Sermons tagged with Courage

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. I just want to say up front, if I seem a little bit off my game this morning, it's because Greg and Liz Roberg took my seats, and I was very thrown off having to sit right there. I really don't know what to do with myself. Do not appreciate this at all. This is going to be a difficult Sunday, but we're going to get through it together. We are continuing our series called 27 from last summer and this summer, where we're moving through the 27 books of the New Testament. Next week, we will tackle 1st and 2nd Corinthians. I will not do them justice. I didn't want to do them together, but it's just the way the timing worked out. This week, we're going to focus on the book of Philemon, which handles this idea of talking a slave owner out of punishing a runaway slave. So it's super just easy content. I hope you brought your guests this morning. This is the perfect sermon for that. But as we approach Philemon together, I kind of wanted to frame it up like this. Can you think of a time in your life when you felt compelled to attempt to alter the thinking or the behavior of someone else? Typically in those situations, it's someone that we care about or someone that we interact with regularly. But can you think of a time in your life when you felt compelled to attempt to alter the thinking or the behavior of someone else in your life? Really, the question is, can you think of a time when you felt compelled to confront someone and you needed to have a hard conversation? You needed to try to convince them, hey, what you're doing is not good. You need to do this, not that. You need to think this way, not that way. Now, we do this in our house every day because we have a three-year-old and every day we sit down and we try to have lunch and we make for lunch something that we know he likes because we've seen him eat it before. He may even have the audacity to tell us in the preparation, I'd like to have this, and we'll make him that. And then we sit at the table, and he no longer wants that. And we engage in the painful negotiations of trying to get a three-year-old to eat his stupid lunch, right? It is very difficult to compel someone to change their thoughts and behavior. And on some levels, we do this often, particularly as parents. But there are other situations in life where we feel compelled to do that, and the stakes are much higher than whether or not they nap well after the meal. There are times in life when we notice a friend, maybe a co-worker, maybe a family member engaged in habits and patterns that are not good and we feel compelled to confront them and say, hey the way you're thinking about this is not right. The things you're doing are not best for you. We feel that it's our responsibility. We think about it, we pray about it, and we know we need to go to them. We need to have that hard conversation. There are times in life when we have to do that. Some of you, as I mentioned that, are thinking of a real life situation right now where you know you need to do that. So the question this morning is, how do we act? What do we do when we feel compelled to confront? And where I want us to start is with this idea of this is the way that the world does this. The way the world confronts, attempts to seek to change the mind and behaviors of individuals, is to demonize and degrade. The way the world confronts is to demonize and degrade. Now, if you don't think that's true, I would like to invite you to watch TV ever. Especially in 2024, an election year. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of highly paid strategists and highly skilled politicians who are trying to convince you how to think and how to behave and who you vote for. How do they go about doing that? By demonizing and degrading the opponent. That's how they do it. That's why we have the phrase attack ads. That's what the world does to try to convince people. We demonize and degrade. They immediately attack each other. And if you think about this interpersonally, when you're talking with someone who doesn't align with your political views, and you tell them who you think you might vote for in whatever race you might be thinking about, do they respond by talking to you about the issues or did they respond by immediately attacking your candidate, telling you why your candidate is a worse candidate than their candidate? This is what we do to try to change minds. We demonize and degrade. We talk down about the people that need to change and we degrade them and we make you feel guilt and shame to change your behavior. More pointedly, I have seen and am guilty of, I've seen parents do this. I've met with people who have adult kids. And they have, those kids are making decisions that they don't agree with. That they think are wrong. That are not good for them. And they'll sit and they'll tell me. I told them I'm disappointed in them. I told them that's not how I raised them. I told them that's not who you're supposed to be. I told them that they shouldn't do that, that you were raised better than this. You shouldn't be making those decisions. That's not how we taught you. And when we do that, not intentionally, not intentionally, but when we do that, we're falling into the pattern of the world and the way the world confronts by demonizing and degrading the person. Often, our default setting, when we are compelled to confront, because it's the pattern we've inherited from the world, often our default setting is to use guilt and shame to compel someone to change their behavior or their way of thinking. Isn't it? How often do we do that with our kids? How often do we do that with our peers, with our friends? How often do we do that with our spouses? When we get on to one another and we talk down to one another, trying to guilt and shame them into being who you think they need to be. I think this is the pattern of the world. And I bring that up because I think the letter to Philemon gives us a much better model of how to confront. Here's what's going on in the book of Philemon. It's a short book. It's one chapter. I bet very few in the room have a verse from Philemon that they love. All right? I don't have anybody, I've never been to any of your houses and seen a verse from Philemon on the wall. Okay. We often don't pay attention to it. We don't regard it. We don't think about it, but the message within it and the model that Paul gives us is critical and crucial to our lives and absolutely applicable to everyone in here. So what's happening in Philemon is Paul came into the company of a man named Onesimus. And Onesimus was a slave owned by Philemon. And sometimes you'll hear pastors or people or teachers try to talk about slavery in the New Testament as if that was really more like they were employees. It's not how we think of slavery. Bull hockey. Yes, it's exactly how we think of slavery. Whatever you think of the worst slavery, that's what this slavery was. That's what Roman slavery was. You are owned and you have no rights and your owner has all the rights there in charge of you. That's slavery, the bad kind, really the only kind. Onesimus had gotten separated from Philemon. It's unclear whether he ran away or there was maybe a shipwreck or an incident or something like that, but he had gotten away from Philemon, and he was in the company of Paul. And Paul is writing this letter to Philemon to be carried by Onesimus to request that Philemon would release Onesimus, receive him as a brother, and let him go back and continue his work with Paul. So Paul, listen, is writing to someone who's a slave owner, who's apparently also a believer. And we know from our country's past that it is entirely possible to be someone who ardently believes in Jesus Christ and someone who owns slaves without the cognitive dissonance that those things do not correlate. We know it is entirely possible as Christians to have a blind spot in our life to sins and moral ineptitude that we simply don't see, but we commit all the time. Philemon is in the middle of one of those situations. He's a slave owner and a Christian, and those things don't go together. So Paul is writing him to address that problem and to request Onesimus. And the way that he does it gives us a roadmap for how we are to confront people when we need to in our lives. So I'm not going to read the whole book. I could. It wouldn't take very long. I would highly encourage you to read it. I'm just going to highlight a couple of verses, but you should sit down and read this and follow the narrative all the way. But this kind of helps us follow along with his reasoning. If we start in verse 4 with the question of how does Paul confront a Christian brother who's got a moral blind spot and needs to change their thoughts or behavior, this is how sake of Christ. Now listen, if you had a friend who was a slave owner and you wrote them a letter to get them to knock it off, I don't think you would start your letter, I always thank my God whenever I remember you. It's a remarkably gracious opening for Paul to start this way. He immediately says to Philemon, this is, I'm grateful for you. I love you. Here's why I'm grateful for you. Here's our joint goal together. That's how he chooses to open. Then once he dignifies him, says, I love you. God loves you. We have this joint goal together. I'm grateful for you. I pray for you. Then he says this, and I think this is fascinating. Therefore, although in Christ, this is verse eight. Therefore, although in Christ, I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do. Yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. Paul says it out loud. He says, hey, listen, I could be bold in Christ and tell you what you ought to do. And in our language and the way we're thinking about it this morning, what he's saying is I could do this the world's way and demonize and degrade you and tell you what you ought to do. And in our language and the way we're thinking about it this morning, what he's saying is I could do this the world's way and demonize and degrade you and tell you what you're doing wrong. I could bully you into what we're supposed to do right. I mean, this is the most influential church planter, pastor, Christian of all time who's not named Jesus. And he has every right and every authority to burn the face off of Philemon. Right? He's got every right to just let him have it. To get after him. And he acknowledges that he does. I could, in boldness, correct