Sermons tagged with Excitement

Good morning, I'm Doug Bergeson. Wait, wait, you've got to be kidding me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it just a few months ago when Kyle Tolbert, our youth pastor, came up here to speak? And before he uttered a word, before a single word, good or bad, was out of his mouth, you were applauding him. What do I get? I'll tell you what I get. I get bubkis, nada, nothing. Let me tell you something. It's not lost on us, those of us who are asked to speak in the middle of July, but never ever at Christmas time, and for sure not at Easter. It's not lost on us that we're not on God's A-team. We get it. We're not stupid. So given that, it might be nice if you tried to be a little bit more encouraging and supportive. So let's try this again. I would not have done that. You know, the Bible's very clear that we're to test and approve what we hear, to be discerning about what's being taught, not just to accept it willy-nilly. And here you all are already clapping for me, and you haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to say. Come on, people, you're better than that. Anyways, hopefully it's obvious that I'm just goofing around, as I'm not only thrilled to be here, but I feel immense privilege to be sharing this morning. And just for the record, far from expecting applause, my desperate and sincere prayer and hope is that God will make what I say clear and useful to you all. I'm really excited about this new sermon series that we're starting. In the past, when I've been asked to speak, I've always kind of hemmed and hawed, wanted to think about it. But when Nate called me this time and explained that the new series was going to be on the obscure heroes of the Bible, I was, for some strange reason, I was enthused, and I immediately jumped at the chance. A big part of it might be that it's just different than the norm, and different is sometimes really good. Mix it up a little bit, move off the beaten path. But more than simply serving as a nice change of pace, there's a much more consequential reason for studying these obscure heroes. They have a lot to teach us. Now, there are plenty of times when I wish the Bible was easier to understand and didn't avoid so many questions that I'd like answers to. Wish that it explained a whole bunch of things better. A little less ambiguity and mystery would sometimes be nice. But in response to that wish, I've heard it said that God, whose Spirit inspired every word written, must have included what He thought was important, what He thought we needed to know. So rather than worrying about the stuff that wasn't included, we'd be much better served paying attention to the things and those people and those events that God did include in his word to us. And that brings us back to our sermon series. God saw fit to tell us about these characters and their stories. And for that reason, we are not going to ignore or gloss over or relegate these heroes to a footnote any longer. Instead, we're going to exploit them for all their worth and see what they can teach us, what they can reveal to us, how they might strengthen and encourage us. The Apostle Paul said it this way, for everything that was written in the past, even obscure heroes that maybe we've never heard of, was written to teach us so that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. As I said, I was surprisingly enthused when Nate called me. Not only was I pumped for the series, but one name immediately popped into my head and I knew that was my guy. That was who I was going to talk about, Gamaliel, the great Pharisee and teacher of the law, and what he wisely concluded when confronted by the incredible boldness and defiance of Peter and the other disciples in the earliest times of the Christian movement. Now, how many of you have heard of Gamaliel? You don't have to raise your hands. You know, just wink or smile as I look around the room. Nothing but a sea of blank, expressionless faces. That's perfect. But before we get to Gamaliel, I need to set the table a bit for you, provide the backdrop to help explain why what he does, what he acknowledges is so valuable to me, that his was the first name in all the Bible that popped into my head. In other words, I need to make sure that we're on the same page with respect to one significant foundational point in order for us to see why Gamaliel, who himself is not even a believer in Jesus Christ, is a hero for us today. The key foundational point is to identify the overarching story of the Bible. Some of you are probably going, oh, sheesh, we're not going to be out of here until Tuesday. Not to worry, not to worry. It's not that daunting a task. In a nutshell, the opening chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, reveal that God's loving intent was to provide all that we, His creations, need. Our job, our part of the bargain, is to trust that He is both able and willing to do that on our behalf, and for us to resist the temptation to want to decide for ourselves what's best. The rest of the Bible is just a long and involved telling of our incredible struggle to trust in God rather than ourselves, as well as the remarkable lengths God goes to to make it possible for us ultimately to place our full and abiding confidence in Him. Now, most of you are probably familiar with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The garden was a fantastic place. Those two have a great life. It's a really sweet setup. There's only one rule, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, growing up in church, I didn't fully understand the significance of the boundary God established for humankind. My general sense was, you know, God likes rules. He's kind of a stickler about rules. And Adam and Eve got in pretty big trouble because they broke one of them. Well, as I've later come to understand, what actually happened was a much bigger deal than simply breaking a rule. What actually happened struck at the very heart of God's intent for creation. In allowing them to eat from any tree but the one, God was establishing the critical boundary for Adam and Eve and for every human since. God was saying, if you want to enjoy all of the good of my creation and live in my kingdom, you have to trust that I and I alone know what's best for you. And even more than that, you have to trust that I'm both able and willing to provide it to you. And so the questions that's faced Adam and Eve, as well as you and me, is do you believe that? Are you convinced that God knows what's best for you and that He is intent on providing it at all times and in all circumstances? When Eve first faced that question, the fate of all humanity hung in the balance. And what did she decide? Well, it turns out Eve wasn't completely convinced that God could be trusted. And she decided and felt the need to trust in someone else. Eve, that's who she decided to trust. She just trusted in herself instead. And now the serpent was cunning and planted the seed in Eve's mind that although God was certainly able to provide what was best for her, He wasn't willing but was holding something back. The serpent said, come on, Eve, you won't die. God's only worried that if you eat that fruit, you'll be like Him and be able to decide for yourself what's best, then you'll be your own God. And that has been humankind's struggle ever since. In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, it wasn't a question of God was willing to provide for his people, but if he was even able. Written at a time when Christ followers were just undergoing terrific persecution, with their very lives at stake, the facts on the ground were so difficult and so dire that only a nut job would conclude that somehow God was still in control and still in charge. And into that terrifically difficult and stressful situation, the Apostle John shared a vision of being transported up to the throne room of heaven where God sort of pulls back the curtain for a second just to show what's really going on behind the scenes. The message, no matter how things look from your perspective, I am God and there is no other. I have your back now and I have it for all eternity. Nothing can ever separate you from my loving care. Your faith and trust are well placed. God is asking each of us, do you believe, are you completely convinced that I'm both able and willing to provide the very best for you? That's the central question running throughout the entire Bible, and it's the central question of our human existence. But our struggle, our temptation, is to say in all different ways, well, God, to tell you the truth, in this particular area of my life, or in this particular relationship, or in this circumstance at this particular time, I'd like to have a say. I'd rather decide for myself what's best for me, what will make me most content, most comfortable, most safe, most fulfilled, most affirmed, most successful, most happy. After all, wouldn't I know better than anyone else what's in my best interest? That's exactly what Eve did. That's exactly what I do. And that is the root of all sin, a failure to trust in God's promise. We're just not entirely convinced, not enough to give up complete control. A famous passage from Proverbs that many of you probably know by heart is, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight. But that's not easy. Our world and our culture constantly bombard us from every conceivable angle with arguments that God, even if he does exist, is neither able or willing to provide what's best for us. That life demands we take charge and we're better off when we do. Non-stop appeals to be our own little lords of our own little lives. Now we're going to do a little audience participation here for just a minute. I'd like you all to close your eyes. Alan, keep your eyes closed. Okay. Imagine that you're on the seventh floor of an office building. You are alone, and it's dark. An electrical short circuit has knocked out the lights and started an intense fire, which has engulfed the entire floor and will soon breach the room you're in. The smoke coming in under the door and through the vents is overwhelming, forcing you to drop to your knees. Your eyes are burning and you're beginning to cough uncontrollably. You can open your eyes now. Suddenly, off to your right, you hear a violent pounding on the outside of the far wall. Then the blade of an axe comes crashing through and soon the shape of a firefighter appears in the opening and he shouts, come on, follow me, I'll get you out. Wouldn't he be surprised if you yelled back, oh, thanks, buddy. I'm good. I got this. Of course, no one would do that. No one trapped and on the brink of perishing would respond that way. We would not only listen to the firefighter's commands, we would literally cling to him. We would follow his every word because we implicitly trust him. Not only does he know what he's doing, but he went to great lengths to find and rescue us. And it's plain as day that we desperately need his help. My illustration borders on the ludicrous because we'd never do that. Yet that's what we say to God all the time. I'm good. I got this. Now maybe some of us hear this illustration and say, that's not me. I'm good at trusting. My faith is rock solid. Maybe that's true, at least on the surface. But even for those of us who trust God fully in most areas of our lives, I bet that there are little nooks and crannies. I appreciated you using that earlier. Little pockets where we don't. A relationship, a decision, a priority, a behavior, perhaps, for which we're not convinced God's preferred course of action serves us best. So we plot the course by our own wisdom. We decide for ourselves what's best. And when we do that, we forfeit some portion of the abundant life that God so desperately wants for us. Sadly, doubting God's promises, not being fully convinced that he is both able and willing to provide the best for me in all of life's situations, happens far more than I even recognize. The decision to trust in my own judgment is typically very subtle. So subtle, in fact, that I don't even realize that I'm doing it much of the time. I'll share an example from my own life, but first I have to give you some context. Twenty-six years ago, we moved down here from New Jersey. I quit a really good job on Wall Street. We sold our dream house that we only lived in for two years. We left our beautiful little town and all our friends. We had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn. We moved for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was my concern that it was all too consuming and that only over time does the true cost of that kind of investment in one's career become apparent? And by that point, it's often too late. The damage has been done. I believe back then, as I still do today, that wherever your treasure is, wherever you invest most of your time, your energy, your ambition, that's where your heart will ultimately be found. And I knew that for me, I couldn't keep doing that job in that city for very long without it, for all practical purposes, becoming my treasure and stealing my heart. Okay, so we did everything they tell you not to do all at the same time. Moved to a different part of the country, changed careers, sold houses, bought houses, had another baby. Deb had just turned 33, and I was 35. The plan was that I would invest our modest nest egg in the financial markets to support our new downsized life, and we'd live happily ever after. Now, fast forward 15 years. I'm meeting Jeff Hancock, who is Grace's teaching pastor at Carolina Ale House. I think it was on a Wednesday afternoon because that's when they had their specials. It's true. Jeff and I had a relationship built largely on a strong and abiding shared love of beer and for the places that happen to serve beer. Is there any stronger foundation for a friendship? Nevertheless, that was ours. So we'd get together every so often. And that particular afternoon, as soon as I sat down, Jeff asked if there was something wrong. And I started weeping and began to share with him how I was in the midst of suffering what for me was a breathtaking financial loss in the futures market. How I couldn't sleep, how it had stolen all of my joy, how it affected all of my personal interactions, including my most cherished ones with my wife and kids. Excuse me. With the child in college and two in high school, how it jeopardized everything Deb and I had planned. That loss was wreaking havoc in my life. Now, I