Sermons tagged with Harmony

I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life, all over my life. I see promises in fulfillment. All over my life. All over my life. Help me remember when I'm weak. Fear may come, but fear will lead. You lead my heart to victory. You are my strength, and you always will be. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. All over my life. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life, all over my life. See the cross, the empty grave, the evidence of your goodness. Jesus. I see your promises in fulfillment all over my life, all over my life, yeah. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life. Yeah, you're all around us. So why should I fear? The evidence is here. Why should I fear? Oh, the evidence is here. I searched the world, but it couldn't fill me. Melted deep rays, treasures of fame were never enough. Then you came along and put me back together. And every desire is now satisfied here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you. There's nothing better than you. Oh, there's nothing, nothing is better than you. Come on, tell them. To show you my weakness My failures and flaws Lord, you've seen them all And you still call me friend Cause the God of the mountains Is the God of the valleys There's not a place Your mercy and grace won't find me again. Oh Come on. Tell them now. Come on, choir. Oh, there's nothing better than you. Nothing. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. You're the only one who can. Somebody give a praise in this house. I don't think we're finished yet. Come on. Come on, one more can. You're the only one who can. You're the only one who can. Jesus, you're the only one. Come on, give Him one more shout of praise. When all I see is the battle, you see my victory. When all I see is the mountain, you see a mountain moon. And as I walk through the shadow, your love surrounds me. There's nothing to fear now, for I am safe with you. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees, with my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs for you. Thank you, God. God, you see the end to tell. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees. With my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs to you. And every fear I lay at your feet. I'll sing through the night. Oh God, the power of our God. You shine in the shadow. You win every battle. Nothing can stand against the power of our God. In all mighty fortunes, you go before us. Nothing can stand against the power of our God We wanted to let you know that our mission here at Grace is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. One of the best ways to communicate with us here at Grace is through our connection cards. If you would like to speak to a pastor at Grace, if you have any prayer requests for our prayer team and our elders, or if you're not receiving our Grace Vine weekly emails, this would be a great way to fill it out and let us know. If you're watching with us online, you can click the link below and submit the connection card there. Or if you're here with us at Grace, the connection card is in the seat back pocket in front of you. Just be sure to drop it on your way out in the box next to the doors. Thanks so much for joining us this morning and we hope that this service is a blessing to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here at Grace Raleigh. I'd like to ask you to stand. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace, and it's great having people here in the room. It's great having people at home joining in with us. I thought that this morning we could start off with the scripture of John 3.16, that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Come all you sinners Come find his mercy Come to the table He will satisfy Taste of his goodness Find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us. Whoever believes in Him will live forever. bring all your failures bring your addictions come lay them down at the foot of the cross Jesus is waiting there with hope in our hearts For God so loved the world praise god praise god from whom all blessings Praise Him, praise Him For the wonders of His love For God so loved the world that He gave us His one and only Son to save The power of hell forever defeated Now it is well, I'm walking in freedom Oh God so loved, God so loved the world Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Come lay them down at the foot of the cross. Jesus is waiting. God so loved the world. Amen. God sent his son. They called him Jesus. He came to love, heal, and forgive. He lived and died. To buy my pardon. An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. he lives all fear is gone because i know he holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives And then one day I'll cross that river I'll fight my spine No war with me And then as death Gives way to victory I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know He lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone Because I know He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives. And life is worth the living just because He lives. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all can have a seat for a moment. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It is fabulous to see your smiling faces in here. And welcome to those of you that have joined us online. It is a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning, Welcome to the world for this beautiful sunny weather because in two weeks, the mission committee will be here to gather all of the goodies that you choose to bring. So if you go to Grace Raleigh's events page, you will find a list of things that the mission committee is looking for for the Interfaith Food Shuttle. You will buy those. And then on either that Friday or either that, I'm sorry, that Saturday or that Sunday, you can drive through. The hours are listed on the screen. You can drive through. They will come out to your car. They will pick it up. They will bring it inside, and they will take care of it. So all you have to do is go to the grocery. And I guess these days you could even have it delivered to your house. So that is fabulous. And speaking of driving by and dropping off, if you are the parent of a 6th grader through 12th grader, today is the day you get to drive by and push them out of the car. Woo-hoo! We are so excited to announce that Grace Students is back up and running live and in person. Kyle will be here tonight in all of his fun. And we have the cool thing happening too that he's live streaming the service. So if for some reason your 6th through 12th grader can't be in the building tonight, no problem. Email Kyle, kyle at graceralee.org. And he has all the information and the links that you need to be able to be attached to the live stream and join in that way. They're now going to start into a routine of being in person one week, meeting online together the next week in person, and you get the idea. But email Kyle for any information that you guys might need. So thank you again for coming, for being a part of Grace Raleigh thisbbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody here. This is as full as the church has been since last February. That's crazy. Man, you guys, apparently, we've been going through Ecclesiastes. Y'all love depression and hopelessness. So thanks for showing up to that. You're like, I got to get out of the house now. Maybe that's what I needed to do the whole time, which is make you really, really sad. So you had to come see people. This is great. If you're still joining us at home, we're so grateful for that. This is the third part in our series called Vapor, where we're moving through the book of Ecclesiastes. We've said the whole time that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. And what's really fun is that this is the joyful sermon. This is the one, this is the good news. This is the one where we celebrate. We only did two songs up front because we want to end praising God together, and he gave us sunshine to do this. So it seems that the weather is matching the rhythm of the series, and I think that that's fantastic. In the first week, we started out and we talked about this idea of a hevel or vapor or smoke, and we concluded that Solomon would argue that a vast majority of Americans are wasting their life, right? Which means a vast majority of us are probably investing our life pursuing things that ultimately we can't grab onto or vapor or smoke. They're here one day and they're gone the next. And so that really left us with this question at the end of that week, is there a worthwhile investment of our lives? And if you have notes, you see that at the top of your notes. I think that's been a question that's been lingering in the series. Is there really a worthwhile investment of my life or is it all just a waste of time? Is everyone here just, we're all just chasing vapor? And I think that there's a good answer to that question, but last week we answered it a little bit, but we stumbled into another harsh reality. The harsh reality that even if we pursue wisdom with our life, even if we're obedient, the godliest of the godly, that does not insulate us from pain. Our godliness doesn't protect us from grief, right? And so what we learned by looking at that beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy. There's a time for grieving and there's a time for healing and there's a time to be hurt. There's a time to live and there's a time to die. Like we saw that passage. And what we learned is that pain is not punitive. God's not tightening the screws on us to punish us. Pain is the result of a fallen world, right? And that the harsh reality that Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes is that no matter what we do, we're going to hurt. No matter how godly we are, there will be seasons of mourning in our life. And so that leaves us, I think, with another really difficult question. Can I ever hope for true happiness? Can I ever, on this side of eternity, grasp onto something that isn't Hevel or vapor or smoke? Can I grasp onto a joy that is immutable and unchangeable, that is resistant to circumstances in life, that even as the storms come, I can still find myself in seasons of joyfulness and contentment? Is it even possible to do those things? And I think those are the two big questions that we bring into this week. Is it possible to pursue anything that really matters? And is it possible to grab onto anything that looks like actual true contentment and joy? And the answer to those questions, I think, is yes. And Solomon answers those questions multiple times in Ecclesiastes. I think in four separate passages, he addresses those with the exact same answer. Four different times, he gives this answer, and I love this answer. I think there's so much bound up in his choice to answer the questions in this way. But like I said, he says it in four separate times. I'm going to read you two of them so that you can get a sense. They're in your notes. If you have them, they'll be on the screen if you're following along at home. But here's what he writes in Ecclesiastes, Solomon repeats this idea. That at the end of the day, what's left for us to do is enjoy our toil, enjoy our food and drink, and honor our God. The end of the book, he ends. The end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. We talked about that last week. And it's important that as we look through what I think is kind of this formula for contentment, that we understand that when he's talking about eating and drinking, when we see eating and drinking in the Bible, that is almost always a reference to a communal activity. Eating and drinking is inherently communal. The Bible rarely talks about eating for sustenance, right? It rarely talks about food as this way to be healthy. It always talks about food and bread and gathering around a table as a form of community. And so when he says that there's nothing for man to do except to find joy in what he does and to eat and to drink. What he means is when we look around the table, when we have our meals, if we love the people who are around us, that's good. That's a gift from God. We go out to eat, we're eating with our friends, and we look around and we have genuine affection, we enjoy these people. That's a gift from God. When you look around your table and you have family there and you love that family. Now listen, we're all parts of families. We know that love isn't just sing song and fairy tales all the time. Sometimes it's hard, but at the end of the day, if you know that I love you and you love me, then that's a gift from God. And so when he's talking about food and drink, he's really referencing community. And then when he talks about toil, enjoying your toil, I have a men's group that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6.30. Anybody can join us if you want to. Just email me. Well, the more the merrier there. And we were talking about this word toil. And to a room full of men, it means career, right? It means work. It means what's your job? But Solomon uses that word a lot more broadly than that in Ecclesiastes. And the word toil really doesn't refer to your job or your career as much as it refers to the activities that you have set aside for that day, the productivity of that day, whatever it is you're going to do. Because we have some men in the group who are retired. If it's only about work, career, then they have no shot at happiness, right? They better get back to it. But really, it's broader than that. It really means, Toyo, what do you have set for yourself today? What productivity are you going to engage in today? And then in this verse, he says that we should do good. And he defines doing good as honoring God with our life, fearing God and keeping his commandments. And it's with these understandings that I kind of arrive at this conclusion of kind of Solomon's equation for contented joy and apex happiness. And I really do think it's this. People you love plus tasks you enjoy plus honoring God equals apex happiness. Listen to me. If when you eat, if as you move through your day, you look around and the people in your life bring you joy, and when you wake up, you're looking forward to the things that you're going to do in that day. Maybe not everything, but the point of the day brings you joy. And you're honoring God with your life. If those things are true of you, then I want you to know this morning, you are apex happy. It doesn't get better than that. Sometimes our problem is just that we can't see it. But I'm telling you, man, if you wake up every day and you get to have breakfast with your family or you go out to lunch with some people at work that you enjoy or you look forward to seeing some friends at small group or something like that, if you