Sermons tagged with Crucifixion

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

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week, Joseph's story reached its incredible conclusion in an emotional reunion with his brothers. Now we reflect on everything that happened in Joseph's life and all we have discussed in previous weeks. We will marvel at the sweeping and stunning sovereignty of God as we ask together what it means for us today to continue to believe that He has a plan. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. If we haven't gotten the chance to meet, I'd love to meet you afterwards between the service and the meeting that I have to go to, but I'd still love to meet you afterwards. If you're watching online, thank you for doing that. If you're catching up during the week, we are grateful that you are doing that as well. This is the last part of our series in Joseph, going through the life of Joseph, and I hope that you guys have enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed kind of diving into the story and getting to preach it every week. I love the stories of the Old Testament. I love trying to help them come to life and taking time to go through them and see that there's really so much there for us to learn from that points to things that are relevant to us today. Just for my own curiosity, by show of hands, those of you who have heard most of these sermons and been in here or watched online for most of these sermons and seen the bumper videos, how many of you have picked up on the fact that it changes every week, that there's different words being said every week? Not very many of you. Some of you are like, wait, what? Yeah, we rewrite them every week to catch you up with the story. And we were joking as a staff, wondering if anybody knew that we were actually doing that. And my bet was no, and I was mostly right. So there we have it. We're not doing that for you ever again. We're just going to make the same bumper videos. And you're just going to have to be stuck with them. So sorry. As we finish this week, I'll remind you that last week, we really, we reached the end of the story, right? We reached the end of the narrative. We had moved all the way through, and Joseph was finally reunited with his brothers. His father was told that Joseph was alive. Jacob was told that Joseph was alive, and he was going to go down and meet him. And he looked, and he said, when he saw all the workings of God, he said, it is enough. And we kind of talked about the profundity of that phrase and everything behind it. And so the whole time that we've been moving through, I've been saying, this is really one big long seven week sermon. And so this is the part of that long sermon where we reflect on all the things that we just learned and saw. And it just occurred to me, I'm going to have to take my watch off. The Falcons are about to start playing, which means my friends are going to be texting like crazy. It just went off and something happened in the game already. This is actually why I had this installed. I'm watching the game as I preach there this morning. That's not true. And that joke was given to me by Kyle before the service. So thank you, Kyle. It worked great. Everybody seemed to love it. Yeah, it was very good. It's very good. Part seven. This is the part where we watch and reflect on all that we've learned. And we ask, what does this mean for us? What's the overarching point of the story of Joseph? Not just what do we see when we drill down into the individual details, but as we move through the whole story, what is it that we learn and how does that impact us? And that, to me, what we learn from the entire story of Joseph is probably my favorite thing about the story. As it was said in the intro video there, that this is the most sweeping and stunning depiction of the sovereignty of God, I think, that we find in the Bible outside of Jesus himself. And so I want us to see the story of Joseph the way that I look at it and see it now. To help us do that, we first look at this summary verse from Joseph. This is in Genesis chapter 50. The family has moved down. Pharaoh has given them the land of Goshen. That's where they're living. And Jacob's life is coming to an end. Their dad is about to die. The brother's father is about to die. And the brothers kind of start to murmur and realize, hmm, dad's about to pass away. And when he does, the gig may be up. Joseph may still be mad at us. He may still be harboring some anger against us. So there's a chance that once dad dies, he's going to let Benjamin stay alive and he's going to kill us for revenge. And Joseph catches wind of this thought. So he calls the brothers to him and to ally their fears, to help them just relax and know that he has nothing sinister planned. Joseph says this in Genesis chapter 50, verse 20 to his brothers. And this is a great summary verse that many of us have probably heard before. He says this, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. Now, many of you probably heard that verse before. You meant it for evil, but you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. But I think put in its proper context, in this big narrative of the life of Joseph, to know exactly what his brothers did, that Joseph had those dreams and the brothers did exactly the exact opposite of those dreams and sold him into slavery and they meant it for evil. But Joseph, now presumably 20 years later, knows that that was God working and that God meant it for good. So for Joseph to say that, what does he mean? How does he know that God meant it for good? How does he see God's plan come to fruition? What are the layers behind God meaning it for good? And all of the implications of the story of Joseph and what kind of plan and for whom was God weaving it exactly? And so to do that and to think through really all the repercussions of the plan that God had for Joseph throughout his life and the story that we just looked at, I want you guys to think about something with me. This is going to be handy for me to use as we go throughout the sermon today to kind of refer back to this. But I don't want you guys to take out your phones because then you might just stay there and I'll get real discouraged. But think about looking at your map on your phone or on your computer. You pull up Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever it is you use, and you zoom in on one particular property. Maybe it's your property. That's all you can see on the screen is just your house. And then imagine pinching it or zooming back or whatever it is and pulling back, and now you can see most of the city. You can see where your property sits in relation to the rest of the city. You can see the streets that surround your community, the different shops and restaurants and different things and schools that are in your community, and you kind of realize that your house exists within the broader context of this community, and then zoom way out until you can see the whole country. And realize that this one house exists in this community, which exists within this country. And you could zoom in on any different portion of the country and find your own community, find a different community. And then within those communities, you can find your own house or another individual house. So it's kind of the same idea that's working on three levels, right? At the home, and then at the community level, and then at the country level. And I bring that up because I think it's helpful to think of Joseph's story as a home within a community, within a country. I think there are layered truths to the story of Joseph and layered evidences of God's plan. And here's what I mean. When we read the story of Joseph, we've said all along, he has a plan, he has a plan, he has a plan. Each one of the voiceovers that we wrote for the videos ended with the phrase, he has a plan. He has a plan. Each one of the voiceovers that we wrote for the videos ended with the phrase, he has a plan. Each week we leave ourselves in a place where Joseph has to choose to continue to cling to the belief that God has a plan. And so this week, I want us to see the multifaceted levels of that plan. So the first one is God has a plan for his child. What do we see when we look at the story of Joseph? We see that God has a plan for his child. God has a plan for Joseph as an individual. God gave him those dreams when he was young. He said, your brothers and your mom and your dad are going to bow down to you one day. God knew that in his arrogance, he was going to go tell his brothers. He knew that in that arrogance, he was going to get thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. And God knew that he needed to plant Joseph for Joseph's own sake, that he needed to be associated with Pharaoh. But if you go back through the whole story, there's no way to get a nomad from Canaan into the court of Pharaoh in Egypt. So how's he going to do that? So God enacts a plan. And part of that plan is to let Joseph be a snot-nosed brat so that his brothers don't like him. And then they throw him into the pit. And they're going to kill him. But Reuben whispers, maybe let's not do this. Maybe let's just sell him into slavery. I don't know this or not. This is total conjecture. But what do you think are the chances that the Holy Spirit whispered into the ear of Reuben, hey, why don't you sell him into slavery instead? What do you think are the chances that God was present in that moment to change the mind of his brothers to what he needed them to do? His chances are pretty good, personally. He sells them into slavery, the exact opposite of the dreams that he was given. How could this possibly be the case? He's been promised that this is going to happen. He's been promised, he's claiming the promises of his great-grandfather Abraham that were passed down through his grandfather Isaac, through his father Jacob, and now bestowed onto him as the firstborn son of his beloved wife. Joseph is going to live out all of these things, except now he's in the back of an ox cart on the way to Egypt, and it feels like none of those things are going to come true. But God was working in the details of that plan. God sent him down there. He gets down there. He's still got to get him associated with Pharaoh. How's he going to do that? Well, he gets bought by Potiphar, a royal servant. So that when Potiphar's wife would eventually accuse Joseph of sexual harassment falsely, and he gets falsely imprisoned, he doesn't end up in the general population prison. No, he ends up in the royal prison with royal prisoners who are associated with Pharaoh this whole time. Even though it doesn't look like that the dreams are going to come true, even though it doesn't seem like God is with Joseph this whole time, God is working his plan and his child. He interacts with the cupbearer. The cupbearer goes to Pharaoh two years after that interaction. He's swept up into Pharaoh's court. He's put where he needs to be. He's got the preparation that he needs. He's had time to age and mature. He's got experience and leadership already when he rises to prominence in jail and when he rose to prominence at Potiphar's house. And now he's ready to step into his role as the secretary of agriculture for the most powerful nation in the world. Number two in command right behind Pharaoh. He's done this before. He's interpreted the dreams before. He was ready for his moment. And this whole time, God has been working his plan. Do you see? To get Joseph into that place. That was his plan for his child. And throughout the whole plan, there was plenty of circumstances where Joseph could look around and say, God, this plan ain't working, man. The things that are happening in my life are not what I expected based on the plan that you gave me. So we just had to trust that God had one. And so we see this whole time that God has a plan for his child. And we talked about when he rose to prominence last week, I said, the story could end here. When he's in charge, he's got his sons. He names them Manasseh and Ephraim. And it means the Lord has provided it for me in my time of trial. Like that story could have been done there. It's good. It's done. But the story is about more than God's child because God has a plan for his children. Joseph is the house. He's the child. But if you zoom out, you see that God has a plan for his children, for his community, for his people. God has a plan for Joseph's family. Last week, we saw in the verses, we saw in the passage a couple of verses where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and he says, don't worry, I'm not angry at you. You intended this for evil, but what you think you're the one who sent me here, it wasn't you, it was God. And he sent me here to preserve many lives. And so what we also see, this kind of pulled back layer of the story, is that God wasn't just preserving the life of Joseph to get him where he needed him to be, but he needed Joseph to be there because he needed to protect his children. He needed to protect his people. He needed to protect the offspring of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Because we learned in week one, God made promises to Jacob and God's commitment to his promises are not contingent upon our behavior. Remember? And so God made a promise to Abraham that you're going to have the land of Canaan. You're going to have so many descendants, it's going to be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. And you're going to have one descendant that's going to come and bless the whole earth. That's the plan. And so God keeps his promise to Abraham. He gives him a son, Isaac. He keeps his promise to Abraham through Isaac, giving him a son. He keeps his promise to Jacob by showing him favor until Jacob finally realizes you've been wrestling against God your whole life. Just relax and enjoy God's favor. Joseph figures out to enjoy God's favor, even when it doesn't make any sense. And he looks around and the plan doesn't make any sense. He's just hanging in there and trusting that God has a plan. And now God's put him in this place where he can provide for everybody. And the whole time he's not just doing it to provide for Joseph. God is doing it, I think, because he knows the descendants of Abraham will not survive a seven-year drought in the land of Canaan. They can't do it. When the brothers came asking for grain the second time, they were in year two of the famine. Now this is conjecture. I don't know this for sure. But when are they going to run out of money to feed a small clan of people? When are they going to start? How many more trips to Egypt can the brothers make before they have to start choosing who gets grain when they get home and who doesn't? They have no idea the famine is going to last seven years. They've probably got a year or two left before they've got to start asking some really hard questions questions because if there's nothing growing on the ground, then there's nothing that their flocks can eat. And if there's nothing that their flocks can eat, then they have no way to make money. And if they have no way to make money and there's nothing on the ground and they have no