. I don't know if the lambs are that way, but I have personal experience with children. And it occurs to me, and I see it all over our church. I see it in my life. Right now, I don't mean to be myopic in the presentation, but we're in the thick of it. We have a three-year-old and an eight-year-old. And as I reflect on what it is to have young children, one of the things that I realize is when you have young kids, and I really want to talk to the moms, and I specifically want to talk to the mamas that have children in the house right now, especially if they're young and they're needy. Listen, when you have young children in your house, you are not as efficient as you would like to be. You fall behind. Nothing, the house is never as clean as you want. It never looks the way you want it to look. The meals are never as high quality and as nutritious as you want them to be. There's going to be a mom in the PTA that's going to bring better looking cupcakes than you. Your kids, there's somebody else who's making more money and they're going to throw a bigger party and someone's yard is going to look nicer than yours. Dads, that's a tough one for me. This is a season of life when you have young children where you simply can't keep up the way that you used to. And that's okay because you're tending to your kids because you're giving them the care that they need and they will slow you down and they will make you inefficient. And that's all right because God even makes an allowance for it in this verse. Why else would he gently lead, would he isolate and specify that particular demographic that he gently leads those who are parents of the young, because he knows that's a challenging season in life. And so God sees you and he leads you gently. Now, how does he do this? I think he does it in myriad ways. I think he whispers encouragement to you. I think he brings people around you. But one of the ways that I'm certain that he does it, and we talk about this here at Grace sometimes, is that he surrounds you with a spiritual family. One way that God gently leads young mothers is through providing a spiritual family for you. One way that he gently leads young mothers is by providing a spiritual family to come around you. So I want to say this. I'm going to talk about the familial nature of church. I'm going to talk about how we all fit into, I'm going to break us into three categories today, children, parents, grandparents. You're going to assign yourself into a category. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to put an age threshold on it. Although I'm 43, so grandparents probably started like 45. You put yourself wherever it is you fit. But as we talk about this spiritual family that is the church, I want to be very clear. For those of you longing for a biological or a natural, even adoptive family that you call your own, I am not trying to replace your family that you desire with the spiritual family that you have. Those of you who long for children but you don't have children yet, I'm not about to tell you, but listen, great news. My son John is your spiritual son, so you should feel fulfilled there. That's not what I'm telling you today. But rather, as a family of faith, we have familial responsibilities to each other within our family of faith. And I would also say this. I know that many of you are here this morning, and you don't come to Grace regularly. I'm so glad that you're here. Maybe you're a part of a family of faith. What I'm going to say to you this morning, maybe you have your own churches. What I'm going to say to you this morning is applicable in those places too, and you can carry out those roles there as well. And I know some of you may not have a church home. You don't go to church regularly. And if you don't, what I would tell you is I'm very sure you have a good reason for that. But I also believe that God designed you, that we have a creator and he designed you to be inside of, thrive within, flourish within a spiritual family. So if that touches something in you, if you've been thinking about that, I hope you'll accept this morning as a nudge to consider being a part of a spiritual family. With that preamble, how can I be certain about the familial nature of church? It's all throughout scripture, but one of the first places my mind goes is to some instructions that Paul gave Timothy in his letter to him when he sent Timothy to take over the church in Ephesus. And Paul writes this to Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 5 verses 1 and 2. He's giving him instructions about how he should relate to the people in the church. He says this, do not rebuke an older man harshly, but extort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters with absolute purity. So he's sending, Paul is sending Timothy to the church in Ephesus. He says, you're going to take this over. Here's how I want you to relate to the people in and around your church. Treat the older men like fathers with respect. Treat the younger men like brothers, mutual encouragement. Treat the older women like mothers. Love them, be devoted to them, honor them. Treat the younger women like sisters, total purity. Encourage them in their spiritual walks. And so he introduces into the thought process this familial nature of what church should be. And so it makes me conclude this. We come to church not for ourselves, but for something bigger than ourselves. This isn't the only bigger thing we come for, but we come to be a part of a spiritual family. So what I want to do this morning very simply is talk first to the children, then to the parents, and then to the grandchildren, and say within this family, what are your responsibilities? What does God want of you? This is not an exhaustive list. This is one simple idea that we're going to carry through the service. There's more things to say here. We could do a series on this. But very simply this morning, I want us to think about our roles within the family that is the church. So first, the children. I