look around at your community and you're surrounded by people you love and you look at your days and God has given you something to put your hand to that you enjoy, that gives you a sense of purpose, that helps you become who he's created you to be and use your gifts and abilities to point people to Jesus as you move throughout your days, if that's what you get to do and you're honoring God as you do those things, then listen to me, you are experiencing apex happiness in your life. And I think that we get it so messed up sometimes. We do all the things that Solomon talked about in the first two chapters, and we chase all the things. We run out there and we chase all the success and all the relationships and all the money and all the fulfillment and all the pleasure and all the stuff that's out there. When really what's true is God has already given us everything we need for joy. God has already provided in our lives everything we need for joy. And listen, if you don't have those things, if you look around, you're like, I don't like any of the people in my life right now. If you don't have a fulfillment in your job, if you're not honoring God with your life, then guess what? Those things are attainable. Those things aren't out there and forever away. Those things are attainable. They're right around you. God gives us everything we need for joy within our reach. That's why I brought this chair today. This chair here is my chair from my house. This is my chair in my living room. This chair sits in the corner of our living room, and opposite me is we have a little sectional couch. There's other people who sit in this chair sometimes, but for the most part, it's me. When I sit in this chair, I get to watch dance recitals. I get to watch Lily come in with her friends, and they sing Elsa to me. And I pretend to care about Elsa. I get to watch dumb little magic tricks. We went to some restaurant and they gave her some pot with a magnet on the bottom and there's a plant that comes out of the wand and she comes in and she does the abracadabra, the whatever, and then she pulls it out and for the 37th time, I'm amazed by this magic trick, right? I sit in this chair and Jen sits on the couch and we talk about our days. We talk about what's hard and we talk about what's fun. From this chair, when someone rings the doorbell, if I angle my head just right, I can see down the hallway to the front door and I can see the little face that's there to come play with Lily. If they're all over, I can look this way out the window and I can look at them all, all the neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline that we got to get for her. In the mornings when I'm doing life right and I'm downstairs reading like I'm supposed to, at about 6.45, 7 o'clock, I can look up the stairs and see Lily up there and motion her down to come sit in my lap and tell me what she's going to do that day. When we have friends over, which I love to do, eventually we end up in our living room and we sit around and we talk and we giggle and we laugh. In the pandemic, I worked from this chair. I set up a little table right here and I do my Zoom calls and I argue with the elders and that's pure joy except for Chris Lata. I love working from that table. I can see all the things that bring me the most joy from this chair. And if I go out there chasing joy, if I go out there trying to track everything down, what am I going to do? Buy a new house for this chair These are from old David. If this church grows to 2,000 people and I get to feel what that feels like, do my conversations with my family and friends get any better from sitting in this chair? No, man. This is it. And sometimes it's not the chair, right? Sometimes it's the kitchen. Sometimes it's when I get to cook dinner and Jen sits on the stool and we talk about our days. Sometimes it's the mornings when Ruby and Lily are on the bed and I'm in the chair in the corner of that room and we're all talking, just enjoying our times. But here's what I know. I can go out there chasing whatever I want to chase. But my times of most profound joy come when I'm right there. They come when I'm around the people that I love the most. They come when I'm soaking in the blessings that God has given me. And this is what we need to pay attention to. Solomon tells us these are God's gifts to us. If people in your life that you love, who love you, they're God's gift to you. Drink them in. Hug them more. Tell them more that you care about them. Tell them more that you're grateful for them. Tell them more that they are a gift from God in your life. You have a thing to do every day that you like to put your hand to, whether it's raising kids or volunteering somewhere or spending time in your neighborhood or going to work or looking forward to seeing your friends or whatever it is. You have things that God has given you that make you productive, that let you feel like you are living out His intended will for you? That's His gift for you. That work, that toil, that's His gift. It's designed for you. And then if we honor God, His invitation to honor Him is His gift to us because He knows that when we live a life honoring Him, we live a life of fewer regrets. We live a life of deeper gratitude. We live a life with a deeper desire for Jesus if we'll just revel in his gifts. This helps me make sense of the Honduran children I saw at one time. For years of my life, I would go down to Honduras with some regularity to take teams down to visit a pastor named Israel Gonzalez. Israel is one of my heroes. The things that he's done for the kingdom are unbelievable. And he is based in a city in central Honduras called, called, uh, Swatopeke. He and his wife have set up a free clinic there. He has a church there. And then from that church, what they do is they organize these goodwill parties and they bring teams down and you get together hot dogs and little tchotchke gifts and you go up into the hillsides. There's mountains surrounding Ciguatapeque and you go up into the mountainside and you go to these villages and he throws these goodwill parties and he hopes that by doing this, these villages that are deeply Catholic, but Catholic in such a way that shuts them off to faith rather than turns them on to faith. And so they're lost communities. And he goes and he throws these parties, and by throwing these goodwill parties, they invite him into the community to plant a church. He's planted 14 churches that way, last I checked. And I would go on these parties. And you go up into these mountains surrounding Suwatopec into a village. And that's not derogatory. It's literally a village. Homes are built of mud and wood, makeshift roofs, one or two rooms, literally dirt poor. I've had the opportunity in my life to be in a fair amount of other countries and to see poverty on multiple continents. Honduras is just about the worst. But yet when we would go there, we would get out and there would always be these children there. And these children would have the biggest, goofiest grins on their face ever. They were so joyful, and they would laugh, and they would play, and they were happy to see you, and it never got wiped off of their face. And I always wondered, kid, how can you be so happy? Don't you know you don't have a Barbie house? Don't you know you don't have a PlayStation? Don't you know your soccer ball stinks? Those kids had it figured out, man. They had people around them who loved them. They had things to do each day that they looked forward to. And they hadn't lived enough life to carry the weight of what it is to not honor God with our choices. They were walking in apex happiness. And I carry all my American wealth down there and privilege, and I look at them and I'm jealous. Because they figured out something that we haven't. And I just think that there is this profound truth that everything that we need is right there within our grasp. We don't have to run around out there chasing vapor and Hevel. God has given us these gifts already. And in that truth, in that truth that everything we need for joy is within our grasp? We answer those two questions we started with. Is there a pursuit that's actually worth investing my life in? Yes. The people you love, the tasks that give you purpose, and honoring God. You want to live a life that matters? You want to get to the end of it and wonder if it's all vapor? Or not have to wonder that? Then invest your life in the people that you love and the tasks that God has ordained for you. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that we should do good works, that we should walk in them. Walk in those good works that God intended you for and honor God with the choices that you make. Those are worthwhile pursuits. You will get to the end of your life if you pursue those things and know that it was a life well lived. And he actually doubles down on this idea of pursuing relationships with other people. I don't have a lot of time to spend here on it, but again, this is a passage that I can't just skip over as we go through the book of Ecclesiastes. He doubles down on this idea of having more folks in our life when he writes this has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon doesn't take a lot of time to tell you to invest in a lot of things in Ecclesiastes. If you've been reading along with us, he doesn't tell you to do a lot of stuff there. He just kind of tells you, hey, this stuff's a waste of time. You should honor God. And then he tells you how we got to that conclusion. But here he stops and makes sure you understand the value of having people in your life who love you, who you love in return. And he sets up life as this struggle, this fight, because it is a struggle and a fight to choose to honor God with our lives. It is a struggle and a fight to keep our marriages healthy. It is a struggle and a fight to direct our kids in the right way, to love our families well, to share our faith, to be evangelists in our community, and to make disciples of the people who are around us. That's hard. And Solomon says, if you try to do this alone, woe to you when you fall and you have no one to pick you up. Woe to you when addiction creeps in and there's no one you can tell. Woe to you when doubts creep into your faith and there's no one you can talk to. How hard it must be for you when your marriage gets rocky and there's no one to fight for it. If there's two, he says, you've got a fighting chance. If there's three, that's not quickly broken. We need people in our lives to fight for us. We need to fight for the people in our lives. It seems to be a big value to us. That will help us ensure that we always have people to eat and drink with that we love and enjoy. So I thought it was worth pointing out Solomon's emphasis on this. The other question that remained from the previous weeks is, can I ever hope for true happiness? Yes. Yes, because here's the thing. If the bad things in Ecclesiastes 3 are true, then so are the good ones. Last week, I read the passage and I said, listen, pain is coming for all of us. It's going to hurt. We're going to mourn. We're going to grieve. No one gets to dodge that based on our godliness. It's going to happen to all of us. We will walk through hard times, but here's the reality. If that's true, then the flip side is true. If the bad things are true, then God says we will walk through seasons where we experience the good things. Look at the good things. There is a time to be born, to plant, to heal, to build up, to laugh, to dance, to gather things together, to embrace, to keep, to sow, to speak. A time for love and a time for peace. If we're going to have to walk through hard times, there's going to be good ones too. And I just think that the blessing from Ecclesiastes is this. It hits us with some hard realities. It's stark. It's unflinching. Hey, most of us are wasting our lives. And no matter what you do to invest it well, you're going to hurt. Those are hard truths. But I've said the whole time that if we can accept them on the other side is this joy that is waiting for us. And this is the joy. The joy is, yes, there's big things going on that we can't control. But in the midst of all that stuff that we can't control, God gives us these gifts, these moments of joy, these pockets to lean into where we celebrate him, where we're grateful for him, and we acknowledge those things as gifts. And I just think that if we accept the difficult realities from this book, then we can start to look for these little pockets of joy in our life, and they will bring us such more fulfillment than if we just move through them waiting to get to the next thing. At our house, we do a thing called Breakfast Sammy Saturday, all right? I like a good breakfast sandwich. I know it's hard to tell by looking at me, but I like a good, I put butter down, I toast the bread, I do the eggs, I do some bacon, do some cheese on there, and then I put it all together on the blackstone, cut it in half, and the good egg bleeds out onto it. It's all the goodness, and then you dip your sandwich in there. It's the best. I love breakfast Sammy Saturdays. You guys are not enthusiastic enough about this. You need breakfast Sammy Saturdays in your life. Well, I'll just let you guys sign up. Come over to the house. I'll make them for you. We love it. But it's just kind of a thing that I do. I like it. I make one for Jen and Lily, and they kind of eat half of theirs. I'm more excited about it than anybody else. But then one day, Lily brought this home from preschool, and it made me cry right on the spot. That's breakfast Sammy Saturday. She drew my griddle. She put food on it. Apparently, I make pizza there. And she brought it home to me. Now, the thing about this is, it was an assignment at preschool. She was told, just make whatever you want. It's an art project. And she made breakfast Sammy Saturday. And she brought it home to me. And she said, look, Daddy. And she told me what it was. I started crying right there on the spot. I got these big old alligator tears in my eyes looking at Jen. What a cool thing. And sure, life's going to be hard. She's going to be a teenager. She's five now, so she's kind of maxed out on cuteness, and now it's just hyper sometimes. But even though I know that there's hard times ahead, even though I know she won't always appreciate things like Breakfast Sammy Saturday, I know she does now. And I know that that's a gift from my God. And I know that what Ecclesiastes says is the best thing I can possibly do is to drink deeply of that. The best thing we can possibly do is find joy in these moments that God allows. We don't know how long we'll have them. I was talking with a friend last night who's got a new infant. And he said every time he gets up with the infant in the middle of the night and holds her, that it's a privilege. Because he doesn't know when that last time's going to be. And that's the truth of it. I think that we have so many pockets of joy in our life every day. If we have people that we love, if we have something to do that we appreciate, if we're choosing to honor God with our life. And I think that because we're so busy chasing vapor, sometimes we miss these sweet little moments that can all be had right here if we're just paying enough attention. That's why I think on the other side of these realities awaits for us this profound joy. And I think that when we realize that, that when we realize that God has designed these things to bring us happiness in our life, that what's really important is if we don't believe in a God, if we're atheistic in our worldview, then that's it. The joy terminates in those moments. That's all we have. But if we are a spiritual people who believe that God designed these things and these blessings in our life to make himself evident in our life, then our joy doesn't terminate in the moment. It turns into exuberant praise. It reminds us that we have a God that designed this for us. And the other part is, and this is incredible, that the joy that we're experiencing in that moment is only a glimpse of the eternity that he's designed for us and won for us with Jesus, which is what we're going to come back and talk about next week, is how these things are glimpses to the eternity that Jesus has already won for us. So in a few minutes, the band is going to come, and we've saved two fun, exuberant songs to praise God together. And while we do that, I want to encourage you to keep those two thoughts in your head. What are the things that I can see from my chair? What are the joys that God has given me that are within my reach from places that I already have in my life? What are the things that maybe I'm missing because I'm chasing stuff that I don't need? And then let's reflect on the reality that there is coming an eternity where that's all we experience. It's no more just pockets. It's reality. And that is something for us all to celebrate. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so very good to us. You've given us so much. Lord, I pray that we would be grateful for those blessings. I pray that you would steep us in profound gratitude for the things that we have, that you would show us what we need and what we don't. God, if there is somebody here or who can hear my voice, who doesn't have people in their life that they love, God, would you bring that to them? Would you provide that community for them even here at Grace? Would you give them the courage to slip up their hand in some way, to fill out some sheet, or to send some email, or make some phone call, or some text, and help them engage with relationships that matter to them. God, if there are people who don't have something they enjoy in their days, would you give them the courage to find that? Show them how you designed them and what you created them for. God, if we are not honoring you with our lives, I pray that you would give us the courage to do that. Let us praise you exuberantly, God, for the joys that you have given us in our lives. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, Nate. Let's all stand up. guitar solo Our God, firm foundation Our rock, the only solid ground Let's lift his name. you are the only king forever you are victorious Unmatched in all your wisdom In love and justice you will reign and every knee will bow we bring our expectations our hope is anchored in your name the name of jesus Jesus you are the only king forever forevermore you are victorious We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. You are the only king forever. Mighty God, we lift you higher. You are the only king forever. Forevermore, you are the only king forever Forevermore, you are victorious. He is doing great things See what our Savior has done See how His love overcomes he has done great things. We dance in your freedom, awake and alive. Oh Jesus, our Savior, your name lifted high be faithful forever more you have done great things and I know you will do it again for your promise is yes and amen you will do great things God you do great things Oh Oh you have done great things you've done great things every captive and break every chain oh god You have done great things. You have done great things. Oh God, you guys here today. God bless. Have a great week. Thank you. Come all you weary, come all you thirsty, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Well, come all you sinners, come find His mercy. Come to the table, He will satisfy. Taste of His goodness, find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us, His one and only Son to save us. If you never believed in Him, you'll live forever. Here we go. We'll live forever. God so loved the world. Praise God. Praise God. From whom all blessings flow. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. His amazing love. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us Whoever believes in Him Will live forever Oh, the power of hell Forever defeated Now it is well I'm walking in freedom For God so loved the world. Amen. You are here, moving in our midst. I worship you. I worship you. You are here, working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are here. Working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are way maker. Miracle worker. Promise keeper. Light in the darkness. darkness my god that is who you are Jesus. Jesus I worship you. I worship you. You're mending every heart. You are here and you are mending every heart. I worship you. I worship you. You are here and you are way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light're the way maker. Yeah, sing it again. Oh, that is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. Yes, even when. Come on. You never stop. You're the way maker. Oh, that is who you are. Oh, it's who you are, my Jesus. Miracle worker. That is who you are. is above depression. His name is above loneliness. Oh, His name is above disease. His name is above cancer. His name is above every other name. That is who you are. Jesus. oh i know that is who you are When darkness tries to roll over my bones When sorrow comes to pain is all I know, oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. I am not captive to the light. I'm not afraid to leave my past behind. Oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. Oh, I'm standing. There's power in your name. Power in your name. There's power that can break off every chain. There's power that can empty out a grave. There's resurrection power that can save. is Thank you. I'm standing in your love. I count on one thing. The same God that never fails will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. The same God who's never late is working you're working Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy. My heart is heavy God that never fails. Will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. This ain't God who's never late. He's working all things out. You're working all things out. Oh, yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will. For all my days. Oh, yes, I will. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all names that nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all Thank you. The name of all names. That nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise. To glorify, glorify the name of our names. That nothing can stand against. Oh yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Come let us bow at his feet. He has done great things..

I am super excited for this sermon this morning. If you let me, I think I could go for about 90 minutes, so buckle up. Thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online. I'm so glad to get to be with my church family, with faces that I know and love, some of whom love me back after this week. It's been a week, man. It's been arduous. And I've been excited for this sermon since we outlined this series. And I opened up my Bible and I was reading through James and breaking it out into sermons and trying to figure out which parts we get to talk about and which parts we'll have to save for the next time we go through James. And when I arrived at this passage in chapter 3, chapter 3, verses 13 through 18, I was just excited to get to share the message from James with you guys, with my church. Because I don't know how you guys have felt about all the divisiveness and contention in our culture, racial and political and otherwise. But it's been wearying to my soul. It's been hard on my heart. It has grieved me that our culture has been this divided. It's been at least 50 years since our country has seen division like this. And as a pastor, it hurts my heart. And it hurts my heart in part because it's just a lot. But it also hurts my heart because I believe that Jesus' bride, the church, has a part to play in this, in this divisiveness. We actually have a role that God wants us to step into, that he asks us to step into. We have a role in our culture right now of who we should be and what we should do, and I believe that James speaks directly to that role and gives us hope and purpose in the midst of this contention. So I'm excited to talk with my church about that this morning. So let's look at James chapter 3, verses 13 through 18. I'm going to read them all, and then we'll talk about the passage. James writes this, Who is wise and understanding among you? By his conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. I love that phrase. James has this flourish for writing that Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, does not have. Paul writes his books like an engineer would write their book. It's very matter-of-fact, systemic, like this is how we're doing it. James has this flourish, and so he brackets this idea, which, by the way, he's extracting this idea out of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount was Jesus' first recorded public address. This is almost like a commentary on the things that Jesus taught in that sermon. And Jesus says, blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth and blessed are the peacemakers. And so it's like James is pausing to say, yeah, let's talk about those people and why they're needed and how we become like them. And so he opens up with this great phrase that the good works in the meekness of wisdom, and then he brackets it with that great phrase at the end, and harvest a righteousness s is it that wisdom has to be meek? Why is wisdom meek? Why did he choose to pair those things up together? Why did he couple them together in that way? Why is wisdom meek? And so to answer that question, I started thinking about, well, who's the person that I know or that I've seen? What's the example or the personification of someone who lets themselves show, whose good deeds are shown in the meekness of their wisdom. And since I don't like to use myself as an example, I'm just kidding, I'm terrible at this. I thought of my mom-mom. My grandmother on my mom's side, I think personified someone who walked in the meekness of wisdom. Her husband, Don, my papa, I'm very southern, so those are their names, was loud and bombastic. He was a phenomenal storyteller. He was the guy that if you went to dinner with a group of friends and he got sat on the opposite end of the table as you, you were bummed out. Because you're talking to whatever boring person is over here, and you're like, I wish I could listen to that guy. That was my grandpa. That was my papa Don. And Linda was quiet. She was diminutive. She was happy to stay in the background. She didn't really want any of the focus on her. And I didn't appreciate it when I was a kid, because I didn't really understand all those dynamics. But as an adult, as the years progressed, particularly towards the end of her life, when she and I were in the habit of having coffee together every other Monday morning and just chatting for a while, I got to see the ways that her quiet strength and gentle, meek wisdom had carried her through so many seasons of her life. And so I thought, well, she's the example to me of the meekness of wisdom. Then what made her meek? So I thought about her life. She grew up in rural Baton Rouge. I have a great uncle named Dodie Sandifer. All right, that's how Cajun we are. She grew up in a very racist home. Racism was so ubiquitous in her family that when my mom was a little girl, she used racial slurs without understanding what they were. Mama grew to disdain that part of her heritage. She grew to see the evil in it. And when I did her funeral, in her retirement years, she was a bank teller. And when I did her funeral, many of her co-workers, her African-American co-workers, came to the funeral and told me how much they loved my mama and how much she meant to them and how well she loved them. She changed over the course of her lifetime. When my mom was eight, they did a church called Forest Hills, did a bus ministry where you used to be able to do this. Can you imagine? They just drove a bus through neighborhoods and just invited kids to get on. It doesn't matter. Do you have your parents' permission? We don't care. We're going to get you saved. Come to church. Do your parents know where you are? It doesn't matter. Let's go to church. They just went. I can't imagine just sending Mike Harris right here, just go get a bus and just drive around Falls River and just grab kids. It'll be fine. That's so weird. But they they did that in the 60s and so my mom went and praised God that she did because she accepted Christ. And because she accepted Christ, my mom and my papa started going to church with her. So here's a woman who grew up without a faith and she embraces a faith. She changes. But as she embraces that change, she got involved in what I believe was one of the worst kinds of churches. Super legalistic and damaging. I'm talking about super conservative, 70s, Southern Baptist, fundamental oppression. No going to movies, ever. Don't be seen at the movie house, is what it was called. No dancing. Girls wear skirts and dresses only. Always below the knees. None of this, none of this, none of this. It was just writ with legalism. And because she didn't know any better, that's the faith she taught her kids. But she grew up. She grew in wisdom. And she started going to churches that lived a more gracious faith. And she became more gracious in her faith. And she moved away from those old things that she believed. And I could talk to you and tell you story after story of ways that I didn't see at the time, but as I reflect back on her now and watching the scope of her life, ways that I saw her change, ways that I saw her grow in her wisdom. And it occurred to me that wisdom is meek because wisdom knows what it is to hold something ardently and fervently and fanatically in your 