shared with Jeff that afternoon that, yes, I was obviously sad to have lost so much of our nest egg at such a critical time. Yes, I was sorry for my stubbornness, my stupidity. Yes, I was sorry for my arrogance not to respect the markets. All that was true. Yet the reason I was weeping, what most undid me, was what the loss revealed about where I placed my trust. How it betrayed the fact that much of my confidence, my security, and my hope was wrapped up in our little nest egg, and that the notion that I trusted God was clearly not true, if not a bald-faced lie. And that is what makes it so tricky, because a lot of the time our struggles to trust are in those gray areas, things which in and of themselves don't strike us being all that bad or sinful. Nevertheless, we are not doing what God is asking us to do, to trust him with everything and in every situation. We simply aren't convinced that his way is always the best way. In answer to his question, do you believe that I am both able and willing to provide all that you need, we are saying no, not always. In the example I just shared from my own life, my answer was clearly no, I'm not completely convinced. In addition to trusting you, I would like my nest egg back. When we worry about things, even very serious things, we are wrestling with the question, will I trust God with my crisis? Is He capable to handle it on my behalf? Once again, our worrying says no, as it reveals that we're simply not convinced that God can handle the situation, or at least not to our satisfaction. According to the Bible, worry is the opposite of trust. When we choose not to forgive someone, contrary to God's clear desire and instruction, what are we doing? In not so many words, we are saying, I don't believe that God knows what's best for me. What about how we spend our money? I like to think that I include God in those discussions. But what I really do is only involve him in the discussion about the small portion that I might realistically earmark for charity. Concerning the other much bigger chunk, the 80, 90, or 95%, I say, wait just a second, God. Stay in your lane, buddy. I gave you some. This over here is for me to decide what to do. Scripture encourages us to confess our sins to one another, even and perhaps especially the deepest, darkest, and most shameful ones. My immediate response is to say, no, thank you, over my dead body. No way can that possibly be in my best interest. We're encouraged as believers to always be prepared to share why our hope is in Jesus Christ. I don't do it. I don't want to offend this person or turn them off. I don't want to be thought a weirdo or a creep. I'm a confident person generally. I'll share my opinion on almost any topic with almost anyone. But for some strange reason, I don't trust that God will have my back if I share my faith. God says be thankful at all times and in all circumstances. But I don't want to always be thankful, and there just so happens to be things in my life that I'm not thankful for. Yet having a spirit of appreciation and thankfulness is one command of God's that I've come to acknowledge clearly leads to joy and abundant life. I think of the people I know who are most pleasant and encouraging to be around, the ones that are most nutritious for me. Almost without exception, there are people who live life in a spirit of thanksgiving. The old saying is true, it's not happy people who are thankful, it's thankful people who are happy. Ironically, even knowing this, there are still times when I choose to defy God's good intent for my life and instead choose the way of the woe-is-me, self-pitting grumpus. Now, I could go on and on, but if each of us took a deep dive into our motivations for doing some things and not others, for worrying about things over which we have little control, for habitually engaging in certain behaviors or responding in certain ways, for placing so much importance on what others think, we would understand more clearly that, at least in those instances, we're not fully convinced that God always has our best interests at heart or that His way is always best, that He is completely trustworthy in all of life's circumstances, that He is intent on giving us life to the full, the life that is truly life, if only we would trust. And that, at long last, brings us to our hero, Gamaliel. What he offers is a simple proof, evidence to bolster our conviction that the God we worship deserves our full confidence and trust. I've never been a fan of belief for belief's sake. Don't care how sincere it might be. In other words, if I'm going to believe that God always has my best interest at heart and is able and willing to provide it to me, I want it to be true. More than that, I need to be convinced that it's true if I'm ever going to fully trust in it. Otherwise, as we've seen this morning, I'm going to succumb to the temptation to lean on my own wisdom and judgment. This is where the battle lines are drawn and the war for my trust is waged. And this is where Gamaliel's cool logic and reasoning come through in the clutch. Now let's go to the story in the book of Acts and jump into the action. Our story takes place in Jerusalem, not long after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The Christian church is in its infancy and growing rapidly. The Jewish establishment is nervous and on edge. The disciples, Peter and John, have just healed a beggar who had been crippled from birth. Everyone was amazed, and when Peter saw their reaction, he said, men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if it's by our own power or godliness that we had made this man walk? You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. By faith in the name of Jesus, the man you see and know was made strong. It is in Jesus' name and the faith that comes through him that has given this complete healing to him, as you can all see. While they were still speaking, the Jewish leaders, none too pleased with Peter and John's message, arrested them and threw them in jail for the night. The next day, they were brought before their rulers and elders and teachers of the law who questioned them about the healing. By what power or what name did you do this? And Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, replied, Let me interrupt our story for just a second to point out what remarkable change can happen in the hearts and minds of ordinary men and women when convinced of God's truth and imbued with His Spirit. Just a short time ago, these same disciples were the gang that couldn't shoot straight, timid and wavering, untrusting, unreliable, and unconvinced. Now look, there's hope for all of us. Now back to our story. The Jewish leaders were astonished by the courage of Peter and John, especially when they realized they were ordinary unschooled guys and weren't sure what to do as they had to admit that the healing was a fantastic, outstanding miracle which they couldn't deny. And they couldn't really punish them because everybody was running around praising God because of that miracle. So they issued some threats and ordered Peter and John not to speak about this Jesus. However, even after the imprisonment and threats, the disciples continued to preach, teach, and heal until the high priest and his associates could not stand it any longer and arrested them again. But that night, an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail in order the disciples to go back to the temple and tell the people the full message of this new life. When all the rulers assembled the next morning and sent for Peter and John, they were surprised to learn that although the jail was locked and secure, nobody was inside. The Bible says they were puzzled by this. I love the understatement. I bet they were puzzled when they later learned that the men were back in the temple court preaching and teaching. They went and got them, but not by force for fear of what the people might do. The high priest again questioned them, and now reading from Acts 5, 28 through 39. This is the high priest. We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, he said. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man's blood. Peter and John and the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. When they heard this, they were furious and wanted to put them to death. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. Then he addressed them, men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago, Thudas appeared, claiming to be someone, and about 400 men rallied to him. He was killed, and all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too wasailed, and the apostles were let go. And now here, for you all this morning, is the $64,000 question of the day. If Gamaliel, the wisest and most esteemed teacher of the day, could be here with us this morning, is there any doubt that he would conclude if their purpose is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men. You will only find yourselves fighting against God. Well, it hasn't been stopped. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. No other power or movement or belief system has come close. Down through all the centuries, across every people group and culture on earth, and reaching the furthest corners of our planet, God has been on the move, faithful to all his promises. The prophet Isaiah wrote about God's faithfulness this way. and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. And that's why Gamaliel is a hero to me. His wisdom and insight remind me again that God is true to his word always and is going to do what he promised to do. If I'm going to trust God completely and not rely on my own wisdom, but surrender control in all areas of my life, not just some of them, I need that assurance. Our God is both able and willing to provide all that we need. My hope and prayer for all of us this morning is that the words of the Apostle Paul might be our words. I know whom I have believed, and I'm convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. Thank you. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for loving us. Thank you for all these people who carved out time on a hot Sunday morning to come to know you better and to worship you. Lord, thank you for pursuing us. Obviously, forgive us for all the times that we are trust wavers. We're simply not convinced that you're completely trustworthy in all of life's situations. Thank you for the hope that you give us through your son. And it's his name we pray. Amen.

My name is Nate. I'm the lead pastor here. Thanks for being here on this Sunday, the last Sunday in our series called Best Practices. The idea behind this series is that I believe that there are some habits or some practices, some disciplines that we can develop in our life that are really the best disciplines or the best practices that anybody can develop ever. That if we'll develop these, if we will make these a part of our life, they will make us better wives and better mothers, better husbands and better fathers, better children, better employees and employers, better friends and better neighbors. They will make us better people. More importantly than that, if we will instill these disciplines in our life, we will know God better. We will know him more deeply. We will experience the joy and the peace that we believe God offers. So here's what I'm doing as we move through this together. I'm assuming that if you're here in June, that you care at least a little bit about your relationship with God, okay? I don't you know this in church parlance, in the church business, or whatever you want to call it, but summertime is not like high visitor attendance time. Summertime is people who mean it come to church. So if you're here, I'm assuming that you do care to some degree or another about your relationship with God. If you're here because you are checking it out and you're not sure yet and you wouldn't even say yet that I do have a relationship with God, then I hope that this is a way for you to just assess some things and analyze some things and kind of look at and get a peek at Christianity. But as we've been going through the series, we looked at some practices that are really best for us, like reading the Bible on a regular basis. We kind of looked at how to do that and what keeps us from doing that and how we can make that a part of our life. We looked at worship in the second week. Last week, we looked at prayer and this idea of reducing ourselves to the need to pray. Don't wait for life to do that to us, but go ahead and every day admit that there's things that we need God for and spend time in prayer. And in that way, we can move further to being obedient to that command to pray without ceasing, which is a really challenging instruction in Thessalonians. This morning, what I want to do is kind of clean up the series and mention a couple best practices, a couple spiritual disciplines that maybe are a little bit less heralded, a little bit less known, a little bit more forgotten. These all probably deserve their own week, but I'm excited about our next series. I wanted to get to it. This one's a tight four-week series, so we're going to kind of hit three different things this week. So my hope for you is maybe all three of these things are great for you and you can instill all of them. Maybe you're already doing one or two, but I hope that everybody today can take home something that they want to begin to instill in their life or a discipline that they want to renew in their life. So that's my goal for you. So as we look at these three practices that we're going to cover today, one of the less heralded spiritual practices or spiritual disciplines that I wanted to talk about is the practice of giving, the practice of being generous, the practice of giving of our finances. Now, as I say that, if you're thinking along with me, okay, if you're anything like me, then your thought process might go something like this, okay? We're doing a sermon on spiritual disciplines. First thing out of the gate is that I need to give to the church. It's pretty self-serving, dude. Like, you're going to get up there, you're going to tell me these are things God really wants me to do, and then the very first one is, bam, you should give to the church. Okay, listen, I don't blame you for thinking that. I would be thinking that if I were you, but a couple of things to clarify. First of all, when I talk about giving, it's only the second time I've talked about it since I became the pastor here two and a