you in the name of Christ, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to choose to appeal to you, and I love this phrase, on the basis of love. And I think it's important to point out that I believe that there is a twofold love that Paul's talking about there. I think it's on the basis of love for Jesus and a basis of love for Philemon. Because Paul loves Jesus and he knows that Jesus loves Philemon. So he knows that he is approaching someone for whom Christ died, whom Christ is pursuing, whom Christ is shaping and molding and cultivating and sanctifying. And it is good to remind ourselves in moments of confrontation when someone's not behaving or thinking the way that they should, to first remind ourselves to appeal to them on the basis of love and allow that first love that we think about to be Christ's love for them. Remind ourselves, I am going to sit down and talk with someone that Jesus loves dearly, that Jesus gave his life for, that Jesus pursues and calls to and sanctifies and forgives and redeems. And this is what Paul does at the onset of the letter when he says, I thank my God when I remember you. He talks about this commonality that they have in Christ. So there's this two-fold love when we confront. First, we remind ourselves that this person is loved by Jesus. This person is saved and pursued by Jesus. Then we remind ourselves that we love them too. We love them. If we did not love them, we would not be in this situation. If we never confront them, we can't possibly love them. If we just allow people in our lives to be in patterns and habits that are not healthy for them and we don't say anything, then we're not truly loving them. So to love them sometimes is to address the issue. And when we do that, we should remember that they are loved by Christ and they are loved by me and I'm going to approach it in that way I'm going to appeal to them on the basis of love not guilt and shame so once he says that I could get after you I'm not going to do that I'm going to appeal to you on the basis of love. How does he do that? We see that in 15 and 16. This is Paul appealing. It's going to be fun. So he says, here's what I want you to do. I'm appealing to you on the basis of love. My hope is that you'll receive Onesimus back. Now, a slave returning to an owner that had run away and stayed separated is someone who is going to be punished. They're going to be punished in a really terrible way. And Paul is saying, don't do that. As a matter of fact, don't just not punish him, but receive him back, not as a slave, but as your brother. And then he continues to compel him. Once you do that, please send him back to me so he can continue the work with me. He's incredibly valuable to me and is helping me a great deal. Please basically free him and let me travel with him so that he and I can work together. This is the request that Paul is making of Philemon. And in this, we see the biblical and Christian model for confrontation, for how we should act and what we should do when we feel compelled to change the way someone behaves or thinks. And I'm summing that model up this way. The world says to demonize and degrade. Christians say dignify and direct. When we approach someone, how should we approach them? What does it mean to appeal on the basis of love beyond simply remembering that Jesus loves them and I love them? It means to dignify the person and direct the person. And I mean direct there in both ways. I mean be direct. Don't beat around the bush. Don't be unclear. Don't imply. Don't be subtle. When we are confronting a brother or sister because we feel compelled to do so, we feel convicted to do that, we need to have the courage and the love and the humility to be direct with them. Here is what I'm asking you to do. And that's exactly what Paul did. He was direct. I'm asking you to receive him as a brother, and then once you do, send him back to me. Release him to me so that he and I can work together. He was very direct in what he was asking. And when we confront, we should love people enough to have the honesty to be direct with them. But he also, before he's direct, he dignifies. I thank my God when I remember you. You are a child of Christ. We have done these things together. We have labored for the gospel together. Here are all the reasons I'm grateful that God was good enough to place you in my life. We dignify. This is the Christian model for confrontation. And just to contrast it a little bit, think about the power of this. And let's say that we have an adult child that's not doing, not making the choices that we think they should make. And we feel like we need to step in and confront them. If the world's way of demonizing and degrading them leads us to say things like, hey, I've noticed this in your life. I'm disappointed in those decisions. I'm disappointed in you, implying I'm not proud of you. And I think you need to change your behavior because your behavior is going to lead to this. And I don't want to see this happen. And we just use guilt and shame to try to compel them to see what we see. I'm disappointed in you. We didn't raise you like this. You need to do better. Let me help you do better. That's one way to do it. But if we do it Paul's way, the way that he confronts Philemon, if we dignify and direct, if we appeal on the basis of love, think about how much more powerful it could be in our lives if we confronted people this way. I love you. How can I better love you towards who you know you want to be and who God created you to be. What if we started confronting like that? How much better would you receive it if your spouse came to you and said, you're really bothering me. You're really annoying me. You're really doing this wrong. You need to do this better the way that spouses do. Except Jen, she never says that to me. How much better would you receive it if someone you love sat down with you and said, hey, I love you. How can I better love you towards who you know you want to be and who God created you to be? It's a simple question because here's the thing. We know in our own lives that when we're not being who we're supposed to be, when we're not being who we want to be, when we're not being who God created us to be because we're allowing habits and sins and patterns into our lives that are not good, we know that we know that. We carry it every day. When we're not walking with God and living the life that we're supposed to live and making the choices that we're supposed to make when we're in unhealthy patterns. We are aware of that all the time. We know that it's not good. We already feel guilt and shame. So I don't, no one needs to come to me to challenge me to be better, to point out all the things that I'm doing wrong. I know them. How much more effective would it be if someone were to point out the things that you're not doing well by simply, instead of denigrating you, making you feel more guilt and shame, heaping on what you already feel, if they actually came to you and said, hey, I love you dearly. You matter so much to me. I'm so grateful that you're in my life because of this and this and this. And right now, you're not living up. You're not living as the person that I know you want to be and you know God wants you to be. So how can I better love you towards that person? That's what Paul does. Paul is confronting a slave owner to free a slave, an egregious sin that none of us would ever consider. He has every right to attack him and demonize him and guilt and shame him, and he doesn't do that. That's not how Christians change minds. That's not how Christians confront. And it works in polar opposite. It sits in stark contrast and juxtaposition to how the world does. That defaults to demonizing and degrading and to belittling and to bemoaning and degradation and guilt and shame. The Christian model for confrontation operates in a very stark contrast to the worldly model of confrontation. We are to confront in those situations where we feel compelled to. Like Paul does, an appeal to our friends, our brothers and sisters, spouses, children, on the basis of love. How do we do that? We dignify them. We remember that Jesus loves them and that we love them. And we direct them. We be honest with them. And we point them in the way that God wants them to go. Think about how much more powerful it is to appeal to someone on the basis of love and equipping to become who God has made them to be rather than shame and guilting them into who we think they're supposed to be. And here's what I love about this book of Philemon. It's Paul practicing what he preaches. It's one thing to say it. It's another thing to do it. Because in Galatians chapter 6 verse 1, Paul's writing to the church in Galatia. He's giving them instructions about how to be a church and what they need to do. And one of his instructions in chapter six, verse one is this. Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the spirit should restore that person gently, but watch yourselves or you also may be tempted. Paul tells the church in Galatia, and he tells all churches for all time, you who are spiritual, you who love Jesus, you who are mature in your faith, when you feel compelled to confront someone, do it gently. Raise them up with kindness. Do not be harsh in that confrontation. This is the instruction that he gives to the church in Galatia. And then, at another point in his life, Paul's in a situation where there is someone whom he loves caught in a sin and he feels compelled to confront. And how does he do it? He appeals to him on the basis of love. This is how the children of God are to confront one another. Be gentle with one another. Do it on the basis of love, reminding ourselves that Jesus loves them and I love them. And I am here to see them become who God created them to be, not denigrate them and guilt and shame them into better behavior. Now, here's the thing. I've felt like it was important for us as a church and as a family of faith to understand and be familiar with the book of Philemon. There's a reason God's included it in the Bible. We are edified to understand it and know it. And it is a model for us for how Christians ought to confront by dignifying and directing, appealing to people on the basis of love. But I also know that it's not very often in life that we feel compelled to do that, to use the lessons here. It's not very often that we're so compelled by the behavior of a friend or a spouse that we need to sit them down in a serious way and