flocks left for them to eat, then what are they going to do but perish? So God, to protect his children, not his child, his children, takes one of his children and places him in a place where he can, according to Joseph, preserve many lives. And so in the story is God keeping his promise to Abraham and preserving the promise to the community, preserving the promise to his children to keep them where he needs them to be. They are brought down, put in one of the most fertile places in Egypt, the land of Goshen, and they are told to live there and flourish there. So when we pull back from just Joseph, we realize that God was working a plan for his children this whole time too, for all of Joseph's family. The brothers had no idea that they were part of this plan, but they were. They were just pawns in what God was doing. Then you pull back even further at the kingdom view, and you realize that God has a plan for his kingdom. What he's working in the life of Joseph, those individual details and the ebbs and flows that we've followed over the last several weeks, he's not just working for Joseph's benefit. He's not just working for his children's benefit. He's working for his kingdom's benefit. We're in Genesis 50 this morning. When you flip the page to Exodus chapter one, what do you learn? You learn that 400 years after Joseph had passed away and Pharaoh had forgotten about them, Moses is on the scene. That's how the stories are linked together. And by the time Moses comes on the scene in Exodus chapter 1, theologians believe that there was between 500,000 and 600,000 Hebrew people living in Egypt as slaves. I have to believe that for some reason, God didn't believe that this family from Abraham was going to make it in the land of Canaan on their own. He had to believe that there was no way they were going to grow to what they needed to be to be able to conquer the land of Canaan and possess the kingdom that he had promised them that they would possess. So what does he do? He takes his children down to the most powerful nation in the world and he incubates them for 400 years where they can grow and develop culture and develop a faith and develop a way that they interact with their God so that when Moses comes on the scene, who by the way, another stunning view of God's sovereignty, God plucks Moses out of Hebrew slavery and puts him in the palace of Pharaoh where he gets the best education in the world. He's exposed to leadership his whole life. He grows up, he's haughty, he goes out into the wilderness and gets humbled, and then he's called in Exodus 3 and 4 back to Pharaoh from the burning bush to go lead his people out into Canaan because now they are finally ready to go live where I want them to live. None of that happens if Joseph isn't sold into slavery when he's 17 years old. None of that happens if Potiphar's wife doesn't falsely accuse him. None of that happens if Joseph doesn't get chosen to go interpret the dream for Pharaoh. None of that happens if Joseph isn't placed as second in command to help preserve the line and bring them down and incubate them. God is planning things on such a bigger scale than Joseph would ever acknowledge or imagine. And so we go from the house to the city to the nation where God's really enacting his plan. We've been saying this whole time, he has a plan, he has a plan, he has a plan. And we've been spending most of our time focused on his plan for Joseph and what it means for him. But as we finish the story, we need to peel back and say, what does it mean for God's children? And then we pull back even more and say, what does it mean for God's kingdom? What is it that he's doing on this huge eternal scale that he's enacting through the life of Joseph? And suddenly we begin to see God's sovereignty woven all throughout the story, understanding that he's in every detail, that he's allowing and disallowing all the different things to bring about the future that he once brought about. And the great part of Joseph's story and seeing God's plan on that scale is realizing that if God has a plan for Joseph, that he has a plan for us. If God had a plan for his children then, then he has a plan for his children now. If God had a plan for his kingdom then, he has a plan for his kingdom now and still. And as Christians, and this is the great part, this is the part that I want us to sink into. As Christians, we have to understand that we are still in the land between, right in the middle of God's plan. We slowed down and we looked at one phrase that Doug did such a fantastic job with, the fact that Joseph had to wait in prison for two years and that land between promise and fulfillment and the already and the not yet. And God, I know that you told me that this would be true, but it's not true yet. And so I wait on you. If you are a Christian, that is where you are. And the promise that Jesus died on the cross for you and that one day he's gonna come back and get you. That's where we find ourselves, in that land between, in that land between promise and fulfillment. All Christians live there. And we cling to the truth and to the promise that God still has a plan. And his plan, by the way, is, was, and will always be Jesus. That's his plan. That's what we cling to. As a matter of fact, what I would tell you is that the story of Joseph ultimately points us to Jesus. It's the whole reason that it's there. I've just been waiting for six weeks to build it up so that we could point ourselves collectively to Jesus because he's God's plan. He was God's plan here in Genesis 50. He's God's plan in Matthew chapter one. He's God's plan in Revelation 19. Jesus is God's plan. And that's what we sit in the middle of. God's plan from the very beginning was to send a Messiah through the line of Abraham. We go all the way back to Genesis chapter 12. We get out of what's called the prehistoric narrative to kind of set up the story. Genesis 1 through 11 basically set up the story for us to focus on Abraham and hear the promises that God gives Abraham. And the promises are land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. All the way back in Genesis chapter 12, God knew what the plan was. And the plan was to establish a nation, establish a faith, let them come to the realization again and again and again that they desperately needed a king, they desperately needed a savior. The plan was to send Jesus in the flesh to live amongst us, to stay here for 33 years, to be crucified, to raise himself from the dead on the third day, conquering death and sin for all time and giving us a hope that we can cling to that Romans tells us will not put us to shame. That was the plan. And then one day, he's going to come back. And when he comes back, he's going to have righteous and true on his thigh, and he's going to take us home with him. That's the plan. It's always been the plan. It's what we cling to. And so right now, in this life, for a little while, Paul tells us, we will endure hardship. And right now, in this life, we're going to look around sometimes, like Joseph did on his way down to Egypt and go, God, this doesn't feel like the plan. None of my circumstances make any sense to me with what I thought I was promised. There's going to be times when, like Joseph, we're falsely accused and we're thrown in whatever version of prison awaits us. There's going to be times when we feel like God promised us something or that something's supposed to go our way and instead we're going to languish for two years waiting for that thing to happen. There's going to be times when the plan doesn't seem like it's going how it's supposed to go. And in those moments when the plan doesn't seem to be making much sense to us, it would help us to not be so focused on our own house and to take a step back and say, God, what are you working in the community around me right now? How is what I'm walking through affecting the children, your children that I'm around? How is it affecting my church? How is it affecting my community? What's the bigger thing going on here? And this is what I mean. Many of you guys know that part of mine and Jen's story is that we struggled for a long time to get pregnant. And then when we finally did, we lost our first child. We had a miscarriage. And at the time, here, looking at my house, God, how could you let this happen to us? We serve you, we love you, we do good things, we don't have secret sins. There's a bunch of people who are way worse than us and they're just like slipping and having children. We can't have any. That's not fair, God. But then I pull back and I look at the community. And what God knew that I didn't is that I was going to be the pastor for a lot of people who struggle with infertility. And he knew that it was going to make me a much better pastor to be able to mourn with them and hope with them and pray with them. He knew that Jen was going to have the opportunity to comfort a lot of women along the way. And so it was a hard part of our plan, but I think it was absolutely a part of God's plan. On another level, I believe that one of the reasons that it took us so long to have children, and now I'm going to be in retirement when John graduates from college. I believe that one of the reasons that it took us so long and that we are older parents with younger kids is because I think that he knew where we were going to be and what we were going to do. And he wanted us to have children of a certain age so that they would make friends with children of that age so that we would have friends of a certain age so that he could build a community with us and for us. I think it all works. Now, do I pretend to know where God is interjecting himself and diverting our plan towards a particular path that we might not see the end of and when it just really is coincidental and then God's working within those circumstances to bring about his goodness and our joy. No, I don't know how to tell you the difference between those things and when they're happening. But I know that God has a plan. And I know that sometimes we have a hard time seeing it because we're so focused here that we can't pull back to here and see what's going on in our community. And then when that still doesn't make any sense, we pull back to the eternal view. And we trust that God still has a plan. That one day Jesus is going to come back. And he's going to restore creation to itself. This is what Romans 8 tells us, that all of creation groans with the beginnings of birth pains for the return of the king, that creation groans, that when someone gets cancer, that's creation groaning. When abuse happens, when divorce happens, when we lose a loved one too early, when things happen that don't make sense, when we see a school shooting, that's creation groaning. That's our very nature saying, God, this isn't how it's supposed to be. And God is in heaven and he says, I know. And I'm coming. And until I do, just trust me. Trust that I have a plan. This trust is the fundamental Christian trust. That even when things don't make sense, even when we don't understand them, even when we can't explain our faith, we still choose it. Because we trust that our hope will not be put to shame and we trust that Jesus is going to do what he said he would do. That trust in Jesus is the fundamental Christian trust. And what we know and what's amazing about our Jesus is that at every level of the plan he is working. He's working in his child. He is working in his children. He is working in his kingdom. He's working in his child and that he's near us. In John 11, it says that Jesus weeps with us. He's working for his children. In Romans 8, where it says that Jesus is the high priest, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. And it says that again in the Hebrews. He's working for his children and then he's working for his kingdom when he's waiting for God to say, yeah, now's the time. And he comes back and he gets us. And he delivers us into that sweet moment in Revelation 21 where it says that God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping, no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. That's the plan to get us to that moment. And your job is to take as many people as you can with you as you go to that moment. And your job is even when I don't, I look around and I'm on an ox cart on my way to be a slave and none of this makes sense. It's to still hold fast and hold firm and hold true and steady to Jesus, trusting that Jesus is God's plan. And if I just cling to this, even when I don't understand it, that one day it'll all make sense to me. That when we get to heaven, we'll look around at everything and we'll go, yeah, this was a good plan. And we'll be very glad that we clung to it. That's the story of Joseph. The story of Joseph points us to that plan. I hope that you'll go back and read it. That you'll read it again thinking about the layers and see different details that you didn't see before. I hope that you'll never think of Joseph the same way you did before we started this series seven weeks ago. And here's the really fun part about where we end this series talking about God still having a plan and that we sit in the middle of it and we are awaiting the fulfillment of that plan. You know the very next thing we're talking about? The end of the plan. Revelation starts next week, where we skip to the last chapter of the book, and we find out how it ends so we don't have to be so stressed about the middle part. And it's just pretty cool to me how even as I sit up here and I say every week, God has a plan, God has a plan, God has a plan, that I believe his plan was to weave these two stories of Joseph and then the account of Revelation together to prepare our hearts for what we're going to begin to dive into next week. I hope that you'll come back for that. I'm very excited to share Revelation with you guys and for us to walk through that as a church. And as we finish up this story, I hope that you'll never, ever read Joseph the same way again. And then I'm going to pray. I'm going to pray and we're going to have communion. And I'm excited about doing communion together with you guys in light of what we just covered. And I'll tell you why in a second. Let's pray. Father, you have a plan. You have a plan for your child, for your children, for your kingdom. We are grateful to sit in the middle of that. God, if there is anyone here who does not have the hope of that plan, who does not have the hope of a coming Savior to rescue them, would they place their hope in you just this morning? Would they cling to that hope and never let go? God, for those of us who look around and feel like maybe our circumstances don't really line up with our expectations, would you give us the strength and the faith and the courage to cling to you and to cling to your plan and to trust it? God, I pray for our church family as we go throughout our weeks. I pray that you would draw us near to you, that we would hear your spirit speaking to us, that we would feel moved and directed and guided by you, that we would have a heightened sensitivity to your timing and to your plan and be grateful that we are a part of it. Help us to be more obedient followers of you. In Jesus' name, amen.