half years ago. But every time I do talk about it, I want to be sure that we cover this thing biblically. And I want to make some points. There's some ways that we talk about giving that just aren't true. The New Testament, which it doesn't mean the Old Testament isn't valuable, but the New Testament is our authority as we look for ways to live our life. The New Testament doesn't tell us to give 10%, and it doesn't tell us that we have to give to the local church. So when I say that we should give, that we should instill the spiritual discipline of giving, I'm not telling you that you should give 10% of your income to grace. That's not what I'm telling you. So in that way, it's not self-serving. What I'm telling you is the New Testament says that we should be a people who are generous, that we should be a people who give. Jesus talks about giving in such a way that he assumes that you will do it when you give. So it's to happen, when you give, give in such a way that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. We see a story about a widow that gave out of her poverty, and Jesus says that's a better, that's a bigger gift, a more meaningful gift than the wealthy person who gives out of their wealth, because her gift required faith, right? We see these instructions about giving, and we know that to give is a good thing. We know that that's something that the Bible talks about. But again, we're to give to God, give to things that are building God's kingdom. So it doesn't necessarily mean the local church. Paul does talk about this idea that if somebody is ministering to you and you're benefiting from that, that we should make it possible for them to continue to do that, that we should support them. But that's as close as we come to me being able to leverage the Bible to say that you have to give your money to grace. So that's really not what I'm talking about. Now, if grace is doing things that you believe in, that you want to support, then support it. Like Mikey, the guy that did the announcements, which is so well, I mean, he knocked those out of the park. When Mikey did those announcements, he told you guys that we were in Mexico right now, that we had two, that we had a team of students down in Mexico and that we're building two homes. I'll just tell you, those homes are $6,000 a piece. The missions committee that we have here, in their generosity, said, we want to go ahead and pay for you guys to build two houses so that two families who live on a dollar a day or less can have a home that they so desperately need just across the border in Mexico. They were able to do that because 10% of everything that's given to Grace goes to ministries happening outside the walls of grace. So if you've ever given, then you are a part of that. If you'd like to be a part of that moving forward, then you can give and you will be. Or if you'd like to be a part of other things moving forward, give to Addis Jamari, a great ministry going on in Ethiopia where they are cutting off sex trafficking at the front. They're nipping it in the bud before it even starts. They take girls that age out of an orphanage and they put them in a home and they disciple them and they teach them skills because there's a very high likelihood that they would end up in some sort of trafficking industry if they did not. And now they're going to the families that have to put up kids for adoption because they simply can't afford the children that they're having, and they're giving them training and investing money in them so that on the front end, those kids don't even have to go to an orphanage. So be a part of something like that. Be a part of faith ministry where our kids are now building homes for families that desperately need them. The instruction in the New Testament is that we should give and that we should be generous, that we should be conduits of God's generosity. And you may think, how is this a spiritual discipline? I know that that's something that we're supposed to do. I get it that that's instructed in the New Testament, but how are we supposed to do that? Why is that a spiritual discipline? And I would just submit that maybe we don't think about giving as a spiritual discipline because we've heard it taught poorly, or we've thought about it in incorrect ways. I've sat in services and listened to sermons before where people talk about giving as if it's some sort of investment scheme. They'll quote a verse in Micah, and they'll say, if you bring your tithe into the storehouse, then God's going to bless you and fill your barns. And it's almost this idea that if you'll give to the church, God's going to give you even more money. That's dumb. That's not how that works. Charitable giving isn't some sort of divine investment scheme, okay, where God just makes you rich because you give to other people. That's how jerks take advantage of ignorant people. That's how that works. So that's not true. It's not some investment scheme. Will you get blessed when you give? Absolutely. Is it going to be by more money in your account? Probably not. So that's not how that works. The other thing is we get guilted into it, right? God's done so much for you, the least you could do is give a little bit for him. And then it feels like this thing that we have to do out of obligation when really that's not what giving is. The reason I think that giving is a spiritual discipline is because giving builds your faith while we participate in God's goodness. Giving builds our faith while we participate in the goodness of God. I'll tell you why I think this. This was, and I have to preface this story. Jen is against me sharing this story because in this story, we stumbled into some obedience. I feel obligated to remind you that I'm an egotistical jerk and that I don't always do good things. But in this story, I'm going to do something good, okay? But now I feel like everything's balanced and that we're fine. About four years ago, I guess it was, it was December. Lily was due in January. Our only child was due in January. And we had managed to save up some money to have the kid and take the hit of Jen not being in work. Jen worked part-time. I worked at a church. I was a student pastor, a small groups pastor. And believe it or not, I did not make a ton of money. So for us to have money set aside was a big deal. We had about $5,000 set aside. And I'll just be transparent with you. we had not had that much money set aside in our marriage ever. So we were pretty thrilled that we had this amount set aside to be able to have Lillian be responsible for us to miss because she worked part-time as an office manager and she wasn't going to get those hours and we're going to have medical bills and you know how it goes. So we're feeling good about that. Well, then in late November, her car stopped working. So I had it towed to a guy that went to the church, a guy named Kelly McCart. And Kelly was looking at the car. He calls me one day. I was on the golf course. I mean, it's hard. We didn't have any money. By the way, I was golfing during work hours. I was on the golf course. He calls me. I said, hey, dude, how you doing? He says, I'm doing better than you will be. And I went, oh, no. I said, what's up? He goes, it's the engine. I said, ugh. He said, it needs to be replaced. And I'm like, what do I do? Do you think I should do it, or do you think I should just trash it and buy a new car? He goes, I think you should replace it. It's a good car. It's a Toyota 4Runner. I said, all right, how much is it going to cost? He said, $5,000. Son of a gun. So I had to go home, and I think I waited a day or two to tell Jen. You know, like, how's the car? Eh, it's fine. You know, I didn't, I just didn't, she's a very pregnant lady and I didn't want her to have to deal with the stress that I was dealing with. Because it's like, my goodness, how, how are we going to pay our bills in January? Like, how are we even going to make it? I don't want to do the humiliating thing of going to my parents and be like, we're, we're screw ups. Can you please give us money? Like, I didn't want to do that. So I was just really stressed. In the midst of this, it was time to give the Christmas offering at the church that we went to. Jen and I had prayed about it, and we had conferred, and we had each agreed that we, that year, wanted to give $500. But then this thing happened, and now we don't have any money. But it's time for the Christmas offering to happen. And I prayed about it, and I just kind of felt, you know, if I can trust him with $500 when we feel secure about our finances, then I ought to be able to trust him when I don't. And I feel like this is what God has asked us to do. So we said, all right, we'll do it. And we gave the $500. Two days later, friends of ours from the church, our age, not like grandparents or something, peers come up to us, come up to me after a service, and they said, hey, we don't know why, but the Lord just kind of put you on our heart this week. So we just wanted to say Merry Christmas, and they handed me an envelope. I take the envelope home, and inside is a check for $500. Yo. So I kind of start crying a little bit. I show it to Jen. And to me, that was God's way of saying, I'm going to take care of you. I have 1,000 sheep on 1,000 hills. I have all the money that I can possibly need. I'm going to take care of you. You did the right thing. I'm going to take care of you. I have a thousand sheep on a thousand hills. I have all the money that I can possibly need. I'm going to take care of you. You did the right thing. I'm going to take care of you. I wish I could chronicle for you the ways that God showed up in January and February so that we didn't have any need. The way that he just took care of all the things that we were concerned about. I think because we were able to stumble into obedience in that situation. But the reason I'm sharing that story is because do you not think that after we decided to give that money and then saw God deliver us in that way, do you not think that built my faith a little bit? Do you not think that helped me trust God even more? And then the cool part is the family that did it, a family called, named the Calders, they had no idea what was going on in our life. And then after they gave it, I shared with them our story. Do you not think that built their faith a little bit? Of them just sitting there going, I feel a prompting that we should try to take care of Jen and Nate. You don't think that built their faith to do that? I think that when we give, we create opportunities for God to show up and show us that he's going to take care of us. When we give, we create opportunities to be on the other end of stories like that, to know that what we gave was used for something far better than whatever we were going to spend it on to begin with. And when we do that, not only does it build our faith, but it allows us to experience the goodness of God as we are conduits of his generosity. That's why I think that giving is a spiritual discipline. Because I think it's something that builds our faith. So if that's not a part of your life, I know, I know that's a tough thing. That's a hard thing. Just practically, it's a hard thing. And there's questions around giving. Do I give 10%? I think that's the tithe. Listen, the New Testament doesn't really tell you a percentage. I think 10% is a good baseline. But I would tell you to just try to get into the habit of regularly giving anything to any ministry that's building God's kingdom. And let God show up. Let that build your faith. Get some experience in participating in the goodness of God in that way. If that's not a part of your life and you want to know God and you want to follow these steps and you want to instill these practices in your life, just find a way that feels right to you. Pray about it. Father, what would you have me do? And give in that way and watch God show up. So that's the first thing that I would encourage you in today is the practice of giving. The second thing is the practice, and you guys are going to be like, what in the world is he talking about? The practice of content consumption. The practice of content consumption. Here's the idea. I'm not going to spend long on this. I don't think I need to make a whole bunch of flowery points around it. I think that you guys can understand this, okay? There's a verse that I love in Philippians. It's one of my favorite verses. It's in chapter 4, Philippians 4, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Now that's a challenging voice. That's a challenging verse. If you think about the things that you allow into your life, the things that you watch, the things that... This steps on my toes, too. The things that you're not even sensitive to on Netflix anymore. Right? The shows that you watch. You're like, but that show has all that stuff in it. Yeah, it doesn't really bother me. Should it? Think about the stuff that you allow into your life. And if it's obedient to this, whatsoever things are just, pure, lovely, commendable, honorable, excellent, there's anything worthy of praise or praiseworthy. Think about these things. How good are we doing at that? And so I just kind of think, if this is something that I want to do, if I want my mind focused on things that are obedient to Philippians 4.8, that are praiseworthy and honorable, and all of those things, that's what I want. How do I do that? How do I organize my life around those things? I think part of it is the content that we consume. And I would ask you, for in your life, besides Sunday morning, besides whatever comes out of my mouth on Sundays, which, that's a low bar, what spiritually nourishing things are you getting in your life? What else is spiritually nourishing you? Outside of random conversations you might have with your friends that you do find encouraging or conversations that you might have with your spouse that you find encouraging, what is in your life that is there to spiritually nourish you, to build you up spiritually? For years and years and years, for centuries, the only option has been to read. And if you're not a reader, if you don't like doing that, which I totally understand, then it's really difficult to consume any spiritual content during the week that's spiritually nourishing in any way, because reading was the option. If you are a reader, I would encourage you, make books that are spiritually encouraging a regular part of your discipline. In my personal quiet time, when I'm really doing it well, when