try to get them to change their mind or their behavior. We don't do that very regularly, and not everyone in the room has an instance they're thinking of in their life right now. I know that. So this is one of those sermons that sometimes I encourage you to tuck it away for later. Just be aware of this. And the next time you need to confront, hopefully the Holy Spirit will spark something in you. And you'll remember the message of Philemon. And you'll confront in love and appeal on the basis of love. But here's the other thing that I just want to mention as I close. We confront ourselves every day. We attack and accuse ourselves every day. We have a negative voice in our head that tells us that we're not who we're supposed to be. We're not who God created us to be. If people knew who you were, you would be ashamed. We have negative voices in our head from ourselves where we confront ourselves about our own behaviors and our own patterns every day. And we carry that guilt and shame every day. If you're willing to sit in a sermon and listen to how we should confront others and to know that we should do it with grace and love and dignity and kindness and gentleness. And that's what you would offer to every person in your life if you needed to confront them. Why would you not offer yourself the same love, the same gentleness, the same kindness? So tuck this away for when you do find yourself in a situation in life where you need to confront. Tuck this away. But also use it every day as you confront and convict yourself. Offer yourself the same grace, the same kindness, the same gentleness. Appeal to yourself on the basis of love. Remind yourself that Jesus loves you, he's grateful for you, and he is pursuing you. And when we do that, we will confront ourselves and others as Christ directs us to do it, not as the world does it. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for tucking the book of Philemon into the New Testament. Thank you for the lesson that it offers, for the model that it is of how to confront someone with gentleness. Lord, if there are people who have listened today and feel compelled to confront, I pray that you would give them the courage to do that, the humility to do it well, the love and the compassion to do it with gentleness. And I pray that the recipients would be restored and built up. Father, as we confront ourselves and experience our own convictions, first of all, God, I pray that we would listen and that we would allow you to love us towards health and towards who you created us to be. God, as we go, I pray that we would be more desirous of you when we leave than when we came. I pray that you would walk with us through this week. Bring yourself to our minds and to our consciences that we might focus on you this week and that we might grow closer to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, everybody. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us on this June Sunday. It's good to see you guys. It is incredibly hot outside. So thanks for braving that. Before we get into the sermon, just a small announcement. For me, this is my last sermon that I'm going to preach until August. A few years ago, the elders talked and decided that it would be best for the church for me to not preach in the month of July and best for me. And here's the reason why. And so we've been doing this for a few years now. The first and most important reason is this. There are other voices in the church that are very much worth hearing. They are thoughtful and insightful and articulate and wise and godly, and we are better off hearing from them. I don't know if you guys realize this or not. I'm sure you have if you've listened to a number of sermons. I don't really have something to say every week. So it's good for other people whose God has placed on their hearts things they do have to say to share with us. So first and foremost, we want to create an atmosphere of other voices. And that's why periodically in the year, I never go more than six or seven weeks in a row without someone spelling me and getting another voice up here. So that's always been a priority for us. It's always been a priority for me as a senior pastor. The other reason is taking that block of time allows me to focus on other areas of the church that I might not otherwise be able to give as much focus to in the regular rhythm of writing a weekly message. Last September, I stood up here on September the 10th, and I told you guys that I was going to be working hard, kind of in the margins and in the afternoons, behind the scenes, to develop some discipleship pathways for us that I believe is the next big step that we're going to take as a church, and maybe the most important thing I've worked on in the last year. So I've been quietly working on that behind the scenes and with other people in concert with others and putting things together. And I'm very excited in September, we're going to do a series on our five traits. Some of you may be aware that we have some, you might even be able to name one, but we're going to make those more a part of who we are and what we do as a church. And to accompany those, we're going to roll out what we're calling discipleship pathways that are kind of the next step for us to take towards spiritual growth as a church. So I'm finishing those up in July. I'm rolling those out to the small group leaders at the end of the month of July, and then you guys will be hearing about those in September. So that's how that work's been going on in the background since last fall. I'm finally ready to show it to you here as we enter into this fall. Now for this morning, as Mike said earlier, we have our last sermon in our series called Idols that's loosely based on Tim Keller's book called Counterfeit Gods. And in it, he presents this idea of source idols, things that really fuel the idolatry that we have in our life and other areas. Those source idols are power, approval, control, and comfort. And what he means by source idol is maybe our visible idol is greed or materialism, and we just want things. We want to get all we can, can all we get, and sit on our can. We just want more things. That's what we want. And so maybe that comes because we're really motivated by a desire for power. We believe money brings power. Maybe it's control. We believe money brings control. Maybe it's approval. Maybe it's comfort. But it's those source idols that really get sneaky and begin to turn our hearts away from God. And we talked about this idea of idolatry being so important because whatever occupies the space of our top priority in our life, and idolatry is anytime we put something in our life, we prioritize that over our devotion to God himself. Anything that occupies that top spot in our life is by default the recipient of our worship. And what we talked about is that nothing can bear the weight of our worship besides our God. So whenever we get that out of whack and we have something besides our God, besides Jesus Christ as our number one priority, then everything else in our life suffers. This morning, I've been excited to do this sermon because I believe it applies to everyone in the room. I've said along the way, different people have different source idols. We struggle differently with different ones. But comfort is one that even if it's not your number one, it's your number two. It's there. I think we all struggle with it. And the more I thought about this source idol of comfort, the more convinced I became that this is true. When it comes to comfort, we are the frog being boiled in cultural water. When it comes to comfort, we are frogs being boiled in the cultural waters of the United States in 2024. A desire for comfort is all around us. A desire to just be fine, to just be chill, to just feel comfortable, to have things set at the right temperature. Kyle just went back there and messed with a thermostat. You know why? Because we want to be comfortable. Because if we're not comfortable, we're not going to listen to Nate. That's why. So we've got to be comfortable. Here's a few ways I know that comfort is ubiquitously important to us. I have this theory in life that is yet to be disproven, that you can gauge a family's net worth by the number of unnecessary pillows they have in their home. Okay? And if you're thinking to yourself, joke's on you, I don't have any unnecessary pillows in my home, you're the problem. Okay? People have to move things out of the way so they can sit on your couch. And here's what I don't understand while we're here. While we're here, I'm just going to say this for the men, okay? Guys, I'm saying this on your behalf. Ladies, we don't understand why you go to the store and spend $200 on a chore to put on your bed every morning and every night. We don't understand why you go to HomeGoods and TJ Maxx and you dump 200 bucks on pillows to put further out from your sleeping pillows so that at the end of the day, you have to take them off when you're tired. And in the morning, you have to put them back on when you're in a hurry. It makes no sense. And you do it so it looks nice. For who? When's the last time you had a guest over to your house? And when you had them over, you were like, and here's our master bedroom. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. It's weird. Nobody sees your master bedroom. Listen, some of you I have been friends with the whole time I've been here. I am such good friends with you, I can walk right into your house unannounced, and I've done it before. You know what I've never seen? Your master bedroom. Because that's weird. No one sees it. Knock it off with the pillows. All right. There you go. Guys, you can talk about that at lunch. We have these symbols of comfort all over our culture. How many of you in your cars don't have heated seats? You don't just have heated seats. You have cooled seats. Don't raise your hand. Those things are wonderful. Yeah, two hands up back there. Whenever I'm riding with my friends that have cooled seats, I crank those suckers up all the way. I love those things, man. Those things are amazing. How many of you have a carefully negotiated thermostat temperature for your summertime nights and for your wintertime nights? These things have been, sometimes you had to bring in a moderating attorney just to get that settled. How many of you, how many of you, I'm being serious, how many of you have had the chance to fly first class before? and within 15 minutes of takeoff, you thought, I'm never sitting with the peasants again. This is amazing. Or you've been lucky enough to get the pods for international travel, where you extend out and you have a personal screen and there's a door to keep the pores out. That's how it goes. And you tell yourself, here's what you tell yourself. This is so funny. I've heard my friends say this. I need to be refreshed because I got to hit the ground running when I get there. I bet you do, buddy. I bet you do. That's why you chose the drinks that you did on the way over because you got to hit the ground running. I bet you do. That's why you chose the drinks that you did on the way over, because you got to hit the ground running. I bet. Sure. Maybe, maybe you just want to be comfortable. We like our space. We like our accompaniments. We like the things that make us feel good. And here's one of the ways I know that it's not a uniquely American problem, but it's a particularly American problem. I've watched House Hunters International. Have you watched House Hunters International? Without fail, the Americans go over to a foreign country, Costa Rica, Europe, New Zealand, wherever. They're looking at a $650,000 flat in the middle of Copenhagen. And you know what they say? This feels small. And it is. It's like a tiny little dishwasher, a one-burner stove. There's a toilet where you can control the shower nozzle from there. Like, it's all, it's real tight. And as Americans, we look at that and we're like, no way. I need my space. This desire for comfort is a particularly American struggle. In a culture, and this is true, where if you choose, if you have a desk job, and you choose at that desk job to stand, you have one of those high desks, people are like, look at the health nut over here. Look at Captain Fitness not sitting in a chair for eight hours a day. This is how much as a culture we prize comfort. And it's not just physical comfort that we prize, although that is a very good indicator. But mental, spiritual. We don't like to be challenged spiritually. We like to go to church. There's a certain amount of conviction that's okay. But over that, it's like, come on, man, you're being a jerk. And I'm not going to sit in this week after week. We want to be comfortable spiritually. I'm just going to edge right up to this and then I'm going to back off because I'm scared like you are. There are certain things I can't talk about and you know I can't talk about them because if I did, everybody in here would get fidgety and uncomfortable and it would feel like this. So I don't. And I talk about other things where we're comfortable, right? There are conversations that we need to have, but that conflict and that tension makes us uncomfortable, so we avoid them. In myriad ways, in myriad situations, we live in a culture that prizes comfort almost over and above all else. And what I want you to see this morning is we are like frogs being boiled in a cultural water. I came across this fact a couple of weeks ago in one of the books that I was reading, but it noted that if you, that there was an officer in the Spartan army circa 400 BC who got dishonorably discharged from the army because he was charged with taking a warm shower. He was charged with allowing himself the indulgence of a warm shower and he was deemed unfit to be a Spartan. How far we have come and the comforts and the things that we demand. So here's what I would say. And here's what I want us to realize this morning. If we don't idolize comfort, we've got to at least admit we have a tendency towards it. I doubt very much that anyone came in here this morning going, oh, comfort, that's me. I very seriously doubt that at the beginning of the series, when I did the first sermon five weeks ago and introduced this idea of idols and idolatry, that any of you went, oh gosh, if I just kind of survey the landscape of my life, I think comfort's probably my idol. I don't think anybody did that. And yet, I think it is prevalent and persnickety and pernicious and corrosive in all of us. And like I said, not just materially, but parents, how many things do you need to broach with your children that you don't? Because it would just be a hassle. I don't have the energy for that fight. I don't have the energy for that discussion. I know, and maybe it's confrontational. Maybe it's sympathetic. Maybe it's relational. Maybe you can see they're hurting and you just, you want to wait another day because it's going to be a hard conversation and you're tired. How many times do we choose our own comfort over what our kids need? Spouses. How often in our marriages do we tolerate a fragile peace? Because breaking that peace would cause so much discomfort that we don't want to deal with it. It's easier to just exist at this simmering tension. How much of what God asks us to do is blocked by the amount of comfort that we desire? I have a good relationship with my neighbor. I don't want to make it weird by inviting them somewhere or asking them about things. I have a good relationship with my coworker. I don't want to jeopardize that by asking an odd question or bringing up an odd topic. It's not just physically that we allow a desire for comfort to begin to derail us in our thought process. It's emotionally. We build up walls. How many of us, listen, how many of us know, know that God wants us to see a counselor? That we have some issues and some things in our life that we need to deal with that are rippling out and spilling onto the people that we love the most. And that what we need more than anything is to talk to someone that he has blessed and trained up to serve the kingdom in this way. And we need to go talk to them, and we don't. And you know why we don't? Because it will be uncomfortable to begin to deal with the things that could be brought up. So this desire for comfort goes way beyond throw pillows and first-class seats. And it permeates into every area of our life. And here's why this idol of comfort is so dangerous. Because idolizing comfort causes us to build our life around protecting it and we end up wasting it. Idolizing comfort causes us to build up our life around protecting that comfort, and we end up wasting our life in the process. I don't love admitting this, but I will, because I think some of us can relate to this in some way. After the first time I flew first class internationally, I got home, and I'm being dead serious. I started thinking to myself and racking my brain and talking to friends. What sorts of side hustles can I do to begin to generate more income so that when I travel, I can travel like that? What kinds of, how can I market myself in other areas? What kind of extra income can I make so that when I travel, I can get the upgrade? I can be in the excellence club. I can be the gold member. What can I do so that when my family has these experiences, I can turn them up a notch because I liked it so much? And listen, listen, that is so honest. It wasn't for other things. It wasn't, what can I do to monetize myself more, to work a little bit harder so that I can give more to God's kingdom, so that I can provide a more comfortable life for my family, so that my wife and my children can have a little bit nicer things and live life a little bit more easily. No, it was as simple as, God, I really like flying first class. I'd love to do that again. I don't want to have to fly back there with the peasants anymore, so let's see what I can turn up to travel nice. Listen, listen to me. How stupid is that? How stupid is that? But some of you do it for golf memberships. Or the cooling seats. Or the nice whatever. And isn't this so easy to do? Isn't it? Isn't our culture tailor-made to suck us into that trap? I was having lunch with a good friend this week. He's 35. And he's kind of come to a bit of a crossroads in his career where he could go this way or that way. And his entire career, he's been headed this way. He got the job. This is what the people in charge of me do. This is what I'm supposed to do. This is the next thing. This is what I'm going to do. And now he's picking his head up at this crossroads going, is that even what I want to do? And how often does that happen? For how many of us is that our story? How many of us have friends with that story? Who graduated high school or graduated college or got their masters and entered into the workforce? And when you entered into the workforce, all you were trying to do is prove yourself and make enough money to survive at some sort of level that you liked and that you wanted to attain. And then you got it. And then you needed to continue to pay for it. And then you married somebody. And then you looked and you said, okay, we're doing this thing together, either single income or dual income. We have goals. And then you spin it forward and you spin it forward and you spin it forward and you just put your head down and you do the next thing and you get the next promotion and your friend buys a white SUV and now I want that. And your friend flies first class and now I want that. And your friend buys this house and now I want that. And oh shoot, we're doing beach houses now? I guess I'll figure this one out too. I didn't know I needed white marble in my bathroom, but I really, really do. This tile is terrible, right? And we just need the next thing. And we never think about if we're spending our life and investing our years in the right thing. It's just the next thing. And by the time, listen, by the time we pick up our head and we wonder, is this even the direction I'm supposed to go? We have mortgages and we have and we have bills, and we have a standard of living, and we have certain expectations that we've built up. I took the kids to Turks and Caicos last year, so if I don't do it this year, I've somehow failed as a father. And on and on it goes. And we stay on the treadmill, organizing our life around comfort without ever realizing we had done it. This is what makes this the sneakiest, most pernicious idol of them all. Because none of you started your adult life and verbalized, you know what I want to do? I want to be comfortable. And I'm going to organize my whole life around it. But as you sit here, you're wondering if that's what you've done by accident. And if that's how we invest our whole life, we will have wasted it. And for me, there is nothing more sad, there is nothing I am more afraid of than getting to the end of my life and looking back on the decades and knowing in my heart of hearts that I wasted it. That I didn't use my years for things that mattered. And let me tell you what ultimately doesn't matter. Your comfort. It just doesn't. And I bring this up because I do think it's so easy to slip into this pursuit. I do think it's so easy to, without realizing it, almost by mistake, to have organized our entire life around building comfort and then marshalling our resources to protect that comfort without ever risking anything for God's kingdom. I can think of no better example of this in the Bible than in a parable that Jesus told of someone who in this instance marshaled their life around protecting comfort. And we see how the master responds to them. It's a well-known parable found in Matthew chapter 25. I'm just going to read verses 24 and 27. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, but this is the parable of the tenants. I'm going to read from the NIV. It says bags of gold. That's one of the places where the scholars have let you down. It's talent. It's a talent. It's a denomination of money that may feel like to us a bag of gold. But in this parable that you guys know, but in case you don't, or in case you need a refresher, there's a master of the house. The master of the house represents Jesus. And the master of the house is leaving. He goes to these three servants and he says, hey, I'm going to go out of town for a while. Here's some money. Give me a report on what you did with the money when we come back. To the first servant, he gives five talents. To the second servant, he gives two talents. To the last servant, he gives one talent. And he goes out of town. And then he comes back in town. And when he gets back in town, he goes to the servant with the five talents. And he says, what'd you do with the money? And the servant says, see, I took the money, I invested it, I traded and sold, and now I'm giving you ten talents in return. I've doubled your investment. And the master says, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will make you lord over many. And then he goes to the two-talent person. And he says, what did you do? And the two-talent person says, see, I have bought and sold and invested, and I have doubled your money. I'm giving you back four talents. And the master says to him, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. I will make you Lord over many. And I would pause right here and just say this. I should do a whole sermon on it, but I'll just say this and maybe it'll sit on some of you like it sits on me. That phrase, well done, good and faithful servant, is worth living your life for. Pursuing that phrase, chasing hearing that from your God in your eternity, at the end of your life, marshalling all of your resources and all of your time and all of your talents and all of your interests and all of your effort and all of your discipline so that one day when we stand before the Lord, he will look at us and he will say, well done, good and faithful servant with the life and the time that you had. That phrase is worth your whole life. You will never be disappointed by the things that you pursue to hear that. And what's wonderful about that phrase is the five-talent person got the same response as the two-talent person. God doesn't care how big of an impact you make or how wonderful your work is or how many people know who you are or how many people come to your funeral or any of that stuff. He does not care about the size and the grandeur of your impact. What he cares is about the faithfulness and your small actions. What he cares about is that you are a good and faithful servant, and he will say, well done, whether you have five talents or two or one. I love that. But then he goes to the servant to whom he gave one talent to you. His master replied, you wicked, lazy servant. So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed. Well, then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned, I would have received it back with interest. He goes to the last servant. He says, what did you do? And the last servant says, well, I'm scared of you. I did not want to risk losing your money, so I buried it. Now, I cannot tell you in good faith and a good conscience that I have a depth of insight into a fictional character's soul in a very short parable in the Bible and can tell you that that man struggled with the God of comfort, but here's what I can tell you. In that moment, in that instance, that's what he chose. He chose to not risk anything and to be comfortable. And in that story, Jesus is represented by the master. And what was Jesus' response to that? You wicked and lazy servant. And he takes the talent from the one and he gives it to the one with the five because he knows it's going to be in better hands. This is what's at stake if we choose to marshal our resources around comfort and by default waste our life. Just bury the gifts and the talents and the abilities and the plan that God has given us because we're too afraid to risk anything. Then one day when we stand before him, we will not hear well done, good, and faithful servant. And here's the thing I want us to go home with today and understand. The more I thought about this God of comfort and how it juxtaposes with works of the kingdom, I was sure of this. Stories of kingdom-building faith always require a sacrifice of comfort. Stories of kingdom-building faith always require a sacrifice of comfort. You will never find anyone who's doing things for the kingdom who didn't, in order to do those things, have to give up some of their comforts in life. Later this week, next Sunday, I'll be flying to Ethiopia to visit Addis Jamari over in Addis Ababa. And I think of the women that founded that ministry. I think of Suzanne Ward and Cindy Douglas. And Cindy is over there months on end. She's over there months at a time with two teenage sons. You don't think that she's had to give up some comfort and that her family's had to give up some comfort for the sake of what God is doing over there in Ethiopia? And what God's doing there is amazing and needed and absolutely necessary. It's a wonderful work of the kingdom for which she had to sacrifice comfort. If you think of the godly people you know in your life, the people who love well and who serve well and who are always here during the week setting things up, they're always at their place wherever they serve, wherever they pour into, they're always pouring into it, they're always doing, they're always serving. Those people give up the comfort of doing that. When you think about good and godly parents, you have to give up your comfort for the sake of your children. Good and godly spouses give up their comfort for the sake of their spouses. Good and godly friends give up their comfort for the sake of their friends. You will never, ever find an act of the kingdom and an act of faith that is done without giving up some comfort on the other end. And we see this biblically in story after story. Two that spring to mind right away are of Saul changed to Paul. And I have to go quickly because we still got communion to do. And I think I'm going long, but just bear with me. When I think of Saul, he was on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians there. Jesus appears to him, blinds him, sends him to a room, names him Paul, and says, I've got big plans for you, pal. And then goes to a guy named Ananias, and he says, Ananias, I need you to go see Saul, turn to Paul, and get the scales off of his eyes, because he needs to start serving me now. And Ananias says, no way, I'm not going to do that. He's a Christian killer. That does not sound very fun. And God says this in one of the most ominous statements in the Bible, Acts chapter 9, verses 15 and 16. But the Lord said to Ananias, go, this man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. But no, no, by all means, God is super concerned with your comfort. He is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. Do you understand that Paul is the most influential post-disciple Christian to ever exist? No one has influenced the church as widely and deeply and profoundly as Paul. And in order to do that, he sacrificed all comfort. And God said, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Shipwreck and beatings and floggings and imprisonment and disease and poverty. He endured it all for the sake of God's kingdom. In the Old Testament, I think of Ruth and Boaz and Naomi. Ruth was a Moabite woman. There was poverty in Israel because of the drought, and some families started moving to Moab, and she happened to marry one of these Jewish boys that had moved over. And then the dad and the two brothers died, and it left the mom, Naomi, with two daughters-in-law. And the other one said, hey, I'm going to stay here. And Naomi looked at Ruth and said, you need to stay here in Moab. You're young and pretty. You can marry, and you'll be fine. But Ruth knew that if she did this, that Naomi would be destitute. And so she said this in this famous line, no, where you go, I go. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. And she did the right thing, and she stayed with Naomi. She ended up marrying a man named Boaz. And if you fast forward several hundred years, you come to the book of Matthew. And in the first chapter of the book of Matthew, you have the genealogy of Jesus Christ. And when you read those genealogies, what you find is that you can trace a line from Jesus back to King David, the second and greatest king of Israel. And King David came from a man named Jesse. And Jesse came from a man named Obed. And Obed came from a woman named Ruth, married to Boaz. Because of her great act of faith and her sacrifice of comfort, God included her in his family tree. So first of all, we never will do anything for the kingdom that doesn't require a sacrifice of comfort. Second, we have no idea what can come out of that sacrifice and what God might do. The greatest example of this we see is Jesus himself, who gave up all the comforts of heaven to condescend and come here. I don't know what the pillow situation is in heaven, but I bet it's pretty good. I don't know. It can't enumerate all the comforts that Jesus gave up. But when he came here, it says in Matthew chapter 8, verse 20, that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. For three years, Jesus sofa-surfed so that he could do ministry to us and build up disciples to leave us, to establish the church in which we now sit. Jesus is the greatest example of all time of what it means to give up comfort for the sake of a work for the kingdom. And what I want us to understand about this, because we do, all of us, somewhere have this God of comfort, that our proclivity for comfort stands in direct opposition to our desire to be used. I know most of you. I know a lot of you really well. And I know in your hearts more than anything you want to be used by God in this life for his kingdom. I know that you do. And what I want you to see this morning is that your desire for comfort stands in direct opposition to your desire to be used by God. God wants to use you in mighty ways. You are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. And I know you want to walk in those good works. But your desire for comfort almost more than anything else is what's keeping some of us from those. So here's where I would end with this simple question for you to consider as we move into a time of communion together. When is the last time you did anything at all that made you uncomfortable for the sake of the kingdom? When is the last time you made an intentional choice to allow yourself to be uncomfortable for the sake of the kingdom of God. This could be in a conversation that we know we need to have. This could be in a neighbor that we know we need to approach. This could be starting a small group that we know we need to start. Starting a ministry that we know we need to start. Volunteering with a place or with an area or in a team here where we know we need to do, we just haven't done it. This could mean broaching a subject with our spouse. This could mean taking the step to go into counseling and begin to let things tweak there so that we can do a little bit better for the people around us. This could mean what we give towards the kingdom of God. When's the last time our giving made us uncomfortable? When's the last time you intentionally chose to sacrifice your comfort for the sake of God's kingdom? And let me tell you this. I have never, ever talked to anyone who got towards the end of their life and said, gosh, you know what I regret? Just doing so much for Jesus. You know what, I think we gave too much. I think I did too much. I think I, here's what I've never heard. I should have made my life more about myself. Wish I would have. We have no idea what can happen when we begin to sacrifice this dearly held comfort for the sake of God's kingdom. And so I would simply ask you to consider as I pray and as we move into a time of communion, what is God pressing on your heart? Where is he asking you to sacrifice your comfort? I believe he's pressing something on each and every one of us. What conversation does he want you to have or action does he want you to take or invitation does he want you to extend or discipline does he want you to adopt or habit does he want you to give up? Where is God calling you to be uncomfortable? Let's pray. Dear God, thank you so much for sending your son who took on all of us and all of this and left behind all of that and all of you for our sake. God, we confess that we are slaves to comfort far more than we intended to be. That not being upset and not being rattled and not being stressed and not feeling uncomfortable in any way imaginable matters to us far more than we would have been willing to admit and perhaps more than we're still willing to admit. But Lord, in your gentle way, where you just navigate into our souls, will your spirit bring about the necessary conviction that you would have for us here? Help us to see with your eyes where we are choosing our comfort over you. And give us the courage, God, to choose you and to find out what happens on the other side of that choice. God, thank you for your patience with us. Thank you for your grace with us. Give us the strength to walk in the good works that you have planned for us and to set aside the comfort that keeps us from that so often. In Jesus' name, 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.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. I can't remember the last time I got up here and thought, gosh, I'm not sure how to follow those excellent announcements. But well done, Haley. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to put her on staff. We will pay you $25 a week. As Haley mentioned, this is the second part of our series called The Treasury of Isaiah, where we're diving into the very rich Old Testament book of prophecy called Isaiah written by the prophet Isaiah. Last week, we started in Isaiah chapter one, and it really wasn't like an introductory sermon in the sense of acquainting you with the book of Isaiah. So that's what we're going to try to do this week. This week probably should have been week 1 of the series, but if I started Isaiah and didn't preach to you out of that passage last week, my little head was going to explode. So I had to do it. Last week I was preaching. This week I'm going to be teaching. It's going to be a little different because we want to do an overview of Isaiah. And I want to take some time on the front end this morning to make sure that you guys understand what a prophet is, the role of a prophet, how the books of the prophets fit into the Old Testament and the Bible narrative. So up front, we're going to spend probably eight or nine minutes just understanding what this is, and then we're going to get into the overall message of the book of Isaiah as it presents Christ to the people of Israel. So we'll kind of march down that path today. The first thing I wanted to talk about with kind of an overview of the idea of prophecy is the idea of a prophet. Because I think that many of us who are maybe haven't been exposed to a deeper study of them, just hear the word prophet or prophecy and just think about some guru making guesses about the future. Somebody's been given a vision and they're going to tell us what's going to happen in the future. This is what a prophet does. A prophet tells the future. It's kind of how we think about them. And a prophecy is something that tells the future. Prophesize what the future is going to be. And this is in part true, but a vast majority of the prophecy that we have in the Bible is not that. It's not projecting forward years and years and years. And the role of a prophet is not to tell the future. Somebody mentioned this to me years ago, I think in one of my seminary courses, and I found it to be a very helpful phrase and it's in your notes. Here's the role of a prophet. A prophet has an ear to God and a mouth to the people. A prophet listens to God and delivers that message to God's people. And sometimes that's a prophecy about what's going to happen in the distant future. And that's what we're going to look at today. Isaiah and his messianic prophecies, his prophecies about Jesus in the very far future, hundreds of years away. But 85%, if not more, of the prophecy that we have in the Bible is prophets warning the people of Israel, the children of God, what's going to happen if they don't get right. It's very rare that a prophet is called upon to give good news. It's kind of the cruddy part about being a prophet. Prophets are not gurus and seers that tell the future. Prophets are cantankerous, grumpy old men who tell it like it is and just don't mind telling the truth and not being liked for it. That's what a prophet is. And they have a very specific role in God's kingdom. And as a matter of fact, to show you how hard it is to be a prophet, particularly in the Old Testament, we can look at Jeremiah. Jeremiah is referred to as the weeping prophet. He wrote the book of Lamentations, the saddest book in the Bible. It's just all sad. It's all bad. There's one verse in there of hope. And we actually preached about that in Great is Thy Faithfulness in the songs we sing. The book of Lamentations is very sad. And Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet because his entire life, God gave him a message and no one listened to him. People stopped showing up. They told him to shut up. We don't want to hear it. We're tired of it, Jeremiah. Jeremiah's like, if you don't get right, the path you're on is not good. It's going to lead to destruction. And nobody's listening to him. Nobody wants to hear him. Nobody believes him. And so not only does he spend his whole life ostracized and pushed to the fringes of society with no friends and nobody likes him, but also he has to watch this slowly sinking ship of Israel fade into oblivion. He knows destruction is coming and they will not listen to him to try to stop it. That's the life of Jeremiah. Because what prophets have to say is almost always negative, is almost always a warning. It's almost always God kind of grabbing Israel by the scruff of, by their collar and shaking them trying to get their attention. It's very much what it sounded like last week in the first group of verses that we read. That's typically what prophecy sounds like. Because those messages are so hard, for many believers, the books of prophecy are difficult and unapproachable. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but I bet if we did, the percentage of people in this room who can honestly say you've read all of the books of prophecy in the Bible, all the major prophets and all the minor prophets, would be pretty slim. This represents, for many believers, kind of a gap in our biblical knowledge. So to that end, I just wanted to try to demystify it a little bit for us and make it more approachable and maybe encourage some of you to introduce this into your studies. But here's, there's 17 books of prophecy in the Old Testament. There's five major prophets and there's 12 minor prophets. Now, don't answer out loud, but in your head, what's the difference between a major prophet and a minor prophet? The length of the book. That's it. That's all it is. It's not import of message. It's not impact in the kingdom. It's just four dudes wrote five long books and 12 dudes wrote 12 short books. That's all it is. And we got real creative in how we titled that. now it's forevermore Major Prophets, Minor Prophets. The five major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The 12 minor prophets are Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Those are the 12 minor prophets. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, very much. There's actually, one of the reasons I did that is to be able to bring up, we're challenging the kids to learn all of the books of the Bible. And that's the trickiest section. Don't let anyone tell you different. That's the trickiest section. We're challenging them to learn all the books of the Bible. If they do, then they get to pie Miss Erin in the face. But some of them have mutinied and insist that it gets to be me. So that could be in our near future, and I would very, very happily smile under the shaving cream and take the pie to the face, because I think that's a wonderful reason to do it. So if you have kids, talk to them about that, and if they're up for it, get them to do it. It's a really, really good endeavor. I don't want all of them to pine me in the face, but, you know, we'll do what we have to for Jesus. But those are the major and the minor prophets. And here's how they fit into the Old Testament. I want you to understand this. I know that this is academic, but I want you to understand your Bibles as you approach them. Okay, so Genesis through Esther is really the narrative portion of the Old Testament that's telling the story of the nation of Israel from beginning to end the books of the law are a little bit different Genesis Exodus Leviticus numbers in Deuteronomy the first five books those are a little bit different because there's they're not all narrative there's some details in there like the book of Leviticus that gives specifics about sacrifices and religious rites and things like that. And then Deuteronomy kind of repeats things. It means law repeated. So it's not all linear. But basically from Genesis to Esther is the linear story of the Old Testament, the story of the children of Israel. It reads like a novel. Every page you turn, you're progressing in the story. Then you get to the books of wisdom, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. The books of wisdom are exactly what they sound like. They're just wisdom books. They're nestled right there in the middle of the Bible, and they offer good wisdom. And you really don't need a lot of context to appreciate what's in those books. The context does help, particularly in the Psalms. Then after that, you move into the prophets, the major prophets and the minor prophets. And those, this group of prophets fits back over the narrative story and just offers different details of different portions of the story that's told in the Old Testament. And while we're here, 1 and 2 Chronicles is basically a retelling of 1 and 2 Kings from a different perspective. Now you know your Old Testament. For those of you who have never taken the dive into the minor prophets, and you want to, a few years ago, it's more than a few now, I realized that I had a shameful gap in my knowledge of Scripture and wanted to tackle the minor prophets. And I was able to find a great commentary by, I think, Dale Ironside, that it's a one-volume commentary for all of the minor prophets. So if that's something that, if you're a sicko and you want to dive into that, do it and email me and I'll get you the book or you can borrow mine. It's a great way to study the minor prophets. So that's what a prophet is, ear to God, mouth to the people. Those are the books of prophecy in the Old Testament. That's where they sit and how they relate to the rest of your Bible. Now what I want to do is look at the book of Isaiah and look at an overview of the messianic prophecy within the book of Isaiah. So we can ask the question, who is the Savior that Isaiah presents to God's people? And it's appropriate to do this with Isaiah because depending on who you ask or AKA what you Google, there is no book more quoted in the New Testament than the book of Isaiah. Some people say Psalms, some scholars say Isaiah, but it's up there in how often it's quoted. And there is no book of the, there's no prophetic book that's more quoted in the New Testament. And there's no books of prophecy that contain more messianic prophecies than Isaiah. So it's right and good as we camp out in the book of Isaiah to look at how he portrays our Savior. So he does this kind of in three different ways. Isaiah portrays Jesus as king, servant, and conqueror. And for my overachievers who like to take extra notes, he portrays him as a king in chapters 1 through 37, a servant in chapters 38 through 55, and a conqueror in chapters 56 through 66. So it kind of follows this flow. So what I want to do is look at some highlight passages within each of those groups of chapters to show how Isaiah portrays Jesus in this way, the words that he uses to do it to familiarize us with some of the prophecies. And then I want to ask, what's that role mean and how should we respond to it? So the first way that he does it, the first half, a little bit more than half of the book, is he portrays Jesus as a king. And maybe the most well-known passage that does this is in Isaiah 9, verses on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. So this is Jesus being portrayed as a king. He's going to sit on David's throne. He's going to rule forever. Wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. Isaiah is laying out for us that he is going to be the king of the universe. And it's difficult reading this when it's so very clear he is going to reign forever, how the Hebrew people, how the Israelites could have construed that to mean, oh, he's going to sit on David's throne and he's going to reign in Israel. It's going to be an earthly kingdom. But that's what they thought. But here, very clearly, he's coming to reestablish David's throne and to rule an eternal kingdom that will last forever. And this is a famous prophecy that we see a lot, like I said, particularly around Christmas time. I'm toying around with the idea. Jen mentioned it to me, and usually Jen's ideas are pretty good. Our Christmas series may be based entirely out of this passage where we look at a wonderful counselor. So we look at the adjective, and then we look at the title, and we talk about why those things are important. So it might be those four things, wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. This might be our Christmas series, but in it and in the first 37 chapters, Jesus is portrayed as a king. And so it's worthwhile to ask, what does a king do? What's the role of a king? Well, a king historically rules and protects. That's what they do. If you've read your history books, if you like learning about that stuff like I do, what you find over and over and over again played out in all of mankind and all of history is that a king rules over people and promises to protect them. So in exchange for the king's protection, I offer my fealty. I will now serve you because you are the king. I will submit to you because you are the king. And you rule over me, so I accept that rule. And in my submission, in my servanthood, and in exchange, you protect me. And so this is what Jesus does as he sits on the throne. We allow him to be the Lord of our life. He rules over us and he protects us. Now we can't misconstrue that and make that let us think that he protects us from all bad things, from all hurt and all pain. We know experientially that's not true, but he does protect us from the schemes of the devil, and he does come to rescue us, and he is building an eternity for us in which we will be protected for the rest of time. So a king rules and protects, and in exchange, we offer our service and our servanthood. Now, here's's wonderful about our king is he's also servant. We see this in Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 is probably the most famous passage of prophecy in the Bible. I'm going to read verses 3 through 6. yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. And the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. In this middle section of the book, Isaiah prophesies about the coming Messiah, portraying him as a servant. This is the remarkable thing about Jesus. Because he is the Prince of Peace. He is the Lord of Lords. He is the King of Kings. He is Almighty God. And he does not have to humble himself to serve us and yet he does, yet he chooses to. We see him when he condescends and takes on human form. When he gives up his God form and he takes on our human flesh. And he comes down here and he literally washes our feet. In the series that we just got done with on the Upper Room Discourse called Final Thoughts, we talked one week about how he washed the feet of his betrayer so that he could go take his payment with clean toes. Jesus did this. He serves us in this way. And this is the role of what a servant does. And we think, why is it important to know that Jesus is a servant? Well, a servant loves and provides. A servant loves you and provides you, provides for you. If you're serving someone else, you're loving them in that moment and you're providing something for them in that moment that they need. And the remarkable thing about the servanthood of Christ is that he doesn't have to do it. You understand that? He doesn't owe you service. He condescends to serve you. And there's something powerful about that kind of service. I think service is most compelling when it is inverted. Service is most compelling when it is inverted. Service is most compelling when the person offering the servanthood has nothing compelling them to do that and nothing to gain from that servanthood. And the person receiving the service has no right to that service. And no one looking on would assume that they were going to get that service. And so we invert our roles. The best example I think I've ever seen of this is my late father-in-law, John Vinson. John was a remarkable man, and stories about him would leak out all the time, because you could never get him to tell you what he did and what was going on. But after, in retirement, they bought a house in a neighborhood called the Georgia Club outside of Athens, Georgia. And that club, he spent his career as a senior VP for Bell South and then AT&T. And so when he got done, they moved out to the Georgia Club. It's a gated community with a golf course and sidewalks, and it's a peaceful little place. And when you live in the Georgia Club, you don't have to cut your own grass. It's one of those places. HOAs are probably sky high, but a crew comes through and they buzz your Bermuda once a week, so you don't have to fool with it, right? So I would go over there from time to time. Sometimes we'd play around a golf with John. Sometimes I'm going over with Jen just to visit or whatever. And sometimes there'd be this white cooler on his front sidewalk. And we couldn't figure out, John, why is that cooler out there? And he'd go, I just left it. And we'd be like, do you want me to get it? No, it's fine. And you'd go out there and look in it. And there was Gatorade and water and fruit and snacks and ice and we couldn't get out of him what it was he wasn't a man of many words and he wasn't the kind of guy you wrestled to the ground to pin down stuff while you just let him be but we figured it out that that cooler miraculously appeared when it was the day for his yard to get mowed and what he was doing every week for the crew that was coming around is providing them with Gatorade and water and fruit and snacks. He wasn't telling anybody about them. He didn't have to do that at all. That's just how he wanted to serve those guys. We found out after his career that there was some parking attendants and security guards that AT&T had hired to monitor its executive parking garage. And John learned the names and birthdays of those guys and on their birthday would bring them a dozen donuts, tell them happy birthday and hand them a little card with a gift card in there. He didn't have to do that, but he did. Another time, he was getting his car worked on, and he was talking to this young mechanic. And the young mechanic was sharing with John excitedly that he had just saved up enough and ordered this dream motorcycle that he had always wanted. And John thought that was great. So the next day, John shows back up at the garage with two of the best motorcycle riding gloves he could find that he knew would match the motorcycle that the kid was getting because he had told him about it. The last one I'll tell you, I think I've shared this before. One year, Jen and I bought John a nice North Face fleece for Christmas. And when you're in your mid-20s and you're both working in ministry and you're poor, a $95 North Face fleece is a big deal. Like this is, we love you, right? So we, everybody else got like a $20 Christmas gift that year so we could give John the $100 fleece. So we give him the fleece. And over the course of the winter, we realized this fleece is really not making any appearances. We don't, did he hate it? Did he not like it? And finally, Jen was so hurt that he didn't like it. And we gave it to him and yada, yada, yada, that he admitted that he was driving down the road one day. And it was a particularly cold day. It was sub-free freezing. And he looked on the side of the road. There was one of those sign spinners and the sign spinner was just wearing a long sleeve t-shirt. And John thought he must be cold. So he pulls over, gets out of his car, takes off the fleece, hands it to him and said, you're going to need this a lot more than me. And gets back in his car and keeps driving down the road. Let me tell you something about that kind of humility and servanthood. Those small actions resound and ripple for eternity. I went to that man's funeral, and it was an outpouring of service like that. It was an outpouring of this inverted servanthood where he had spent a lifetime serving people he did not have to serve. Whenever I would go over to his house, he would have Andy Griffith on the TV 100% of the time. I don't know how he found that many episodes. And whenever I would go in, he would immediately change it to whatever sport was on. Even if I didn't want to watch that sport. He just knew I liked sports. So he would always change it. And I'd beg him not to do that, and he would insist on doing that. And when we had his funeral, the church was filled with hundreds of people that John had quietly and faithfully served for his whole life. So when we see the service of Jesus, the king who chooses to serve us, the correct response that we should have is to serve others as Jesus serves us. It's Isaiah's way of preaching Jesus's new command in the upper room discourse what's the new command that the disciples were given in John chapter 13 go and love others as I have loved you the Isaiah preaches that exact same message he just says it this way go and serve others as Jesus has served you go and offer Jesus type service to people who don't deserve your service. Go be a humble servant to everyone you meet. And let's be honest about this, Grace. In this room, we have an unusual concentration of people who have opportunities to invert that service and to serve people around you who probably don't think they deserve your service. To serve people around you that you have nothing to benefit from by serving them. When someone is on a lower echelon in life, experience, wealth, position within a company, whatever, and they serve someone higher, that's natural, that makes sense. But when someone higher serves someone lower, those kinds of acts push people towards Christ. Those kinds of acts change minds and change lives. And we have the opportunity to do that. So I'd love to challenge you through the book of Isaiah to think about the people in your life you might serve more. Or better. Or differently. Let's not look for the opportunities to be served. Let's be like our good and gracious king and look for opportunities to serve. And as we do that. As we serve like our king, we wait on our conqueror. This is how Isaiah finishes up his book in chapters 56 to 66. And we have two verses that I want to look at. The first is Isaiah 56 verse 1. This is what the Lord says, maintain justice and do what right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed. So he's like, hang in there, keep doing justice, keep serving people, keep flipping things on its head, serve the oppressed, because my righteousness is coming. My salvation is coming. It will be revealed. There is something that's going to happen at the end of this. And then we get a little bit clearer picture over in 62 verses 11 and 12. The Lord has made proclamation to the ends of the earth. Say to daughter Zion, see your savior comes. See his reward is with him and his recompense accompanies him. They will be called the holy people, the redeemer of the Lord, and you will be called sought after and the city no longer deserted. The end of Isaiah, Jesus is portrayed as a conqueror. My salvation is coming. My righteousness is coming. Recompense for evil is coming. And the city will be conquered, and it will not be called deserted. And see, here's why it's important to see Jesus through these lenses of Isaiah, particularly Jesus as conqueror. Because a conqueror presses forward and the scales of justice tilt in his favor. A conqueror presses forward and the scales of justice tilt in his favor. Now here's what I mean. A conqueror does not sit back. A conqueror does not establish defensive lines and erect bulwarks. That's not what a conqueror does. A conqueror doesn't think about defensive postures and keeping things out. No, a conqueror presses forward. A conqueror goes to get. A conqueror goes to claim. Jesus, we understand, is on the move. Jesus is pressing forward. And when people have conquered in history, you can look through history. When people conquer, they write the history books. The scales of justice tilt in their favor, rightly or wrongly. I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying it's right when one group of people moves in and takes over a continent and then they get to write the history books about it. I'm not saying everything that happened was good and right and fair, but the scales of justice tilt in their favor because they write the history books. So when Jesus conquers, when he moves forward, he will tilt the scales of justice in his favor. And this is great news for us because it will be right and good and it will be fair. And when Jesus conquers, the only people who suffer are the people who deserve it. The only people who suffer are the ones who have not submitted to him. That's it. And then the scales of justice are tilted in the direction in which they should be tilted. They're tilted towards right and good and true. They're tilted towards Revelation 21 where the former things have passed away. And what's interesting to me as I look at this overview of Isaiah and we see Jesus as a king and a servant and a conqueror, is it's so similar and follows thematically that same refrain I remind you guys of so often, that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Which follows the pattern of Isaiah. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the king of the universe. He's divine. He's the king. Isaiah, Jesus is king. It's to believe that Jesus did what he said he did. He came as a servant and he suffered for us just as Isaiah said he would. And then he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come and conquer sin and death and shame for you. And he's going to claim you and take you back to the perfect future where he will protect you. It follows that refrain that I offer you guys of explaining salvation follows exactly the message of Isaiah. When things sync up like that, I just kind of think, God, you're pretty neat in the way that those things get drawn out. And so what we do in light of this, in light of this overarching picture of Jesus through the lens of Isaiah, and I wrote this down because I wanted to get it right. As we wait on our conqueror, we submit to our king by serving like our savior. As we sit in the here and now, we wait on our conqueror. He is going to come claim us. As we wait on him, we submit to our king. And we submit to our king by serving others like our savior served us. And in that service, we will build up this kingdom and draw more people to our Jesus. And I think that's what we can take away from the message of Jesus in the book of Isaiah. As we wait on our conqueror, we submit to our king by serving like our savior. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your prophets. Thank you for the men and women who have been submitted to lives of being ostracized, being ignored, being disliked, being relegated to the fringes because they had to say hard things on your behalf. Thank you for their courage and for their bravery and for their example and for leaving us a record of what they've said. God, I pray that we would continue to learn from your servant Isaiah, that what he says and what we discuss would push us closer to you. And God, I pray that you would give us eyes to see this week that we might serve other people as you've served us. Give us opportunities to serve people who don't expect our service, Lord, and in so doing, would they see a little bit of Jesus in us? And would we bring people into your kingdom as we go through our lives serving others as you served us? It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.