My name is Nate. Thanks for joining us online. If you're watching online, thank you for joining us in person here on this Palm Sunday. As we anticipate Easter, I'm already seeing some Easter colors sneak out of the closets and into the church. This is fantastic. I see a Master's shirt over here. That is where my heart is at. The heart in the spring is with the Masters and is on Easter. So all things good are heading our way. This is the fourth part in our series called Greater, where we're moving through the book of Hebrews together. For some context, you'll remember that Hebrews is written to the Hellenistic Jews outside of Israel. So it's written to a group of people who grew up outside of Israel in a Greek context in one of the different surrounding cities and the surrounding countries. And they grew up as practicing Jews. They practiced Judaism and somewhere in their adult life, likely, converted to Christianity, heard the good news of Jesus, heard of the recent crucifixion and resurrection of this man who was the Messiah, the Savior, and then converted to this new faith later in life. And in this new faith, they're facing tremendous persecution from without and within, right? I've reminded you of that every week. They're facing persecution from the Roman government, who is violently opposing their faith. And so they're putting their safety and the safety of their family at risk by publicly professing their faith. And they're tempted to kind of fade away or shy back from that. And then they're facing persecution from within the Jewish community that's ostracizing them in their new faith and trying to woo or coax them back to their old faith of Judaism, not yet understanding that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Jewish faith. So it's in the face of that that the author of Hebrews writes this letter. And in this letter, he makes these comparisons between Jesus and figures in the Jewish faith to make the point that Jesus is greater. He's greater than the greatest messenger. He's greater than the angels. We looked at that in week one when we looked at that profound statement where Jesus is the personification of God's glory and the exact imprint of his nature. And we kind of marveled at that thought and Jesus as messenger. And then the next week we compared Jesus to Moses and we compared the generation of Moses to the generation of Hebrews and then looked at for us. And we said, Jesus is greater than Moses and the law that he brings. Jesus' grace is greater than Moses' law. And then last week, we looked at Jesus being our high priest, and our absolute need for our high priest Jesus to be in heaven advocating for us at the right hand of God. He is completing the redemptive work of salvation in heaven on our behalf, on your behalf. After that, in the flow of Hebrews, if you'll allow me this editorial comment, we discuss how he is the greatest sacrifice. Jesus is the greatest sacrifice once and for all. But as we were planning the series, I looked at that and I thought, gosh, that's the perfect Easter message as we get to Easter and focus on the sacrifice of Christ and the miracle of his resurrection. So let's save that one for Easter, which means that we're skipping forward in the text a little bit this morning to Hebrews chapter 10. And in Hebrews chapter 10, and the verses that we're going to read, Hebrews chapter 10, verses 19 through 25, if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. We're going to sink into that passage this morning and really work through that passage. I'm going to read it once, and then we're going to go back and look at kind of verse by verse and answer this overarching question. I think the question that this text is answering is this, and I would encourage you, this is not in the notes, and it should be. If you're a note taker, write this down at the top of them. If you're writing things down at home, I'll repeat it twice. But really, the question as we approach the text is this. In light of all that we've learned about Jesus, so he's the greatest messenger, priest, and all the things. You don't have to write that down. It would be awkward to write down all the things in your notes. But in light of what we know about Jesus, how should we then approach Jesus and others? That's the predominant question as we enter into the text this morning. In light of what we've learned about Jesus, in light of what Hebrews has said about Jesus, how then should we approach Jesus and approach others? That's the question that this text sets about answering. As a matter of fact, this text starts with the word therefore. And I've told you guys this before, that a little biblical interpretation trick is whenever you see the word therefore, you have to ask yourself, what's it there for? All right, what's the therefore there for? And in this situation, the therefore is there for this. How fun is that? The therefore is there to say, because of all the arguments that I've made, because of all the things I've taught you about Christ, because of this lofty view that we have of him, because he's greater than these things in the Jewish faith, because he's the summation. And last week we learned the culmination of these two streams that run through the Old Testament. Because Jesus is those things, now this is true. So he's kind of reaching the conclusion point of the narrative of the letter. And from here, we have the Hall of Faith in Hebrews chapter 11, which is one of the most famous chapters in the Bible. And I'm not going to get to cover it in this series, so you definitely need to read that on your own. It chronicles the heroes of the Old Testament and then concludes with the beginning of chapter 12 and this encouragement that he gives us to run our race. And that's where we're going to conclude the series two weeks from now. But this morning we kind of settle in to his conclusionary statements, which are this. This is a good summation of what he's been driving to over the course of the book. He writes this in Hebrews chapter 10, verses 19 through 25. Read along with me. That is, through his flesh. So this is kind of the great conclusionary statement of Hebrews after he makes the comparisons. When I was growing up, my dad would teach me about preaching. He would always, and as I was learning to teach, he would, I would say this point or this great thing about God, this thing that I learned, and dad would always look at me and go, so what? Like, now what do we do? Like, okay, that's great. So now what do we do? And this is kind of the so what of Hebrews. We've learned this about Jesus, so what do we do? Well, how do we approach Jesus and how do we approach others? And so this passage answers that question. And at first, I want to draw our attention to this verse because this is a verse that some of us may instantly understand, and that's great. We know exactly all the context that goes into this sentence, but for others of us, it's a bit mysterious. Or maybe we have no idea, and we would freely raise our hand and be like, yeah, you got me on that one. Or maybe we'd keep our hand down and think that we should understand it, but maybe we don't. So I want to make sure that we're all on the same page before we just continue through the passage together. But it's this sentence in Hebrews 10 verse 20 where the author writes, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is through his flesh. Okay, so Jesus has united us with the Father through this curtain that is through his flesh. So what are we talking about with the curtain? Why bring that up? And again, some of you guys know this, but for those that don't, all the way back in the days of Moses, as they're wandering through the desert towards the promised land, the Hebrew people, God gave Moses and Aaron, the priests, some instructions to set up a tabernacle. Tabernacle is a series of tents that made this holy space. And in the middle of the tabernacle was this place called the Holy of Holies. And in the Holy of Holies rested the very presence of God. And only one person was allowed to go into the Holy of Holies, and it was once a year on the Day of Atonement. The only person allowed to go into the presence of God was the high priest of all of Israel, and it was to make sacrifices for the sins of Israel for the previous year. The high priest was the only one invited into direct contact with the presence of God. And then later on, so it's important to note, so if you wanted to get a message across to God, you had to go to the priest who would then go to the high priest who would then go relay that all the prayers of Israel to God, right? You did not have a direct connection to him. You had to go between. And actually several in the way that it was in the hierarchy was the way that that was established. And that stayed the same for millennia. Hundreds of years later, Solomon, they're in the promised land, and God allows Solomon to build the temple. And the center of the temple, sure enough, you guys know this, is the Holy of Holies. It's where the presence of God rested. Only one person could go into the presence of God, the high priest, once a year to atone for your sins, to make sacrifices for the sins of the people. And the thing that separated the holy of holies, where the presence of God rested, from the rest of Israel and from the rest of the temple complex was this curtain. It was said to be so thick that two teams of oxen pulling against each other could not rip it apart. And it was, it was this physical, visible barrier between God's people and God's presence. And when Jesus died on the cross and fulfilled everything in the Old Testament and ushered in a new law of grace, in the moment that he died, the curtain in the temple was ripped in two from top to bottom, almost as if God himself was reaching down and tearing it. And when that curtain tore open because of the death of Christ, the presence of God rushed out in the form now we know of the Holy Spirit and made itself ubiquitous among us so that we are now invited into the constant presence of God. Totally different than the Hebrew people would have approached God in the Old Testament where they had to go through all these intermediaries who would then go into the presence of God and pray. But what we learned last week is that we go directly into the presence of God. Anytime we want to, no matter where we are, we say in our head or in our hearts, dear God, or we begin to speak to him, we fall to our knees, or we say in the car, we speak to God, we are ushered, Scripture teaches us, into the very throne room of God before the Father, where Jesus our Savior sits at his right hand and leans over to God and says, they're good, I got them covered. And so a New Testament believer, because that curtain is torn down, is invited into the very presence of God. And in this way, in that moment, what this verse is indicating is that communication with God went from telegrams to cell phones. Communication with God went from telegrams to cell phones. I did zero research on telegrams to know how they work, but I've seen enough movies that I feel confident in using this as an illustration. I think in the Old West, if you wanted to get a telegram to someone out east, you wanted to get a message to someone out east, you couldn't just call them. You had to go into town. You had to go to the one telegram guy. You had to hope he was working that day, and you had to tell him your message. Then you had to trust that guy to write it down and type it out in whatever way it was supposed to be presented. And then they would send that across the cables and then someone else would get it and that person would come and they would get their message from the person on the other end. All these go-betweens to get this message and there's a physical place you had to go to to try to communicate with others, right? And then we had cell phones. Cell phones keep everybody connected all the time. We can talk to anybody we want to in the whole world whenever we want to talk to them. The thing that really drove this home for me when I realized just how connected cell phones make us was in 2008, I'm on an island off the northeast coast of Honduras called Fifi. Fifi Island off the coast of Trujillo. It was called Fifi Island because a year or two earlier, Hurricane Fifi had swept through and flooded an area so badly that it actually separated a whole mass of land from the mainland and created a new island called Fifi Island. And there was a village of people living on this island, and it was only reachable by boat. We literally, we drove, we parked in some gravel, we get in a John boat, and they take us out. In Miami, it's intercoastal waterways. In Honduras, it's just floodplains. They take us out there, and they take us to this dock, and we get out, and there's this village. Dirt and sticks, thatched roofs, no electricity, no running water. And we camped there overnight. And we were there to help the folks dig wells and dig trenches. And I could tell you stories about that and the way that they did it. It was just amazing. Those people are incredible. They're just ingenious in the way that they solve problems out there. But I'll never forget, they put a shovel in my hand and they put the shovel in the hand of this Honduran man. I don't know how old he was. He was older than me by, he could have looked like he was old enough to be my dad. And they sent us out to like this far-flung area in the village. And our job was to dig a trench from this high point to this house down here. And so we just start digging. And this poor man saddled with the American who can't keep up with him. He must have been so frustrated at me as he just like waits for me to keep up. But we're just digging together. And I'm telling you, I just want to paint a picture for you. The dude was dirty. Showers had been a while. Had a tattered button-up shirt. The edges of it were tattered. He had frayed, tattered jeans. He's wearing those cheap, flimsy, like rubbery 1980s flip-flops, and he is digging away. And we're just going to town. Pretty much in silence. There's a language barrier, but, you know, whatever. We're working. And then I hear one of those ancient old Nokia brick cell phone rings, right? That one that if the instant we heard it, I'm tempted to make the noise with my mouth, but I'm not going to do that. But if we heard it, we would know what it was. And I'm like, where in the world? And the dude drops his shovel, pulls a Nokia brick out of his pocket in the corner of a continent on an island that was created with no electricity. Hola, como estas? I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. Cell phones work out here? And this guy's found out a way to charge, like it blew my mind that that's how connected we are, that we can be on a newly created island on the corner of a continent, and yet if you have a cell phone, you're connected with the whole world. This is now how our communication with God