Sermons tagged with HighPriest

Thanks, guys. Thanks, Jeffy. I can tell you've been paying attention. That's fantastic. That's great. I don't know if y'all noticed, that was all guys up here. We've got a new boy band at Grace, so submit the names for that band online, please. The best one we'll put in lights next week. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If I hadn't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that. Particularly, I've kind of noticed every week as we gather in person that there's some folks who moved to the area or just decided that they wanted to find a church sometime in the last year and found us online. I've had a conversation a lot where I say, hey, I'm Nate, and they go, yeah, we know. We've watched about 10 of your sermons. I'm like, oh, gosh, well, God bless you for being here. But if that's you and you come through the doors, I would love to meet you. So let's make sure we do that in a Sunday here very soon. This is the last part, as Jeff said, in our series called Greater, where we're moving through the book of Hebrews together. For context, just so that we all know, we've kind of begun each week this way. Hebrews was written, we don't know by whom, to Hellenistic Jews, Jewish people who grew up outside of Israel as practicing Jews and at some point in their life converted to Christianity. Because of that conversion, they are facing great persecution from the Romans and from the Jewish community. And the author writes the book of Hebrews to encourage them to hang in there, to persevere in their faith. And so he does this by comparing Jesus to different facets of the Hebrew faith. And that's why we've called this series Greater, because he goes to great lengths to show us how great Jesus is. And we've said it's the most soaring and lofty picture of Jesus in the Bible. And that's important because of where we arrive at today. Today, we arrive at Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. Probably two of my favorite verses in the Bible. If you've been going here for any time, you know that I say that about a lot of verses. I don't know which ones are my favorite, but I love these two. And these two, to me, to someone who grew up as a Christian, I don't have any memories before my family was involved in church. These are two of the most life-changing verses I've ever encountered. They changed the way I went about my faith years ago. And so my hope and prayer for you this morning is, if you're familiar with these verses, if you understand them the way that I do, that this can be a good reorienting or recentering for your life and for your heart as you move throughout your weeks and your months ahead. My sincere hope and prayer is that for some of you, this might be the first time you've heard the verses looked at in this way, and that they can be similarly life-changing for you. I think they're life-changing and hope-giving. And it's important to note that they follow this long dissertation, right? 10 chapters, 11 chapters long of this lofty view of Jesus. To compel these Jewish Christians to stay in the faith, to hang in there, he paints this incredible picture of Jesus. And every week we've gone through and we've done our best to point to Jesus as well in the different comparisons. And as Jeff prayed as the great high priest, and last week we looked at him as the sacrifice. We see him as the greatest messenger. We see his law is greater than Moses' law. And we talked about how all streams in the Old Testament converge on Jesus. All hope in the New Testament remembers back to Jesus and the promises kept and anticipates the promises that he will fulfill. Everything culminates on Jesus. And last week we even talked about how everything we do as a church and as individuals and that the Bible admonishes us to do really is to point ourselves and others to Christ. So that's kind of where he's been driving to in the book of Hebrews. And then we get to chapter 12 and chapter 12 starts out with the therefore. And I've told you guys that whenever we see one of those, we have to ask, what is this therefore, therefore? And in this case, it's because the preceding chapter is Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews chapter 11 in theological and Bible nerd circles is called the Hall of Faith. It is a who's who of the Old Testament, where the author is trying to explain to them, to this audience, really how faith works and what faith looks like and what faith does. In chapter 10, he tries to define faith. And then in chapter 11, he says, let me show you what faith does. And he just goes through these Old Testament heroes. And he says, by faith, Abraham, by faith, Moses, by faith, Rahab, by faith, David, by faith, Solomon. He just goes down the line. So it's the hall of faith. And then the end of the chapter, he's talking about all these other saints that suffered. Actually, in the first week, I referenced chapter 10 and read about some of the persecution that they were going under. And then we know that that could continue for the rest of history, right? John Wesley and John Calvin and all these other great heroes of the faith that has come, Billy Graham, that have come through the years. And so chapter 12 starts off like this, and to me, it's a verse that really resonates. I've always really loved it. He writes this. I love the imagery of that verse. There is this sense that all of the saints that came before us are in heaven. And they've run their race. And now they're watching us. They've done their part. They lived their life for better or worse with regrets or with pride. They lived their life. They played their part. They turned in their time. And now they're in heaven and they're watching us. I kind of even get the sense, if you take this verse a step further, it's not just the heroes of the faith. It's not just the hall of faith, but it's every saint that's come through the centuries. Every Christian that's lived and died and is now in heaven, you get the sense based on Hebrews 12 that they're looking down on us since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses like there is this heavenly arena and earth is the playing field. And you get this real sense from Hebrews 12, one, that it's our turn to run, right? It's our turn. It's our generation's turn. It's our turn to live our life. You know, when I was growing up, this has kind of struck me all freshly. We're going to have a son here in four or five weeks, Lord willing. And when I was growing up, my whole life was sports, man. That's all I cared about. I played sports all the time. I watched SportsCenter. I memorized the statistics. I went to school and I talked about sports. I came home and I played sports. I got done with those and I watched sports. Like that's all I care about. The measure of a man was how good you are at the sport that you chose. And I didn't understand anything beside that. Now that's antiquated and silly, but that's how I grew up. And when I was 18, 19, 20 years old, I played a little bit of soccer in college. When I was doing that, like I couldn't wait to have a son and train him in sports. And now at 40, I've moved much farther. I've moved past that. And I'm like, I don't care if this kid throws a ball. Do whatever you want to do, man. Just be comfortable with yourself. Just learn to love yourself in your own skin, and that'll be half the battle. Be good at sports if you want to be. But if he does play, and if Lily takes up sports, that's my daughter. My time is done playing. I'm not going to go play competitive soccer anymore. I did it for one season in my 30s and thought this was a huge mistake, and I will never do it again. Like I'm out, okay? I will go compete against average to below average golfers. That's the height of my competitiveness. My time is done. As a parent, you know this. When you do your thing, when you go through your adolescence, and then you're a parent and you have kids, it's their turn to run. It's your turn to watch and spectate and cheer on. And that's one of the things I love about this verse is this picture that it gives us of living our life, of running our race. It's our turn to run. From the youngest in the room to the oldest in the room, it's still our turn to run. And there is a sense that heaven is watching and cheering for us. And one of the things that I like to think, now listen, I like to think this. I don't know that it's true. I hold this with a very open hand. If I get to heaven and God says, you weren't right about that one, I'll be like, yeah, I wasn't really sure. But, and I'm not going to quote a verse to help support this, okay? I just think that this could be true. I think it's entirely possible that the people in your family who came before you are made proud and joyful by what you do here. I think it's entirely possible that my papa still smiles in heaven every Sunday morning when I get to preach. I think it's possible. I like to think that could be true because in Hebrews it talks about this great cloud of witnesses watching us from heaven. And we acknowledge that it's our turn to run our race because of that, because they're watching, because God has commissioned us to run this race. What should we do? Well, it tells us that we should throw off the sin and the weight. This translation I read from the ESV and it says that we should lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely. I think it's the NIV that phrases it like this and I kind of like this phrasing better. It says that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. Because it's our turn to run, we should run the race that God has laid out for us. Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, including God himself, we should run the race that he has laid out for us. And to do that, to run that race effectively, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And I love that there's two things included there. Because as Christians, we kind of know the deal, right? We kind of know as Christians, no matter where we are in the theological knowledge spectrum, we know that when we become a Christian, we should try to not sin. I think we get it. Even if you're here, you're a brand new Christian. You're here, you wouldn't even call yourself a believer, you're spiritually curious. One of the things that you're loosely aware of about the Christian faith is, if you want to sign up for Christianity, we should try to not sin. I think we all know that, right? But here he says we should throw aside the sin that keeps us from running our race and the weight. So verse one introduces the idea that something might be prohibitive rather than sinful. It introduces the idea that something in our life might be prohibitive of running our race rather than simply sinful. A good example of this, this isn't true anymore because I'm just not in this rhythm of life, but an example of something that if you would ask, is this sin, you would say no, but is it prohibitive? Well, probably yes, is for me in years past, the NBA playoffs. When Lily was born five years ago, I was in the habit of waking up every day, and I still am. I just come down and I do it in the office. But at this point, I was in the habit of waking up every day and spending time in reading and spending time in prayer. But when we had Lily, she started waking up at like six o'clock in the morning every day. So I realized if I wanted to get that time with God, if I wanted to have my quiet time and do what I say is the most important habit that anybody can form is to wake up every day, spend time in God's word, spend time in prayer. If I wanted to do that, then I needed to get up at five. And so I got in a rhythm of waking up at five, having an hour to myself and God, and then Lily, I'd hear a little wah upstairs. I would read my Bible, I would pray, and I would read a spiritually encouraging book until I heard Lily. That was my rhythm. And then when I heard her, I'd put that down, I'd go upstairs, I'd be ready to be a dad. But when the NBA playoffs rolled around, I wanted to watch those things, man. I love the NBA playoffs. I don't care for the NBA regular season. There's 82 games. There's too many of them. It's a waste of time. Half the teams are going to make the playoffs anyways. We all know which teams are going to be at the beginning of the