I'm really walking in consistency, I'll read the Bible. I'll let that push me into a time of prayer. And then when I'm done praying, I'll read a spiritually formative book until Lily wakes up. That's kind of how it goes. So if you're a reader, then choose books that nourish you spiritually. But if you're not, I just want to, on a practical level, let you know that there are some really great options out there for you. And I want to talk to you about this idea of harnessing the dead spaces in our schedules because we're all very busy. But there's these things called podcasts that you should really listen to. They're phenomenal. If you don't know what podcasts are, ask someone around you after the service. We will give you a one-day moratorium of not making fun of you or even calling you names for that. Just ask somebody around you, what's a podcast? How do I find them? How do I assess them on my phone. All of you have phones and you can get podcasts on all of them, okay? These podcasts are great because all of the sudden I can listen to sermons from all over the world. I can listen to people have discussions about things that are spiritually formative from all over the world. I can listen to all kinds of people. Do you understand that for centuries and centuries and centuries, the only spiritually building, nourishing thing that people got was whatever their pastor said on Sunday. And that's a bummer. Now you have access to the best pastors in the world who are preaching every week and you can listen to their sermons every week. So I want to encourage you to look for the dead spaces in your schedule. If you have a commute over 10 minutes, use that to listen to something that's spiritually formative. If you go on a walk with your dog, put in some headphones, listen to something that nourishes you spiritually. When you're at the gym, can we just all agree that almost everybody in this room is old enough to no longer need pump-up music? Nothing that you're doing requires you to be pumped up, okay? Nothing. Nobody in this room, I'm looking at you right now, nobody in this room, except for maybe Mikey, is lifting any amount of weight that requires you to be jacked. So just listen to something. Listen to something that's helpful. Listen to something that informs you, that nourishes you, that encourages you, that's spiritually formative. I have a buddy, he goes to the church, I'll tell on him. He's not here this week, and we'll see if he mentions anything to me because he listened to the sermon. But Shane Smith, and he has Smith, he has to drive to Durham every day for work, and he started listening to sermons on his drives. That dude texts me questions a couple times a week. He's asking me stuff. He's wanting to understand Scripture. He's saying, hey, I heard this taught to me. What do you think of this? He is chewing on it. He's considering it. He shows up to my 6 a.m. Bible study. I have watched his life change over the past several months. And one of the biggest things is because he takes time in his day, he looks at that drive not as a burden but as an opportunity to consume some content that's going to nourish him spiritually. And it's changed him and his family. Look for those opportunities in your life and find things that we can listen to. On your bulletin there, I emailed some people in the church who I know listen to podcasts, and I compiled some there for you. So there's recommendations there if you need some. The other thing I would say on this point is there's an app called Audible. And that you can subscribe for like 14 bucks a month and download books. You get one book a month and then they read it to you. You can listen to it. So if you're not a reader, but you're jealous of all the people you know who do read and seem to have things to contribute at parties and at like Bible study and stuff, and you'd like to be one of those people, you can game the system and have somebody else read it to you while you cut the grass. That's really great. So you can subscribe to Audible and you can get these books going in your headphones. So I just want to impress upon you this idea of consuming content that can help you. I think it's a discipline that we should all have and be careful with. The last one I want to talk about today is the practice of fasting. The practice of fasting. Now, fasting's an interesting thing. Fasting shows up in the Bible a lot. And fasting, if you spend any time around church, is something that we've heard of. If you grew up in a Catholic environment or an environment that observed Lent, then you know the idea of fasting for 40 days from certain things. And so we all kind of understand what fasting is. But as I thought about it this week, to put it in front of you, there's a couple things that I thought were interesting. First of all, we can fast for a bunch of different reasons. In 1 Samuel, we see David fast because he's mourning. He's lost his son. He's mourning the loss of his son. And so he fasts and he's brokenhearted before the Lord. We also see David fast in repentance. He's done something that he very much regrets. He made a moral misstep. He sinned before the Lord. And as a form of repentance, he pursues God by fasting. And maybe that's what some of us need to do. Maybe some of us have something in our life that's just eating our lunch that we'd love to not be a part of our life, but it just persists and it just pervades and it's just always there. Have we ever fasted over it and said, God, please take this from me? There's this really interesting passage in the New Testament in Matthew where Jesus says that this type of demon is only cast out through fasting and prayer. Like it somehow intensifies our prayer. We can fast when we're seeking guidance. In Acts chapter 13, it says that the church was getting together, and after a season of prayer and fasting, that they set aside Paul and Barnabas to go on their missionary journeys. We can, when we don't know what to do, when we don't know what's next, we can set aside some time to fast and pursue God in that. But I think maybe the most interesting thing that I saw about fasting is that Jesus just assumes that you do it. See, I think that when we hear fasting, there's a part of us that goes, okay, that's for like, that's for the ninja Christians, right? That's for the Navy SEAL Christians. Like, I'm just regular, just getting by, trying to not do dumb stuff Christian. That's for like super intense, big time Christian. Okay. Do you know in the New Testament, there's no delineation. There's no stages of Christians. You don't get to be like a white belt while that dude's a black belt. You don't get to do that. We're all on the same path moving towards the same goal of walking with God and being disciples of God. And part of that path is this assumption by Jesus that we would fast. Because he tells us in Matthew, he says, when you fast, don't do it like the religious hypocrites do it. Don't walk around with a sunken in face and all sad and be like, what's wrong with you? Be like, I'm fasting because I'm super spiritual. Don't do that. Splash water on your face. Fake it. Try to sneak it by people. Don't let anybody know what you're doing. But the interesting thing to me is this assumption by Jesus that it's a part of your life. And I know that for me, I'm not speaking for you. I'm sure that I'm behind the bell curve on this and you guys are all way ahead of me. But for me, until recent years, that was not a regular part of my life. I still, I fast with the elders from time to time, and I'm still bad at it. Honestly, half the time I fast with the elders, I have to email them the day before and be like, guys, I'm so sorry. I made a lunch appointment tomorrow, and I'm definitely going to eat tacos. So I kind of ruin that for us. It's true. The elders are nodding their heads at me right now, like, yeah, we know. And they're secretly grateful for it, so don't let them talk bad about me after this. They like it when I do that. But it's not really a part of our lives. We don't do it as a regular thing. I bet most of us in here can't remember the last time we did it. But see, Jesus assumes that we fast. And he doesn't assume that it's for, the super intense believers. It's for all of us. And the more I looked into it and thought about what it meant and what it was and why would Jesus assume that we did this, the more apparent it became that it's this picture of something. There's a book by a girl named Margaret Feinberg. I think that's her last name. Is that her last name? Yeah. And it's called Taste and See. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, told me about it, and I started reading it. It's really good. It's gotten me firing on a bunch of different things. I'm really considering doing a whole series on food. I feel like I'm an expert on this. I could bring a lot to the table. See what I did there? Yeah. Okay, I feel like I could do a lot with that, and I want to expound more on this later. But fundamental to this book is this idea that God could have created us any way he wanted to. He could have had us nourish ourselves any way he wanted to. We could have gotten our energy from the sun. We could have worked on photosynthesis like plants. He didn't have to make people who had to eat. He didn't have to make people who had to eat so often, but he did. And it's interesting to think that maybe he did that as a constant daily reminder of our spiritual need for him. As a constant daily reminder that our appetite for food, our body's appetite for food should be the same as our spirit's appetite for God. And in that way, fasting is a physical reminder of a spiritual need. The more I started thinking about this, the more I realized that food is a picture. Every time we sit down at a table and we eat because we need it, that's a physical picture of what our spiritual body needs. And so when we fast, it's an acute reminder of that. It's an intense reminder of that. It forces us to focus on this picture that exists with us every day of our life. And every time we feel the hunger pangs in a fast, that's why some people say, well, you can fast from different things. You can fast from alcohol, or you can fast from social media, or I'm going to put down my phone, or I'm not going to do this, or I'm not going to do that. I'm going to fast from TV. And those are fine. But there's nothing quite like fasting from food. Because it's a physical reminder of a spiritual need. And as we feel those pangs of hunger, gosh, I wish I could eat right now. That's a reminder. This is how your spirit longs for God. I've even gotten to the habit of, on the occasion when I'm actually good at fasting, I'll get a little headachy. And it's really tempting because I still have a lot to do in my day. I'm usually still about to go to an elder meeting. I have other things that I have to accomplish. I'm trying to get a sermon done, whatever it is. And it's tempting to eat something because I've got to stave off this headache because I can't really do my job if I'm not feeling well. So I need to take care of myself. And I'll start to go down that road. But it's a reminder. The way that your body begins to ache because you haven't had food is the way that your spiritual body begins to ache when you're not locked into God. We don't feel it as acutely, and we don't feel it as immediately. And I think that's why God gives us this physical reminder all the time. When we don't eat, we know it. And when food is good, and the meal is good, and we're around other people, and we're around our friends, it's one of the best experiences in life. And I just think it's this one-for-one picture of our need for God. So fasting serves as an acute reminder of our spiritual need. And if nothing else, it brings to the forefront of our mind our spiritual need for God. And so if fasting isn't a regular part of your life, I would encourage you to try it. Try it and let that drive you into prayer. Try it and let that take you into a place where you admit and acknowledge your spiritual need for God. I had a friend who, he's got three boys. This is the worship pastor I used to work with in another church. For all three boys, the week they were born, he fasted for a week and prayed for them. Because those were his boys, and he wants them to grow up to be godly men, and so he pursued the Lord after them. If you've got a big decision coming up and you don't know what to do, have you fasted about it? If there's a sin in your life that's just kicking your tail and you'd love to be done with it, have you fasted about it? If you'd like to get into these spiritual disciplines more but can't seem to find that in yourself, have you fasted about that? I want to encourage you to consider the spiritual discipline of fasting. Now, as we wrap up the series, to me, there's this key question, the answer to which dictates all of our actions after being asked the question. So as we wrap up the series in light of all of these practices, the practice of reading scripture, the practice of worshiping God, the practice of prayer, of giving, of consuming the right content, of fasting, all these different things that we can instill in our life so that we could pursue God better, I think that there is a key question. And when I say key question, what I mean is the answer to this question really determines all of your actions after you answer it. And I get this idea from a book that Jen and I have recently been given. A lot of you know that cancer has become part of our reality and our family in 2019. And so when that became a part of our reality, people started giving us different things and somebody gave us a book. It's called Chris Beats Cancer. And at the beginning of this book, there's a question. And the question is, do you want to live? And it may seem like a simple enough question, but it's really profound in how you answer it. Do you want to live? Because what's about to follow in that book, what he's about to tell you to do, is for most people a radical change in your lifestyle and your diet and your habits. So he sets it up with, do you want to live? The implication is, if the answer is yes, then you'll be willing to do whatever it takes to live. If the answer is no, that's a different conversation. And for those battling that disease, that's a more tricky question than you would think. So I think it's this key question. Do you want to live? If you do, then you will do whatever it takes to accomplish that. And I think that there's a key question for us as we consider our relationship with God, and it's this. Do you want to know God? Do