works. Wherever we are, no matter how far from God we feel, no matter how far out we've wandered, no matter what's happening in our life, no matter how surprising it would be in that moment, we can stop and we can talk to God. And to the Jewish mind, this was shocking. I do not think it's an exaggeration to say that this idea of constant communication with God, that just instant prayer and communication with God was as shocking to the Jewish mind as a cell phone would be to the mind of Wyatt Earp. I think it was that kind of a gap. Like, you mean I can just talk to him whenever I want? Yeah. Whenever I want? Yes. No matter where I am? Yes. I think it would floor them. And see, we're used to this kind of constant communication. And it's funny to think of the older generation, even my generation, I look at kids now and I'm like, you don't know what it was to call your girlfriend and hope her dad didn't answer the house phone. You just don't know. You'll never know that pain, right? Like now we have cell phones. Now we have direct communication with one another. And some people older than me, like you remember when it was more difficult to place phone calls. And so now we just assume that we have constant access to God and we have constant access to all the people that we want. And we never stop to think and marvel at the miracle of just being able to talk to the creator of the universe whenever we want. The second I shut my eyes and say, dear God, I'm ushered into the very throne room of God. And this is what the death of Christ won for us. It's worth us to stop and slow down and reflect on that miracle this morning. And that's what he's talking about in verse 20 when he says that he opened this channel of communication for us through the curtain. He tore it down and God's presence rushed out to all of us. So then he says this. Once we understand that, this is how we approach Christ. This is the answer to the question. This is in Hebrewsvering, for he who promised is faithful. I love this first sentence. Let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed pure with water. I've said this before, and I'm going to continue to beat this drum. I think as Christians, now some of us are there, but for most of us, if we were to think about approaching God, I know for me, there would be this degree of guilt and shame. There would be a degree of timidity. I don't deserve to be here. There would be a part of me that would want to approach God like the prodigal son approaches his father with a speech, with an explanation. I'm sorry for who I am. I'm sorry for the decisions that I've made. I'm sorry for my seasons of wandering. I'm sorry for allowing myself to become this version that you didn't intend. I'm sorry for all the regrets and the ways that I know that I've disappointed you. And so we would kind of approach God hat in hand. I'm sorry for who I am. I think if we're being honest that many of us would approach God with timidity and shame. Because I think to be a Christian is to hear about the grace of God, the forgiveness of God, to hear things like our hearts have been sprinkled with the pure blood of Christ, to hear that we've been washed in the waters of Jesus' baptism and think, yeah, they have, but I know better. And so we continue to approach the throne of God with fear. And what Scripture tells us over and over and over again is that we need not do that. Earlier in Hebrews, we're told that because of Christ, we can approach the throne with boldness. And here it says, we go with the true heart and full assurance that we just walk right in, expecting that God is excited to see us, expecting that he is excited for us to walk into his presence. And this, for so many, is such a foreign concept. We know intellectually it's true, but in our heart, we can't seem to master it. As a matter of fact, I came across a quote this week, and I'm going to butcher it. This is not word for word, but this is the gist from a Franciscan monk. And he said, God, your standards are not good enough for me. I'm going to create my own standards and my own will. To that God whom we have offended with our actions. Jesus covers us with his blood, washes us clean with his baptism, and now we go to God whenever we want to, as righteous as we will ever be, as loved as we will ever be, as innocent and pure as we will ever be. And the sooner we can accept that, the sooner we can enjoy the presence of God. The sooner we can accept that about ourselves, the better we'll be able to love other people towards our loving God as we are overwhelmed by his acceptance of us. The sooner we can accept God's acceptance of us, the sooner we'll stop trying to prove to everyone else around us that we're good enough to be accepted. When we bask in the fact that our God values us, we no longer need everyone around us to value us near as much. There's something incredible about being able to accept the fact that God loves you. He loves you as much as he ever will. He does not see all the things you did in your past or the things you will do in your future. He sees the righteousness of Christ's clothing you, and you have been washed pure in the waters of his baptism, raised to walk in a newness of life. Speaking of baptism, next week in our Easter service, I get to baptize someone who has become a good friend of mine, and I hope that we will show up and celebrate that and all that Easter is. But this is what the death of Christ wins for us. Rather than approaching God with timidity and shame and fear, we approach him with the boldness of faith and assurance. And scripture says we do not shrink back because Jesus has won that for us. And then at the end, he says that let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering for he who promised is faithful. So as we think about how do we approach Jesus? Well, first we approach him with boldness. We approach him with full assurance. And then we approach him with the knowledge that we can hold fast to God because he who promised it is faithful, which means we don't have to waver because God never does. We don't have to waver in our faith because God never does. We all know what it is, all too well and sometimes all too painfully, to hitch our wagons to the wrong thing. We know what it is to place our hope in someone or something that is going to disappoint us. I'm from Atlanta. I'm a sports fan. I live in the land of disappointment, okay? I know what it is to hitch my wagons to something and to look foolish. I know what it is to believe that the Braves are finally gonna win this series, or the Falcons are finally gonna win the Super Bowl, or that the Hawks are finally gonna make it to the next round of the playoffs, and then I know what it is to believe that the Braves are finally going to win this series, that the Falcons are finally going to win the Super Bowl, or that the Hawks are finally going to make it to the next round of the playoffs. And then I know what it is to have those hopes dashed and for me to feel like a dummy for not just rooting for Alabama and New England all the time. If you don't get that, I'm sorry. I'll come back to the reservation now and quit talking sports. But I know what it is to be disappointed. And more than that, we know what it is to put our faith in a spouse, to put our faith in a father or a mother or a friendship or an institution and to be let down by that. We know what it is to put our faith in pastors and then to watch them fail and for that to shipwreck our own faith. We know what it is to hitch our wagons to imperfect beasts and then watch them fail and drag us down with them. And so it engenders in us rightly and wisely a hesitancy to put our full and reckless faith in anything. But God says that he who promised is faithful and that we can put our full and reckless hope in Jesus to keep his promises. It's interesting to me, and I read it one time, and it has never left me. There's a theologian from Scotland named N.T. Wright. If you're bored one day, YouTube him. His accent is great, and he's super smart. And he wrote a whole book called Justification, a whole book on just that word, justification, in the book of Romans. And at the beginning of the book, he defines the righteousness of God. And a lot of y'all have been Christians for a long time, and if I asked you how to define the righteousness of God, I'm sure that you could do it in a way that would be effective. But he does it like this. He says God's righteousness is his commitment to his promise. God's righteousness is his commitment to keep the promises that he's made. He made a promise to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, and the Old Testament is a whole testament to the fidelity of God in keeping his promise despite the behavior of everyone. He keeps his promise to Jacob, and Jacob was a jerk. He keeps his promise through David, and David was messed up, man. He keeps his promise through Solomon, and for most of his life, Solomon didn't honor God at all. He keeps his promise to his nation of Israel, even though they rebel and they go against him and they follow after other gods and they get enslaved. God keeps his promise regardless of the behaviors of his people. He always has and he always will. His very nature depends on his keeping of his promises. And now through Christ, he's promised to us eternity with him in paradise. And he's promised that one day Jesus is going to return on that white horse in Revelation 19, and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He's going to make sense of all the pain that we've had to go through while we're on this earth. All the things we talked about in Ecclesiastes, God's going to send Jesus and he's going to clean all that up. That's the promise. And we're told over and over again in scripture that we can cling to that promise. Romans 5 tells us that our hope in Christ will not be put to shame. We can hitch our wagons to that with full assurance. So that's how we answer that question. In light of everything that we've learned in Hebrews, how do we approach Jesus? We approach him with full faith. We approach him with pure hearts, with humility and gratitude for his love. And we approach him with reckless abandon, knowing that he who promised is faithful. So then the question becomes, okay, that's how I approach Christ. How am I then to approach others? How do I treat my Christian brothers and sisters? And he answers that in verses 24 and 25. In verse 24, he writes, and let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works. I love the simplicity of this phrase. You know how you should treat your Christian brothers and sisters? If we think about grace, you know how we should treat the partners of grace? By constantly considering how we should stir up one another to love and good works. And sadly, and I'm speaking of the Christian culture in general, particularly the last year and a half, as things have been so divisive in our country, love and good works is not the, spurring one another on to love and good works is not all the time how we see Christians treating one another in the public forum. So often it's blame or it's condemnation or it's judgment or it's how could you think that way when God clearly wants us to think this way. I have a friend who's a pastor in another state. And he posted, I think earlier in the week, this relatively innocuous like, hey, here's a Christian perspective on the vaccinations. Okay, I'm not gonna get into that on a Sunday morning. I didn't post it on my Facebook feed, but he did, he's brave. And I'm telling you, if you read through the comments, there's like 30 comments of all Christians, all people who go to this church or who claim, if they don't go to the church, they claim in their posts to be Christians, firing back and forth at each other with literally, how can you claim to be a Christian if you think this? Don't you know, yada, yada, yada. And then this person and three of their friends come to their defense. Oh yeah, well, how do you think you're a Christian? Don't you know these things? And then they get sniped by four other people who now want to jump into the conversation. And it's just back and forth. And I read this and I thought, what must a lost world think of this garbage? That Christians are so worked up about whether or not we should get a shot in the arm, that we're sniping at each other in such a way that both sides look terribly unchristian, and it is so far from stirring one another up to good works and to love. It's the exact opposite of that. And so many churches get caught up in that stuff. No grace, all condemnation. If you don't think like me, then you must be wrong and you might not be a believer. And it's happened a lot in the last two years. And it's gross. And I just bring it up to say, let's not have that happen at Grace. And in Grace's defense, I don't see that happening a lot. In Grace's defense, we are gracious. We know good and well that we have people sitting here right now on both sides of the aisle, on both sides of all the issues, and we allow the Spirit of Christ to unify us, and those remain tertiary background issues that we discuss sometimes, but we don't allow those to divide us, and I'm proud to be a part of a church like that. And so, in fact, if I think about how to use this passage, that we should seek to stir one another up towards love and good works, if I think about how to apply that at grace, it's really less about, hey guys, let's avoid judgment and condemnation. It's really more the opposite end of the spectrum. Let's encourage each other on to good works. Because if we're going to default to something in our church, it's going to be to encourage one another towards works. Whatever you're doing is great. Let's just have a small group, talk about the sermon a little bit, talk about what you're learning. Oh, that's going on in your life? That might not be great for you, but I don't want to rock the boat. So I'm just going to love you. I'm not saying we all do that. But I wonder how many of us in our small groups and in our good, like soul-warming, God-earned friendships that we share here, in the deep community that we share here that we're so proud of and that we continue to grow off of, how much do we think about that community as far as our ability to spur on our friends towards love and good works? You know, last February, February of 2020, we were doing our campaign series, right? And one of those weeks, right before the world shut down, we were on the all-time high, but one of those weeks was on discipleship. And we defined discipleship at Grace. We said it's this difficult, nebulous term that we throw out in churches, and it can kind of be confusing and challenging. But for us at grace, discipleship simply means to take your next step of obedience. This is what Jesus modeled with the disciples. He just put in front of them the next thing that he wants us to do. And we contended that all believers have a step of obedience that