had the idea in this part to bring in the kids, the kids K through 5, because I wanted them to hear what I'm about to say. And I pitched it to Erin Winston, our children's pastor. And she said, it's very nice that you want to do that, but none of them will care. And they'll just be a distraction to the church. And which is funny because I told Jen what I wanted to do, and she said, I don't think that's a good idea because nobody's going to care what you have to say. And I went, no, no, they will. I'm their pastor. They want to hear from me. And then Aaron said the same thing. I was like, okay, loud and clear, God. Nobody cares. Which may be the general ethos right now. I don't know. But I do have middle schoolers and high schoolers in the room. I do have college students in the room. And to you, I would say this when we think about our roles within our spiritual family. Do you know that the Bible that I'm aware of only has one instruction for you? One instruction that's specifically for children. We find it all all over scripture but the first place we find it is in Exodus chapter 20 in the middle of commitment 10 commandments when he says this honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land the Lord has given you children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right the only instructions that are given specifically to children in scripture are that we would honor our father and mother. We do all the other things, but while we're kids, we do that. We honor our father and mother in the Lord for this is right. So listen, middle schoolers, high schoolers, college students, your responsibility is to first honor your father and mother. And then horizontally, it's to help your friends live lives that honor their parents as well. That's your responsibility to each other. We've got a great group of middle school guys here. I can see two of them right now. Three of them. They're a good crew. Hang out all the time. They're good boys. Kyle, our youth pastor, spends a lot of time with them. I love that they're a part of our church. Your responsibility to each other is to encourage one another to live in such a way when parents aren't around and no one can see you that you are honoring your parents. We've got a great group of middle school girls. Same thing. Your responsibility is to encourage one another when no one's around and no one can see, to live lives in private that honor your father and mother in public. That's our role as friends and as peers, as children, to help each other live out that commandment. Now, here's the challenging part. Implicit in that commandment, parents, I'm going to shift to the parent demographic here. If you feel like you're there, then you're there. If you don't, then you're not. The people who are of the age to be parents. Implicit in this commandment to the kids, if all God is ever telling the kids is, hey, honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. If that's the instruction to your children, then implicit in that instruction, like it or not, is by honoring you, they will de facto honor God. If your children grow up in your home and they honor you, what that means is they are by default honoring God because that's the way in which you are leading them. What a shame it would be, what a tragedy it would be for children to grow up in a home with parents that come to church and are spiritually minded people and value Jesus in the home. Your kid grows up and honors you and yet fall short of honoring God because the example that you set for them was insufficient. So parents, it's our job to live lives worthy of emulation and worthy of honoring. So that as our children grow up honoring us, they by default honor God. We are to show them that path. I skipped a point here. I'm going to go down to the verse. This is the verse that I have for the parents. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Parents, with that in mind, that our kids should grow up in our home and by default honor the God that we serve, then our responsibility, our familial responsibility to our brothers and sisters in our generation is to help one another live lives worthy of honoring to encourage one another to live lives worthy of emulation by our children to make sure that one another for the kids growing up in our homes that I know that a kid growing up in your home is going to grow up to honor God. It is my responsibility to my brothers and sisters in this family to make sure that happens. It's why a couple of months ago in January, I talked about this idea, and I talked about the idea of sacred spaces. We have our small groups, and our small groups are wonderful. We've got two really vibrant small groups for young families. And then we've got another, we got another ladies group as well for moms. It's wonderful to have those groups. Those groups exist, not just to connect us to the church, to the church, not just to make us feel friends, feel like we have friends, but they exist so that we can sharpen one another. But a few months ago, I told you those are insufficient for that task. We can't get into the deep heart work that we need to get into and a big co-ed small group. There's just sins. I'm not going to confess in front of your wife. Sorry, man. So we need sacred spaces. We need two or three people in our life that know us intimately, that are safe places for confession, that are safe places for weakness, where we can encourage one another. I'll tell you transparently, I sat on Thursday, my sacred space met, three of us. And we sat around, and not every time we gather is it like this, but this one was a special one, and it lasted for four hours. God bless our wives. And there was tears and prayers and hugs and a deep, deep level of sharing that is not accomplished in small group. If you are here in the generation of parents, I believe it is your spiritual responsibility to have those spaces in your life so that we can sharpen one another and we can be sure that our children are growing up in homes whereby honoring us, they honor God. Parents, that's our responsibility to one another. That's what we must do to make sure that, I mean, think about it. The kids that are about to be dedicated at the end of my sermon. What can I do to make sure that these kids grow up knowing Jesus in exactly the way that God wants them to grow up? I think about that verse in Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we should walk in them. I have a God's son in Chicago, and they asked me, the church reached out and asked, is there anything you'd like to contribute to say, would you like to write a short note to Tucker? And I said, Tucker, we're told in Ephesians, he's five, so he might be able to gather some of this. Tucker, we're told in Ephesians that we are created by God and purposed for good works. So my prayer for you is that you'll find your good works. And my prayer for your parents is that they will help you find those and that you'll walk in them. If we are to look at the kids that are going to be dedicated, if we are going to think about the kids littering that hallway and ask ourselves how we can honor them, how we can partner with them, how we can surround them, what's the best thing we can do? The best thing we can do is to partner with their fathers and mothers to make sure that they're living in houses so that when they grow up honoring their parents, they will by default grow up honoring God. That's our responsibility. Grandparents, your responsibility is even harder because you should have figured this out by now. So Titus chapter two, I'm going to look at verses two through four and then seven and eight. Here's what it says to the older generations. Grandparents, your job is to show us how to be honorable. If you are in the demographic where you would consider yourself a grandparent or of that age, it is your spiritual responsibility within the church to show us what it looks like to live honorable lives. We need your example. I don't know how to be more clear about this. I'm a pastor. Traditionally, I'm expected to have it figured out. I do not. And I make no bones about that. Jen was telling me just this last week that I do an exceptional job of living a life that makes it hard to put me on a pedestal. That's my spiritual gift to you. I think about it this way, and I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, but most Sunday mornings, we have a phenomenal covenant group that sits back there. If they have hair, it's gray. And then we have a young small group. Both of our young small groups sit over here. I'm not speaking only to the covenant group. I'm not speaking only to the young small group. But I am speaking to everyone that fits in those places. As clearly as I can say it, I don't know why I'm getting emotional about this, but, you know, stuff happens. You guys, they need you. They need to look at you, and they need to know what it is to weather the storms of marriage loving God well. They need to look at you and know what it is to have an eight-year-old that won't listen or a college student who wanders or adult children that disappoint. They need to know what it is to face the slings and the arrows and the storms of life and to watch you walk through it well. We need you. I have wonderful parents that I can learn so much from. But Jen and I need to be able to look at the people in our church and learn from you and hear from you and ask you and watch you and know what it looks like to be honorable. So grandparents, keep it up, keeping each other honorable. Keep it up, sharpening iron with iron for the sakes of your families and your walks. But please know that those of us who are younger than you are watching you to learn from you and to see what it looks like to live lives that are honorable. So show us that, please. Those are the roles of the families within churches. That's what we are supposed to do. Children, honor your father and mother. Children, hold each other accountable to honor them. Be a good friend. Help your friends honor their parents. Parents, be a good friend. Help your friends lead households that are worthy of emulation so that if children grow up in this church, they grow up and they honor their parents, they by default honor God. Grandparents, continue to encourage and walk with one another and please know that we need you. We need to look at you and see what it looks like to live lives that are worthy of emulation. This is how God leads young mothers gently, by surrounding them with that sort of environment. Young mothers, go get your kids. We're going to dedicate them. It's Graham. Get out of here. I'm going to pray, and when I'm done, we're going to invite those families up. We're going to say some words about what it means to dedicate children. And then we're going to pray. And y'all are going to brunch. Let's pray. Father, we thank you. We thank you for the good moms that we have. We thank you for days like today that we can stop and pause and reflect on what's really important. God, I thank you for the spiritual family that you've given us, for the way that you've surrounded your people with your children. Lord, I pray that the kids in this church would hold each other accountable, would encourage one another to honor their parents and in turn honor you. Father, I pray the parents in this church would sharpen one another and be actively involved in helping their peers have homes that are worthy of emulation and honor. And God, I lift up our grandparents. I ask that you would move in them, work in them, and that you would use them as examples in the lives of those watching to know what it is to honor you with their lives. God, we thank you for the joy and the privilege of making the dedication that we're about to make. We thank you for the young babies and the families that you've blessed these families with and in turn blessed the church with. And God, we pray that it pleases you to see these moms and dads offering their children back to you. In Jesus' name, amen.