Well, good morning. Happy Easter to you. My name is Nate. I'm the lead pastor here. It's great to see everybody in their bright Easter colors. My wife picked this shirt out for me. She told me that she was going to get the dry cleaning done because there was that pretty Easter colored shirt in the dry cleaning to be done. And I said, oh, which one was that? And she described it by saying, oh, it's the nice one that you got a couple of years ago. It was too big for you then. I think it'll fit you now. And as I buttoned it up this morning, I thought, dang it, if she's not right. So here I am. Listen, this is the 11th part of our series in John. We've been moving through John together. We've been timing it up to arrive at this sermon on this Sunday because this is Easter, man. This is the best day of the year. It really is. This is my favorite day of the year. This is the day where Jesus wins everything for all of eternity. This is the day when the disciples find an empty tomb, and what it means is that Jesus conquered death, and what it means is that we have a way to be reconciled with our Creator God for all of eternity. It is the victory of victories. It is absolutely, as Christians, what we claim, what we stake our hope on, and what we hold fast to no matter what. And Easter celebrates that day. So it is like the Super Bowl of Sundays to be able to preach to you on Easter. This is my third Easter that I've gotten to spend with you at Grace. And back in the fall, I knew that we were going to be going through John in the spring. And so I was reading through John in part in preparation for this series. And I arrived at a story in John chapter 20 about doubting Thomas. Some of you probably know the story. Thomas was a disciple of Jesus who, when he heard that Jesus had resurrected from the dead, he said, I don't really believe that. And then Jesus appears to him and he gives Thomas the proof that he needs to show him that he's actually Jesus and that he's actually risen from the dead. And I thought, man, what a great thing to be able to share on Easter how Jesus responds in the face of our doubts. And so that's what we prepared for, and that's what I prepared for, and that's what I had in mind as we approached Easter, and we mapped out the series, and I knew what all 12 weeks were going to be. And a couple of weeks ago, we made a video, and we showed it in here, and we said, hey, on Easter Sunday, Nate's going to preach about Doubting Thomas and how Jesus responds in the face of our doubts, and it's going to be great, and you should invite people. And that's been the plan. We even, we put it on Facebook and then Steve told me, Steve's our worship pastor, who they did great. Steve told me, hey, we boosted it on Facebook. I don't even know what that is. But I've been boosted on Facebook. I'm kind of a big deal now. I mean, some of you may even be here because we boosted it. And if you did, you're going to be bummed out because I'm not preaching what I told you I was going to preach. Last night at about 10.30, I'm not making this up, I saw a tweet of all things, and I knew that I had to do a different message. My wife is out of town. She's at home with her family, and you'll find out why in a second. And I was going to bed. I grabbed Ruby, Jen's dog that I don't like, and I went to take Ruby outside as just the final hassle of the day to let her go to the bathroom. And while I'm outside, I grab my phone. And my buddy, who I used to work with, a guy named Heath, had tweeted this out. And I saw it in the morning, but I really just kind of passed over it. But for some reason, it was at the top of my Twitter feed, and I saw it. And this is what it says. It says, Holy Saturday, silence, sadness, sorrow. At some point in our lives, we all go through a season of this day. Darkness surrounds us. Nothing is happening. Hope seems lost. Today is the best reminder that the silence of God does not equal the absence of God. Sunday's coming. And as I read that and reflected on what's going on in my own life, I knew that I could not trot out here this morning and preach to you about how Jesus responds to our doubts. Which is a shame because I had a nice alliterated point at the end. It was very pastory. It said, in the face of our doubts, Jesus responds with patience, pursuit, and provision. And I was really happy about that. Isn't that fancy? But I knew as I read that, I can't, on Easter, that because my life feels like a Saturday right now. At Grace, we're real. We're authentic. We're honest. I feel like it's part of our secret sauce. I feel like it's what makes us us. And as a pastor, it's what makes me me, that we tell the truth and we go from our gut. And I felt like to preach what I had planned to preach would be dishonest with you this morning because my life feels a little bit like a Saturday and I need Easter this year. I don't know if you've ever thought about the disciples' perspective on Saturday, but we've been going through Holy Week. And in Holy Week, Jesus on Palm Sunday enters into Jerusalem and sets in motion some mechanisms that are going to ultimately lead to his crucifixion. And he knows to his resurrection the following Sunday. And each day during that week over history has been given a name like Ash Wednesday or Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. And Saturday is called Holy Saturday. And I don't know if you've ever thought about Saturday from the perspective of the disciples. But the disciples were men who had walked with Jesus every day. They woke up every morning with him. They listened to him. They followed him. They loved him. They left their jobs for him. They left their lives for him. They put everything on hold for Jesus. The Bible tells us that Jesus says that foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. So they followed Jesus even though they were basically couch surfing for three years because they believed so much in what he was doing. And over the course of those three years, they came to love that man and respect that man and want to mimic and emulate that man. And they had high hopes for that man. And on Friday, it all came crashing down. On Friday, they watched that man put up on the cross and get crucified. And we talked about that last week. They watched their hopes and dreams die on that cross. And I imagine on Friday, though there was sadness, there was also shock, not really knowing what to do, trying to process what had happened. But on Saturday, the disciples are sitting in a room with the door locked because they're fearful of the authorities that they're going to come in and get them and arrest them. And so they're sitting there with the door locked in sorrow and in silence, not knowing what to do. And it feels very much like their God let them down. It feels very much like God is not present. We had hoped in him, we had believed in him, and now he's dead and we don't know what to do. And they look to each other for hope and there was none there. And what the disciples don't know is what we know is that the next day they're going to find an empty tomb and that Sunday is coming. But on Saturday, they didn't know that there was hope for Sunday. On Saturday, it's just death. And on Saturday, death wins. And on Saturday, evil wins and despair wins and sorrow wins on Saturday. Because that's where they are. And that's what they know. And Saturday is sorrowful. It's solemn. And it's silent. And as I thought about that, and thought about how much my life feels like Saturday right now, and thought about how much I need Easter right now, I thought I can in good conscience roll out there and talk about doubts tomorrow morning. My life feels like Saturday right now because three weeks ago, they found a mass on my father-in-law's pancreas. My father-in-law is a man named John. I love John a lot. I have a deep and abiding respect for John. I've said this to some people and I mean it. He has, to me, character that looks more similar to Jesus than anybody I've ever met. There are times in my life when I don't know what to do, and I think, I wonder what John would do. And I try to emulate that. Jen loves her daddy very much. They're very close. Lily calls him Papa. That's what I called my Papa. And so it's been a tough three weeks. Three weeks ago, they found a mass, and then it's just a series of appointments and different things, and you don't get the answers that you want. If you've walked through it before, you know it's painfully slow. And then yesterday, on Saturday, we find out that it's stage three. The Internet doesn't have a lot of good things to say about people with stage three pancreatic cancer. And so it's sad, and it's hard, and we're hopeful. On Monday morning, he meets with one of the best pancreatic surgeons in the world who has devoted his whole life to eradicating cancer from the pancreas. If anybody can help him, it's this guy. And so we hope in that, and we're happy about that. And I was on the phone with his wife, Terry, yesterday, telling her, listen, we don't know anything for sure yet, so we cling to hope. But it's hard. And I'm texting with Jen yesterday because she's down there with her family. How you doing? How's it going? And she just says, it's really hard. My daddy's really hurt. He's not really himself. He doesn't have any energy. And for three weeks, we've been doing a lot of praying, but we don't feel a lot of answers. And so my life feels like a Saturday. God, where are you on this one? He's a good man. It doesn't feel like it's the time. And here's the thing. You have your Saturdays too. You've walked through some Saturdays, haven't you? You've walked through some times in your life that were hard, where it felt dark, where you looked around and you said, where's Jesus here? And you didn't know where the hope was going to come from. You've sat in some Saturdays. Some of you are in them right now. And Saturdays don't all look like loss. I know since I've been here for two years, I've walked with some people. I've watched some people in the church walk through Saturdays. We've walked through the stories of miscarriages together. That's a Saturday. That Saturday's happened in my life before. There are people here who have lost spouses far too soon and walked through that Saturday. One of our very special partners lost his 58-year-old brother a couple of weeks ago out of nowhere. That's a Saturday. Our old pastor lost his son this year. That's a Saturday. Those are Saturdays. And they come in other ways too. I had breakfast with somebody on Monday of this week. And he said, man, my life has just been really hard since about December. I really need to hear from God and I can't. I don't know where he is and I don't know what's going on and I don't know how this is going to get better. It's kind of hard to cling to hope right now. And I wish that I'd had my mind wrapped around this sermon when I met with him because I could have just said, dude, it's Saturday. It's Saturday. And sometimes it's sin that brings it on, right? I was prepared. Sometimes it's not just things that happen around us. Sometimes we bring on our own Saturday, if we're honest. Sometimes our life feels so dark because of the things that we've allowed into it, because of the addictions that we walk with, because of the private shames that we hold close to us, because of the things in our life that are in the dark corners of our life that we don't want to shed light on, that feel like they're owning us and feel like they're eating our lunch. And what we really feel like is we're hopeless in this situation. And I see the freedom that other people walk in, but I don't think I'll ever walk in that. I don't think I'll ever be a whole person. I don't think I'll ever experience the happiness and the freedom that the Bible talks about because I don't believe if you were to ask me, can I overcome this sin, you would say, I don't think so. That's a Saturday. And so last night, at about 1045, I realized, I got to talk about Saturdays, man. Because here's the thing. The disciples had a Saturday too. And they got up on Sunday and they went to the tomb. Actually, it was Mary. And she was expecting to go in and find the corpse and dress the corpse of Jesus with some perfumes and some oil and maybe pray over it. And she found an empty tomb there. Jesus wasn't there. But there was an angel there who looks at her and says one of the greatest lines in the Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, for he is risen. What are you doing here, Mary? Jesus isn't here. He's alive. And she rushes back and she finds the disciples locked in that room in sorrow and silence. And she tells them and they run to the tomb to see it for themselves. Peter and John run out there. And in John's account, he makes sure to tell you, we started out neck and neck, but I dusted that old man. I beat him to the tomb. I had plenty of time to look around and get my bearings. And when they get there, they find that the tomb is empty and that Jesus has conquered death. And that's Sunday. And they realized for all of eternity, Jesus has taken the sting out of death. Jesus has given us eternal life. Jesus has beaten all the things that would seek to take us down. It's why Paul can write in Corinthians, why he can quote the Old Testament and say, oh death, where is your sting? Where are your shackles? You have no power over us anymore, death, because Jesus rose on Sunday. Because on Sunday, the tomb was empty. Because Jesus overcame it and gave us victory and gave us hope. A hope that we can cling to. A hope that Paul says in Romans 5 will not put us to shame. Jesus won eternal victory on Sunday. And the sadness that was Saturday became the joy of Sunday because Jesus has conquered the grave and conquered hell and conquered sin and death and he's delivered that victory to you for all of eternity. All you have to do is believe that he did it. And then death can't touch us anymore. And then sorrow can't touch us anymore. And I knew that I had to preach about this and I knew that I had to tell you this story and I knew that I had to tell you about Saturday going into Sunday because here's what Sunday means. You understand? Here's what Easter means. Easter reminds us every year that Jesus always comes through. He always comes through. Without Easter, the internet tells me and my family that we have a 12% chance at happiness. Easter says, I've already beaten