God has placed before them. And it's our job to simply take it. And in that way, we grow in our relationship with God through obedience. And then once we take that step, he's going to place another one in front of us. And our life is nothing but a series of steps of obedience as we grow closer to God. And that the way that we can help disciple one another is to encourage one another to take that step of obedience, right? Which sounds very much like what he's saying in Hebrews chapter 10. Let us consider how we might love one another, spur one another on to love and good works. Let us consider at grace how we might help those who matter to us the most take their next step of obedience. Let's be intentional with our community and intentional with our friendships. Let's challenge and be bold when it's loving and appropriate. Let's spur one another on to love and good works. And then he closes it out with this. And I think this is just a uniquely appropriate verse right now. He closes it out with this little nugget at the end. He says, and let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works. Verse 25, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near. Another translation says, do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together. It's the biblical imperative to have church. It's the biblical imperative to come together as a body of Christ and worship him and focus on him and be refueled by him. It's the biblical imperative to be communal in our faith. And it even says, let us not stop meeting together as is the habit of some. And as I read it this week, I just thought, my goodness, has this verse in any of your lifetimes ever been more appropriate and relevant than right now? When for a whole year, we began to meet virtually. And listen, I've been incredibly grateful for the opportunity to meet virtually. The technology that we have and the expertise of our staff, and we've said big thanks to Steve for doing it, but it's enabled us to continue to meet virtually, to continue to gather when gathering was impossible, and for the church to continue, to persevere. And it's been great. But now, as vaccines become more common, as people become more comfortable, and we've been able to open the church back up and meet with some regulations in place with relative safety, we have the opportunity to gather in person. But yet some of us, and I have to be careful here, I don't say this to condemn anyone, but I'm a bad pastor if I don't address what's in the text here and say it to a church. It says, don't neglect meeting together as is the habit of some. And listen, I've heard of people, and I am with you. I would do this if I didn't get paid to show up and run my mouth every Sunday. Some of us have gotten into the habit of wearing sweatpants and eating omelets while we watch church. And I've heard like, yeah, we're going to come back, but this is a pretty good setup. And listen, I get it. And I don't, I have never, and now, next month will be, I will have been here for four years. I have never in four years preached on the importance of attending church. I do not beat that drum because I am of the conviction that if we do things here that are God-honoring enough and valuable enough to your soul, that you'll show up for it. So me asking you to come is really not a good idea. It's a waste of time. But in this instance, do not forsake the assembling of ourselves together. That imperative, that commandment has never been more appropriate. So I would say to you this morning, Grace, come on back. Come on back to church. Now listen, as I say that, and I'm looking directly into the camera on purpose, if you are a family that does not feel comfortable going out in public places, if you're a family who, for whatever reason, protecting yourself, protecting your children, protecting your parents, anybody else, you have your reasons where you don't yet feel comfortable venturing out in public, I would never, ever look you in the eye and say, get over it, come to church. I would never do that. I'm not going to play doctor. I'm not going to tell you where your level of comfort should be, ever. I would never do that. So I'm not talking to you right now. I know you want to come back, and you will just as soon as you feel like it's safe. But for those that do enjoy watching church in your sweatpants eating an omelet, and you've been going out to dinner with your friends, and you've been kind of hanging out with other people, and you've kind of gotten into this rhythm, and maybe it's become your habit to just consume church online, even though you would feel comfortable coming in person, I would say to you, yeah, go ahead and come on back. And I'm saying that because I'm a bad pastor if I don't. In Acts chapter 2, the church is defined and characterized by the gathering of itself together. Here in Hebrews, we are told that we shouldn't forsake assembling ourselves together, that we shouldn't neglect meeting together. And so if I skip over this because I'm scared of it, then I don't love you well. And I also think that it's the right thing to do because there is just, there is a power and an efficacy to the gathering. There is a power in gathering together. There is a power in singing praises together. It became apparent to me really quickly in quarantine that when we reduce church to a message, it's not really church. When it's just me on a screen every week, that's not really church. That doesn't feel as good. But when we show up and we sing together, I've had so many people say to me, man, you know, I was consuming church online, but man, I came back and I sung with everybody and it was just good. There's something good for the soul that happens when we gather together. That's why it's important to God. That's why he insists on it over and over again in Scripture. And so I would just encourage you, if you're comfortable, if you feel safe, if you're venturing out in other ways, then come on back to church too. Because this is how God says we're supposed to approach one another in light of all that Jesus has done. Because we should get together and praise together. We should get together and see that person that we haven't seen in a while. Because there is some unspoken encouragement when you show up, you've gone through your week, you've weathered whatever storm waited for you in the week, and you show up at church and you see that person, and you may not even talk to them, but you kind of know by just seeing them and acknowledging them, or just giving them a little fist bump, like your walk with God matters to you too. You're still in this thing too. You're still committed too. And it inspires one another. It builds one another up. It's a good thing. And I say this because what better time to come on back than Easter next week? We're asking people to register for services so we can make sure it's safe in here. And as Michelle mentioned earlier in the announcements, if you didn't catch it, the early service is filling up fast. So like in the parking lot, get on your phone and register for the early services. That's what you want to do because people at home, they got a beat on you, all right? They're already doing it. But what better week to come back and celebrate than Easter as we celebrate next week as a family of faith? But this, the author of Hebrews writes, is what we do in light of what we've learned. We approach Christ with full assurance of faith, knowing that we are washed clean by his blood, that we are as loved as we ever will be, that we are accepted, and maybe we need to work on the fact of accepting that we are accepted. We approach one another, trying to spur one another on to love and good works, and we commit ourselves to gathering together. Let's pray, and we'll see you next week for Easter. Father, we thank you for the book of Hebrews, for the challenges in it, for the encouragement in it. God, I hope that as we move through this book together that you have enlarged our view of Jesus. That he is more to us now than he was weeks ago. I pray that through your word and through song that you would draw us near to your presence. I pray that you would grow our faith, that we would recklessly count on you, that we would throw everything we have at you. God, for those of us who struggle with the fact, like me, that we are accepted by you, I pray that we would feel that more and more. God, if there's anyone who's listening to me who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. I pray that they would take a step closer to you this morning. And we pray in advance over our Easter services next week that they would be an appropriate and joyful celebration of all that you've done. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

There is something so peaceful about lighting a candle, watching the flame flicker, move ever so slightly that seems to lull us into an almost meditative state. So different from the lack of peace we've experienced in our world, we come here caught up in the flow of traffic and Christmas shopping, our feet moving in the way of the world. It is exhausting. Add to that the barrage of chaos in the news or on social media that has us scared or worried, that has angered and outraged us. At times like this, we welcome Jesus into our fearful, anxious hearts. This is one of the reasons why we celebrate Advent. It is a season of expectant waiting, and we light a new candle each week. The earlier candles have burned down, now misshapen, showing our patience wearing thin, our longing growing more fierce. And so we prepare ourselves in a fresh way for the coming of our Lord Jesus in our Christmas celebrations because hope, love, joy, and peace aren't just words we find on Christmas cards. No, we find them in Christ, who is our light, the most peaceful light we could ever experience. Like we read in the book of John, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. Jesus is that light. The prophet Isaiah calls him the one who would come, that he would be the prince of peace for hearts that grieve in a world in turmoil. We are a people whose whole lives have been go with the flow, but it is Jesus who shows us how to march to the beat of God's heart, who shows us what it means to really live. So let's welcome him. We welcome you with all of your peace, Jesus. Give us your peace so that we can be peace bringers. Stop us in our tracks so that the flicker of the flame captures our attention, so that we look past the flow of the world to Jesus who says to some meaningful plans with your family. I can't wait to experience the Christmas Eve service with you guys. I can't wait for y'all to experience the Christmas Eve service. I think it's going to be a really special time for Grace. This week, we want to wrap up the four different topics that we cover in Advent as we talk about peace. Aaron opened talking about hope. I got to talk about love. Kyle taught us about joy. And now we get to focus on the peace that Jesus brings us. As I reflected on peace this week, I was reminded of a story, something that happened to me on an airplane a few years ago. And now I'll warn you, I'm going to tell this story and it's going to make me look kind of good because I do nice things. I try not to share stories about myself that shed me in a positive light because I think that's gross and self-aggrandizing. But this one just kind of makes the point pretty well. So if you'll indulge me, I'll admit some kindness to you. I was getting on a plane a couple of years ago, and I sat down, and I sat down next to this older woman. It was just two on each side and two seats on each side. And as I sat down, it will not surprise you to learn that I'm not one that introduces myself to my seatmate on my plane. I'm one who just sits down and silently stares straight ahead until the plane lands, and then I get off and go about my business. But this particular woman decided that she wanted to introduce herself to me, and so we started talking. And it didn't take very long for her to say that this was her first flight ever. And I said, oh, really? Are you nervous? And she said, yeah, I actually am pretty nervous. I struggle with anxieties. It was hard for me to even get on the plane. Have you flown before? And I said, you're in luck. Don't worry. I've flown probably hundreds of times. I will guide you through the process. I'm not going to be worried at all. As a matter of fact, this is what I told her. I said, listen, when we're flying, if something feels weird, if it feels like it shouldn't happen, if you start to get nervous, you just look at my face. And if I'm calm, you can be calm. If I'm at peace, then you can be at peace. If I'm not worried, then you don't have to be worried. If it feels amiss to you, because if you've never flown before, there's all kinds of things that can happen that can make you go, wait a second, is this safe? Is this okay? And so I told her, if you are experiencing that, just look at me. And if I'm calm, you can be calm. I said, as a matter of fact, I'm going to leave my hand right here on this armrest. And if you feel the need to reach over and grab my hand, you feel free to do that. And we'll get through this together. And she said, okay, thank you. Good. So we're sitting there, we're minding our business. The plane taxis and it goes to take off. And as it takes off, I'm already kind of have my eyes closed, dozing a little bit. It's a short flight. I was just trying to get in a quick nap. And as the plane is picking up off the ground, which if you've never experienced that before, it can feel a little turbulent, I feel her hand reach over and grab mine. And so I just give her a little squeeze and let her know everything's going to be okay. We get up into the air and we're cruising. She's good. I'm good. I'm reading a little bit. And then I close my eyes to doze again. And as I close my eyes, the plane hits a little bit of turbulence. And if you've never experienced turbulence before, it can be scary. You bounce a lot. It can make you feel sick to your stomach. And if you've never experienced it before and you're already worried about flying, that can be a really terrifying thing. And so we begin to experience a little bit of turbulence. We're bouncing around and I'm aware that she's probably freaking out a little bit. So I keep my eyes closed. I'm not dozing anymore, but I keep my eyes closed because I just kind of have a feeling she's looking at me to see if I'm calm, to see if I'm worried. And I wanted to project some peace for her. I wanted her to know this is no big deal. It's just normal turbulence. And so while I'm sitting there kind of fake snoozing, trying to offer peace to her, I just kind of do a thumbs up with my hand like this, like it's going to be, it's all right. You got nothing to worry about. And I feel her hand kind of tap mine, like, thank you. I see that. I appreciate that. And we got through the flight. We landed. She said, thank you. She went about her