year. What's the point? But the playoffs are fantastic. I love watching those. The problem with the playoffs, especially in the early rounds, is there's three, four games a night. The last one will come on at 9.45 or 10.30. They're every night. So if you want to watch all the games, and I do, you would stay up, I would stay up late watching those games. And you say, is it a sin to watch the NBA playoffs? I mean, I can't point you to a Bible verse that says yes. But here's what I knew. Here's what I saw in myself season after season. I would watch these games. I would stay up late. And suddenly, I'm like getting up at five every day. Suddenly, I'm getting up when I hear Lily's voice. Suddenly, I'm out of sync in my walk with the Lord. I'm falling out of that daily discipline. Or if I could make myself wake up at five, how good do you think my prayers were after four and a half hours of sleep? Not very coherent. Not really giving God my first and my best, right? So for me, what I learned, was it a sin for me to watch the playoffs? I don't know. Was it prohibitive of me running my race? Yeah, it was. So that was a weight, something that was prohibitive, that was preventing me from being as effective in my life as possible that I had to lay aside. So what I started doing is recording the late game, then I would get up at the normal time and then just watch and then just fast forward through the breaks while I was holding and tending to Lily, which is kind of a better way to watch a game anyway, so I've kept that practice. But I love this idea of something that can be prohibitive and not simply sinful because of that. It's important that as we consider running our race and as we consider, as we calibrate our own morality for what our soul and our spirit can handle, for what's good for us and for what's not good for us, I want us to actually move away from asking a certain question. Let's stop asking, is this sin? Don't ask, is this sin? Ask instead, is this helpful? When you're thinking about allowing something in your life, or you're thinking about something in your life that you have, don't ask, is this sinful? Ask, is this helpful? I don't know about y'all. I don't know how often you talk about this. But as a pastor, I get this question pretty frequently. Is it a sin to blank? Is it a sin to binge watch Breaking Bad? Is it a sin to watch the playoffs? Is it a sin to just have maybe more drinks than I should on like a Friday when I don't have any responsibilities the next day? Is it a sin to do blank? Can I just tell you something? That's a Bush League question to ask, man. That's a little baby Christian question to ask. Is this sin? And I don't mean to be too mean about it, but really what that question implies is, what's the bare minimum I have to do to keep God happy with me? Is it a sin to do blank? Like, how does God feel about this? Are we still good if I do this? This is us admitting when we ask that question. It's us admitting, what's the least amount of effort I can put into my faith so that I'm still keeping God happy? And here's the thing. The least amount that you can put into your faith to keep God happy is to accept Christ as your Savior. And the good news is that's the only thing you can ever do to keep God happy. It's to simply believe in the sacrifice of His Son. Once you do that, you are as loved and as accepted and as approved of, and God is as proud of you as he will ever be. After that, it's simply about living in his goodness. But when we ask questions like, is it a sin if I blank? That's Bush League, man. That's small thinking. We need to ask instead, is this helpful? Is it a sin for me to stay up late and watch the NBA playoffs? Probably not. Is it helpful in my race? No, it's not. Is it a sin when I get my screen report back at the end of the week and I've looked at my phone for four and a half hours a day? I don't know. Did that help you run your race? Is it a sin to watch this particular show? It's got a little bit of nudity and a little bit of violence and a little bit of cussing, but I think it's okay. I think it's all right for me. I think I can watch that. And what I've noticed over the years is as Christians decide whether or not a show is appropriate for them to watch, that the scale of their morality operates in direct proportion to the quality of the show, right? The better the show, the more okay things get, right? Because we really want to watch it. Is it a sin to watch a show that may be borderline? I don't know. Is it helpful to you? How does your soul feel after you watch it? You feel like you need a shower after you finish watching the show? Then maybe, yeah, I mean, it's not helpful, right? I think we think about morality like people who are trying to cheat on a diet. Like if you could go over to the Olympic Village when Michael Phelps is swimming in his 11,000 different events that he does for every Olympics. He's won like nine gold medals in one Olympics, I think. If you go over there and he sits down for dinner one night knowing that he has a big race the next day, he's not looking at a steak with crab meat on top of it and some sort of cream sauce going, is it bad for me if I have this steak? No, he's thinking, is this going to help me win my race tomorrow? I don't want anything entering my body that's not going to help me accomplish my goal. We need to stop thinking like Christians trying to cheat on our diets and start thinking like athletes trying to perform in the race that God has set us about. So let us, in our moralities, stop asking, is something a sin? And start asking, is this helpful? Does this help me run my race? Now listen, this idea, this admonishment from, in this particular case, the author of Hebrews, to run our race, to let us lay aside all the weight and sin that entangles and run the race that is set before us, that's an idea that's common throughout scripture. That means live the life that God wants you to live. That means be the person that God created you to be. It said this way in this chapter, which happens to captivate me because I'm a competitive guy and this stuff resonates with me, but maybe it doesn't resonate with you. Maybe the way that Paul says it in Ephesians resonates with you more. When Paul says in Ephesians 2 verse 10 that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. This idea that the creator of the universe designed you very intentionally, created you in Christ, he purposed you, he set you down, he wound you up, he set you down, and he faced you towards some good works that he designed you to do. So go walk in those good works. Or maybe we like the imagery that we find in Timothy when Paul again explains that God is the master of the house and that we are all vessels. We're all utensils within the house and he's going to reach in the cupboard and he's going to pull out the utensils he needs to get the things done that he wants to get done. So just be ready to be a vessel. Maybe we like the way that Jesus tells us to do this. When he says that we are to be a city on a hill, or a light to the world, or the salt of the earth, maybe we prefer that imagery. Or maybe we like it when Jesus just comes out and just says it flat, straight up in the Great Commission, going to all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It's all the same idea, guys. It's all the same stuff. It's just repackaging to try to connect with us in different ways based on different personalities that shared it when they wrote it in the Bible. But it's all the idea of we run our race. We live our life that we've been designed to live. And this idea is not a new one to us. Again, even if this is your first view at Christianity, if you're not very familiar with it at all, one of the things you know fundamentally is that if you are going to sign up for this life, then you're committed to trying to get your act together so that you can follow God better, so that he can use you more. That is a ground level foundational understanding that all of us have of the faith. So we can add to it that we shouldn't sin and we shouldn't allow things in our life that are prohibitive from running this race. But this effort to throw off the sin and the weight that entangles and run the race that is set before us, walk in the good works that God designed us to do, be the city on the hill, make disciples of all the world, however we want to phrase it, this idea that that's what we should be doing is one that we're familiar with. So the more interesting discussion is how. How do I run my race? How do I do that? How do I throw off the sin and the weight? That's to me where the rubber meets the road because none of you came in here this morning thinking in your lives that I have nothing in my life that I need to get rid of. I have nothing that I need to add to my life. I'm doing pretty good. If you did, email me. You're the new pastor. I'm going to sit down for a few weeks and listen to you. None of us came in here thinking that. The real interesting question, especially for Christians, is how do we do it? Okay, there's some stuff in my life that doesn't need to be there. I know. How do I get rid of it? There's some things in my life I need to start doing. I know. I've been trying. How do I actually get that to take? And I think that this question resonates with us so much because for most of us, if not all of us, for all of our lives, the answer to this how, okay, how do I get rid of things so that I can run my race? The answer to that question has been white-knuckleled discipline. It has been try harder. Draw more lines. Make more declarative statements. Double down on it. Last time I tried to beat this, I failed, but I didn't do this. I didn't take this step, so this time I'm going to draw the line here, and I'm never going to cross it again. And we try to eradicate sin from our lives with white-knuckled discipline. And we could use any sin here as an example. Anyone would fit. I'm going to go with the sin that is very common now, something that a vast majority of us have dealt with, or at least a majority of us have dealt with, which is this idea that we can pull out our phones and we can look at anything we want to at any time. And a lot of times, in a lot of days, we look at things on our phone that we ought not look at. But you could pick worry. You could pick gluttony. You could pick selfishness. You could pick greed. You could pick any sin you wanted to and place it here. But by way of example, let's choose the sin of pulling out our phone and looking at stuff on there that we ought not be looking at. And maybe this has been a habit in our lives for a long time. And we hear a sermon like this and we go, yeah, I'm going to throw off that sin and that weight. I'm going to stop doing that. I don't need to do that anymore. I want to run my race. How do we do it? And this is a sin that you've tried to beat before. And you do it by white knuckle discipline. God, I swear I'm never going to do this again. We put timers on our phone. We set it aside. We call our friends. We ask for some accountability. We commit to a new regimen of quiet times. We're going to do whatever it is we have to do. This is the time I'm going to beat this sin. How'd that go for you before? If you have ever drawn those lines in your life before, then I know that you have also failed. White-knuckle discipline, maybe because we're dumb Americans, is the only thing we know to try to get better at things. But when we're talking about sin, that doesn't seem to work, does it? And when we try to white-knuckle our way to holy, what we end up doing is failing. And when we fail, one of two things happen. Either we think we are not good enough for our God or our God is not big enough for our sin, right? We read these passages that we're no longer a slave to sin. I can walk in total freedom. And we're thinking, well, it certainly feels like I'm a slave because I don't know how to stop picking up my phone and looking at stuff I'm not supposed to look at. I don't know how to not have that drink when no one's around. I don't know how to not think those thoughts when no one knows what I'm thinking. I don't know how to not gossip about people when I know I should just keep my mouth shut. I'm told I'm not a slave to sin, but it doesn't feel like it. White-knuckle discipline leaves us in this place of disillusionment where we're disillusioned with ourselves and we're disillusioned with God. So just doubling down on effort, leaving here and going, I'm going to try really hard to run this race. You will for a couple days. If you have really good discipline, you might even do it for a couple of weeks. But eventually, and you know this in your soul, you'll be right back to the same stuff that you've already been up to. So then, how do we do that? How do we run our race? How do we actually succeed in throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles? Hebrews tells us how, and it's beautiful. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 2. Here's the answer. You want to know how to throw it off? You want to know how to finally get over that sin? Look. Verse 2. You want to know how to defeat sin in your life? You want to know how to throw off the sin and the weight that prohibits you from running the race? Then listen to me. Your soul was created to and yearns to run. You want to know how to do that? Focus your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. Doesn't that make so much more sense? Focus your eyes on Christ, on the single one, on the Messiah, on whom all the streams in the Old Testament converge, on whom all the hope in the New Testament relies, on whom all the hope in the New Testament church looks forward to. Focus your eyes on Christ, your high priest sitting at the right hand of God in his majesty in heaven who's going to come back on a white horse and make everything right again, who by his death and by conquering the grave and by ascending back up to heaven has won for you redemption so that you can look forward to an eternity where there's not any more stuff that doesn't make sense, where the weeping and the crying and the pain are former things. They are not a part of reality anymore. We focus on that Jesus, and when we do that, we throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. How do we get rid of the things in our life that we don't want in our life? We focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We do what we've been doing for the past five weeks in Hebrews, coming here every week and going, hey, Jesus is a pretty big deal. And you might say, okay, that's moving, that's good. How does that actually, how does that work? Well, I think it works like this. Jesus says in the Gospels to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. And at first read, it kind of seems like God is saying, prioritize me first and I'll give you all the things you want. Focus your eyes or seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and I'll make you a billionaire if that's what you want. But that's not at all what that verse means. What I've come to understand that verse to mean over the years is when we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, that our hearts start to beat in sync with the heart of Jesus. Our heart begins to be enlarged by the things that move Jesus' heart. The things that Jesus celebrates become the things that we celebrate. The things that grieve the soul of Jesus become the things that grieve our souls. And the more we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, the more our heart beats in rhythm with God and the things that we want for others are the things that he wants for others. And the things that we want for ourselves are the things that he wants for us. And so in Hebrews, when we're told to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, we're being told that because as we focus on Jesus, as we fall more in love with him, as our heart begins to beat in rhythm with his heart, then our interest in the other things, our interest in the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, they simply fade. They simply go away. If you want to focus on not looking at your phone, then don't think about not looking at your phone. Think about Jesus. And what you'll find is the more you focus on him, the less interested you are in whatever's on this stupid device. We think that to throw off the sin and the weight that entangles us in our life, that we need more discipline. We don't need more discipline. We need more Jesus, man. We don't need more discipline. We don't need more strength. We don't need more American cowboys running around there trying to white-knuckle their way to holiness. We need Christians who admit that we can't do it, who know that our strength is insufficient, who have had plenty enough life lessons in however many years we've been trying to walk with the Lord to know good and darn well that we don't have the strength to will our way to holiness. That our only hope for any of this is Jesus anyways. Let me show you what happens when you focus your heart on Christ. When you focus your heart on Christ, he so fills you up that you don't have room in your heart for things that he doesn't want. When you focus your heart on Christ, you don't have to ask yourself, is it a sin to watch this particular show? You just have to ask, does my soul really want me to consume that? We're so focused on Christ that our heart is beating with us. The things that we shouldn't watch or shouldn't participate in aren't nearly as tempting anymore. If you've ever had the experience of being on a diet and really sticking with it and learning how to eat right, it's amazing to me how a month into a diet, stuff that you used to go nuts over, you're now looking at that going, oh, I know what that's going to do to me. I don't want to touch it. Just give me the salad. And six months ago, Nate would be like, salad? What's the matter with you, man? And now I'm like, I don't want to deal with all the stuff that's going to happen if I eat that big hamburger. Just give me something light. I've got things to do. The more we focus on health with Christ, the less interesting other things are to us in our life. And here's the other thing. A heart that is growing in love towards Jesus does not have space in it to grow in love for other sins. A heart that is growing more and more in love with Jesus every day, a heart that is waking up and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. A heart that is coming to church and taking in the message and singing exuberantly to God when given the opportunity. A heart that is embracing small group and talking about spiritual things in small group and finding other outlets, other things, other things to consume during the week and turning off the radio if you still have a commute, if that's a thing that exists in 2021 and just taking some quiet moments between you and God, a heart that wakes up thinking, how can I begin to pursue Jesus better today, does not have space in it for the sin and the weight that we've been carrying for years. So let us not focus on the sins that we need to eradicate. Let us focus on having hearts that are so full of Christ that there's no space for the other things in our life. And then here's what it does that I think is really, really practically valuable for us as we think about getting rid of the sin and the weight in our lives. Focusing on Jesus creates an untenable tension in our hearts. Focusing on Jesus creates an untenable tension in our hearts. Take whatever sin you want. We've been using the sin of looking at your phone, of looking at things you're not supposed to. And I'm going to skirt the line of being too liberal and casual with sin here, but if we could sit down in my office and you would come to me, whatever your deep, dark sin is, whatever the thing is that eats your lunch that makes you think that I wrote this sermon for you, that thing, whatever thing that is, if you could come to my office and sit down with me and you say, Nate, I've been struggling with this for a long time. I want it out of my life. What do I do? I would tell you, listen, take that sin, whatever it is, and set it aside and acknowledge that it has become so ingrained in you and who you are that there are parts of your psyche that you don't even know that whether it's a dopamine hit or whatever it is, that you're going to rely on that as a crutch. That's going to continue to be a sin for you. And I would even encourage you, don't think about it. Don't think about trying to stop it. Just think about more Jesus. Just focus on Christ. And if you wake up in the morning and you have a quiet time, and you focus on Jesus, and then at night you do the thing that you're not supposed to do, but you know good and well that you're going to have that quiet time in the morning, and you make yourself get up, and you make yourself have that quiet time, even though you feel like garbage for what you did the night before, and you keep doing that, eventually you will create an untenable tension in your heart where either Christ or the sin is going to win, but you can't keep straddling the fence like you've been doing. Either I'm going to keep having my quiet times and keep focusing on Jesus and keep pursuing him on a daily basis and stop doing the other things that make me feel like a hypocrite when I do this, or I'm just going to walk away from Jesus entirely and I'm going to embrace this sin. And you're here this morning because you don't want option two. You want option one. So quit worrying about the sin that we need to get rid of in our life. Start worrying about consuming more Christ, and that will naturally eradicate the other things in our life by creating an untenable tension in our heart where we say to ourselves, if I'm going to get up tomorrow and pursue Jesus, I don't want the feelings of what this thing is going to give me when I do that. So no thanks today. And if we can do this, simply focus on Christ rather than focusing on our sins, I think what we will find on the other side of that focus is a freedom that we've never had before, is a belief and a hope that we've never experienced before. There's a picture in Malachi when it says that a forgiven person skips like a calf loosed from his stall. I want you guys to run through life like that. I want you guys to run the race that your soul yearns to run, and I want you to acknowledge with me that we don't do it by white-knuckle discipline and trying harder. We don't will our way to holiness. We admit defeat. We admit that we need Jesus. We focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. And we allow his enlarging of our heart to eradicate within our heart the desire for anything but him, slowly but surely over time. That's how we deal with sin. That's how we throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that we were designed to run. So my prayer for you is that you will run it. My prayer for you, after walking through Hebrews together, is that our hearts will be so enlivened by Jesus, so impassioned for him, that we will continue our pursuit of him to the expense of everything else in our life so that as a church, as individuals, we will skip like calves loosed from our stall, that we will run the race that God created us for, that our souls yearn to run. That's what I want for you. And that's what I'm going to pray over you right now. Father, would you please help us to run our race? We, all of us, have folks in heaven who are cheering for us, who I believe are made proud by us. God, we hope that the way we live our life, that the humble decisions that we make, not the great grand things that we do, but the daily decisions to pursue you and the results that come from that. God, we hope that those would make you proud. God, give us not the strength, not the discipline, not the determination to run our race. Give us the focus. Give us the humility. Give us the passion. Give us the desire for Jesus that we need to run our race. God, if there's someone who can hear me who feels like they have a sin or a weight in their life that is just dragging them down, I pray that you would breathe that fresh air of hope into them this morning for the first time in maybe a long time that it might be possible to live life on the other side of that sin. That it might be possible to run with you without that encumbrance wrapped around their ankle. Father, would you focus us on Jesus and captivate us with who he is so much so that our hearts have no room in them for anything but him. It's in his name, our high priest, that we pray. Amen.

Good morning and happy Easter. It's so good to see everybody. Thank you for joining us online. It's good to see a good crowd and Easter colors. I love Easter. It's my favorite day of the year. I love everything that it celebrates. It's such a victorious day. It celebrates not only the greatest victory ever won, but the greatest one to come. It gives us hope for a future. My favorite quote about Easter is actually from Pope John Paul II. He said, we do not give over, give ourselves over to despair. We are the Easter people and Alleluia is our song. And what a day to come together and celebrate our risen Savior and all that he won for us. As we do that, we are in the middle of our series called Greater, going through the book of Hebrews together, and we're going to continue right on with that here on Easter. So hopefully you've been able to follow along and you have kind of a loose awareness of what we've been talking about, but for the uninitiated, for those that got drugged here by friends or are watching in somebody's living room, just so that we all are caught up together. The book of Hebrews is a letter. We don't know who wrote it, but we do know that it was written to Jewish people who lived outside of Israel in a Greek context who had at some point in their life converted to Christianity. So they grew up as practicing Jews, practicing the faith of Judaism, and then at some point received the news about Jesus and his resurrection and placed their faith in Jesus and converted to Christianity. Because of that conversion, they faced persecution from within and without, from the Roman government and from their own community, both of whom were trying to encourage them in various ways to walk away from their newfound faith and to embrace their old way of life. And so the author of Hebrews writes this letter to those people, those converted Jews into Christians, to compel them to stay the course in their faith. And he chooses to try to compel them by painting this lofty, soaring picture of Jesus and who he is. And he paints this picture by way of comparison. He compares Jesus to different facets of the Hebrew faith, which is why we're calling the series Greater, because he was greater than the angels and the other messengers. He was greater than Moses and the law. We see that he's the great high priest we talked about a couple weeks ago. And this week, we see that he's the greatest sacrifice. Now, to appreciate the fact that Jesus is the greatest sacrifice, we need to understand a little bit about how the sacrificial system in the Old Testament worked. And I know that you might think to yourself, boy, this is a weird place to go on Easter, but hang with me, okay? We're going to get to where we're going, but we've got to move through here first. In the Old Testament, the way that you would be right with God, the way that you would have a good standing before God, in our New Testament vernacular, most of us probably think of it as being saved. So in the Old Testament, the way that you were saved, or really the way that you had right standing before God, is through the sacrificial system. In Leviticus, we're given 630 some odd laws, and you had to live your life trying to follow those as best you could. If you could follow them perfectly, then good news, God is happy with you. But just in case you fall short, which everyone but Jesus did, then there were sacrifices that you could make. So once a week, once a month, whatever your rhythm allowed, whatever your wealth allowed, the head of the household, the dad or the grandfather, would take a bull or a lamb or a goat or whatever the sins of that household required based on different parameters of sacrifices that we're not going to get into. But he would take an appropriate sacrifice to the local temple, and the priest would sacrifice this animal on your family's behalf. And as the animal was sacrificed, the father would lay his hands on the head of the bull or the lamb or the goat or whatever it was, and the sins of the family are symbolically transferred onto this animal that is now paying the penalty for your sins. And once you go through this ritual of sacrifice, now you're good. You and God are squared away. You're fine. All your past sins are forgiven. The problem with the animal sacrifice is it only covered your past sins. So if you planned on screwing up in the future, well, then you better plan on making some more sacrifices. And you would. So every week or month you had to go back and you had to make a new sacrifice for the fresh sins. And then once a year on the greatest day in the Hebrew calendar, on the day of atonement, the high priest would go into the tabernacle or into the temple, into the Holy of Holies in the very presence of God, offer a sacrifice for himself and for his sins, and then a sacrifice for the nation of Israel. And it was this system of sacrifices of sinning and repenting and offering sacrifice to give yourself right standing before God. It was this system of sacrifices, of sinning and repenting and offering sacrifice to make yourself, give yourself right standing before God. It was this system of sacrifices that kept you right before God, that kept you saved, right? And so in the Old Testament, they really focused a lot on doing the rituals the right way, on offering the sacrifice in the right way, of putting our hands in the right place. If you were here a few falls ago, we did a series called Feast, where we went through the Jewish festivals, and the biggest one is the Day of Atonement. We spent a whole Sunday morning on the pomp and the circumstance in the Day of Atonement, and when things are supposed to happen, and the ceremonial bath, and the robe that you're supposed to wear, and when this sacrifice happens, and who's allowed in this room, in this space, and it was all very choreographed and nuanced and detailed. And you see, that led them to this assumption in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, they thought the rituals were the point. They thought the rituals were the point. If we can do everything just right, if I offer the sacrifice in the right way, if my priest is a good priest and he's doing it right, if the day of atonement goes well and that high priest performs his sacerdotal duties in the right way, then we're good. In the Old Testament, they thought that the rituals that they were following were the point. The problem is there's a little bit of Mr. Miyagi going on in these rituals. Now, I wanted to show you guys a clip from the 80s smash hit Karate Kid, but we can't. We're fancy now and we stream on YouTube and they would shut down our channel if we showed it, so we decided not to chance it. And now you'll be subjected to me describing to you a movie scene. So let's do this together. For those that don't know, Karate Kid is the predecessor to the really cruddy Cobra Kai that's on Netflix now and is a shadow of the former realities. But in Karate Kid, there's this great scene. There's a guy named, there's a little kid, or he's a teenager named Daniel, and he's getting bullied, okay? The kids are picking on him and he can't fend for himself and whatever, whatever. And so he finds this karate master named Mr. Miyagi. And he goes to Mr. Miyagi, and he says, will you train me? Teach me to do karate like you do karate. And Mr. Miyagi says, okay. But if you do karate, you got to do it all the way. You can't waver. If you do it, we'll squish you, he says. And Daniel's like, I'm in. And he goes, okay, great. And he puts a sponge in his hand and a rag in his hand, and he says, here's my cars. Wax on, wax off. Clean my cars. And he's like, what? And he goes, ah, no questions. You clean my cars. Daniel's like, all right, fine. So he starts cleaning the cars, right? And then the next scene over, he's like washing the car like this, and Miyagi sees him, and he's like, no, what are you doing? Wax on, and he takes his hand, and then wax off. And he moves it really intentionally. And he's like, what's the big deal with the waxing on and the waxing off? I'm cleaning the cars, right? And then he does this series of chores. He paints the fence, and he sands the floor, and he does all these repetitive motions. And it feels, for the first several weeks of of his training that Mr. Miyagi is really just using him for free labor, right? That he's just taking advantage of this kid's desire to learn karate and he's not actually learning anything. And then there's this great scene when Daniel gets ticked and he kind of confronts him. He's like, what's the deal? I want to learn karate and you're just making me do chores. And Mr. Miyagi's like, all right, wax on. And he's like, and he goes, no. And he takes his hand and he does it really intentionally. He goes, wax on. And then you hear Mr. Miyagi scream, hi, and he goes to punch him, right? And Daniel blocks the punch. And then he tries to punch him again and Daniel blocks the punch. And he's like, sand the floor and he blocks the kick. You know, paint the fence and he blocks the punch. And he's like, sand the floor, and he blocks the kick. You know, paint the fence, and he blocks the punch. And you realize in this moment, oh man, Mr. Miyagi really knows what he's doing. This is amazing. I'm all in on the karate master. This is like the smartest thing that happened in the 80s. And you can't believe it. And you're like, oh my gosh, all the things that he was doing, he was teaching him muscle memory. He was teaching him karate. Those were a form of what was to come. The waxing the floor wasn't the point. Waxing on wasn't the point. Sanding the fence wasn't the point. All the chores weren't the point. He was getting them to the point that he didn't understand yet. This is what's happening with the Old Testament rituals. They thought that the rituals were the point, that the cleaning of the actual floor, that the sanding the floor, the painting the fence, that that was the point. But they were really, through those rituals, getting in a much deeper reality. And the author of Hebrews actually writes about this reality and lays it out for them almost. I'm not willing to call it sarcastic and joking, but man what he's saying. He's saying, you guys went through these rituals all this time ago. And then he even comes out and he overtly says it. Those were shadows of the reality that was to come. Those rituals that you were doing that day of atonement was a shadow of the reality that was to come. It's not here yet. And then I love the way that he ends it. This is almost the sarcastic part for me. Maybe I just read my own personality into it. But it's like he leans in and he's like, did you really think the blood of bulls and goats is doing anything? Do you think there's anything magical going on in their blood? It's a symbol, guys. It doesn't make a difference. The ritual's not the point. And then he says this about Jesus. He says, those things weren't the point. They were a shadow of the realities to come. It's the reality of the ritual. And then he goes on and he says, and this is really the fulfillment of those rituals. This is why we did that. And he talks about Jesus in verses 11 through 14, when he writes, He says, that the high priest was pointing to our great high priest in Christ. You watched the sacrifices happen. You didn't realize that the sacrifice was a shadow of the reality that was going to come in Christ as he offered the ultimate sacrifices. And we've already acknowledged that the limited ability of the sacrifice of the animals was that they only covered the things that had happened in the past. But with the eternal sacrifice of Christ, you're not only forgiven for all the things you did up until the moment that you accept that sacrifice, but all the things that God knows you're going to do in the future, which is the remarkable thing about salvation. So he's saying that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of the rituals. And what we need to see is what he was trying to get them to see is that the real point of the rituals was to point to the point. Do you get the point? The real point of the rituals was to point to the point. Think about it. The point is Jesus. The law that they give him in the Old Testament, follow these rules and you can be okay with God. The point of those rules was never to make them okay with God. It was to show them their inability to ever earn their way into God's favor and so surrender to their need for God. The law was given so that we would acknowledge our need for Jesus. The sacrifices that he gives in the Old Testament, those point to the sacrifice of Christ one day. The role of the high priest, the imperfect high priest going into the Holy of Holies is a picture of Jesus as your high priest dying on the cross and then going to heaven and sitting at the right hand of God where we talked about a couple of weeks ago. He prays for you. He intercesses for you. He goes to the creator of the universe and he says, I have him. I have her. They're good. They can approach. He goes, he not only wins our salvation, but then he goes and he sits at the right hand of the throne of God and he ushers in our presence into the throne room so that anytime we want to, anywhere we are, we bow our heads and we say, dear God, and we are rushed right into the very throne room of God, into his presence, which is not a place that we would dare tread if we were not going in the name of Christ. That's what our high priest does for us. And what he wants them to see is that everything in the Old Testament, everything in your old way of life, the point of it is to point to the point. It's all pointing to Jesus. The prophets pointed to Jesus. The kingship of David points to Jesus. The priesthood of Melchizedek points to Jesus. All streams are running to Jesus. The point of everything is to point to Christ. And it would make sense to me if now you were thinking, okay, Nate, that's neat, but we don't live in the Old Testament. We don't do those rituals. So I'm glad I understand that, but what does that mean for me? I'm glad you asked. Don't you understand that we're still just waxing on and waxing off? Don't you understand that we're still just being Miyagi'd? That everything we do as a church is designed to point ourselves and others to the point? Don't you understand that everything we do as a church, as a church, everything we do is designed to point ourselves and others to the point. We come here and we gather together and we worship corporately. We sing praises to our God. Do you understand that that's a picture of heaven? That that's just this glimpse, just this sliver of our ability, the grace that God gives us to gather together with other people who are united in faith and come together as a body of faith and praise God to his throne. That that's a picture of what we're going to be doing in heaven. So that when we come and we praise God together, the point isn't to worship and be moved in your soul right now. The point is to understand that one day we will do this for all of eternity, that one day I won't just be singing next to the people I go to church with, but I will be singing with all saints for all of history. I will be praising next to Moses and David and my grandparents and Esther and Ruth and Naomi and all the heroes of our faith. We will come together and we will praise before the throne together. And what we do on Sunday morning is a shadow, a glimpse of the reality that is to come in heaven. We're pointing to the point. Don't you understand that when we take communion, it's not about the ritual? It's not about how we do it. It's not about if we dip it right or if we use the right bread. It's pointing to the point. As a matter of fact, I just heard before the service started, and I said, oh, that's great. I'm going to use it in the sermon. We did communion two weeks ago, and a single guy was watching online, and he wanted to participate in communion, and the best he could muster up was a tortilla chip and a glass of wine. Great. He participated in communion with his family. I would lean into that like the author of Hebrews did and say, do you really think there's anything magical going on in the bread? I think it matters whether you use Welch's or like whatever, Summer Home. It doesn't matter. I don't even know if that's a wine. I'm a bourbon guy. Somebody in between services, somebody tell me a good wine to use there, and I'll see if I can remember it in the second service. There's nothing special going on in those elements. It's a sign of the things to come. It's pointing to the point that one day we will be gathered around the table of God, of the King of the universe, and we are adopted sons and daughters of the King, and we are invited into that fellowship with Jesus. It is a reminder of what Jesus did 2,000 years ago, and it's a reminder of what he will do, what he has promised to do in the future. Do you understand that even the behaviors that Scripture admonishes in you are designed to point to the point? That faithfulness and goodness and kindness and gentleness and meekness, that God doesn't implore you to be gentle for gentleness' sake. He implores you to be gentle because when you are different from the world that we live in, when you are so gentle that it's noticeable, it orients your heart towards Christ and other people who watch you walk in your gentleness are oriented towards Christ as well. That he asks you to be forgiving, not for the sake of being forgiving, not for forgiveness's sake, but for the sake that with radical forgiveness, we mirror Christ and orients our heart to him and other people are pointed to Jesus as a result of our forgiveness. Go down the list. Goodness, love, mercy, charity. All those behaviors that are prescribed in the New Testament, we're not prescribed them for the sake of the behavior, but so that our hearts would be oriented towards Jesus and other people would see that in us and want to know our Savior as well. Even our marriages, these things that we go through for our lives, we choose a life partner, we stay married, we love them, and even the most holy of marriages, it's a ritual to point to the point. The marriage is used over and over and over again in scripture as a picture of the way that Christ loves the church, that we are the bride of Christ. Pure, unadulterated, marital love between the most holy of people who love Christ only serves to show the world around them how Christ loves the church. Marriage itself is designed to point us to the point. We're still just waxing on and waxing off. Even, I would say to you, fighting your own sin nature within yourself, striving and failing and striving and failing and feeling never good enough is intentional to point you to the point so that you'll come to the end of yourself and admit, I need Christ. Even our striving against ourselves in sin is serving to point us to the point. Not to mention baptism, what we just did. People get concerned about the ritual. Did we do it right? We were in the bathroom changing afterwards and Kyle said, did my head go all the way under? And I said, you're good, man. It took. That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's not the point. Whether or not we did the baptism right is not the point. The point is that it points to Christ. In Romans 6 it says in baptism we are buried with Christ in death and we are raised to walk in newness of life. That's why the early church did it on Easter because it's a symbol of Jesus being put in the grave and when Kyle Kyle goes under the water, he's being put in the grave too. And his former self is passing away. And when he rises up out of the water, he is washed clean. He is sprinkled pure by the blood of Christ. He raises to walk in newness of life in eternity with Jesus. It's a picture of Easter. It doesn't matter if we do it right. The point is not the ritual. The point is to point us to Christ. And speaking of Easter, Easter, more than any other day, points us to the point. Easter, more than any other day, points us to Christ. It is amazing to me, the victory that was won on Easter. It is amazing to me that when Mary went and she found the tomb and she heard the greatest line in the Bible from the angel, why do you search for the living among the dead? He is not living. Or he is not here, he is living just as he said. In that victory, Jesus conquered hell and Satan. Jesus conquered death for us. Jesus conquered disease for us. When we gather on Easter, we remember those of us who have lost loved ones in the last year or even further away than that. We are reminded that the last time we said goodbye to them was not goodbye forever. It was goodbye for now. Easter reminds us of that reality. Easter reminds us of the hope that we have. Because Scripture says, death, where are your shackles? Sin, where is your sting? Like it's been defeated. Jesus won that for us because Jesus died on the cross and left the tomb empty and went to heaven as our high priest and now prays for us because he won us that salvation. We get together on Easter and we remember that reality. And because he did that, my friend Kyle, his father watched him from heaven get baptized with his little granddaughter and with his wife sitting on the row and his daughter-in-law that he loved so much. He watched that and participated in that. And when Kyle goes to heaven one day, he's going to hug him. That was one on Easter. Do you understand? We don't have to fear what everybody else fears. We have a tremendous hope. That's why Pope John Paul II said, we do not give way to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. We praise God no matter what. It's an amazing thing that was won on Easter. And here's the bigger deal. Not only on Easter do we remember the victory that Jesus won and be grateful for what it did to us and ushering us into heaven and uniting us with him for all of eternity? But his victory over death is the greatest victory that's ever been won, but it's not the greatest one that will be won because Revelation tells us that Jesus is coming back on a white horse and he's coming back to wreck shop and he's gonna set up his new kingdom and his new earth where there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. Jesus is going to come back and win that victory. One day when we don't have to ask why do shootings happen and why do bad things happen to good people and why do bad people seem to thrive? Jesus is going to come back and he's going to make all that make sense. As Christians, that is the promise that we cling to. That is our hope that will not put us to shame. That is what we usher others to. So even Easter, as we celebrate it, the point is not only the resurrection of Christ, but also the greatest victory that he will win. It's his seal on his promise. I kept that promise. I sent my son. He died for you. He conquered death. He resurrected. He ascended to the right hand of the Father. He prays for you. And one day he's coming back and he's going to make everything right. And so on Easter, we celebrate the promise that we remember that has been kept and we celebrate the promise that we look forward to him keeping. It's still pointing us to the point. As we celebrate Easter with our families, and we do all the things that we do, let us remember the victory that Christ won for us. Let us acknowledge that just like the Old Testament church, they were simply waxing on and waxing off, that the rituals and the things they did were simply designed to point them to Christ, that so it is with us as we exist as the New Testament church, that all the things he asks us to do and all the rituals he's installed and all the behaviors in our life and all the faith that he asks from us is really designed to point us to the point. And let us remember that on Easter, we don't just celebrate a victory won, but one that we know will be won in the future. Let's pray, and we'll continue to worship together. Father, we are so grateful to you. We're so grateful for your son. Thank you for sending him to pay the penalty for our sins. Lord, I pray that if there is somebody who doesn't know you, that this would be the morning when they decide that they want to. If there's someone who hasn't felt your forgiveness, let this be the day that they feel it. God, let us accept more and more that everything in our life is simply designed to point us back to Jesus. That everything we do at the church, everything that you encourage us to do together, all the ways that you encourage us to love, all the ways that you love us, all the things that you let us struggle with are designed, Father, to point us to our need for your Son. God, I pray that we would have the best Easter, not only reflecting on the victory that you've won, but on the one that you promised to win too. And it's in that returning Savior's name that we pray. Amen.

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

Amen. Boy, Steve, I don't know if you can hear it from up here, but that was the best singing I've heard in like a year and a half. That was amazing. Great job, everyone. One of my greatest joys as a pastor, truly, is to sit in the front and just sometimes I stop singing and I just listen to the body that I get to be a part of praise our God together. And it's just a really sweet and special thing. Thank you for being here this morning. Thank you for joining us online or listening throughout the week. If that's your habit, we are grateful for all of that. This is the third part in our series in the book of Hebrews called Greater. When we're moving through the book of Hebrews, we're looking at the comparisons that the author makes between Jesus and some of the figures and facets of the Jewish faith. You'll remember that he writes this letter to Hellenistic Jews, which are Jewish people who grew up outside of Israel in a Greek-dominated culture, probably grew up as practicing Jews, and then converted to Christianity somewhere as adults subsequent to the death and resurrection of Christ and are now trying to work out their new faith. Not only are they trying to work out their new faith, but they're being oppressed by the Roman government violently and physically, and then they're being rejected by their culture. So they're being persecuted from without and from within. And so the author writes this letter to compel them to persevere in their faith, to hang in there in the face of persecution, to hang in there in the face of isolation and stay true to Jesus, their Savior. And again, he does this by making different comparisons over the course of the letter. And so this morning, we arrive at the comparison of Jesus to a high priest, and he makes the point that Jesus is our great high priest. And as I broach the subject of high priest, and we think about Jesus being our high priest, we may feel about that news a little bit like I felt in December of 2008. December of 2008, it was the first year of our marriage. We got married in that July, and Jen's family decided it was high time that we go to Rome, Italy. They had been planning this trip for a while. Now I've married into the family, so my poor father-in-law has to pay my way to Rome as well, and I get to go and schlub all the bags all over Italy, all over the place, wherever we're going. That was my role. While we're there, we're staying in, we rented an apartment, I guess, like it was Airbnb Rome, I guess. And we're staying in this apartment, and it's a couple blocks away from the Vatican City, from St. Peter's Basilica, St. Peter's Square, and all that stuff. And we happened to be there on Christmas Day. And I knew that on Christmas Day, the Pope was going to come out, who was Pope Benedict at the time, and give a papal address. And so I thought it would be a really fun experience. When am I going to be in Rome on Christmas again, a couple blocks away from the Vatican? So I get up that morning, get dressed, and go to St. Peter's Square for the papal address. And it is packed with, I think it was a couple hundred thousand people. It was amazing to see flags from different countries all over the place. I worm my way up towards the front, and Pope Benedict comes out, and he gives his address. And I remember being incredibly impressed with him because he gave the address seven or eight different times in seven or eight languages. And he did it flawlessly. And I don't think he was reading off of anything. It was a really, really impressive thing. And for me, I didn't grow up Catholic. I have no Catholic background. I knew less about Catholicism then than I do now. And I only know a little bit more now than I did then. So it was all just kind of a new experience for me. And I remember at the end of the address, somehow or another, I learned this. I don't know if I heard him say it. I don't know if I read it on the screen where it was giving us the closed captioning of it, but at the end of his address, he offered all of those in attendance. He gave us, I got to see if I can get this right, a verbal plenary indulgence for non-mortal sins in 2008 for that year, which is great news. I was thrilled to have this. Now, I don't want to be disrespectful to Catholicism because for some people that was very meaningful. And what an indulgence is, it basically meant that the Pope forgave me of all of my non-mortal sins in 2008. I don't know what the difference is between mortal and non-mortal sins. It seems like we should try to invest our sinning in the non-mortal kind. I really don't know. But for those sins, I do not have to pay my penance in purgatory. I'm not going to be punished for those in purgatory. And as I received that news, I thought, well, that's great. But I don't really believe in purgatory. And I don't want to be disrespectful to the Pope, but I don't need your forgiveness for my sins. Jesus offers me that. So like I'm all squared away here on the verbal plenary indulgences for non-moral sins. But thank you. I'm good. And I think that that's a little bit how we as 21st century Christians receive the news that we have a great high priest. Oh, I have a high priest. Well, that's great, but like I'm a Christian, I'm all squared away here. I have direct access to God. I don't need an intercessor. Because we might understand a priest to be someone that we go to the priest, and then the priest goes to God on our behalf. And you might be enough of a biblical scholar to kind of start to piece this together from the Jewish perspective, where the Jewish people, they grew up with a high priest. You would go to your priest, and your priest would go to the high priest, and the high priest would make sacrifices on your account. You didn't go directly to God. You went to the high priest, and was your conduit to God, right? And then we know because we're Christians, we act like we have direct access to God. We can pray. We can go to God whenever we want to. I can go into the very throne room of God. I don't need a high priest. I can go directly to God myself. So that's cool that Jesus is the great high priest. It's neat that it's explained like that, but that's probably more for the Hebrew audience than it is for me, because as a Christian, I know I can go directly to God. Except for here's the thing. No, you can't. You cannot go directly to God. I'm going to tell you why in a little bit. But what I want us to understand as we begin this discussion of Jesus as our high priest is that we absolutely need a high priest. We need a high priest. We need someone to go to God on our behalf because we cannot go into the perfect throne room and the perfect presence of Creator God Almighty on our own. We cannot do that. We would be consumed by His glory in an instant. So we have to have a high priest. We need one of those. Before I tell you why we need a high priest, why we need someone to intercede to God for us. I want to tell you about your high priest, because there's some things unpacked in Hebrews. Really, the end of chapter 4 to the end of chapter 7, so close to three and a half chapters, the author invests in this comparison of Jesus as a high priest and explaining to us just the very nature and importance and grandeur of our high priest. And he introduces this idea to us in this way. If you have a Bible, turn to Hebrews. We're going to be in chapter 4, and then we're going to be in chapter, I think, 5, and then we're going to spend the rest of the time in chapter 7, and there's lots to read along with today. But if you have a Bible, turn to Hebrews chapter 4. This is how the author introduces to us the idea of our high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God. Let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who, in every respect, has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then, with confidence, draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in the time of need. There's a couple ideas there, and it's important that we understand them. There's the idea of because of Jesus, we can draw near the throne of God with boldness. We can go to God with boldness. This idea that we've inherited as Christians that we go directly to God, he says that we can do this. So we go directly to God with boldness, and we're going to talk about how we do that in a little bit. So to kind of put a pin in that idea, and we're going to circle back to it later. But he also says that we don't have a high priest who cannot sympathize with us. It's important that we remember that Jesus walked this earth, that Jesus was human, that Jesus faced the same temptations that we do. We see him in Matthew in the desert after fasting for 40 days being tempted by Satan himself. He's tempted with his desires, with his appetite for bread. He's tempted with the desire for authority. He's tempted with his ego. And we see that Jesus was tempted as he moved through life in much the same way as we are all tempted as we move through life. And so as a result, we understand that there's no temptation that we face that Jesus has not dealt with. It's not as if Jesus didn't have to manage and master his own propensity to lust in his own heart. It's not that Jesus didn't have to manage and master his own ego, his own greed, his own selfishness. When we feel fatigued and people need more and more and more from us, moms, moms, I think, are chief among this. Moms, they never get to go through their day without somebody needing something, right? Jesus felt that fatigue. He knew what it was to perform miracles, to serve and serve and serve and give, and then to go off to a quiet place, the bathroom, and have someone knock on the door, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Yes, what? He knew what it was not to lose his mind with that, right? He knew what it was to be tempted by his ego. He knew what it was to have people say things to him and have it within him to crush that person. Have it within them to verbally spar with this person in such a way that they would never speak again. And he bit his tongue. He knew what that was. There is no temptation that we face that Jesus did not walk through himself. Because of that, we have a high priest that empathizes and sympathizes with us. I think we tend to think of Jesus on the throne judging us, looking down on us, being disappointed in the things that we do, and that's not it at all. Jesus sympathizes with us. He looks at us and he says, I've been there. I understand why you made that choice. Don't make it again. It's not good for you. He offers us his sympathy. That's a really, really powerful thing. But this isn't all that the author says about Jesus as our high priest. He actually compares telling you, is the most mysterious, fascinating figure in the Bible to me. I have my whole life since I encountered him, since I read this verse, I was probably in high school and I encountered this verse and my first thought is, the order of Melchizedek, who is that? Because here's the thing, there's an order of priests in the Old Testament, the descendants of Aaron. When God sent Moses to Egypt and said, free my people, he sent him with his brother Aaron. And Moses was the civil authority and Aaron was the spiritual authority. And through the tribe of the Levites that follow from, that come from the line of Aaron are named all the priests and high priests throughout the ages. So you would expect for Jesus to be named high priest in the order of Aaron, because that's the order of priests that have moved throughout the Old Testament. But that's not what the author says. He says he is the high priest, not in the order of Aaron, and we're going to see why in a minute, but in the order of Melchizedek. And if you're paying attention, you're saying, no, what now? Why? Well, let me tell you why. Hebrews chapter 7, verses 1 through 3, we're told a little bit more about this figure. He writes this, for this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him. And to him, Abraham apportioned a 10th part of everything. He is first by translation of his name, king of righteousness. And then he is having neither beginning of days nor end of life. Oh, wait, I'm sorry. And then he is also king of Salem. That is king of peace. He is without father or mother no genealogy? He has no father or mother? He resembles Christ. He continues as priest forever. Who is this dude? And why don't we know more about him? He only shows up three places in the Bible. We see him in Genesis 14. This is what he's referring to. And I love how flippant the Bible is. Like that's an unimportant detail. Abraham was returning from the slaughter of the king. So don't worry about that or the slaughter or anything, but let's pay attention to this. I just love the Bible. It's not much for detail sometimes. But in Genesis 14, Abraham has a nephew named Lot who's dumb and gets himself in trouble. And Abraham goes to rescue him. And on the way back, he encounters this king named Melchizedek. His name literally means king of righteousness. He is the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, the first king of Jerusalem that we see in Scripture. And when Abraham encounters him, he gives him a tenth of everything that he owns. All his riches, all his wealth, all his livestock, everything that he owns, he gives Melchizedek a tenth of it. This, incidentally, is where we get the idea of the tithe. That's where the tithe started. Tithe just means tenth. And in the New Testament, people disagree on whether or not we're supposed to tithe, but no one disagrees on whether or not we're supposed to be generous. And generally, we take that 10% rule as this is the starting point. And as God grows your heart for generosity and your ability to be generous, we do all that we can. But we trace the tithe back to this incredible interaction that Abraham has with Melchizedek in Genesis chapter 14. And it's incredibly interesting that Abraham felt compelled to tithe to Melchizedek and acknowledge him as a priest. Because to this point in Scripture, all we know of is that God revealed himself to Abraham. We don't know that God has been revealing himself to other people, but clearly, somehow Melchizedek knew who God was, served God, and was this king and priest. And to the Jewish mind, for Abraham to be subservient to him, you would expect Melchizedek to tithe to Abraham to the Jewish mind. But instead, Abraham tithes to Melchizedek, acknowledging a superiority there, which would have shocked the Jewish audience. And in Melchizedek, we see, this is fascinating to me, the unification of civic and spiritual authority. In Melchizedek, we see this man who is a king. He is a civil authority. He is in charge of the military. He is governing over a group of people, and yet he is also the spiritual authority over this people. And this is not a unification that we see again in the Old Testament. From Melchizedek, we see Moses take the civil authority, and we see Aaron take the spiritual authority, and we watch those threads run through, we see those streams run through the Old Testament. But we do not see in God's Israel a reunification of the civil and spiritual authority. Actually, from here, he's only mentioned one more time in the Old Testament. David mentions him. We don't see him again. He shows up in Genesis chapter 14. Abraham pays him a tithe. He offers Abraham a blessing. Off he goes. It's this mysterious king of righteousness who's a unification of civil and spiritual authority. And then we don't see him again. And then out of nowhere in Psalm 110, David refers to him again. It's a messianic prophecy, which means David is talking about the Messiah that is to come, who we know as Jesus. And he says in this prophecy that he will be priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. And you're going, what? Why don't we know more about this guy? Why haven't they written more about him? Why didn't God include him more? And to those questions, we have no answers. But here's what's fascinating to me, and it's amazing to me that God allows David to be a part of Melchizedek's story. Because what we have in the Old Testament, if we're paying attention, and this week as I was researching this is the first time I realized it, and I thought I loved it. In the Old Testament, we see this stream of the civil authority of kingship. We see this stream of this reign of who would become David. And in 2 Samuel chapter 7, God promises David that his throne will go on for all of eternity, that his reign will persist through eternity. And we know that Jesus is the continuation of David's reign, that when he returns to earth, he's going to sit on the throne of David. And so Jesus is the continuance of David's reign for all eternity. But what we may not know is that another stream running through the Old Testament is the stream of the priesthood of Melchizedek that is also going to continue for all of eternity. But it's running parallel to this stream of Aaronic priests, priests through the line of Aaron. And it seems like Jesus is going to come back and fulfill that priesthood, and he's not. This is what I want you to know about your high priest, because I think it's amazing. Your high priest, Jesus, is the continuance of the reign of David and of the priesthood of Melchizedek and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority for all eternity. That's big, so I'm going to say it again. Your high priest, Jesus, who intercedes on your behalf, is the continuance of the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority for all eternity. Do you understand that there's these two streams running through the Old Testament that seem like they're parallel, that seem like they don't have anything to do with each other, the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek. And then in the person of Christ, those streams converge and they conclude and they are completed that the whole Old Testament is these streams running and pointing to Christ and culminating in him, that that's your high priest, the one to whom the entire Old Testament points to and culminates in. He is the completion of these two things. He is the continuance of the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek. For all of eternity, they were just simply foreshadowing for Jesus, who came to die on the cross for you and to be your high priest for your sins. And he is the reunification of the civil and spiritual authority. And in Revelation, in the new heaven and the new earth, when God sits on his throne, he sits on the throne of David and continues as our king and our priest forevermore. Melchizedek is a setup for that. And Jesus is the completion of it. When I sit in that truth, I cannot help but be awed at my Savior. He is so much more than a man who came to die on a cross. He is so much more than simply the Son of God. He is the convergence and the completion of all of the Old Testament, and the promise and the hope of the New Testament, and then the completion of everything at the end of time. Jesus is a pretty big deal, and that's your high priest. And not only is he the continuation of the reign of David and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority and the continuation of the priesthood of Melchizedek, but your high priest is the perfection and completion of the earthly priesthood. He is the perfection and the completion of the Aaronic line of priests that they had in the Old Testament. And we see that in these verses here. I've grouped some together, Hebrews chapter 7, verses 11, 18, and 19. I'll kind of jump around, but this is what the author writes. Now, if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood, for under it the people received the law, what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than one named after the order of Aaron? For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness, for the law made nothing perfect. But on the other hand, a better hope is introduced through which we draw near to God. I know that's a little confusing, so here's what's going on in that passage. The Hebrews followed the priesthood of Aaron, and the descendants of him were priests. And these priests were messed up dudes. They were human just like me and you. They were pastors. And the best that a pastor can do is be human. I mean, your pastor may or may not have snapped at his sweet daughter on a road trip this weekend when she asked one too many times if we were in a new state yet. I mean, that could have happened. We are fallible, gross humans. And the author of Hebrews points out, that's who your high priests were. They were men who sinned and first had to offer a sacrifice for themselves before they could even get to your business. And now we have a high priest that doesn't need to sacrifice for himself. They were men who lived and then they died. This high priest does not do that. The priesthood of Aaron, the Aaronic priesthood existed much like the law did to simply show you your inability to earn your way into heaven. And it said, why would we need another priesthood unless the one that you acknowledge, the line of Aaron, was fallible and ultimately showed you that it couldn't bring you to salvation. We actually needed a priest in the order of Melchizedek to be perfect and to be complete, which is what Jesus was. So he's the perfection and the completion of the priesthood that already existed. So that's who your high priest is. He is the one on whom the entire Old Testament converges and is personified in. He is the completion of the line of priests that we see run through the Old Testament. Both streams. He's a pretty big deal. But I said at the beginning that we actually need this high priest. It's not just nice that we have them. We're not just awed at the majesty of Jesus and who he is. We actually, we need him. And we're told why in chapter 7, verse 25. Verse 25 starts out consequently, is the first word there. And it starts out consequently, which means because of everything that I just said, because of everything I just said from starting in chapter 4, verse 14, moving through chapter 5, 6, through all of 7, now as a conclusion to by dying on the cross and by raising from the dead. And that in that, in what we celebrate here in a few weeks at Easter, Jesus' death on the cross on Good Friday and then his subsequent resurrection from the dead, that Jesus conquered death, he conquered sin, he conquered the grave, he conquered hell, and on our behalf, now we are saved if we simply place our faith in him on the cross. And that is true. However, Hebrews chapter 7 verse 25 tells us that unless he goes to God and intercedes on our behalf, unless he goes to God and sits at the right hand of the throne and prays for you in your salvation, that that work of salvation is not complete. So what we understand is your very salvation relies on the prayers of your high priest. Your very eternity, your spot in heaven. We sang a few minutes ago, I'm a child of God. I'm free indeed. In my father's house, there's a place for me. That is all true. But it's not true if Jesus doesn't go to the throne of God and intercede for us. The salvific work of Christ was not completed on the cross or rising out of the grave. It is completed as he goes to God and sits at his right hand and says, I got them. When they talk to you, I covered them in my righteousness. I love them. I died for them. God, they're good. At your worst moment, Jesus looks at you and he prays for you and he says, Father, they're good. Forgive them. They know not what they do. And if our faith just rests in what Jesus did on the cross and that he rose from the grave and we don't acknowledge that we have a high priest in heaven who's praying to God on our behalf, who is interceding for us, that our understanding of what's working for our salvation falls short. Our very eternity relies on the prayers of our high priest. How arrogant and ignorant is it of us to say that I don't need a high priest, I can go directly to God. No, you can't. You get to go to God because your high priest, Jesus Christ, sits at the right hand of him and allows you to do so. That's why in chapter 4, verses 14 through 16, he says it's because of our high priest that we go boldly into the throne room of God. Because if he's not there going, he's good, she's good, let her in, let her speak. Then we are dashed in the glory, we are consumed in the glory of God. We cannot hope to stand in the throne room of God. And maybe I'm just speaking about myself here, but sometimes we just arrogantly think or claim or feel that I don't need any of that, I don't need a high priest, I can go directly to God. Yes, you do, you need a high priest more than anyone. But your high priest is Jesus. He died for you. Hebrews says he was perfected in that suffering. He conquered death by raising from the grave for you. And then he goes to Father to complete your work of salvation, and he intercedes on your behalf once you place your faith in him. That's your high priest. That's what he does for you. Do you understand that that's why we pray in Jesus' name? That when you pray and you end your prayer because you heard your parents or some other person as you were growing up in their prayers in Jesus' name or the Bible study that you went to, they said in Jesus' name, and so you just started saying in Jesus' name. Do you understand that this is why we do it? Because if we pray in our name, then God's not hearing our prayers. If we pray in our name, in the name of Nate, I pray. Shut up. No. In Jesus' name, we pray. It's an acknowledgement. Whether you understand it or not, it's acknowledgement at the end of your prayers. God, I'm asking for these blessings. I'm thanking you for these things. I'm confessing my sins. I'm asking for intercession here. I'm presenting all of my prayers and petitions to you in the name of my high priest who died for me and sits at your right hand and prays for me. In Jesus' name we pray. Because of his completed work of salvation by sitting at the right hand of the Father and praying for us. Now I don't know about you, but as this washed over me this week, I couldn't help but be awed at my high priest, at pulling these threads from the Bible and seeing how they all work to converge on the person of Christ, and be humbled by my arrogance in the past to think that I get to go directly to God without acknowledging my utter need for a high priest in Christ. But I do hope wherever you were in that spectrum that we will never again go to God without acknowledging that it is because of the death and resurrection and prayers of our high priest that we are able to do that. I hope that this sermon in particular this week helps us paint a more full and rich picture of the person of Jesus in our life whom we come to and whom we worship and who we submit ourselves to. I hope it enlargens our hearts with gratitude and even with awe as we consider Jesus our high priest in the order of Melchizedek. And because we can pray in Jesus's name, I want to invite us to do that now and then we're going to participate in communion. Well, there's one more thing about Jesus and Melchizedek that I'm excited to share with you. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for hearing our prayers in the name of your Son, Jesus. Thank you for praying for us. Thank you for interceding for us. I pray that you would enlarge our hearts with gratitude and faith as we revel in all that you are. Jesus, we can't wait to see your face, to see you sit on the throne of David as our king and our high priest. May we have a fresh gratitude for our salvation, God. May anyone who is listening to me now, who doesn't know you, who has not received the gift of salvation, would they please by faith receive the gift of their high priest, Jesus, whom they so desperately need? Would you please make us daily aware of our need for him? Thank you for your servant Melchizedek and how you used him. Enlarge and enliven our hearts to you, Father. And it's in Jesus' name, our high priest, that we pray. Amen. Right now, we're going to take a minute and observe communion together. So if you're watching at home and you're able to grab some of the elements, we hope that you will do that. Here we have these packets just by way of review. The very top flimsy layer reveals a stale wafer, and then under that is the juice. Again, this is the COVID-friendly version of communion. Nobody likes it, but it is nice to be able to share in it together. This represents the bread and the wine from the last supper that Jesus had with the disciples. Jesus is about to be arrested, and he starts this tradition with his disciples, and he offers them bread, and he says, whenever this is my body that is broken for you, do this in remembrance of me. And then he pours the wine, and he said, this is my blood that is spilled for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And so it became a tradition with the followers of Christ that when they would gather to consume this bread and wine and to do it in remembrance of Jesus and this tradition that he started. And we see in Acts chapter 2 that this was a defining trait of the early church. They would gather in one another's homes and they would break bread and they would share wine and they would pray together and they would remember their Savior. And the reason that we're doing it this week is back in Genesis 14, when Abraham offers a tenth of all that he owns to this king of Salem, Melchizedek. Melchizedek, in return, offers Abraham a blessing. Do you know what that blessing was? It was a blessing of bread and wine. Just another way that the life of Melchizedek tips its cap and points an arrow to Jesus. Another way that our Savior is foreshadowed in the Bible. So as we focus on this mystery of Melchizedek, let us acknowledge together that he offered Abraham the peace and blessing of communion thousands of years before Jesus came to define it so that when we participate in communion today, we don't just go back to Jesus and the disciples, we go back to the very foundations of our faith with Abraham and Melchizedek and participate in this millennia-old tradition as we focus on our Savior together. So I'm going to be quiet for a minute and pray on my own. As I do that, I would invite you to pray too. Go into the throne room of God, ushered there by your high priest. Ask God to unveil in your heart anything that is there that shouldn't be there. Ask him to create in you a renewed sense of gratitude for him. And be awed by the fact that you are participating in a tradition that goes far back beyond Christ, all the way back to the very beginnings of our faith. Let's pray for a minute. I'll say amen and then we'll take the elements together. Amen. Jesus took the bread and he broke it for the disciples. And he said, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And he poured the wine. And he said, this is my blood. This is poured out for you. Whenever you drink of this wine, do it in remembrance of me.

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..