it. You've got 100% chance of joy. Without Easter, there's no hope. But Easter tells us that Jesus always comes through, that he never fails and that he never lets us down. And here's what I know. Because of Easter, because that tomb was empty, and because Jesus conquered death and delivered eternal life to all of us, including John, here's what I know, that because of Easter, he's going to come through for John too. It may be in the form of giving him some more years. He may get to watch Lily grow up a little bit longer. It may be in the form of taking him to heaven where he will wait, but make no mistake about it, John's going to hold Lily some more. And he's going to hug Terry some more. That's the victory of Easter. That's what today means. And if you're on a Saturday, today is a reminder that Jesus always comes through. Jesus always wins. And even if you can't see how he's going to come through, I will just tell you that he will. Either in this life or the next, he's going to come through. Either now or in eternity, you place your faith in him and he's going to come through. And now I don't have a 12% chance of happiness. I have a 100% chance at joy. And so does Jen, and so does Terry, and so does her sister Lauren. Because 2,000 years ago, Jesus beat cancer. And he beat sadness, and he beat tragedy, and he beat heartache, and he beat your Saturday too. That's what Easter is. Last night, when I decided I was going to be the least prepared pastor on Easter Sunday in America, I made a pot of coffee because I was tired. And I went outside and was just thinking and drinking the coffee. And I looked up and it was cloudy, but on the other side of some clouds I could tell the moon was there. And I knew that on the other side of those clouds was the light of the moon. And I kept my eye on it, and wouldn't you know it, in a couple of minutes the clouds parted, and it was a full moon, and it was bright. And it was like this little reminder from God. It's Saturday now, and it's dark, But that's my sun shining on that moon. And in the morning, it's going to be bright. Because in the morning, it's Easter. In the morning, it's Sunday. And on Sunday, we're reminded that I always win. And it may feel like night in our lives sometimes. We may feel the darkness of Saturday in our lives sometimes. If you do, look to that moon that's reflecting the light that God created and know that whether we know it or not, whether we understand it or not, in a way that we might not be able to predict, that Sunday is coming and the sun will shine again. And 2,000 years ago, Jesus won a victory for us over all the things that would seek to darken our days. And that's what we celebrate on Easter. Pope John Paul said, we do not give way to despair. We are the Easter people. And hallelujah is our song. So no matter how dark it gets, Christians, we sing because we know that Sunday is coming. No matter how silent God seems, Christians, we listen because we know that God will speak. No matter how sad we are on Saturday, Christians, we know that Sunday is coming and Jesus always comes through. And that's why Easter is the greatest day of the year, because it reminds us that Jesus has come through for us in more ways than we can possibly imagine. So I'm gonna pray for you. And my prayer is that you have a good Easter. And my prayer is that if you're in a Saturday, that you will know that because of Easter, you can know that Sunday is coming and Jesus is gonna come through for you too. Let's pray. Father, you're good. You're good to us. More than we deserve, more generously than we deserve, you love us in ways that we don't deserve. You are good. We thank you so much for Easter. We thank you for what it means and for what it represents, for the hope that you won when you conquered sin and death, when you came roaring like a lion out of there, giving us hope for all of eternity. Father, I pray that those of us who feel like we are in a Saturday would take solace in Easter, that we would cling to the hope of Sunday, that we would cling to the hope of you. Let us believe, God, that you've won this victory already, that it's yours. Let us celebrate Easter in the hope that it brings well. Let us reflect on you as we do it. Be with those who are sorrowful, God. Let them hold on just a little longer until your light shines. We thank you for Easter. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for being here. This is the seventh part in our series going through the book of John. We're going to continue this series through the week after Easter. So I'm thrilled to see all of you here. Hopefully, as I've been encouraging you every week, you've been reading along with us. I think it's hugely important for you guys to be reading the Gospel of John on your own as you process it and we go through it as a church so that my perspective isn't the only perspective that you're getting on this book. That's why it's such a bummer that I realized yesterday I forgot to update the reading plan and the one that we have out there is not current. So I'm real sorry about that. I had a wedding to do yesterday and then basketball, so I didn't get a chance to do the reading plan. But we'll have that done for you tomorrow. We'll get it out online and we'll have a physical copy for you next week when you get here. If you are following along in the reading plan, just read the next two chapters. We've been going at two chapters a week and you'll be good, okay? But as we've been going through this week, I had a sermon planned out of John 11, looking at the story of Lazarus and the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept, John 11, 35. And I had been looking forward to that sermon. But as I got done last week and looked at the chapters that we had to cover this week, there's a portion, there's something happening in John chapter 13 that I just, I didn't feel right about doing a series in John where we don't cover this. There's been a ton that we've skipped over in the book of John. We didn't even stop on the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16. We haven't talked about that, which again is why we should be going through this on our own. But I just didn't feel like it was right to go through a series in John without focusing on what Jesus says in John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's a seat back in front of you. And then later when I read the passage, it will be up on the screen. And I think we have it in your bulletin. There's really no reason, unless you're illiterate, to not read John chapter 13, 34, and 35 with us, okay? So in this verse, Jesus gives a summation of all of his teaching for the disciples. He's left with just the 11 faithful disciples that are with him, and we'll get to this in a minute, but he's giving them a summation of everything that he's ever taught them. And I find summaries like that to be the most helpful teaching or the most helpful advice, right? We know that good advice summarizes all the other advice and makes it a little bit more memorable. I think something that we can all relate to is many of us in this room have had kids. And we know that when you're about to have a kid, this is the time when you are receiving the most unsolicited advice you have ever received in your life. The only other thing I've ever experienced like it was when I was about to become a pastor. I had been named the senior pastor, and so I had kind of a month to get my affairs in order and then get up here and take over, at the time, Grace Community Church. And so everybody was giving me advice on how to be a senior pastor, including my atheistic uncle, who hadn't been in a church in like 35 or 40 years. I'm literally, I'm golfing with the guy. It's the last time I'm going to hang out with Uncle Dick. And he's in the fairway practicing, and then he like steps off the ball and he goes, Nathan, you know, I've been thinking about you becoming a pastor. And I'm like, what in the world is going on here? He goes, I just had something I wanted to tell you. And I'm thinking like, just like everybody else, come on, let's go. You haven't been in church in 40 years. Let's see what you got. It was okay advice, but I just thought it was hilarious that an atheist cared about advising me on being a senior pastor, right? And when you're a parent, you get all this parenting advice. It doesn't matter if they've had kids before. It just matters that they've read a book or seen something on Facebook. They will tell you what they saw. And sometimes this advice is even contradictory in nature, right? You got the camp over here saying you should use cloth diapers. And I'm like, you're crazy. And then you got this camp saying you should use regular disposable diapers. I'm like, these are my people, right? You got the camp that says when you get home, you do not let that child sleep in the bed with you. You put them in their room on night one or they are going to develop dependency issues. And you're like, holy crud, that sounds really hard. And then you have other people that are like, you let that child sleep in your bed until they are eight if they need to. They are your precious angel, you know? And Jen's reading books the whole time. Jen's my wife, not just some lady who reads books for me. So she's reading books the whole time. And she's getting all this advice. And it's contrary. This book says this thing, and this book says this thing. You're like, well, which person knows more about this? Who knows? Can I speak to their adult children to see if this worked out? You just don't know, and you're getting so much all the time. But one guy, this was super helpful, Kyle Hale, the worship pastor at the church that I was at at the time, I was on staff with him. He came up to me one day. He had three boys under five. So he had earned his dad's stripes, right? And he comes up to me and he goes, hey man, listen, a lot of people telling you a lot of stuff. And I'm like, yep, and here comes your thing. And he goes, listen, just for the first three months, just keep the kid healthy and stay sane. Whatever you have to do. Don't worry about what you're going to do to them. You're not going to do any permanent damage. Just keep the child healthy and stay sane. Try not to yell at Jen. That's it. Just do that. And I thought, this is good advice. I can do this. I don't know about all the other stuff. I don't know about the five S's and all the things, but I can do this. I can just try to take care of them, and I can try to not yell at Jen. This is good. This is actually how I still parent. Just make sure she's good and try not to get mad at Jen. That was good advice. It was a summation of all the other advice, right? It was memorable and easy and executable. And this is what Jesus does for the disciples in John chapter 13. Here's what's happening in John 13. I actually, I feel a little bit badly about the way that we've done this series in that we haven't done a lot to follow the chronology of Jesus through his ministry and through his life. We've dropped in on snippets of what he's taught and things that he did, but we haven't done a good job of following the chronology of Jesus. So here's what's happening in John chapter 13. Jesus has moved through his life. About the age of 30, he goes public with his ministry and begins calling disciples to him. And then they do ministry together through Israel. Israel is a relatively small country. It's really a small country by any measure. And so all over Israel, they're doing ministry and they're following Jesus around and he's teaching them how to do what he does. He's preparing them to hand them the keys to the kingdom. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but why didn't Jesus just come to earth, live perfectly, become an adult, and die for our sins? Why did he dabble for three years with this public ministry? Why was it essential for him to do this in order to die on the cross for our sins? And I think the answer is Jesus knew he was going to have to leave behind his kingdom in the form of the church. And he knew he was going to have to entrust that to people. And so he wanted to invest three years of his life into some young men so that he can hand the church off to them as passing them the keys to the kingdom. So I'm convinced that he spent an extra three years here on planet Earth with us for the main purpose of training the disciples to get them to a place where they were ready to take over his kingdom called the church and propel it into the future, which they absolutely did, or you guys wouldn't be sitting here in a different continent 2,000 years later, right? So that's what Jesus is doing with the disciples. So about age 30, he goes public, he calls the disciples to them, he trains them for three years, and then at the age of 33, he's crucified. And that week leading into the crucifixion is called Holy Week. And we're in the period of Lent that's leading up to Holy Week now. So Palm Sunday, which this year we're going to celebrate on April the 14th, is the day that Jesus goes into Jerusalem. It's called the triumphal entry. He enters as a king. But this sets in motion a series of events that by Friday has him crucified. We call that Good Friday. And then Easter is when he resurrects on Sunday. So he is in the middle of Holy Week here. It is the end of his life. He's sitting around one night with the disciples. If you were here the first week, we know, you know, that Jesus has just looked at Judas who had betrayed him and said, the thing that you are about to do, go and do it quickly. So Judas has left. He's at the end of his ministry with the 11 faithful disciples who he will hand the keys to the kingdom to and entrust them with the church. And he looks at them and he says, I have a new commandment for you, which is an interesting thing. Because the Bible says that Jesus had that all authority on heaven and on earth had been given to him. He had come down from heaven as God. He was God in the flesh. He could have added all the rules that he wanted to. He could have been given out commandments left and right. He could have done anything that he wanted. He could have made any rules that he wanted. And he waits three years to do it. And right before, like a couple of days before he's going to go be arrested and die for us, he says, oh, by the way, I have a new commandment for you, in verse 33, he calls them little children. Come to me, little children. Jesus doesn't play the little children card a lot. That's like maximum God card, right? Because they're peers. He's a dude, they're dudes. But in this one, he says, little children, listen to me. So this is like, hey, pay attention. Jesus is playing the God card here. He doesn't do this a lot. What's he about to teach? He says, I have a new commandment for you. So we should be leaning in. This is the one rule that Jesus makes. He could have made any rule his whole life. He's made one, and it's going to be this, and it's going to be a summation of all his teachings. So Christians, church, we should lean into this. If you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, you should be very interested in this new commandment that sums up everything that Jesus ever taught and did and said. Non-believers, if you're here and you're considering faith, you should be very interested in this because in this one commandment is the whole of the faith that you are considering. This is a hugely important, crucial passage. And this is what Jesus says to them that night before he prepares to go to heaven. He says this in verse 34. He leans in and he says, little children, disciples, church, for the rest of time, I'm going to give you, I have a new commandment for you. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. This is how the whole world will identify you from this moment on. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. Now, if you've been paying attention in the book of John, you should have some questions. How is this a summation of everything that Jesus teaches, and how is it different than things that he's taught in the past? Because at the beginning of the Gospels, in the beginning of Matthew, and at different places in John, he tells us that we are to, what, love our neighbor as ourselves, right? We know this commandment. This isn't new. This doesn't feel different. We know that we're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. In fact, it was commonly known then. Then there's a story where Jesus is talking to a lawyer, a young man who's been studying the law, which incidentally is the Bible, and he asked the lawyer, what do you think are the greatest commandments? And the lawyer says, love your God with all your heart, your soul, and your mind, amen, and love your neighbor as yourself. This was a commonly accepted teaching. So how is this different than this commonly accepted teaching? There's another theme that runs through John of what Jesus teaches. Over and over again, he continues to come back to this idea that it's our job to believe in him. We looked a couple weeks ago when people asked him, what do we do to inherit eternal life? How do we labor for eternity? He says, believe in the one that the Father has sent. When he prays, after he resurrects Lazarus, Lazarus is a friend of his who dies. Jesus shows up at the grave. He brings him back to life, and he prays, and he says, Father, I knew you were going to do this. I did this so that they would believe that I am who I say I am, so that they would believe in the one that you have sent. So over and over, we see this theme in John that Jesus admonishes us to believe in him as the Son of God. And if we see those themes, it's already commonly accepted practice and commonly accepted teaching that we should love our neighbor as ourself, and we know that we should love God as well, and that it's our job to believe in God. How is this a summation of those things that Jesus has taught us? Well, we start when we understand this. When you look at the command to love your neighbor as yourself, do you understand that you are the standard of love in that scenario? That when the admonishment, when the instruction is, love your neighbor like you love yourself. And to love somebody for all intents and purposes is simply to want what's best for them and to act in a way that would bring that about. We love somebody, so we want what's best for them, and we act in a way that would bring that about in their life. That's what we do. And so when we love somebody as we love ourselves, then we are the standard of love in their life. So however we love ourselves is how we ought to love other people. And that's a problem because we are imperfect and we love ourselves imperfectly. There have been seasons of my life where I did not do a good job at loving myself. And if I were to love you like I love myself, then I would probably owe you an apology, right? There are seasons of your life where you love yourself imperfectly. You're not taking care of yourself very well. You're not making the best decisions for yourself. You're not bringing about the best things in your life. And so if you started to love other people like you loved yourself, if we're honest, that's a pretty low bar. When we say that we should love our neighbor as we love ourself, that sets the bar at us. And you'll notice that Jesus says this at the beginning of his ministry, before the disciples have watched him relentlessly love everyone around him. But at the end of his ministry, when they've watched him for three years, graciously and patiently and givingly and sacrificially love everyone around him all the time, Jesus raises the bar on this command. And he says, it's no longer good enough for you to love other people as you love yourself. No, no, you need to love them as I have loved you. You need to go and love other people as you've seen me love them. And when that's the commandment, do you understand that Jesus is now the bar on that love? Before we set the standard, go love others as you love yourself. That's our standard. And he says, no, no, no. I want you to raise it to my standard. Go and love other people as I have loved you. He says this to the disciples who have watched him over the years. Bring sight back to the blind. Make people who can't walk be able to walk again. Love on people who are found in the middle of sin. Restore people who the world would condemn. Argue with the Pharisees. Teach the multitudes. Perform countless miracles. Sit patiently with them. They've watched all of this. And Jesus says, as you have seen me love on you and minister to you, I want you to love one another that way. He sets the bar at himself, not us. But the question then becomes, if I am to love other people as Jesus loved me, how is it that Jesus loves me? And how does that fulfill the instruction that we should believe in Jesus and love God? How can this possibly be a summation of everything that he's taught? And to answer that question, we need to look at the way that Jesus loves. Now, I'm going to give you kind of three categories or ways that Jesus loves us. I would encourage you in your small groups this week as you discuss this, you guys can probably think of more ways or more categories of ways that Jesus loves us. But here are my three this morning. There are three ways, main ways, I think that Jesus loves us. I think Jesus loves us sacrificially, he loves us restoratively, and he loves us recklessly. Sacrificially, restoratively, and recklessly, I think, are ways that Jesus loves us. Sacrificially is obvious, right? If you were to ask anybody, believer, non-believer, anybody who has a cursory knowledge of Scripture at all, how does Jesus love us? One of the answers would be sacrificially. He died for us, so he sacrificed, he gave of himself for us. But it's not just that he died on the cross for us. That's the biggest of sacrifices. But we see him time and again in the gospels give of his time and give of his energy and give of his attention and give of his patience. We see him constantly choosing other people over himself. He even chose homelessness. He has foxes have holds and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. He just wandered around loving on other people, not being concerned with himself. So if we're going to love like Jesus, we need to love sacrificially, which means that we need to give of our time and our effort and our energy and our resources in his name and for him. And this happens a lot. We have people over there who are watching kids so that young families can sit in here and go to church in peace. And some of these families just need to sleep right now. I'm not even mad at them for not paying attention because they just need rest because it's hard to be a parent sometimes, right? So we have people who are giving of their time on a Sunday morning and loving on them so that they can be in here. We have people who are teaching the kids in there, loving on them, giving of their time. We have servants all over the church who are loving well through sacrificing. I see that happening a lot in Grace. Once a month, we do this incredible thing when we go to Pender County that was impacted by the floods. And Florence came in, the hurricane came in, there was floods, and we're good, and everything's settled, everybody's got power. Except out there, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of homes that have been impacted by the floods that are unlivable. Insurance can't help them out, and these people have no options. And so Grace actually sends a team of people down once a month to go and help restore these people and restore their lives and fix their homes. And so the men and women who do that on a monthly basis are going and loving sacrificially. They are giving up a Saturday to be down there, which is a big deal, particularly in NCAA tournament time, to give up these Saturdays. Incidentally, the trip this month got canceled and got moved to this upcoming Saturday. So if that's a way you'd like to love sacrificially, you can sign up for that online or indicate it on your communication card, and that's fine. And so there are all these ways to go out and to love others outside of our homes and to kind of step into the lives of others and love sacrificially, show up for the food drive and love the people, the kids who might not be able to eat over spring break. That's good. But to me, the surest test to know if we're really loving others sacrificially is whether or not we're doing that in our home. It's easy to go out in fits and starts and to kind of drop in and make an appearance and love here and then retreat back to those who know us best and be selfish and need our space and our time and our TV and all the stuff, right? That's easy to do. It's easy to step out and love for a couple of hours and then step back into our shell. I learned this lesson when I was in high school. I was 17 or 18 years old and I had just gone off to summer camp, right? A place called Look Up Lodge in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. And it made a huge impact on me. I had grown up in the church, grown up, I think, as a Christian. But this was the time, this was the week where I really, really got it. Something switched for me, and I understood Christianity in a way that I never had. And so I'm on fire for Jesus, right? I'm like the classic mountaintop experience kid coming back from camp. Like I am, I am so fired up. I'm ready to charge hell with a water pistol. And it doesn't have to be one of those pump kinds. It can just be like the single action. Like I'm still in, bring it on Satan. I'm coming for you. Like I am ready. And I'm, my hair is on fire for Jesus Jesus. I come back and I'm telling my parents who raised me in the church and who love God and who love me, are super involved with the church. I'm telling them all the things that I'm going to do. I've made all these commitments. I'm going to do all the things. I'm going to start all the Bible studies. I'm going to lead all the things. I'm going to teach the little kids. You've never seen a Christian like me, Dad. I'm going to change the world. Dad says, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom. I'm like, man, you really cut the legs out from under a guy. And at the time, I thought he was kind of a jerk for saying that. Maybe he still is. But the point that he made is right. That's great. That's wonderful that you've had this mountaintop experience. That's wonderful that you love Jesus. Be nice to your mom and love your sister. It's easy to run out and fake it and sacrifice for others. It's hardest with the people that we know best. That's why we're meanest to the people that we love the most. That's why we have the shortest fuse with them. That's why we sometimes fail to offer the grace to others, the grace inside our home that we offer outside our home. If we want to love sacrificially, then it looks like, for me, this is something that I struggle with, when I come home sometimes, I know we make jokes about pastors and our job, and it is stressful looking at Facebook and golfing a lot, but there are times when I do come home and I am stressed. I've had a lot of meetings and a lot of things, and we've made decisions, and I've had to work hard, and the last thing in the world I want to do is sit on a chair that is too small for me and make Play-Doh donuts. I don't want to do that. I want to sit on a couch that is too big for me and eat donuts. That's what I want to do. But if I love Lily and I love Jen, then I'll come home and I'll sit down and I'll play. And I'll give Jen the space she needs to do the things she needs to do because she hasn't had that space all day and I'll engage with my daughter. If we love our family, we'll come home and we'll sacrifice for them. If we love the people around us, then we will consider their needs before they have to consider their own. I think sacrificial love shows up first in the people that we know best. Jesus also loves us restoratively. He seeks to restore us. There are so many examples of this. A couple weeks ago, Kyle did a great job preaching about the woman at the well, who at that time had had five husbands and was living with the sixth man who she was not yet married to, which by any account throughout all of history is generally referred to as scandalous, right? And Jesus doesn't bring it up. He just mentioned it as if it's true, but he doesn't seek to condemn her about it. He's far more concerned about restoring her and letting her know about who he is and the promises that he makes and her need for him. In the book of John, there's a story that some versions include where there's a woman who's brought to him in adultery in the city streets. And the Pharisees, the religious leaders say, should we stone her? And he has this impossible question to answer. And he does this thing where he makes everybody, he convinces everybody to go away by riding in the dirt. And once everyone is gone, he looks at the woman and he says, is there anyone left to condemn you? And she says, no, Lord. And he says, and neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. He's not there to condemn her. He's not there to convince her, hey, you know adultery is wrong and you really shouldn't do it. You know that the thing that you were doing was shameful and that I don't like it. And that when you do that, you trample on my love. Like I'm here to die for you because you do stuff like that. Could you maybe knock it off? He doesn't say that. He says, neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. We've extended this series a week so that I can preach to you about the restoration of Peter after he messes up. Peter messes up big time. And Jesus comes to him and he has every right to get onto him and condemn him and he doesn't. He simply restores him. What we see in the ministry of Jesus over and over and over again is that he is far more concerned with restoring you than condemning you. And in the church, when we look at other people, it gets so easy to identify that as sin. Is that person sinning? Is that person doing something that's wrong? Look at what they're doing in their life. Doesn't that count as sin? And Jesus says, yeah, maybe, but how about we love them first? He doesn't let them off the hook. He says, go and sin no more. Go and don't do this thing anymore. But first, he says, neither do I condemn you. He's always, always, always more interested in restoring than condemning, in restoration than condemnation. And if we are going to love other people like Jesus loves us, then when we approach others, we should always be primarily concerned with their restoration to spiritual health, not condemning them and defining what they're doing. We restore people. We do not condemn. That's the Lord's job. And Jesus loves us recklessly. Now, I like this one because we're going to sing a song after the sermon called Reckless Love. I think it's called Reckless Love. I never know song titles. It should be called Reckless Love. And it's about the reckless love of God. And it was a popular song in Christian circles. But we had some debates and some discussions about it as a staff because part of the concern was that it was erroneous to call God's love reckless because reckless kind of infers that there's mistakes made, that it's just like reckless abandon, that there might be some mess up or some error to his love or some misjudgments within his love, but it's good and it's fine and we like God's love and so that's okay. So that maybe it was almost theologically inaccurate. But after we talked about it some more, we decided to go ahead and sing the song. And I'll confess to you that the first time I ever even looked at the lyrics of the song was when we were singing it on Sunday morning because I'm really bad about keeping current with worship songs. We do a playlist on Spotify with the songs that Grace Raleigh does, and that's my worship. That's what I listen to. And if it's not on there, I don't listen to it. So I had not heard this song before. And as we're going through it on Sunday and I'm looking at the lyrics and it talks about how he leaves the 99 and he comes after us and he always chases us and he always pursues us and there's no wall that he won't kick down and there's no mountain that he won't climb to come after us. What I realize about the recklessness of God is that it's talking about this emotional recklessness where he has no regard for how much we hurt him. He is always going to pursue us. That's the recklessness of God. It doesn't matter how many times someone rejects him. It doesn't matter how many times someone makes him a promise and says, God, I'm never going to do the thing again. And then they turn around and they do the thing. It doesn't matter how many times we betray God or we walk away from him or we break his heart or we break his rules or we hurt his spirit, he is always going to forgive us and he is always going to pursue us. It doesn't matter how many times he extends a hand to us and we knock the hand away and we say, I'm not interested. He is still going to extend the hand again. He recklessly pursues us. This is the picture that he lays out in the Old Testament when he has a prophet named Hosea marry a prostitute named Gomer. He says, I want you to go and I want you to take Gomer as your wife. She doesn't deserve you. I want you to go marry her anyway. So Hosea, in obedience, does it, marries her. Inevitably, she cheats on him, goes back to her old life, and God speaks to Hosea again and he says, go back and get her and marry her again, regardless of the toll that it takes on you. That's the reckless love of God. Because there is something very human and very natural to this idea that once our heart has been broken, once someone's turned us down enough times, once someone has disappointed us enough times, once someone has required our forgiveness more than a few times, there's a very natural human thing to do to recoil and to withdraw our love from them and to not pursue them as hard and to not go after them as hard because it's hurt us so many times in the past. And so we recoil out of this sense of self-protection and we build up walls and we don't let other people in because we've been hurt so many times, and we've been damaged so many times that we don't want to experience that again, so we learn to protect ourselves from the possibility of other people hurting us. And God's reckless love says, I don't care how many times you hurt me, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna pursue you. That's the recklessness of God. And if we want to love like Jesus, then we love recklessly. This is how Jesus is able to tell Peter how many times to forgive people, right? Peter goes to Jesus and he says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone when they wronged me? When someone wrongs me, when they disappoint me, when they let me down, when they break my heart, when I thought I could count on them and they show me that I can't and it really, really hurts, how many times should I forgive them? Up to seven times seven. As many times as it takes, you forgive them until they do it right. You forgive them as many times as you have to. You recklessly pursue them with your love. That's what it means to love like Jesus loved. We love sacrificially, we love restoratively, and we love recklessly. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about how to love in that way, what becomes very apparent is we are not able to do that. We are not able in and of ourselves to love in those ways, to love perfectly sacrificially, to always empathize and love with restoration in mind. We are not able to love recklessly. We do not possess the ability to do that. And this is how it fulfills Jesus' teaching that we ought also to believe in him. Because what we understand is it is impossible to love others like Jesus loved us without Jesus's possession of and power in our hearts. You see, unless we believe in Jesus and he has taken up residency in our heart and has possession of our heart and his power is working in our hearts to change our ways and our desires to his and our ability to love to His. Unless He's doing that, unless we've loved God enough to believe Him and place our faith in Christ, there is no possible way we can be obedient to the command to love one another as Christ has loved us. So in this, we come full circle in seeing that it is really a summation of everything that Jesus has taught. It raises the bar on the commandment to love our neighbor as ourself. It fulfills the commandment to love God and fulfills the commandment to believe in the one that he has sent because it's impossible to do it without believing in Jesus. And in that way, it's a summation of everything that Jesus ever taught. Simply go and love. Andy Stanley says it this way. He's a pastor in Atlanta. He says, when you don't know what to say or do, just love others as God through Christ loves you. That's what we do. We love other people sacrificially. We love them restoratively. We love them recklessly. And then Jesus says, this is how the world will know that you are my disciples. This is how I want the world to look at you and know that you belong to me. This is what I want to be your defining and distinguishing characteristic. This should be the way the world identifies you to look at the way you love one another and you love others. That's what I want to define you. And this is something that I think the church gets messed up sometimes. He does not say that the world will know that you are my disciples by what you stand against, by how you define sin, by who you choose to condemn, by what you stand up and rally against in Washington. That's not how we are going to be defined. We're not going to be defined and identified by the world by our good doctrine or dogma or theology. We aren't made known to the world by winning a Bible knowledge trivia contest. We're not made known. The world will not know that we are his disciples by how well we know this book. Now, all of that flows out of our love for him, but it is not our definitive thing. It is not our distinguishing characteristic. Our distinguishing characteristic is who and how well we love. That's what Jesus wants to define us. All the other things are important, but if we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we believe. If we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we're against. If we fail to love others first, then nobody cares how well we serve. We are first to love others sacrificially, distortively, and recklessly. And this is how we will be defined. This is how the world will know that we are his disciples. What would it look like for you to be known in that way? What would it look like for the people around you to say whatever it is they want to say about you, but at the end of the day, that person loves people well? What would it look like to love people so different and in a way that was so other that when people saw you doing it, they were drawn to your God because there must be something else going on here. Nobody could possibly love others that well. Nobody could possibly sacrifice that much. Nobody could possibly mean it. You know how when you meet somebody who's super nice and super gracious and they're very kind to everyone, you think to yourself, they're faking it. You think to yourself, what do they look like when they're down? What if you never were? What if you weren't faking it? Because that love was fueled by Jesus and you loved everybody just as hard as he did. What if this was the distinguishing and defining characteristics of our homes? What if when someone entered into your home and spent some time with you and your family, when they left and they got in the car and whatever else they said about your home, I really like her napkins or those curtains or that's what cozy farmhouse looks like and that's what I want to do. Like whatever else they said about your home, the one thing that they took away was, man, those people love each other well. Man, I felt loved in that house. What if your kids growing up in your house, the one thing they'll say about mom and dad is, listen, they did some crazy stuff and there's some crazy, I got to knock off of me here in adulthood, but man, they love me well. And when I brought friends over, they loved them too. What if that's what was said about your house? That they showed the love of Christ there? What if that's what's said about the church? That when people come to Grace Raleigh, they walk away, and whatever else they experienced here, sermon was okay, music was great, announcements were outstanding. Whatever else they experienced here, they walk away and they go, those people love well. Those people loved me. And I'll brag on you a little bit because I don't think we're too terribly bad at this. Last week we had a guy here, we're getting our website redone. He's our web developer, a guy named Hugh. And Hugh is here. I invited him to just see the church and kind of learn more about us. And so he came in, and he came in after the first service, stayed in the lobby, came to the second service, and then I talked to him afterwards. And I just said, hey, you know, thanks for coming, whatever. And he said, dude, I love this place. I said, really? He says, yeah, these are the friendliest people I've ever met in my life. And he wasn't kidding. He said, they were so nice. He lives on the other side of Cary, like 40 minutes away. He said, if I lived closer, my family would start coming here next week. This place is incredible. So good on you if you were a part of that. I think this is one of the things we do well, but I think we can do it better. What if we were a church where no matter what other people experienced, they walked away and they said, those are some of the friendliest people I've ever met. What if that were everyone's experience? What if when you brought a visitor here, you brought friends or family here, they walked away and they said, that place loves well. It starts in the individual, it goes into the home, and then it comes here. And if we could be a church that loves other people well, that's what we become known for, that's the kind of church I want to be a part of. And you're here, I know, because that's the kind of church you want to be a part of too. But it begins with us. It begins with us pursuing Jesus and asking him and praying, help me to love other people as you have loved me. And what I love about this teaching is Jesus knows he's about to leave the disciples on earth. He's been a physical presence there. He has been the representative of the Godhead there. But he is about to leave and they're going to be the ones who carry the torch. And what better way as the torchbearers of Christ to represent him to the rest of the world than to go and be the embodiment of love to them as Jesus was. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We love you imperfectly. We love you inconsistently. We love you often half-heartedly. Often, God, we love you forgetfully. God, please continue to work in our hearts to draw us near you that we may love you more. And that out of that love, we might love other people more. Give us the grace and the patience to love sacrificially, God. Give us the sympathy and empathy and insight to love restoratively and give us the strength and the faith to love recklessly. God, may we, may our homes, may this place be known and identified for how well we offer your love to others. It's in your son's name I pray. Amen.