business. I went about mine. And it just, that principle that I took away from that as I was thinking about peace and that story this week is just this idea of, hey, listen, you just look at me. If I'm calm, you can be calm. If I'm not worried, you don't have to be worried. If I'm at peace, you can be at peace. I was thinking about that idea and how often Jesus does this for us in the Bible. It's something that we don't think about a lot. I never thought about it before this week. But then as I looked at the Bible and I went through the stories of Jesus in my mind and kind of asked that question, what are the times that Jesus looks at us? And he says, listen, look at me. If I'm not worried, you don't need to be worried. If I'm at peace, then you can be at peace. And I saw over and over again in Scripture where Jesus offers us his peace. Maybe the most glaring example, the easiest place to go to is when Jesus calms the storm. A lot of us know this story. This is a story that shows up in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, three of the four Gospels. But we're going to look at the story in Mark, chapter 4, verses 35-41, just to make sure we're all on the same page. If you have a Bible, turn there with me as I read. It says down in verse 35, This is Jesus speaking. I love the story of Jesus calming the storm. The disciples are out on a boat. They're in the Sea of Galilee. They have been there thousands of times before. They are a crew of mostly fishermen. And the wind picks up and the waves start to buffet the boat and the water starts to come into the boat in such a way that they are freaked out. And it's a big deal that they're freaked out because, again, these are seasoned fishermen. They had weathered some storms. This isn't the lady on the plane experiencing light turbulence for the first time. This is the seasoned businessman or businesswoman who flies cross country twice a week going, holy smokes, what is gonna happen? This has to be the end. They're freaking out. They're so scared that they go and they wake up Jesus who's managing to sleep through this. And they say, are you not worried? Are you not worried? Can you not see that we are perishing? And Jesus is almost annoyed with them. And I see him stretching out a hand and saying, peace, be still. And everything calms. And they marvel at who this man is and what he can do. His legend with them grows. But the part of it that I see now as I think about this idea of peace is this invitation from Jesus. They're up there on the deck freaking out. They look at Jesus. He's sleeping. And what they should have done is said, he's clearly not worried. We don't have to be. And that's Jesus' first question to them. When they wake him, he says, why do you have no faith? Don't you see me? I'm at peace. You can be at peace. I'm not worried about this storm. You don't need to be worried about the storm. I'm not anxious. You don't have to be anxious. Look at my face. If I'm calm, you can be calm. If I'm not worried, you don't have to be worried. The disciples forgot in that moment who Jesus was. Or they didn't yet realize who he was. But it's so interesting to me that Jesus challenges their faith. Just look at me. Just remember who I am. If I'm not worried, you don't need to be worried. And I realize that Jesus has this habit of calming storms in our life. He has this habit of remaining stoic, of remaining calm, of remaining unmoved in the face of turmoil. And he reminds us from the scripture, if I'm not worried, you don't have to be worried. I was reminded of the story of the adulterous woman and thought about the peace that Jesus must have given her in that moment. In the book of John, there's this famous story where Jesus is teaching in, I believe, Jerusalem, and the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day, go and they catch a woman in the act of adultery. They drag her through the streets, and they put her down at the feet of Jesus. And they say to Jesus, the law of Moses says that she should be stoned. What do you think we should do with her? You see, they think that they have Jesus between a rock and a hard place. Because here's Jesus, this new radical teacher, who's teaching and proclaiming grace. And yet, they bring this adulterous woman in front of him. And if he says we should stone her, then he has no mercy, and the people that he's teaching will lose interest in what he's saying. If he says that we should forgive if we'll stop for just a second and think about it from her perspective. Being in the act of adultery, having men storm into the house or the room, grab her and drag her into the street. Maybe she was able to grab a sheet on the way. Maybe she wasn't. We don't know. And she knows the penalty for what she's doing. She knows who these men are. They are Pharisees. And she knows the penalty for what she's doing. It is to have big rocks dropped on her head until she dies. She knows that. She has to be at the height of fear and anxiety in her life. There is no possible way she was ever more worried or anxious than she was in this moment. And there she lands at the feet of this new radical teacher named Jesus. And for some reason, somehow, she realizes that her fate now rests in his hands. And these angry men are accusing her, and they're asking Jesus, what should we do with her? I would love to be able to go back in time and see whatever look it was that Jesus gave her. I would love to see her eyes connect with his. I would love to see his calm and tranquility transposed onto her. I would love to see the recognition on her face when she realized that she was in good hands. And Jesus responds in the midst of all this turmoil and chaos. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And one by one, the Pharisees begin to go away. And then he looks down at her and he says, is there anyone left to condemn you? And she says, no, Lord. And he says, neither do I condemn you. And it's one of my favorite stories. Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. It's one of my favorite stories about Jesus to see this perfect balance of grace and truth in that moment. But what I've never thought about is the peace that he gave her, is the peace that he imparted onto her. When she is worried, she is anxious, she is fearful, she doesn't know if this is going to work out. And Jesus almost, you can just see him. Just look at me. If I'm calm, you can be calm. If I'm at peace, you can be at peace. If I'm not worried, then you don't need to be worried. Look at me. I've got this. These men will not harm you today. I'm going to protect you. Think about the peace and the certainty that he gave her in that moment. I think about the night that Jesus was arrested. He gets done praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. They've just finished their Passover meal. The disciples are outside with him, and the guards of Caiaphas, the high priest, come to arrest Christ. And in the scuffle, Peter takes a sword and lops off the ear of one of the guards. And Jesus stops everything and he reaches down and he picks up the ear and he places it back on the soldier. And it's almost as if he's saying, Peter, calm down. I'm not worried. This has to happen. And if I'm not anxious, then you don't have to be anxious. If I can be calm about this, you can be calm about this. Scripture tells us that Jesus was crucified, that he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, that he was quiet and that he was passive and that he was calm, that he was in perfect peace. And he's telling the disciples, if I can be at peace with this, that this is supposed to happen, then you can be too. Don't worry. It's going to be okay. What Jesus knows is that in three days he's going to conquer this death that he's about to face. He offers them perfect peace. You look at me. While everyone else in the Garden of Gethsemane, the troops are likely terrified because this Jesus figure just spoke words that knocked them all down. Now they have to get up, dust themselves off, and try to arrest this guy. The disciples are seeing their Messiah being taken, their leader being taken. Everyone around him is freaking out, and Jesus is in perfect peace. Look at me. I'm fine. You can be fine too. The last moment I would take you to is in the book of Revelation. John, at the end of his life, lifelong disciple of Christ, is whisked up to heaven for a vision and told to write down what he sees and share it with the people. And when he gets there, he's terrified. He sees God and he sees angels and he sees the span of heaven and he feels his feebleness. He feels how small he is and he's not exactly sure where he is and he's seeing angels for the first time, which are terrifying creatures, and he's kind of hunkered down in a corner, not sure what's going on. And in that moment, we see in Revelation that he feels a hand on his shoulder. And he hears a voice. And it's the voice of Jesus. And he says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And I have the keys to death and Hades. One of the great lines in the Bible. In this moment where John is anxious and terrified, Jesus gives him peace, puts his hand on his shoulder, lets him hear his voice, and he says, I'm here. I've got this. I'm the one that's in control of this space. You're going to be okay. He offers John his peace. And so as I thought about all these different stories, and there's more. I could do this for a lot longer. It occurred to me, this idea of look at my face. If I'm calm, you can be calm. What's happening in that moment is that Jesus is imparting peace onto us. So what we need to realize is our peace is imparted by Jesus. The peace that we're offered in Scripture, the peace that God offers to us is imparted to us by Jesus. When we look at His face and see that He is calm, we can be calm. When we look to Him and see that He is at peace, then we can feel peace. When everything around us is chaos, and everyone around us is worried and losing their mind, we can look at Jesus who is not worried, who is calm, who is a picture of perfect peace, and we can experience his peace. And in that way, our peace is imparted to us by Jesus himself. And so it made me wonder, how is Jesus able to maintain perfect peace in all these situations? How is he at so much peace in a storm where seasoned fishermen are freaking out that he is taking a nap? When he is at the epicenter of an entire body of really smart men trying to entangle him, how can he be so calm and answer so eloquently and succinctly while protecting this woman? When he is being marched to his death, how can he maintain perfect peace knowing what lies ahead of him? It's because of this. Because Jesus has true peace. And true peace is certainty that is untouched by circumstances. Peace is certainty that is untouched by circumstances. It's like Jesus knows a secret. He's unmoved by everything around him because he knows it's all going to be okay. He's not worried about the storm sinking his boat because he's the creator of the storm. He made the heavens and the earth. Without him, there is nothing is made, says the book of John. So he's not worried about the storm because he made the storm. He's not worried about getting tripped up and entangled in the law because he wrote the law. He's not worried about getting marched off to his death because he came to do just that and he knows where that ends. That ends in him conquering the death that he is about to suffer for you and for me. He came to conquer death and sin and that's how he did it. So he's at perfect peace in going through the process. He's at perfect peace in heaven when everything feels like it's at chaos at the end of times because this is what he came to do and he offers that peace to John. Jesus has a peace that is untouched by circumstance because nothing in this world can change that God is sovereign. Nothing in this world can change that God's will will be done. Nothing in this world can change that God loves you. Nothing in this world can change that God has a perfect plan and in the fullness of time he will execute it. Nothing in this world can change that for those who believe in him we can look forward to an eternity where God is with his people and where we will be with our God and where there is no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore. Because God is in control, because God has orchestrated all of time to bring about that moment, we know that there are no circumstances that can change the certainty that we have in Christ. And so we have perfect peace. Maybe this is why Paul writes about peace in the book of Philippians and points us to God in prayer so that we might have perfect peace. In Philippians, Paul writes this in chapter 4, verses 6 and 7. He says, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understandings, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. You understand that our peace isn't just imparted by Christ, but our peace is guarded by God? As believers, we have this Christ-imparted, God-guarded peace that circumstances cannot touch. You understand that God advocates for your peace, that He wants you to feel at ease? He does not want you to be anxious. He does not want you to move through life with anxiety. He does not want you to be crippled by worry. He does not want you to be one of the ones freaking out and wondering how everything is going to be okay. And because of that, he offers you Christ-imparted and God-guarded peace so that your soul can be at rest. So we don't have to worry so much. And guys, has there ever been a year in our memories where we needed this peace more? where it feels like everyone around us is losing their mind, where we're in a culture that is rife with racial and political tension, where we're seeing riots and demonstrations and we're wondering what is going on here, where we are in a country that is more divided than ever, When will I ever get to see my loved ones? Is the vaccine really going to work? Will the economy recover? Will I be able to find a new job? Will my position still be there? We have all sorts of anxieties and worries this year. Has there ever been a time when we needed God's peace more? I know that for me, I've needed that peace this year. For me, I've worried a lot about grace. When we went into quarantine in March, we had come off of what was, while I've been here, a high point while I've been at grace. More people than we've ever seen were coming every week. We did a campaign. We were hoping to get a $1.5 million pledge. We had $1.6 million pledge. I would have never expected that. God was moving and shaking, and there was so much contagious enthusiasm here, and then we just had to stop meeting. And for a while, into doing online services like this, I would look for those numbers every week. How many people are watching online? How many screens we're on? How many downloads do we have? What's our engagement look like? Are we losing our momentum? Oh no, God, the church is gonna