20s and be ashamed of it in your 50s. Right? Wisdom knows what it is to hold an opinion tightly and then to see the currents of change move through the community and hold it a little bit more loosely and regret how tightly you used to hold it and who you hurt in holding it that way. Wisdom has fallen on its face a few times. Wisdom knows that it has some shadows in its past and some skeletons in its closet, so it's not going to leap to beat you too hard with yours. Because wisdom has grown in grace. Wisdom has made mistakes. Wisdom has seen who they were when they were younger and been forced through introspection to offer themselves grace for their humanity and likewise is gracious towards others in their humanity. Wisdom is someone in their 60s who doesn't get super annoyed by the person in their 20s because they understand and they were that person too. That's what wisdom does. Because of that, I came to the conclusion that acquiring wisdom is a humbling process. That's why we pair meekness with wisdom because acquiring true wisdom is a humbling process. That's why we pair meekness with wisdom, because acquiring true wisdom is a humbling process. You don't grow in wisdom by just stridently thinking you're right all the time. I'll never forget when I was 18 years old, my dad took me to college. I went to Auburn University my freshman year. He drove me to college, he dropped me off, and he said, son, I'm bringing you here, and I hope that you get dumber. And I was a snot-nosed 18-year-old kid who thought he knew everything. And what he was telling me is you need to grow in wisdom, which, by the way, can you imagine how insufferable I was at 18? I would hate that guy. Like, good, find a new church, pal. I needed to grow in wisdom. I needed to be humbled. I needed to know that I wasn't right about everything. And I think that that's why James pairs meekness with wisdom. Because acquiring wisdom is a humbling process. And so, I want to offer this to you. You take it or leave it. Okay, this is Nate talking, not Scripture. This is just my opinion. You're smart adults. You take it for what it's worth. But I think that there's a litmus test for whether or not we're growing in wisdom, particularly growing in the meekness of wisdom. And I think it's this question. When's the last time you changed your mind about something important? For you as an individual, the things that you hold dear, the things that you hold firmly and stridently, when's the last time you changed your mind about something important? And I'm not talking about going to Winston's for lunch thinking that you're going to get the health nut salad and then calling an audible and getting the prime room sandwich with french fries. I'm not talking about that kind of mind change. I'm talking about the way that you used to feel about a community. Has that shifted? The way over the years that you viewed the other side of the aisle, has that grown more or less gracious? This person in your neighborhood that you can't stand, have you grown to be able to appreciate them a little bit more? The person that you were in their 20s, have you been forced to offer yourself grace for being that person? Have you changed your mind about something that's important to you? Because if you haven't, if you can't think of anything, there's only really two options. Either, dude, you're nailing it. Like, you're right about everything. And that's super impressive. Good for you. Let's have lunch. Or we're just walking in our strideful ignorance, refusing to learn anything that God is trying to teach us. Right? If our mind never changes about anything important, then we're not very open to growing in the meekness of wisdom. That's why just being old doesn't make one wise. Being old and learned and introspective and adaptable and malleable and impressionable and open to reason, like James says here, is how we grow in the meekness of wisdom. So I would ask this morning, are you growing in wisdom? And again, that's my litmus test. If you don't like it, throw it out. If it's helpful, use it. But I think it's important to understand how meekness and wisdom work together, because if we don't, if we can't be meek in our wisdom, then I don't think we can do what we're told to do in the rest of the passage. I want to pick it back up at verse 17. He finishes it this way. He says, but the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. I don't just want to blow by that verse because I think those things are so very important. It is pure. It seeks peace. And this is the thing that I love in here. It is gentle. True wisdom. God's wisdom from above. It's gentle. As I prayed before the sermon a few minutes ago, I prayed, God, let me be brave and let me be gentle. Bravery is not often what I struggle with. Gentleness is. True wisdom is gentle. It's open to reason. It's not convinced of its own correctness all the time. And then he finishes it this way with this great sentence. I just love it. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. And that sounds nice, but we might think to ourselves, what is a harvest of righteousness? I think it goes with the theme in the book of James. In the first week, remember I said that the reason that James wrote this letter was to help us, to help the church pursue wholeness, to help the church become this whole person with a sincere faith, to not live as two disjointed people, as the old nature and the new nature, but to walk in the person that God wanted us to become, to walk in the person that Jesus died to turn us into. We related to Romans 7 where Paul laments, the things that I want to do, I do not do. The things that I do, I do not want to do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? That lament is why James was written. And so what he's saying is you will reap a harvest of righteousness. You will move towards that wholeness, towards being the person that God created you to be and died for you to become. A sowing peace by making peace. James is telling us that it's our role to make peace, that true wisdom makes peace. And so I thought, if it's our role to make peace, if that's what God has called us to do, what does it look like to make peace? What does a peacemaker do? I think it's an important question. The first answer, I think, is that a peacemaker values understanding over persuading. A peacemaker values understanding someone over persuading them. Often when we're in a conflict, when we're in a situation, in a relationship or a dynamic where we're not at peace. There's tension here. I think so very often we approach it trying to be persuasive. If they could only see my side, if they could only understand what I'm talking about, if they would only see it from my perspective, or if they would just be encountered with this list of facts, which by the way, 2020 has shown us that facts really are not argument winners anymore. We've all got our own set. We don't trust anybody else's. So that ain't it. Persuasion is not the goal. Understanding is the goal for a peacemaker. The other night, I had a moment in the house that I was very much not proud of. We've got a daughter named Lily, and Lily is the sweetest. She is the best when you see her. A lot of you have seen her on social media, or you might see her here in the church, and she is sweet and cute and adorable, and she's very quiet and meek in the church because she's scared of everyone, and that bodes well for us as parents because it looks like she has behaved. And she is. She is. But here's the thing with Lily. She has a will. She's found it, which is a fun part of parenting, I think. I've told Jen a few times, you're not raising yourself, sweetheart. I'm very sorry for this. You're raising me. And the other day, she expressed that will more than normal, and it got me frazzled. I was getting a little tired of it. And at night, it was time for her to go to bed, and I told her to clean up her room. She had taken some stuff out of a small Tupperware container or a plastic bin or something, and it was kind of all over the floor. It was like little magnets that you can dress girls up with or whatever. And I told her to clean it up. And she said, okay, Daddy. And then I walked out. I came back five minutes later. It was like two things in the bin. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, clean up. Let's go. I told you to clean. And she's like, I know, but I'm doing it this way. I said, I don't care what way you're doing it. Clean up, sweetheart. Let's go. And I left. And I came back. And there was not adequate progress made. And so I get frustrated. I said, all right, that's it. I'm going to clean this up. You go to the potty, and then we're going to bed. That's it. And she starts to leave, but she says, but Dad, I want to do the other thing. And I said, I don't care. Go and come back. And things started to escalate. And they ended in tears on both sides. And I was not proud of myself at all. And the night ended with us hugging and falling asleep next to each other in her bed, and the world is good. But as I was thinking about it the next morning, she wasn't being defiant, at least not intentionally. She wanted to organize her toys. She didn't want me to put them all up together because she was in the middle of a task, and she just wanted to keep the things that she had separated, separated. She just didn't want me to mess it up. She wasn't trying to say, I'm not going to put it up. She just had a system and it was important to her because she was going to wake up in the morning and she was going to keep playing with it. And if I would have taken just a dang second to understand a four-year-old instead of trying to persuade her, it all could have been avoided. I could have made peace. Instead, I was an idiot. And it makes me wonder how many conflicts in our life would go away if we chose understanding over persuasion. If we just stopped for a minute and thought, am I really right about all the intentions and motives and stupidity that I'm reading into this instance? Or would it be worth it to talk to them and see what their side is? Would it be worth it to try to empathize? Those of us that have relationships in our life that are not at peace, how many of those could be made peaceful if we would simply choose understanding over persuasion? It's not a panacea, but it's a start, isn't it? Peacemakers make that choice. The next thing in your notes, it says that a peacemaker seeks harmony over victory. And that's well and good and that's fine and we can talk about that. But I actually, as I was thinking about it just this morning, it occurred to me that actually what a peacemaker does is they prize the victory over small victories. A peacemaker prizes the victory over small victories. Guys, we're a church. We're believers. The only reason we walk the earth after we come to faith is to share our faith with others. The only reason we still breathe is to bring as many people with us to heaven on our way as possible. That's it. We are here for the souls of men and women. That's why we're doing the whole thing. That's why the first thing in our mission statement is to connect people with Jesus. That's what we want to do. That's the victory. That's what this whole thing is about, is to unite people with their Savior. Yet sometimes we get so caught up in pursuing the small victory that we forsake the victory. Yesterday on Facebook, I posted something that I feel is true. And I just said to Christians that the way that we respond right now in light of the election matters a lot. And I just said, if you're a guy won, be gracious. If you're a guy lost, be gracious. And I wrote that. People started to comment or whatever. I went away. I had dinner with some friends and came back to my phone hours later. And when I came back to my phone, I scrolled down and there was a comment from a guy that actually I met the year that I went to Auburn. I don't know him very well, but we're Facebook friends, and he commented, what should I be if I didn't vote for either of them because I didn't like them, which I think that's not an unfair stance, and I said, you should be gracious, but before I could say that, under his comment, someone else that I know, I know him from back home. He's a good man. He's a loving man. I like this guy. I've since deleted these comments, so you can't go and look at them. He commented under my Auburn friend's thing this big paragraph about how could you think about voting for so-and-so when all of these reasons point that you should vote for so-and-so. Just demeaning him and tearing him down. And then my Auburn friend responded to that, don't come at me with that stuff and did his own paragraph with an article attached to make his point. I didn't read both of the comments. I deleted them immediately. But here's what I know. My Auburn friend is not a believer. The man from back home is. And when I saw his comment in my Facebook thread where he attacked this guy for the way that he felt politically, I thought to myself, what are you doing, man? What are you doing? What are you trying to win? All he has to do is click your name and he knows who you are and what you stand for. And you're going to turn him off to your savior so you can turn him on to your candidate. Who cares? He sacrificed the victory to try to win a victory. And it doesn't matter. Church, the victory is the souls of men. The victory is acquainting people with their Savior. The victory is that people would see Jesus in us and want that in them too. The victory is not in small political or otherwise silly arguments. We're the church. We pursue souls. We pursue the victory. And when we do this, when we make peace by prizing what's important, when we make peace by seeking understanding rather than persuasion, when we sow that peacemaking, we reap a harvest of righteousness. We walk exactly as the people that God designed us to be, which is why I think it's impossible to make true peace if we cannot walk in the meekness of wisdom. They go hand in hand. So here's what's vitally important to me at Grace. That we be peacemakers. That we walk in the meekness of wisdom, that we understand that the true victory is that people would see Jesus, not that they would see our side. So, Grace, let's be peacemakers. I'm going to pray for us. Father, would you make us whole? Would you heal our hearts? Would you heal our community and our country's division? Would you make us your agents of peace? Lord, I pray that we would reap a harvest of righteousness by making as much peace as we can and pointing people towards you. God, may we be brave about the things that matter and may we be gracious about the things that don't. Father, let us walk increasingly in the meekness of wisdom that comes from you And let us in that meekness point people towards your son. It's in his name that we pray. Amen.

This morning we are jumping into a brand new series simply called James, where we're going through the book of James in the Bible. The book of James is one of my favorite books, mostly because James tells it like it is, man. Like, James is blunt. He just kicks you in the teeth, and I need that. Subtlety doesn't work for me. I need you to just tell me what I need to do and tell me how I've messed up. And that's exactly what James does. So I'm excited to go through it with you. Another thing about the book of James that I like to share, because I think it's a really well-made point. It's not mine. It's a pastor named Andy Stanley. James is the half-brother of Jesus. And he ends up writing a book of the Bible and is one of the leaders, along with Peter, of the early church. He's like the very first early church father. So James believed that Jesus was the Son of God. Those of you with brothers or sisters, what would it take for them to convince you that God sent them from above and they came to die on a cross and save the whole world? Like what would it take for you to believe your brother or your sister when they said that? Because James believes that, that's pretty good evidence that Jesus was who he says he was, right? That's Andy Stanley's point, not mine, but it's a good reason to listen to James. As we approach the book of James, I'm actually going to share a video with you guys. There's a group called The Bible Project online. If you don't know about them, you should. They make tons of great videos that explain books of the Bible. You can find one for almost any book of the Bible. Just go to Bible Project. You can Google it. If you're at home right now, don't go yet. I'm about to show you a video. Please stay locked in here. But they make books, they make videos about the books of the Bible and about themes in the Bible. It's a tremendous way to begin to understand and approach Scripture. And I thought the one that they made for James was so good that as we kicked off the series, it was the best possible way to kind of prime us for what to expect. It's a little bit longer of a video. It's about eight minutes long. So settle in and buckle up, and we're going to watch this intro video to James together. Here you go. I hope that you enjoyed that. If the biggest thing that you get out of this Sunday, honestly, is to use that more in your personal life, I'm good with that. It's a really, really good resource. So I hope that you appreciated that video and how easy it is to kind of make the whole book approachable now as we read it. If you don't have a reading plan, you can grab one on the way out or we have them online on our live page. This week is set up just like chapter one is. You can see from the video that chapter one's kind of a setup for the rest of the book and the themes and the things that we need to be familiar with so that we can understand it and apply it to ourselves as we move through the book, and in this case, as we move through the series. And so that's what I want to try to do this morning, is pull out the themes and help us set up some parameters around what we're going to talk about for the remaining five weeks of the series. This is going to be a six-week series that's actually going to carry us into Advent. I'm really excited for our Christmas series that we're already working on that we've got coming up. So this is going to carry us all the way through to Thanksgiving. One of the things in the video that I wanted to point out that I thought could help us approach the overarching point of the book of James is that idea of perfection and living lives as our whole selves versus living lives, they called it in the video, as our compromised selves. I think that this is something that we can all relate to. In chapter one, they said that through the book of James that this word perfect or whole appears seven times and that James is writing to push us in that direction. And I think that we can relate to a need to be made whole in that way because many of us know what it is to live disjointed lives, right? I feel like if you're a believer for any amount of time, you know what it is to live a life that doesn't feel all the way in sync. You see a version of yourself that you know that God created you to be. I know that I can walk in that obedience. I see who he wants me to be, and yet I continue to walk in this direction and be this person that I don't want to be, but I keep getting pulled in that direction. We know what it is to come to church on a Sunday, maybe have a good experience, be moved by the worship, which I was this morning, that was great. Be moved by the worship. Be moved by the sermon. Feel a closeness to Jesus. Feel like it was a sweet moment. And then Monday morning you wake up and you go crack skulls at work. Monday morning you wake up and you forget that yesterday was a sweet moment. Maybe it doesn't even make it to the next day. Maybe you had a sweet moment and then in the car the wife says the thing that you don't want her to say and then you're off to the races, right? And there goes that peace and harmony. You know what it is to wake up in the morning, to have a quiet time, to devote some time to God, to spend time in God's Word, to spend time in prayer, and on that very same day lose your mind with your co-workers or your kids or your spouse. We know what it is to have a habit or a hang-up that we say, I'm done with this. I'm not doing this anymore. This has owned my life and has displeased God and displeased me for too long. I'm drawing a line in the sand. I'm not doing this anymore. And then maybe we added in some controls and some accountability and we asked people to help us out. And we took this stand. I'm going to live as that person finally. And then a day or a week or a month later, we do the same thing. And we live as the version of ourselves that we don't like, that Jesus died to save us from. But for some reason, we continue to go back there. I think we all relate to what I find to be one of the most encouraging passages in Scripture in Romans chapter 7 when Paul writes, he says, the things that I want to do, I do not do. The things that I do not want to do, I do. So he's talking about this tension. I see the things that I want to do. I see the person who I want to become. I want to do those things, but for some reason I can't walk in that life totally. And then I see this person that I don't want to be. I don't want to make these choices, but I can't stop myself from making those choices. The things that I want to do, I do not do. The things that I do not want to do, I do. And then he finishes off at the end of chapter seven with this great verse. He says in declaration, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? I've taken the time a couple of times in my life to read all the way through the book of Romans from start to finish, it's great for plane rides, I always stop at that verse and just kind of go, thank you God for Paul and for his experience of this too. Oh wretched man that I am who will deliver me from this body of death? Because we know what it is to feel out of sync. The Bible calls it our new self and our old self. That our old self was crucified with Christ and it no longer lives and now Jesus lives in me and we're free to walk in this new self but there is this part of the world that continues to drag us down and make us less than whole. And it's this that James writes to address. He writes to the church, and I believe that the reason that James writes the letter is to help us pursue wholeness. James is written to help us pursue wholeness. That wholeness that is walking in the person that God created us to be, walking in the person that Jesus made it possible to be in the first place through his death, walking as that person, walking in that wholeness. He wants us to no longer live these disjointed, out of sync, incomplete lives. I think we'll see that's why he wrote the whole book. His goal is, some people call it maturity, others call it wholeness. He calls it perfection or completion. His goal is to help us get there. We understand that the only way there is through Christ, but we also understand that in this earth, on this side of eternity, that God asks us to obey. He asks us to walk and to follow. And in doing that, we will grow into mature versions of ourselves and to who God wants us to be. And so James writes to help us pursue that wholeness. And I think that's true because of this passage, chapter 1. If you have a Bible, you can open it. If you have one at home, open one there, and you should have the scriptures in your notes. But I'd love for you guys to be interacting with the Bible and with the chapter and see how it all ties together. But if someone were to ask me, point me to the synopsis verses on why James is even written. What is James trying to do? I would take you here. This is where I think he's trying to help us pursue wholeness. Chapter 1, verses 22 through 25 why James writes the book. Because he wants us to be doers who act. He wants us to persevere. He says we shouldn't be like, again, it's this imagery of two versions of ourselves. Don't be the person that looks at the law of God. He calls it the perfect law of liberty, which I love that phrase because God's word was not given to us to constrain us, but to offer us liberty. And that perfect liberty, that perfect law of liberty is Christ. He is the word of God. And he rewrote the law of the Old Testament to say, go and love others as I have loved you. Love God and love others. That's how Jesus rewrites and summarizes the law correctly. And he says that there's one version of us that we stare at the law, we see what it says, we hear it, we pay attention to sermons, maybe we listen to podcasts, we talk with friends about spiritual things, we have our ears open. We hear the word, but then we go and we don't do it. We live lives as those disjointed versions of ourselves. He says, when you do that, you're like somebody who looks at your face in the mirror and then walks away and you forget what you look like. He said, but if you'll gaze into the perfect law of liberty and persevere in doing it, then you will be blessed in your doing. And so I think the answer to our question, James says first, we say first that James writes to help us pursue holiness. So the question becomes, okay, James, how do I pursue holiness? Well, he tells us in these verses, we pursue wholeness by persevering in doing. We pursue wholeness, that complete version of ourselves, by persevering in doing. So that, I think, as a summary statement, begs two questions. Why does James feel it necessary to highlight persevering? Why does he put that out front? Why does he open up the book with it? It's the very first thing, once he starts writing. He says, hey guys, how you doing? And then he starts talking about how pain is going to happen. Why is it that James says right away, if you want to live as a whole self and you need to persevere, because he's communicating this idea of you're going to want to quit. It's going to be really hard. It's kind of a terrible selling point for James. So why does he start there? And then what does doing look like? What are we supposed to be doing? So as we answer those questions, the first question, why persevering? Well, we persevere because life requires it. We persevere because life requires it. James is aware of this reality. Like I said, it's how he starts his letter. Literally, verse 1, James, the servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ to the 12 tribes and the dispersion. Greetings, which means the Hebrew people who have dispersed outside of Israel. You also refer to it as a diaspora. Then, verse 2, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. He says, hey, how you doing? Haven't seen you in a while. Listen, life's going to stink like a lot, and when it does, just count it joy. Like, that's a terrible opener. James, why are you doing that? But he says, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know the testing of your faith produces steadfastness perseverance instead of steadfastness. But he says, And plenty of people have pointed this out before, but just in case you missed it those times, he doesn't say, if you have trials. He doesn't say, hey, if life gets hard sometimes, not saying it well, but if it does, then hang in there. He says, no, no, when? When you face trials, plural, of all kinds, count them as joy. Why? Because they're going to bear out a perseverance and a steadfastness that's going to make us perfect and complete, not lacking anything. It's this idea of being a whole person again. So a couple things from that idea and why James introduces it as a theme that shows up throughout the book. We find it again in chapter 5 when he's talking about having patience and doing good. James knows that your faith is going to be challenged. He knows that perseverance is going to be required. He knows that there are going to be couples who struggle mightily with infertility, and all they want is to experience the joy of having their own child. He knows that. And he knows that when that happens, it's going to test their faith, and it's going to make them wonder if God is really good. James knows that we lose people too early. He knew that parents would mourn the loss of children. He knows that. And because he knows that, he knows that it's going to be really easy for those parents in that moment to cry out and say, God, that's not fair. Why'd you let that happen? And that those circumstances would conspire to shipwreck your faith. And so he says, hang in there. Have faith when it's hard. He knows that marriages will end and that diagnoses will come and that abuse will happen and that abandonment is a thing and that loneliness and depression are things that we walk through. He knows that we are going to lose loved ones before we want to. James knows that and he knows that when those things happen, we're going to want to walk away from our faith because it's going to seem like God isn't looking out for us anymore. And he's telling you when that happens and it seems like things are broken, hang on, persevere, continue in faith, Continue to obey. And when you do, it will make you perfect and complete, not lacking anything. This is the real reason for perseverance. Those of you whose faith has seen that test, those of you who have walked through a season in your life where something happened that was so hard that it made you doubt if God was really looking out for you, it made you doubt if God really cared about you, it made you question your faith, if you came out of that clinging on to your faith, you know it is all the stronger. I was actually talking with someone this last week about this idea, and we just kind of noted, I noted, I don't really trust someone's faith very much until it's been through tragedy. Until it's been hardened in that kiln, I just don't trust it yet. There is something to the people who have walked through tragedy and yet have this faith that they cling to that makes it unshakable. Isn't there? I think of somebody who's going to be an elder in the new year, Brad Gwynn. To my recollection, Brad has lost his sister and his brother and his mom. He's, I don't know, in his 60s, maybe late 50s. Sorry, Brad, I don't know. He's been through tragedy. His faith has been through the tests. But if you talk to him about Jesus and about why he believes, it's humbling. It's admirable. I can honestly tell you, I don't know if I want faith that strong because I don't want to walk through what he has to walk through to have it. But I want faith that strong. James knows, if you cling to your faith through trial, if you cling to Jesus and continue to obey him even when it's hard, that it will produce this completion in us. It will produce this firm, unshakable faith that cannot be shaken, that cannot be torn down. So he opens with, hey, hang in there. Because when you do, you're going to be stronger for it. So if we're supposed to hang in there, if we're supposed to continue to obey, even when it's hard, what is it that we're supposed to do? What does doing look like, right? What does God want from us? What does he expect from us? James is setting something up for the rest of the book to go through, like, here's some simple ways to obey. If you really want to please God, then here's a simple way to do it. If you really want to walk as that person, then these are the things that you need to be doing. These are the things that you need to be paying attention to. The question becomes, what does it look like to do? And I think he answers this question by saying, doing looks like helping the needy and pursuing holiness. Doing, obeying God, walking as a whole person, looks like helping the needy and pursuing holiness. Here's why I think this. Look at verse 27. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God. You want to do what God wants you to do? You want to live out your faith? You want to live as a whole person? Then here's what you need to do. Care for the widows and the orphan and their affliction and keep yourself unstained from the world. Help the needy and pursue holiness. That's a synopsis for everything that comes in the rest of the book. Everything that comes in the rest of the book is telling you, here's the heart conditions you need to help the needy. Here's why you should do that. Here's why it's near to God's heart. Everything that happens in the rest of the book is, here's what you do. If you want to pursue holiness, then here's how you do it. And this is a theme throughout the Bible. In Isaiah chapter one, we see the very same thing. He distills, Isaiah distills it all down. God says, you want to make me happy? Care for the widows and the orphans. Pursue me. That's what you need to do. Micah says that we should seek justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. It's all through Scripture. So if we want to persevere in doing, what does doing look like? Doing looks like helping the needy and pursuing holiness. And when I say helping the needy, I really do mean that because in that culture, you've heard me teach this before, but for those who may have missed it or have joined recently, when we see widows and orphans in the Bible, what we need to understand is that in that culture, that was the least of these. Widows were typically older women who had no way to make any money. So if their husband had passed away and now they're living as single women and they don't have families to care for them, there is very little they can do besides beg for sustenance every day. They are the most exposed and endangered and vulnerable in that culture. Likewise, orphans are the most exposed and vulnerable in that culture. There's no welfare. There's no orphanages. There's no Social security, there's no public medicine, there's none of that. They're just on their own. And God says, my people should have a heart to care for those who can't care for themselves. My people should have a heart to care for those in the greatest need. That's why at Grace we partner with Faith Ministry down in Mexico that builds homes for people who can't afford their own homes because they work in a Panasonic factory for less than a dollar a day. So we send money down there and build them homes and go down there in teams every year to love the least of these, to care for those who can't care for themselves. We heard earlier Mikey talk about Addis Jamari, who literally cares for orphans in Ethiopia. As girls age out of the orphanages and have no life skills and nothing to do with themselves, they take them into a home, teach them skills, send them back to school, and give them a path forward. And now they work with families on the front end of it so that when they have new babies and they don't know what to do and they're too poor to afford these babies, they give them materials and they give them training and they give them money so that they don't have to turn those kids into orphans but they can grow up in good solid homes. That's why we partner with them. That's why so many people at our church are all into a seat at the table downtown where it's a pay what you can restaurant so that you can go and have your meal and leave a token behind so that someone else can have a meal too if they can't afford it. Caring for the needy is near and dear to God's heart. And I would say to you this, if you're a believer and a part of your regular behavior and pattern isn't to care for those in need, then I don't think you're doing all that God has for you to do. I don't think it's possible to say, I'm walking in lockstep with Jesus. I'm being exactly who he created to me. I love him with my whole heart. I spend my days with him. I commune with God in prayer and yet still not help the needy. It's one of the first things that shows up in every teaching in scripture that if you love God, you'll help those who can't help themselves. Not only should we be about this as a church, we need to be about this as individuals. If you call yourself a Christian, if you claim God as your Father and Jesus as your Savior and that's not a part of your pattern, I would encourage you to find a way to make that a part of your pattern. There's a part of God that we find in doing that work. It's who His children are designed to be. And then He tells us that we should pursue holiness. Keep yourself unstained from this world. The word holy simply means different or other. In Scripture we're told to be holy as God is holy. And it's this command, it's this acknowledgement. Listen, you're different. You're different than the world. You're not better than the world. We're cut from the same cloth. You know Jesus, and the world doesn't yet know Jesus. That's the difference. You're not better than anybody, but you're different than them. And we're called to be different than the world. We're called to laugh at different jokes. We're called to post different political memes, if any at all, ever. We're called to argue differently in the public square. We're called to behave differently than them. We're called to love differently than the world. We're called to watch different things than what they watch. We're called to different standards than what they're called to. Personal holiness matters a lot. And James says, if you want to be a whole person, then persevere in doing. And what does doing look like? It looks like helping the needy and pursuing holiness. Now listen, we're holy because Jesus has made us holy. We're already there because Jesus has died for us and we are clothed in his righteousness. However, in this life, the Bible reminds us over and over again that we are to obey. And obeying takes our effort. So as far as it depends on us, we help the needy and we pursue holiness. And the rest of the book is about really unpacking that idea. What are the heart conditions that exist around helping those who can't help themselves? And what does it look like to live holy and unstained in this world? So I hope that that will serve as a good primer to get you ready for the rest of the book of James. Next week we come back with probably the easiest thing to do. It's why we're starting off with it, taming the tongue. And then we're going to move on to the rest of the book. I'm really looking forward to going through this book with you guys. I'm going to pray for us and then we will be dismissed. Father, you're good to us. My goodness. You're good to us and we're not good to you. You remain faithful to us when we are faithless. God, you watch us live our disjointed lives. And you're patient with us, and you're gentle, and you're loving. Father, I pray that as we go through this series, that everybody who hears it or preaches it, God would just have their heart enlivened to this idea of walking wholly with you. Of walking in lockstep with Jesus. Give us visions of actually being the people that you created us to be, of leaving behind our disjointed selves. Give us the honesty to identify where we're not obedient, and give us the courage to walk in the obedience that you show us. It's in your Son's name we pray these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

How old are you, pal? Four. Four. When's your birthday? My birthday is in October. Speaking of birthdays, whose birthday are we celebrating for Christmas? Jesus's. Um, baby Jesus. Jesus's birthday. Now, where was Jesus born? Do you remember? In the manger. In the steeple. In the steeple? Who else was in the steeple with Jesus when he was born? The animals. What kind of animals do you think? Tows and donkeys. What about tigers? You can't look to the audience for help. Was anybody else at the manger with them? God, for sure. Do you know his mommy and daddy's name? Do you know the city that Jesus was born in? Bethlehem! I just watched that movie. I watched it. That's the bright star with those two little donkeys with that bird. That Jesus was in Bethlehem with those mean dogs. But at the end of the movie, the mean dogs turn into nice dogs. That's great. That's a Christmas miracle. Is that your favorite Christmas movie? Uh-huh. I watched it when I had a sleepover with my Nana and Papa. Sorry, Kendall. I'm sick. How did the shepherds know that Jesus had been born? Because they were smart boys. Now the wise the soul of Bethlehem. The wise men. I don't know what, but I think you gotta tell me. Um, those, links and more. Kendall, you might be the smartest four and a half year old I've ever met. How many wise men were there, do you know? Two. Two? You know, that's just as reasonable a guess as any other answer. First, um, Christmas, I am going to make Jesus a tank. You're going to make Jesus a tank? Oh, a cake. It'd be way better if you made him a tank. If you got to give Jesus three presents, what presents would you give him? A chew toy for when he's a baby. Sure. I'll go with my genie cup and a baby Jesus doll. Sure. I'm sure Jesus would love a baby Jesus doll. I think those are all the questions I have for you buddy. You did so good. I think I want to do one more question. Is there anything else that we should ask? Anything else? No. to meet you. I'm so glad that you're here. And like Kyle said, thanks so much for making us a part of your Christmas celebration. I know that you have a lot of options on Christmas Eve. It's the time when you're supposed to go to church. And so we're so glad that you chose to spend that with us. When we think about the Christmas story, I think all of us probably go to a very similar place, whether we're church people or not church people. If we come to churches like this a lot, or we come a little, we all kind of know where to go for the church story, right? It's Luke chapter 2, and though we might not know the reference, we know the content. We think about probably the peanuts special, right? When Linus quotes it, I think that's the one who does it, and it's the old King James, and it's, lo, they were sore afraid, the angel of the Lord shone round about them, right? And the shepherds were in the field giving watch over their flock by night. Like, that's what we think of is the Luke chapter 2. We think of Joseph and Mary going to Bethlehem for the census. There's no room in any of the hotels, so they got to stay in the manger or in the steeple, which was really, really great. We've got it that they can't stay there, and the baby Jesus is born, and we celebrate it, and the wise men come, and it's a whole party, and that's the deal. That's usually what we think of as the Christmas story, and if that's what you think of as the Christmas story, then that's right. That is the Christmas story. That's what we celebrate at Christmas. But I really think that to have a deeper understanding of the Christmas story, to really understand what's happening there, what we're celebrating, what are we all gathering here to celebrate for? What are we meeting with family and exchanging gifts to celebrate? Why did the angels appear? Why do we talk about the joy of Christmas? What's really the reason for the season? When we start to ask questions like that, I think we have to take a broader look at the Christmas story. I'm so fond of telling the Christmas story in this way that my first Christmas with Grace, I told it in this way, but I so believe in it, and I believe in it helping us see the power and efficacy of what the gift is that I wanted to tell it to you again. So if you'll indulge me for the Christmas story, you got to go all the way back to Genesis chapter one. And since this is the second service, I'm going to take my time, baby. You got to go all the way back to Genesis chapter one and understand what's happening there. God's word teaches us that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, that there is a creator God and that he made this place and that he created you and I. And when he did, he said it was very good and to a good God, that means it's perfect. It was exactly as he intended. And you, whether you realize it or not, whether you've thought about it at all in 2019 or not, your soul was created to be in harmony and relationship with that creator God. And the creation was made to be in harmony with that creator God, and that's how it was perfect. Scripture tells us that lion laid down with lamb, which is a way to say that there was no violence. There was no death when God created the earth. There was no cancer. Children didn't survive. Parents didn't survive their children when God created the earth. Divorce wasn't a thing in the Garden of Eden. Abuse didn't happen. Greed wasn't there. Malice and poor intent and evil and violence, that didn't exist. Selfishness did not exist. It was perfect until sin entered in and broke God's creation. And when we think of sin, for those of us that know the Bible at least a little bit, we know about the garden and they ate the fruit and that was kind of against the rules and they shouldn't eat the fruit and she did and that's a bummer. But really what's going on there is the sin of pride. What's happening with Adam and Eve is God said don't do this thing and they said, you know what? God, I hear you. I appreciate that. But I actually trust my judgment and my own life to determine what's best for me. And right now what's best for me is to eat that fruit. So that's what we're going to do. And they elevated themselves to the position of God in their life. And that's what sin is. And sin broke God's good creation. The first thing it broke is our souls that were again created to be in harmony with creator God. And as soon as sin entered the world, their souls were out of harmony with God, and as we're born into this world, our souls exist in disunity with our Creator God. That's why if we don't know Jesus, if we're not in harmony with our Creator and with our God, in our quiet moments, we have this sense within us. There has to be more to life. There has to be more to what's happening here. This feels broken. This doesn't feel right. I would argue that if we have a soul that's not in harmony with our creator God as it was intended to be, that we will scratch and claw for that happiness and for that fulfillment in any way that we know how, and what we really need is for God to rush in. What we really need is reconciliation because we're broken. And it's not just us and our souls that got broken when sin entered the world. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the world itself, creation itself broke. Do you understand that in the Garden of Eden there was no cancer and now there's cancer? In the Garden of Eden there was no abuse and now there's abuse. In the Garden of Eden there was no violence and now there's violence. In the Garden of Eden, lion lay down with lamb and now that is not the case. So the creation was perfect too and it was broken down by our imperfect decisions. And I think, I think Christian or not, whatever your background is, to be alive and aware is to know and to feel that there's something broken here. To be alive and paying attention is to get a sense there are some things here that are not right. There's some things that happened even in this last year that we look at that and no matter what your background or your worldview, you look at that and you go, that doesn't make any sense that that could happen. That shouldn't be so. That's not right. This place has to be broken. I saw on Twitter a couple weeks ago, one of those videos, it's like those heartwarming videos, right? That you watch it and there's like a bunch of cry emoji in the comments. And normally I don't watch those. My heart is as warm as it can be. And I just don't need any auxiliary help. But on this one, I thought, let me give it a whirl. And so I watched it, and it's these two children. They were probably seven or eight or younger, and they have cancer, and they're clearly in a children's hospital. And one was better able to get around than the other. And so the little boy that was able to get around takes the little girl that really couldn't move very well and sets her in his wagon and puts blankets over her lap and makes sure that the IV thing can follow. And he walks her down the hallway so that she can take a walk. And everybody watches that and they go, oh, that's amazing. That's great. This is what the internet is for. And I watched that and I thought, yeah, that's beautiful, but that's broken, man. Life shouldn't be like that. Kids shouldn't get cancer. That doesn't feel right. Why does that happen? And we felt the same way too. To be alive and aware is to feel that at times this place is broken. And Scripture agrees with that. In Romans 8, the Apostle Paul tells us that all of creation groans for its return, for its restoration to creation as God intended. All of creation cries out from the rocks and from its core. This is not right. There's something better. This is broken. This has to be fixed. This doesn't make sense. Life shouldn't look like this. All of creation groans along with you. When you see something in your Twitter feed or on the news or someone shares something with you and in your soul, you go, gosh, this just isn't right. This feels broken. Creation groans with you. And God himself agrees with you. Which is why in Genesis chapter 12, he enacted a grand plan to fix the broken things and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And to enact this plan, he went to a man named Abram, who would later become Abraham. And he made Abraham three promises. He says, you're going to be my guy and your descendants are going to claim these promises that I'm going to give you. And he promised Abraham the promised land that we now know as Israel. He said, your descendants are going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. And then he said, and one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. And Abraham might not have known it at the time, but we know it now. That was the promise of the Messiah, that one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That was God promising, and one day, one of your descendants is going to fix all this stuff. That feeling in your core that things are broken, that disunity in your soul that longs for me, one day I'm going to send somebody who's going to be one of your descendants and they are going to fix these wrong things. I'm going to make this right. I'm going to fix it and I'm going to reconcile your soul to me. And it's going to happen through you, Abraham. And thus began the practice of Abraham and all of his descendants watching and waiting and hoping for the fulfillment of that promise. When is this going to happen, God? And it was funny for Abraham to receive that promise because he didn't have any kids. So if he's gonna have all this land and he's gonna have all these descendants and then one of those descendants in the distant future is gonna bless the whole earth, it would be pretty good to have like one. And he doesn't. And it takes longer than he thought it should. And his faith wavers. And he gets nervous. and he makes a mistake in his 80s, and he has a kid, and that kid is not the one that was promised to him, and so he waits more, and he has another kid in his 90s, and that was the one that was promised to him. His name is Isaac. No doubt in my mind, Abraham told Isaac of all the promises. Abraham told Isaac that he was a claimant to the things that God told him. That said, Isaac, you're going to have massive descendants. You're going to have this land and one of your descendants is going to fix all the broken things and is going to reconcile us back to our God. And so Isaac is now the carrier of that promise and he joins in Abraham and watching and waiting and hoping. And Isaac has two sons, one of them named Jacob. Jacob's name is later changed to Israel, the namesake of the nation. He has 12 sons, and they make up the 12 tribes of Israel. The youngest son was a guy named Joseph. Joseph ends up in Egypt. And through a series of events that's really incredible in the book of Genesis, he ends up as the second most powerful man in the world. From an obscure nomadic tribe to second most powerful man in Egypt, therefore the world. And he is in control of all the food stores for that part of the world. No one survives the seven-year famine without going and seeing Joseph. He's estranged from his family. They don't know who he is. They don't know that he's there, but they are the remnant. They are the descendants of Abraham who are clinging to the promise of God that one day this will make sense and that one of our descendants will bless the whole earth and fix the broken things. That's what we know. And they're watching and they're waiting and they're hoping. Because of the famine, they have to go down to Egypt and they have to see the guy that's in charge of all the food. And they find out that when they get there, that that's their long lost brother, Joseph. Look at him. Look at his power. Look at how he provides. Look at how he fixes the broken things. And you have to know that his brothers and their little kids and the whole family and the whole clan wondered, yo, is Uncle Joseph the guy? Is he the one? Is he the one that was promised by God to our great-grandfather Abraham? Is he the one? But Joseph dies, and his bones are buried in the land of Goshen where his ancestors put down roots. And then as the people of God wait for the fulfillment of the promise, the Bible goes silent for 400 years. In between Genesis and Exodus, there's 400 years where we don't know what happens, where God doesn't speak, where the remnant of Abraham is left holding on to and claiming the promise, clinging to the hope of God. And at the beginning of Exodus, there's a guy named Moses who shows up. And I would imagine in the time of Moses that it was pretty difficult to continue to believe in the promise because Abraham's descendants, the Hebrew people, are now slaves to the Egyptian people. They are hopelessly in slavery. The Egyptians are the most powerful nation in the world. They are the slaves of the most powerful nation in the world. None of the nations around them care about them or are going to go in to rescue them, okay? There was no UN. They have no hope. They're just there. And I would imagine that to grow up a slave in Egypt made it pretty difficult to buy it when your grandpa told you about the promises that were made to your forefather Abraham. Hey, listen, I know it looks dark now. I know you've got to make all these bricks, but listen. God made a promise to your great, great, great, great grandfather. And we're his people. And one day, one of us is gonna fix the broken things and is gonna restore creation back to him and is gonna bring harmony to your soul. One day, that will happen, cling to those promises. I bet it was tough to cling. I bet it was difficult to have faith. But a faithful few, a faithful remnant of believers clung to the promises and held true to them and believed that God would keep his word and believed that God would keep his promises. And in the midst of clinging to that hope, Moses comes back from the desert. He had been exiled for 40 years. He comes back, and when he comes back, he's got the power of God with him, man. And he, God, through Moses, puts the 10 plagues on Egypt. They convince Pharaoh to let his people go, and now the people of Abraham go out into the desert, and they watch their savior, Moses, who delivered them from slavery and impossible bondage, part the Red Sea and defeat the armies of Egypt and miracle after miracle, day after day in the desert. And they watch as Moses goes up on the mountain and sees the presence of God and glows for days and brings down with him the 10 commandments and hands them a new religion. And they had to wonder, you can't tell me that they didn't. Is this the guy? Is this the one? He's got to be. He has to be the promised one. He's a descendant of Abraham. He's delivered us. He's begun to heal up our wounds and restore things to us. He's showing us how to be right with God, to unite our souls to him. This has got to be the one. But Moses dies before they ever enter the promised land. And he's not the one. And so Israel waits. And Israel watches. And Israel hopes that one day God will keep his promise. After Moses comes Joshua, they sweep into Israel and take it over, and that promise is fulfilled. Now the land is theirs. The problem is they don't have the infrastructure to be able to defend it, and so Israel kind of spirals down into this dark period in their history called the Judges, where all the different neighbors of Israel would come in and oppress them and take their stuff and bully them and make them give it to them, right? They couldn't keep their crops. They couldn't feed their kids. It was a tough time in the nation of Israel. And during that time, God would send judges to overthrow the oppressors and restore Israel to what it needs to be. And they had to wonder in the midst of this turmoil with every judge, is this the person? Is Gideon the one? Is Jephthah the one? Is Ehud the one? Maybe it's Deborah. Maybe it's Samson. They had to wonder, are these the people that God promised that are going to rescue us? Because it seems like they're doing it, but they weren't. The power of each judge was finite, and the timing of them was fleeting. The judges aren't the ones. And again, I wonder what it would be like to be one of the faithful remnant, clinging on to the promises that were passed down to them by their forefathers, when they can't even keep their own wheat harvest, when things feel really broken and life doesn't make sense. I bet faith was scarce in the time of the judges. Out of the time of the judges, Israel demands a king, and so they appoint a man named Saul. Saul was the guy that you would choose. He was head and shoulders above everybody else. He was very good looking. When you think of Saul, you can think of me. That's probably a good representation of who he was. But Saul was a terrible king. He was arrogant, and he used it for himself, and he wasn't the guy. But after Saul, there's a guy named David. David was the eighth son of Jesse. He was a little shepherd boy. But the last great prophet, a guy named Samuel, was directed by God himself to go and anoint David the next king. And what was said about David was that he was a man after God's own heart. And the mythology of David builds as he goes and he slays the giant Goliath. And all of Israel pays attention to him. And they make up songs about David and they celebrate him. And then he goes and he defeats their enemies. And he brings back the presence of God, the Ark of the Covenant. And he dances before it and he restores Israel, brings Israel to a place of international prominence that it had never seen. David's rule was so profound that he's the greatest king they've ever had and his star still flies over Israel to this day. He wrote the largest book in the Bible, the book of Psalms. And they had to go. David's gotta be be the guy. He's got to be the one. This has to be the one that was promised to us. Look, he's redeeming us. He's saving us. He's restoring us. He's fixing the broken things. This has to be him. But David wasn't the guy. David sinned profoundly. And I wonder how much faith wavered. But God, in the middle of David's life, in 2 Samuel 7, makes David a promise. He says, David wanted to build the temple. And God goes to David and says, you're not going to be able to build the temple in your lifetime. I'm going to let your son do that, but I've got something better for you, David. I still am going to keep my promise to your forefather, Abraham. I'm still going to send the Messiah. I'm still going to send the King of Kings. And when he comes, David, he's going to sit on your throne. And then this promise is a renewal of the hope of Israel. That God has not forgotten his promise that he made a thousand years ago to Abraham, that he still remembers. He's not forgetful of the things he said he would do. He still intends to keep his word. And when he does, he's going to sit on the throne of David and the hope of Israel is renewed. And it's good that it was renewed because after David comes Solomon. And then after Solomon, the country splits into a civil war from which it never recovers. And the northern kingdoms and the southern kingdoms have bad king after bad king after bad king after bad king. And the remnant gets smaller and the faithful get fewer. And there are fewer and fewer people who still cling to the promises of Abraham and follow the religion that was imparted on them by their forefathers. And then each of the kingdoms get drug off into slavery, one by Babylon and one by Assyria. And I can only imagine how difficult it would be to grow up as a slave in Babylon or a slave in Assyria and hear your grandfather or your grandmother or your mom or your dad tell you, hey, hang in there, be faithful. You should follow these laws and these rules because they were given to us by a God that made a promise to your forefather, Abraham. It would be really difficult to not look at those promises growing up as a slave in Assyria and go, yeah, what are those promises now? Because we're not on that land and no one's coming save us, and we're slaves. I imagine faith was pretty tough in the time of exile for Abraham's followers. And because it was a hard time, because even the return and the restoration was a hard time, God spoke to them through the voices of the prophets that told them more about their Messiah. And we see these great prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Habakkuk and Zephaniah and Malachi and all the ones at the end of the Old Testament that are proclaiming the coming Messiah. And they tell us things like when he comes, he's gonna bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted. When he comes, he's going to give good news to the poor. When the Messiah gets here, the blind will see and the lame will walk and the deaf will hear and the prisoners will be set free and the slaves will be released. When he gets here, he's going to make the wrong things right. He's going to fix this broken place. He's going to reconcile your soul to your God, and he's going to fix this creation that our sin has broken. He's going to do it. Hang in there. Be faithful. The Messiah is coming. Wait and watch and hope. And the faithful remnant did. Generation after generation, voice after voice, until we get to the end of the New Testament. And in the middle of this waiting and watching and hoping and clinging to the promises made by God to their forefather Abraham, there's another 400 years of silence at the end of the Old Testament. Malachi speaks and closes out that part of the Bible. And then in this darkness and in the silence, Israel waits and they watch and they hope. And they wonder, is our God going to keep his promise? Or are we foolish for this? And in the midst of that silence, there's a righteous man named Simeon. And we meet Simeon in Luke chapter 2. The Bible says this about Simeon. It says, now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. And this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him. Listen, Simeon was waiting for the consolation of Israel. He is the personification of all of the hope, of all of Israel, of all of his ancestors for all time up until this moment. He is representative of the nation of Israel and those who are paying attention, the rest of the world, groaning for the restoration, groaning for things to be made right and for the broken things to be repaired and for their souls to be reconciled to their creator. He is the personification of their hope. He is representative of the thousands of years of history that lead into this moment. And in his righteousness, he prays. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. How crazy do people think Simeon was? I wonder how many of his friends he told. The promised one's coming. The Messiah is going to be here. God told me. I'm not going to die until I see him. How crazy would you have thought Simeon was? And he came in the spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him, according to the custom of the law, on the eighth day of the life of a Hebrew boy, you take him to the temple and he is circumcised. And so moved by the spirit, Simeon goes to the temple to intersect with Jesus there. He took him up in his arms and he blessed God. And he said, I imagine the Simba moment as Simeon holds up baby Jesus and blesses God. And this is what he says, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people, Israel. Simeon says, God, I can die in peace. I'm holding the fulfillment of your promise. Do you understand what's happening in this moment with Simeon? Do you understand that he holds the promise, the ones that the faithful remnant clung to, generation after generation after generation, all the people before him that the culture told, you're foolish, you're dumb. God's not going to do that. If he's so powerful, if he's so good, if he keeps his promises, then why is this happening? All the people that ever asked that and got in clung to faith anyways, God is, Simeon is holding the fulfillment of that promise. He is holding the gift from God that through this Messiah, he is going to live a life in such a way that is perfect. And he is going to bear our iniquities and our transgression. And he is going to take our sin and our shame and all the things that break down our relationship with God. And he is going to hang on the cross for me and for you to reconcile our souls back to our creator God. That's what this baby boy is going to do. And that's what Simeon holds. And that's what he knows. But he doesn't just know that. He knows that everything else, this broken world, all the things that hurt and don't make sense and seem like they're broken, this baby boy is going to restore those as well. And so Simeon holds him up and he says, God, I can die. I understand. I get it. You have kept your promise. So let Christmas remind you that your God always keeps his promises. He always keeps his promises. Even when our life feels like the life when we're in the judges and we're getting oppressed by one thing after another, we're getting influenced by one thing after another, our faith is getting beaten up. It feels foolish to cling to it. We don't know if it's actually true. Remember, Christmas tells us that God always keeps his promises. Even when faith doesn't make sense to those who grew up as slaves in Egypt and are told about their powerful God and they say, if he's so powerful, why am I here? Jesus is a reminder that God kept his promises to them and he will keep his promises to you. And just like Israel went through dark times and had to cling to the promise, so do we. Sometimes life erodes our faith. Sometimes life picks away at our faith. Sometimes it makes it seem pretty impossible, but Christmas reminds us that for the faithful remnant that cling to the promises of our God, that he always keeps his promises. He will never let us down. And not only does that boy come to reconcile our souls to him, but he's going to grow up, he's going to become a man and go back to heaven, and one day he's coming back to fix everything else. And Christmas looks forward to that day too. So when we celebrate Christmas, go drink eggnog. Put a little something in it. Go nuts. Open the gifts. Enjoy your family. Celebrate all the blessings that we have. But know that this is what we celebrate. Know that we give each other gifts, not just because Jesus came to make salvation possible for you, but to make it possible for everyone to reconcile the soul back to its creator and that one day he's coming again and he's gonna fix everything else. He already came to fix your soul and he's going to come back again and fix creation and we cling to that promise. So let Christmas remind us that we cling to the promises just like the ancestors of Abraham and we anticipate the promise just like the followers of Abraham and that God always keeps His promises. That's why the angels sing. That's why they showed up in the sky. That's why the wise men came. That's why we celebrate it every year. Because the baby Jesus came and he restored your soul. And the son of God is coming back and he's gonna restore all of this. And so we cling to that hope. And Christmas is a reminder of that. That's the joy of Christmas. Let's pray. Father, you are good. And we are humbled by your gift. We confess, God, that sometimes things do feel broken to us. Sometimes it's hard to make sense of things. God, for some of us, even this year, even 2019 was one that has, if we're honest, eroded our faith. May we be reminded of the faithful remnant that clung to your promises, and may we be like them and cling to you as well. God, for those who are struggling, be with them. For those for whom this season is difficult, may they feel your presence. For those for whom this season is joyous, may they see with fresh eyes your blessings. God, may we never again reduce the gift of your son to a baby and a manger, but understand him for the God that he is. We thank you for Christmas and all that it represents. In Jesus' name, amen.