crumble. Everything's gonna fall apart. I think we're starting to lose people. I'm really worried and I lost sleep over what was happening at at Grace until I was gently reminded to just look at God. And over the course of the year, I saw his hand on Grace. I was so worried about giving because we're not meeting in person, and we're not telling anybody to give online, and I wouldn't dare, especially if you remember the beginning of quarantine when the economy was tanking and everything was going bad, I wouldn't dare ask for money then. So I just buttoned it up and just hoped. And God just continued to provide everything that the church needed, even so that we were able to continue to give away to other ministries who were in need. And God just reminded me over and over and over again over the course of the year, I care about grace. I've got this place. Look at me. Do I look worried? And so now, I don't even look at the numbers. Steve emails them to me every week as is our habit. I never even open it. Sorry, Steve. Because I don't care. They don't matter to me. God's got this church. We're not going anywhere. He's got big plans for us. He's chosen to sustain us. I have a certainty about grace that is untouched by circumstances because I see that God's not worried, so I'm not. He offers us this peace in our lives too. He's not worried about your kids. He's got a plan for them. He's not worried about how your family is going to make it. He's got a plan for that. He's not worried about if everything's going to be okay. He's not worried about what's it going to look like as we try to return back to normal. God isn't concerned with pandemics. He's unfazed with 2020. I promise you he's seen harder years from heaven. But I think sometimes we get so caught up in our worry and in our anxiety and in the circumstances of the day that we keep our focus down. And maybe what we need to do is slow down and let him impart his peace. Maybe this morning or wherever we are as we listen to this or watch this, what we really need to do is just slow down, look at the face of Christ, and let him impart his peace. Let him guard our hearts with perfect peace. When we will be people who will do that, who will constantly put our focus on Christ and not on circumstances, who will allow him to impart his God-guarded peace on us, we can have conversations like I got to have this week. Many of you are aware of what Jen's family is walking through, and just this last week I sat next to my father-in-law in his bed as he moves towards passing away. And I knelt next to him and I told him that it was time for me to say goodbye. And he said, oh, are you going somewhere? I said, no, John, I'm not, but you are. And he said, yeah, I am. And we shared a really sweet moment that caused me to go ugly cry for about 15 minutes on my own in the bathroom somewhere. But at the end of the conversation, I said, John, you're going to go to heaven soon. And you're going to see his parents are Porter and Bernice. You're going to see Porter and Bernice. You're going to hug them. They're going to be glad to see you. Jesus is going to be there. He's going to be glad to see you too. And John whispered in his soft and weak voice, yeah, and when I get there, there's going to be a lot of rejoicing. He's not afraid to die. He's anxious for it. He welcomes it. Because he has a peace that is untouched by circumstance. Because he knows where he's going. He's focused on the face of Christ and Christ is waiting to welcome him into perfect peace. And if there is a peace that is so strong that when someone is hours away from transitioning into the next life, they can lay in their bed at perfect peace and be certain that they are not about to be sad, but that they are about to rejoice. That's the kind of peace that we should want. And Christmas is our yearly reminder that God offers us a peace that no circumstance can touch. This year, as we celebrate Jesus, let's remember that Jesus imparts a peace on us. He imparts a certainty that circumstance can't touch, that God guards this peace. And maybe instead of being worried about all the things that we can't control anyways, what we should do is slow down and focus on the face of Christ and hear him say to us, I'm not worried. You don't have to be either. And let's all of us experience perfect peace as we finish up this year. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for your peace. We are so grateful for the way that you guard our hearts, that you don't want us to be anxious, that you don't want us to be worried. Lord, I pray that if there are people hearing this who are anxious, who are riddled with anxiety, who are riddled with worry, who haven't felt peace and rest in a long time, God, would you give their soul rest in you? Would they hear you today saying, look at me. If I'm calm, you can be calm. Would they today accept your peace? Would they rest easy in that? God, I pray for every person who can hear my voice, that they would experience the same peace that Jesus had, a peace that is untouched by any circumstance. Father, thank you for that gift. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Christmas is coming. The Advent candles mark this season of waiting. They help us pay attention to our longing for a Savior, for Jesus, the reason for our Christmas celebration. He gave us our first gift, our greatest gift, His love, which is perfect because we live in a world starving for love. We live lives starving for love. We're lonely, longing for a place to belong. We crave affirmation because we wonder if we really even matter. We long to be known and understood and accepted, don't we? Our whole selves, our real selves. In the midst of our shame and feelings of unworthiness, we desperately want, no, we need to be loved as we are. We long for Jesus because he loves like that. We read it over and over again in the Bible. We love because He first loved us. God is love, so you can't know Him if you don't love. And this is how God showed His love for us. God sent His only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they have done to our relationship with God. Friends, if God loved us like this, why can't we love each other? God's great miracle at Christmas was to love us up close, personally. Emmanuel, it means God is with us. So today we light this second candle of Advent as a reminder of God's love because the God who loves us knows we need his love. So he came to earth to be with us. Jesus coming means that we have that love. You are loved. Receive it. Welcome him into your home, into your brokenness, into your hurt and your shame and your sadness. Welcome him into your heart, into your places of joy and celebration and thanksgiving. Ask Jesus to fill you with the light of his love so that you can be light in a dark world. Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to get to be back with you up here preaching. Last week, Erin kicked off Advent for us. Erin is our wonderful children's pastor, and she did a phenomenal job kicking off Advent at Grace. If you didn't get to watch it, I would very much encourage you to go and do that. If it gets boring while I'm preaching, just jump over to our messages page and watch that one instead if you missed it. I wouldn't blame you. She did a great job of framing up Advent in that it's a season of expected waiting. It's a season where we as believers prepare ourselves for the coming of the Messiah and all that it means. And so every week we focus on a different thing that Jesus brought. Last week was hope. This week is joy, or this week is love. Next week is joy. The week after that is peace. And then on Christmas Eve, we get to focus on Jesus. So this week, as we settle into this idea of love, I wanted to take you back a couple of years ago. It's a Saturday night, Sunday morning, about 2 a.m., 2.30 a.m., something like that. And Jen and I are awoken by our dog, Ruby, barking. I have a golden retriever named Ruby. If you know me, you know I would like to not have a golden retriever named Ruby or any dog by any name, but Jen loves her, and so we keep her, and Ruby is about as good of a dog as you can have. I have a friend that has a dog named Rocco, and Ruby is way better than Rocco, but at about 2 o'clock, 2.30 in the morning, we were awoken by her barking, and she never barks inside. And so we were both a little bit startled, and I go scrambling down the stairs, but I fully expect I'm going to get down the stairs, Ruby's going to have her nose pressed up against the window, and there's going to be a rabbit or a deer or another dog or something in our yard. It won't be that big of a deal, but as I'm going down the stairs, Ruby's going to have her nose pressed up against the window and there's going to be a rabbit or a deer or another dog or something in our yard. It won't be that big of a deal. But as I'm going down the stairs at our old house, we moved back in April. At our old house, as you're going down the stairs, you can see the front door and then you can see like the window pane next to the front door and then the stairs going down our front porch to the sidewalk. And as I'm going down the stairs at 2.30 in the morning with no shirt on, I'm looking out that window and I see two men start to walk up my porch stairs. It's two dudes in their 20s. And I was instantly terrified. What are these guys doing here in the middle of the night? And what I should have done in the moment is stopped, turned around, gone back into my room, grabbed a gun and a phone and called 911. That's what I should have done. Instead, what I did was leap down the last eight stairs into my small foyer and press myself up against the glass panel right as they came to the stairs. And when I saw them, it was two guys and one of them was carrying a beer bottle, but he wasn't carrying it like he was drinking it. He was carrying it like he was about to swing it. And I thought, oh, it's about to go down. It's happening right now. So I thought maybe they are just trying to like sneak in and steal a couple things. So I press myself against the glass and I bang it as hard as I can. And I say, get off, get off my porch, get out of my house, get off my property. And they start to argue with me. At one point, I'm trying to get them to get off my porch. At one point, he holds a phone up against the glass and he says, is this your address? And I say, yeah, but that doesn't matter. Get off my property. By this point, Jen's at the top of the stairs. Lily's two years old at the time. She's crying in her room. I'm flipping out. I am waiting for my door handle to start jiggling. And when it does, my plan is to go to the kitchen and get a knife and come back and meet them. Like, I'm ready. But then I keep telling them to get off my property, and they go, they treat me like I was a crazy person. They walk back off the stairs. I go upstairs. I get my gun and a phone, and I told Jen, look out the window and tell me what you see. And she says, there's four men standing at the end of our driveway. And I'm like, I only got five shots, you know, so let's make sure that I'm careful. And so I call 911. They send somebody out. The guys start to walk down the street. Long story short, they were just out probably partying, got an Uber to a place they thought they were supposed to go, put the wrong address into the Uber and ended up at my house and ruined my night. Now, here's why I bring that up. I sat in Lily's playroom staring out the window until 4.30 in the morning, like not moving a muscle in case they came back. But I bring that up because I want to ask the question, what is it about us? What is it about me that when I saw a threat to my family, I jumped down the stairs and bang on the glass and have a plan to go get a kitchen knife and fight two dudes who are trying to break into a house? Like, listen, I don't want any of you to take advantage of this. I've never been in a fistfight. I don't know how valuable I would be. I know that I would fight dirty, and I know that you'd really have to hurt me to get me to stop. Other than that, I'm pretty sure I'd be terrible at it. If I started fighting these two dudes, I was going down. But that didn't even occur to me. I just instantly threw myself in harm's way because two people that I loved were upstairs. And I ask what is it that would make me do that because I am certain that any of you who love anybody would have done the same thing. Any dads who are listening would have not have hesitated to do and react in the exact same way that I did more or less. Any mamas listening would do whatever they had to do to protect their kids. We would do anything for the people that we love. And I think the reason that we do that is because we do genuinely and deeply love them. I love my wife, Jen, and I love my daughter, Lily, and I would do anything for them. Of course I would do anything for Jen. Do you realize that my wife Jen and I have been together nearly 18 years? We've been married 14 years. She puts up with me daily and weekly. You understand that? Like I'm a gross human. I have terrible manners when there's nobody around. She puts up with that. I'm a pain in the rear. She puts up with that, and she loves me, and she supports me. Of course, I'll do anything that she needs. I loved Lily when she was born, but I love her even more now. Just this last week, she's in the back seat singing along to a Wren Collective song, and I turn around. She's in a big girl booster seat now, and I start crying like a moron because I just can't believe that I get to love this girl. Like, I just love her so much. And you would do the same for your families and for the people that you love because love is this compelling thing because typically when we love people, they've done something to warrant that love, right? That's how it goes. They've showed up for us. They've listened to us. They've hugged us. They've cried with us. They've laughed with us. They've seen us at our worst. They hope for our best. Like the people that we have in our life who we love, who if you think about, if they picked up the phone and they called you and they said, hey, I need this, you would do anything to be able to provide that for them. Those people have typically reciprocated the love that you offer them. That's kind of how love works. It builds and we reciprocate it. That's what makes God's love for us so miraculous, because he didn't do that. He didn't wait for us to earn it. He didn't watch you live your life and then decide to love you. He didn't wait for you to reciprocate his love and then say, yeah, now my affection is growing for you. As a matter of fact, this is how Paul writes about God's love in Romans chapter five. I'll pick it up to deserve it. He loved us before we did anything at all to deserve it. We had never even existed. We weren't even a figment in our parents' or grandparents' imagination. God just decided that he loved us and he sent his son, his only son, whom he loved and whom he was well pleased. Jesus came down and he died for us even before we deserved it. And make no mistake about it, this was a huge sacrifice. Jesus came down and the night that he was arrested to be crucified and to die for you and I, out of his deep and abiding love for us, he prayed in a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. And he begged God, stressed to the point of sweating blood, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please don't make me walk this path of crucifixion. I'm scared. I don't want to. And then he did because he loves us. He loves us when we've never done a single thing to deserve it. The only approximation I think we have of this love in our human experience, the type of love that God lavishes on us, is when we hold our brand new baby. If you're a parent or an aunt or an uncle, you know what it is to hold this child that is hours old and know in your soul you would do anything for this kid. For your heart to be so full of love that you can't stand it. We know what that love is. But God's love is even bigger than that because not only have we never done anything to deserve it, but he knows everything we're going to do. Imagine holding this child and knowing all the worst things that this person is ever going to do or be capable of and then trying to have that type of love well up within you. There'd be mixed emotions there, right? This is why I think God's love for us that he gives to us without ever earning it is miraculous. But the bigger miracle is that he continues to love us without borders. The bigger miracle of God's love, it's a miracle that he loves us before we deserve it, without deserving it at all, but he loves us knowing that we're never going to. He loves us without borders. This is why I know that's true. Because in Romans 8, Steve brought it up as a devotion a few weeks ago, and it rings so true this morning. Romans 8, to me, is the greatest chapter in the Bible. We did eight weeks in Romans 8 a few summers ago, and it finishes this way in what I think is the crescendo of hope. For it says, We cannot be separated from that love. And I phrased it that way, love without borders. God loves us without borders. This is a concept that I actually picked up from my counselor. And he was talking about human relationships and the borders that our love has in human relationships. And to me, it really makes a lot of sense that we love people in our life, but we love them within certain parameters, right? We love people within certain parameters. Kyle Tolbert's here this morning, Christmas Kyle, you may remember him earlier in the service. And I love Kyle. But if I'm honest, I love Kyle with some parameters. There's some borders around his behavior and around his actions. And if he ventures outside of those borders, it's going to impact my affection for him. This is how we love everybody. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a reality of life. If you think of me as your pastor, hopefully we have some sort of mutual affection for one another and you have an affection for your pastor. But you have parameters around me. You love me with borders. You give me affection with some boundaries. And if I were to go outside of those boundaries, then your affection for me would change. Just would. And it works the same way for our great partners. If I'm being honest, I love the great partners. But if I'm being honest, I love you within some boundaries. There's some things, there's some parameters around your behavior that if you were to do this thing or that thing, it would change my affection for you. And now some of these borders are necessary for our own self-protection, right? Like husbands and wives love each other, but even in those, the most intimate of relationships, there's borders around that love. Jen loves me very much, and she's offered me very generous borders for the continuation of that love, but if I begin to act in a way that's harmful to her or to Lily, well, now I'm acting outside the bounds of the love that she's offered me. So sometimes as people, we need these boundaries and these borders to protect ourselves. That's why I think God's love is phenomenal. That's why I think that's the biggest miracle of God's love. Because he loves us without borders. He puts no stipulations on our behavior. He has no expectations on us. He just says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I've given you my son. I've given you everything. I've made a path so that I can spend forever with you. That's how much I love you. And if you really think about it, this is so powerful because we know that we love with borders. We know that other people love us in some ways contingent upon our behavior or the parts of ourselves that we allow them to see. And so very few of us, very few of us in life are fully known and fully loved. We reveal bits and pieces to ourselves. When you have an acquaintance, someone that you meet, whatever your public persona is, whatever that is, you present that to them. And the more they get to know you, the more the layers begin to peel back. And you're like, will you accept this layer? If I show you this side of myself, will you continue to love me for who I am or is that going to cause a fissure between us and now you can't love me like that anymore? And so we're very careful about who we let in and how vulnerable we become to people because we don't want to do anything to disturb the relationship that we have. And even in our most intimate of relationships, very few of us are fully known by our parents or our spouse or our close friends. There's always portions and pockets that we hide. Are these people over here who get this version and these people over here who get this version? And there's not a Venn diagram in our life of where somebody who fully knows us would intersect and know all the parts of us. And it's a sad thing to not be fully loved. It's a sad thing to pine, to be known and to be seen and to be vulnerable and yet to be accepted anyways. And it's an incredible gift that God gives us to love us without borders. Because none of those expectations are there. None of those parameters are there. Every time we realize our vulnerability to God, we are met with the warmth of his love. And so, God loving us without borders, what that means is this means that we are fully known, fully seen, fully vulnerable, and yet completely and limitlessly loved. We are fully known, we are fully seen, we are fully vulnerable, we are completely exposed to God the Father. All the things that we've done that would bring us shame. Some of the things that we have sworn to ourselves we are going to take to our graves. God knows about those things. The moments in our past that when we think of them they're painful because we don't like that version of ourself or what we did that night or that season or whatever it was. Jesus was with us in those moments and he was loving us anyways. The things in our future, the things that we're capable of, the thoughts that we have, the critical things that we think, the awful attitudes that we espouse and we continue to foster, Jesus is with us in that ugliness. And he loves us anyways. In our vulnerabilities, when life is heavy, when everyone in the world expects us to be strong and inside all we say is, God, I need you. I'm not strong enough for this. I can't do it. I can't be who they want me to be. God says, I know. I love you. I'll make you who you need to be. The miracle of God's love is not just that he loved us before we'd done anything to deserve it, but that that love perseveres regardless of what we do. And in him we are fully known, we are fully vulnerable, and yet fully accepted. And this is the thing that we all pine for. This is what we want. More than anything, that's what we want. If you think about your actions, think about your actions as an adolescent. Think about yourself in high school and then in college. Everything you did screamed, will you accept me now? Am I good enough now? Have I earned the world's affection and acceptance now? And the older we get, it doesn't change. That desire doesn't change. Am I good enough now? Am I enough now? We just learn more nuanced ways to pine for it. And I think what happens is, even though as Christians we know we are loved deeply and fully and completely and without hesitation, I think we tend to forget that. We go throughout our years, we go throughout our days, and we know that we have the affection of the Father, but for some reason we pine for it in other places, and we look to it from other people, and we put on other facades because maybe they will tell me that I'm enough. And I was trying to think about what this would be like, and I remembered one night this summer when I went over to Greg and Laura Taylor's house, and I was in their backyard. And now they have maybe the greatest backyard setup I've ever seen in my life. I was over there with a bunch of guys and we all made a pact to never show our wives this backyard because we don't want to do near the amount of work that Greg has placed into it. At the end of his yard, you go out, there's a deck and then there's like a water feature and there's like sidewalk and a garden, and there's probably like live dancing gnomes there. They just were off that night, and they were walking to the end of the yard. At the end of the yard, there's a fire pit, and the fire pit is level on the ground that you're walking on, but it's on a slope, so the end of it is about four feet high. So it's stacked up from the ground. It's stone that Greg hand laid. He probably hand hew it too out of his own rock. And he just laid it there. And then in the middle, there is a pit. It's like two feet deep. It looks like a big stone donut. And there's chairs all around it. And there's wood, like endless amounts of wood for fire. I have no doubt in my mind that Greg researched the best possible firewood and then chopped it down by hand and then brought it to his house on a burrow. And there it is. It's ready. We're waiting for the fire. And so I want you to imagine being invited over to the Taylor's house, which, lucky you, and sitting around this fire. You've got all the wood you could want. It's the perfect fire. It's the perfect environment right there on the edge of the yard and the woods. It's really peaceful. And it's cold out. And he's got drinks and he's got s'more setups. And you're sitting in there at that fire. And you get up. And you start to wander through the woods. And you're gone for a few minutes, long enough for Greg to go, hey, what are you doing? And you go, I'm just grabbing some wood. And he's like, you don't have to, man. I got all this. I brought it in last week. You're like, no, no, no. I'm going to make my own fire. He says, what? Why? I have a perfectly good fire over here. And you go, no, no, no, I'm just getting a little chilly. Just thought I'd make my own. And you just go wandering through the woods, picking up like wet twigs and a couple of leaves, and you wander out of the woods, and you've got this bundle, and you set it down, and we think, okay, they're going to get it together and come sit with us and warm themselves on this good fire. And then you start to walk back in the woods, and we go, you still going to build your fire? And you're like, yep, yep, just one second. And you just keep going back and you try to make this fire and it's never gonna be as good as the one that's in the pit. His wood's way better than yours. His fire's gonna be infinitely better than yours ever could be. And you don't even have s'mores. Like, what are you thinking? I think sometimes we forget that God loves us fully and completely, and we go pining for it in other places. I think we tend to forget, and we build our own fires. We tend to forget that God loves us, and so we wander into the woods, and we get these cruddy sticks and twigs, and we assemble our own little sad fire over here with God's got the one raging over there, and he says, just come on. I've got everything you need. Just warm yourself. It's here. Come in. He invites us into his love. And we go, no thanks, God. Actually, I do want the warmth that that fire provides, I'm just going to make my own really cruddy version of it over here. And I think that this is why we need Christmas. And this is what the Advent season does for us. Because Christmas is our yearly divine reminder that God loves us without hesitation, without borders, and without end. It's this time once a year as we observe Advent. And Advent is a time of expectant waiting where we prepare our hearts for the coming of the Messiah because so often we just flippantly say, yeah, Jesus is the reason for the season. Or we post something ridiculous. I'm sorry if this offends anybody, but it's ridiculous. Santa kneeling at the crib of Jesus as if to say like in this house, Jesus is a bigger deal than Santa. Yeah, no kidding. We do all these little things to kind of give this token appreciation of Christ. And sometimes we forget to just slow down and let the weight of the gift that he is sit on our shoulders. We say that God is love. We sing that God loves us. But how often do we sit in the reality of this love? How often do we sit and let it wash over us that God loved me before I did anything to deserve it, knowing I would never do anything to warrant it. And he loves me. He is the only being in the universe to pick up our own things and to build our own fires as a replacement for the love that God offers us. And so Christmas exists as this time once a year where God beckons us back to his love to warm ourselves at his fire and to remind us of who we are and how much he loves us. So as Christmas approaches, let's not observe it for another year, flippantly regarding giving passive intellectual assent to the love of God, but let's sit in the majesty and the miracle of it and be together grateful for it as Christmas approaches. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you so much. We love you, as your word says, because you first loved us. God, without that, we know that we never could. We could never have the slightest inclination to love you. Father, if there is anybody listening who doesn't know your love, who has not received your love, if we are out in the woods collecting our own wood, trying to make our own fire, trying to fabricate what it is that you've already created for us, God, I pray that we would drop all that junk right now and rush to you. Lord, if there's anybody who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. For those of us who, like me, move through this season with so much urgency and so much purpose and this feeling of busyness that can sometimes produce in us a flippancy as we consider your love, may we slow down and be hit with the weight of it this morning. Father, as sincerely as we can say it, we say thank you for your love and thank you for your son. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen.