Sermons tagged with Home

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

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. It's so fun to watch myself for two minutes before I preach every week during this series. This is the third part in our series, Big Rocks, where we're talking about the large priorities in life. And this week, I want to talk about having a Jesus-centered home and a Jesus-centered family. So this, I will tell you up front, is family-centric. But it applies to having a Jesus-centered marriage. If you're a single person, there are principles here that we can absolutely apply to having a Jesus-centered life. But when I throw out that term, Jesus-centered home, I think a lot of us would go, yeah, we have one of those. Like our home is a Jesus-centered home. But I want to kind of challenge you up front on that by just making this simple point. A pro-Jesus home is not the same as a Jesus-centered home. A home that's pro-Jesus, if we would say, yeah, we got a Jesus-centered home, well, is it a pro-Jesus home or is it a Jesus-centered home? For instance, the Rector House, our home, is a Kyle Tolbert pro-home. We are pro-Kyle Tolbert. Thank you. Thank you for that. He's running sound today for me, so a little less pro-Kyle right now. But overall, the Rector Home is a pro-Kyle home. We like him. We hope things work out for Kyle. I bet most of the homes in this church are pro-Kyle homes. We want the best for the guy, right? We hope things work out for Kyle. We hope that he has good days. We're fans of what he does. We like DJ KT and Christmas Kyle and Easter Kyle and Summer Extreme Kyle. We like all the versions of Kyle, right? But it's not a Kyle-centered home. We don't pray every day that John and Lily will become more and more like Kyle as they age. We don't wake up going, what can we do? What can we implement in our home to get our children to be closer to Kyle, right? Like we don't do that stuff. We don't have WWKD bracelets, right? We don't have what would Kyle do, like anywhere in our home home. We're pro-Kyle home. We're not a Kyle centered home. I think a lot of us have pro-Jesus homes. We're foreign. We hope things work out for him. We want his will to be done. We might pray that sometimes. We support, in this house, we support Jesus. There's no more, I don't mean to step on any toes. If I do, I'm a little bit sorry, not a lot of it, sorry. There's no more pro-Jesus sign in a home than at Christmas time when you see the poster or the postcard or whatever it is of Santa kneeling at the cross. Like in this house, first Jesus, then Santa. Santa kneels to Jesus here. We are pro-Jesus, even during Christmas. Good job, right? We have pro-Jesus homes. Do we have Jesus-centered homes? Do we have Jesus-centered conversations? Do we wake up every day thinking, what can we do? What can we implement so that our children grow more closely to Jesus? What can I do to make Jesus the center of my life? What can we do to make Jesus the center of our marriage? What kinds of things can we implement to make sure that the relationships in this house, the things that happen in this home are things that revolve around Christ? And so to that end, I wanted to talk this morning about actually having a Jesus-centered home. And I'll tell you this up front, okay? As I was thinking about the sermon and the best way to approach it, and really, most of the time when I'm thinking about a sermon, I'm thinking, how can this be maximum helpful to the people who got up and showered and brushed their teeth and came today? Like, how can this be maximum helpful for you? And so as I thought about that, I really didn't think it was worth investing a ton of our time in this idea of having a Jesus-centered home. I didn't want to come in this morning and try to convince you to have a Jesus-centered home or leave with this compelling vision of what can happen when Jesus is the center of your home. Not because I don't think a compelling vision is worth having, but because I think you're probably already with me on that. Like you got up in the summertime and you came to church and your kids are over there or you're here or whatever it took you to get here, you're here. So I think I'm going to assume that a majority of us, I'm not saying that everyone in here is in on this hook, line, and sinker, but a majority of us in here, if I could talk to you and say, do you want to have a Jesus-centered home, you would say yes. So I'm going to assume that we came this morning, you didn't wake up thinking, boy, I really want a Jesus-centered home. But when I first started mentioning it, I'm going to assume that you're with me and that this is a thing that you'd like to pursue. This is something that you'd like to implement. So to that end, a couple things. First of all, my goal for you today, if you have someone to drive home with today, is to have a family meeting in the car. It's to schedule a family meeting in the car on your way home. If you have children, I want you guys, my goal is for you guys to schedule something with your children to talk about some things that you're going to do. I want mom and dad to talk about how can we make this a more Jesus-centered home. I want husbands and wives to look at this and go, okay, there's some things that we can implement. How do you want to, which of those seem practical? Which of these seem like something that we can actually do? So my goal is for you guys, to whom it's applicable, to have family meetings as a result of today to talk about how to implement some of these things. Also because of that, this is just a ridiculously practical sermon. I'm going to give you six suggestions of things that you can do to have a Jesus-centered home. Because again, I wanted it to be maximum helpful. I didn't want to bring you in, talk to you about having a Jesus-centered home, and then send you home with no practical ideas, just leave you to search Google and figure it out on your own. So this is the place where we're going to do that. Our guiding passage today is found in Deuteronomy chapter six. So if you have a Bible, it's the fifth book of the Bible. Deuteronomy chapter six is just a sideline. This doesn't mean anything. Deuteronomy, the word Deuteronomy literally means the law repeated. So Deuteronomy is like a synopsis of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Okay. So if you really want to know what's going on in those three books, Deuteronomy will kind of give you the highlights for better or for worse. And it finishes up the narrative of that portion of scripture. But in this portion of Deuteronomy, they had just received the law, and Moses is telling them how they are to teach it to their families, how they are to implement this as a culture. How are we going to learn this law, to breathe this law, to obey this law as a culture? Here's how we're going to do it. This is what he says. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. He's talking about the law. You shall teach them diligently to your children. And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your. When Moses is telling them, this is the law of God, this is our religion, this is our faith. Here's how we're going to implement this countrywide, nationwide. To us, it'd be nationwide. To them, it was peoplewide. The Hebrew people, this is how we're going to implement that law. You're going to teach it to your children. You're going to write it in your homes. You're going to keep it on your hands and on your head. To this day, if you go to Jerusalem, you go to the wailing wall, you will see some Orthodox Jews, some men who have it, literally, phylacteries, I think is what they're called, tied to their head and tied to their wrists with these elaborate leather bands in obedience to this. This is how they said that we are going to learn God's word and learn the law and learn our faith. And what's interesting to me is he does not say, diligently take your family to church, diligently go to synagogue, diligently go to the tent when we set it up and we have the sacrifices. No, no, no. And he doesn't say, listen to your pastor, listen to your priest. He doesn't say, make sure the kids get to youth group. What's he say? He puts it all on the parents. You teach it to your children. How's this faith going to go forward? You teach it to your kids. You teach it in your house. You teach it in your house. We'll teach it in our house. And the next generation will do the same thing. And somewhere along the lines, we kind of lost this a little bit. Where we bring our families to church and that's where they get their Jesus. But our families need to be learning Jesus from us, from the parents. So the other thing that I want to say about this as we apply it to our lives, this verse is talking about the law, the Ten Commandments, the law of God. However, the New Testament teaches us that Jesus perfected the law. Jesus himself said that he did not come to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it. Romans tells us that he perfected it. And so not in every case in the Old Testament, but in this particular case and others like it, I think it's fair to apply what God wanted his people to do with the law, to apply that to his New Testament people and say, this is what God wants people to do with his word and with his son. So teach our kids the word. Talk about it. Write it on our houses. Keep it in your head. Keep it in your hands. This is how we are to have a Jesus-centered home. This is how we are to be obedient to this command in Deuteronomy. I think the same impetus still sits on us to center our lives and our homes around Jesus and around God's word. So how can we do that? What are the practical ways to be obedient to Deuteronomy, to have not just a pro-Jesus home, but to have a Jesus-centered home? Well, the first thing is the most obvious one. It's where all of your heads went, so I just thought I would go ahead and get it out of the way and say it up front. Family devotions. Have family devotions. In your marriage, read something together. Talk about what you're reading in the Bible. Even if you're not reading the same thing, you're not on the same reading plan, you're doing different small groups, you're doing whatever, read it and talk about it together. But for those who still have children in the home, have family devotions. And I know that that feels intimidating. I don't even have my own devotions. How am I going to do a family devotion? This is a good way to learn them. And here's the thing. Your kids have never had a family devotion either. They don't know that it sucks. They don't know that you're not good at it. So just start. They're not going to know that you're not any good at it. And you'll get better. And you'll figure it out. And here's the thing that I bet most of the parents in this room don't know. Do you know that every week, one of Erin Winston, our children's pastor, one of her volunteers, every week, puts a piece of paper in your hand when you pick up your child that has prompts, that has devotional prompts on it for three to five days of the week. Age appropriate according to what they talked about in that room and in that room over there on the other side of the aquarium store. According to what they talked about, she puts a piece of paper in your hand with prompts that are age appropriate. They get more and more detailed as your child ages to help you have these conversations and have devotions in your home. She also last summer gave to all the families a devotional book and has a ton of resources for you. So a devotion is just a time where you sit down, you read usually just a verse of scripture, you reflect on it as a family, and you move on. So if we want to have a Jesus-centered home, one of the first things we can do is implement some regular family devotions in our house. You can do it. Moms, dads, step up to the plate. It'll be all right. You can do it. Married people, have your quiet times. Don't hold each other accountable. Don't pester each other about it. That doesn't work. I don't think that works in a marriage. If that works in your marriage, that's fine. I'm not advocating that, but every now and again, you should say, hey, what have you been reading? What have you been learning? That's a good conversation to have. The next thing that I would tell you to do to have a Jesus-centered home is to have public quiet times. Have public quiet times. And what I mean by that is quiet times that are visible to the rest of your family. I don't mean put on your cool jeans and go to Sola and read your Bible like a lonely hipster. I don't mean that. I mean, read your Bible in a place where your family can see you. I've told you guys this before. Growing up, I would come downstairs to go to school in the morning as a teenager, And every morning I would see my mom's Bible open to a different portion of scripture. And I would see a mug of coffee that was almost all the way gone every morning. And I knew that she was praying for me every day. And I knew that she was reading God's word every day. And I'm going to tell you something. When she told me the Bible says this, or I think God says this, or I think you need to do this, I gave her words more weight because I knew that she was reading her Bible. My dad traveled all the time, but when he would travel, he would take his Bible with him. I saw that in my parents. I knew that they knew their Bible. I have been meaning to, I read my Bible when I get into the office. That's my quiet space because we have two young children. But I'm going to try, you can hold me to this, I'm going to try to intentionally shift to sit in the chair that you can see. I can see the stairs so that when Lily wakes up, she'll see me there doing my devotions. Steve, our worship pastor, he gave me this idea, and it's a great one. He listens to scripture on his phone. He's got a great porch with a great view of some woods. He'll turn Scripture on on his phone on the Bible app and just let that read it to him. So you could do that on your way to work or whatever, but he'll sit there, have his cup of coffee, and let the Bible app read Scripture to him. And I thought it was such a great idea that me and John, my three-month-old, listened to Colossians four or five times through this week while I was feeding him in the mornings or whenever else. And while he's doing that, sometimes his son Grayson will come outside and he'll say, what are you listening to? And he's saying, First Thessalonians. And he's like, can I listen too? Yeah, sure. So then they talk about it. Have public quiet times. Let your spouse see you doing that. Let your kids see you doing that. Make it a part of the regular rhythm of your home. It's not a thing that needs to be hidden. Another very simple thing to do to make your home a Jesus-centered home is to write scripture on your wall. It's simple. It's easy. But it's important. Pick a verse. Pick a passage that characterizes your family. That really depicts. Maybe it's the fruit of the Spirit that you want to hang on the hallway. Not so that your children will have the fruit of the Spirit, but so that you'll be reminded to have the fruit of the Spirit with your children, right? Put the verses in visible places in your home so that they become a part of your family life. When I walk in the door every day, one of our favorite verses is on the wall right when you walk in from the garage door, and it's a phrase out of Psalm 1611. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, neither me nor Jen put that there so that we could walk in and go, ah, fullness of joy. We didn't think about that. We just put it there because it's small and it fits on that wall. That's why we put it there. But when I walk in and I see it, there are times when I see it and it reminds me. In God's presence, there's a fullness of joy. And I remember that my family is one of God's biggest blessings to me. And so the joy that he intends for me is found in this place. It grounds me. Jen may not say that that feels true to her, but it's true sometimes. She doesn't know what I would be like if I didn't read that verse. Put it on your wall. We have something that we're going to put on our wall. It's written out. It's a prayer from Paul that we've had. Her cousin wrote it out. I've got to get it framed, and that's going to sit in our living room wall and kind of be our family verse. If you go into all of the children's rooms, Erin has selected a verse that's appropriate for that season of life, and she's put it on the wall. If you walk back through the hallway into the kids' room back there, the one thing you see down the hallway is love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. You see scripture everywhere. Put it in your home. Display it. Go into Hobby Lobby in Kirkland, those stores that are filled with what I call old lady clutter. There's tons of it there. Go look at the old lady clutter because some of it has scripture on it. Buy some pretty old lady clutter and then put it in your home. It's an easy, easy way to have things, to make, to follow this prescription from Deuteronomy that says write it on your walls. So legitimately do it. Find a verse, find a scripture, find a passage that's encouraging to you, find something that you want to implement with your kids and display that on your home and those verses will stick with them and they will stick with you. It's an easy, easy way to do it. Pray together. Number four is pray together often and about everything. Pray together often and about everything. Do we pray for our meals? Let's start there. Let's pray for our meals and let's do it in such a way that we're actually remembering who got us there and why we're there. Do we pray in the morning before we take them to school or camp or wherever it is they're going? Do we pray at night before they go to bed? Do you pray with your spouse? When your spouse is stressed, is your knee-jerk as a couple, let's go to Lord in prayer on this. Or is it the same, that stinks, and keep talking about whatever else. Listen, I'm not good at this either. But if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, I think one of the easiest things to do is to pray often and to pray about everything. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so got a bad diagnosis. Let's pray for them real quick. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so is pregnant. Let's pray that God, let's celebrate and then pray that God keeps this pregnancy safe. I'm stressed about this at work. I'm stressed about this for our kids at school. I'm unsure about this thing. Okay, well, let's stop and let's pray together. And to that end, I would just throw this out for you guys. Give your spouse permission to suggest that you pray. Give your spouse permission to grab the kid and pray about something. And here's why I'm saying that. Because if you exist in a relationship where there's never any prayer at all, and after hearing this sermon, your husband, the next time something comes up, reaches over and says, well, let's stop and let's pray about this. Your inclination is going to be to go, who the heck are you? What? It's weird. No. I'll pray about it later. Your inclination is going to be to look at them like they're a hypocrite. And it's going to be to say, you're only doing this because Nate said we should do it. Yeah. That's the reason. If it wasn't happening before today and it happens after today, then yeah, it's happening because I brought it up. All right? So let's just accept that up front and let's let prayer be brought into our marriages and into our homes. This refocuses us consistently and constantly on the Father. It refocuses us on his throne, on who he is and on who we are. It reminds you this is out of your hands anyways. There's nothing that you can do about this. It settles down control freaks and people who like to worry. If you do it with your children, doesn't it set this incredible pattern for them and their own life to go to the Lord in prayer all the time? To have this ongoing conversation with the Father? Doesn't it set them on a pace to be obedient to the instruction in Thessalonians when he tells us that we should pray without ceasing? To have a continual conversation with the Father. Let's implement prayer more in our homes. Let's give each other permission to work on this, to do this well together, to not look at each other like we're hypocrites when we suggest it. Let's start modeling that and bring our attention to God as spouses and then model bringing attention to God for our children. So that one day when they're grown up and they hear a sermon about incorporating prayer in the home, it doesn't feel like a weird, awkward thing for them. All right? We're already, we've lost. Okay, we're done. We failed, but they have a chance. Let's pray and teach it to them in that way as well. Number five, and I'm excited to get into this today. Know your role. I wanted to talk to you guys about gender roles in the house this morning. I'm just kidding around, I'm not doing that. Know your role. We're not talking about roles in the home. It's an easy way to say and to remember this idea. You are in your spouse's life. You are in your children's lives. You are in your family's lives. As a tool to be used by God to help them become the person that he created them to be. That's your role. Do you see why I reduced it to know your role? You're married to your husband because God is sanctifying him. God is changing him. God is working in him. God is developing his character and his spiritual maturity. And he is trying to learn to walk with God more and more every day. And the world is trying to get him to not do that. And you've been placed in that marriage by God to help him become the godly man that God wants him to be and created him to be. Husbands, you are in your marriages to help your wives become the most beautiful version of themselves, which is to say the most spiritually healthy version of themselves. You have been placed by God in that marriage to help them walk more closely with the Father than they ever have before. That's your primary role for your spouse, is to cultivate their spiritual life and their spiritual health and to see them flourish and become people who are passionately following Jesus. That's why God placed you in that marriage. It's not for you. It's not because you're a good decision maker or you're a bad decision maker or I'm not good at directions and she's good at directions, or we both like the same music, or any of that stuff, God placed you in that marriage first and foremost to be used as a tool by him to fashion your spouse into the person that God created them to be. To help them see more and more that they are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that they might walk in them. That's why he placed you in that marriage. And I think that sometimes we lose sight of that. I know I do. But when we think about our spouses, if we want to have a Jesus-centered marriage, our very first thought towards them ought to be, how can I help them grow into the person that God created them to be? The thing that we love most about them ought to be how much they love Jesus. It ought to be a heart for the Father. These should be regular things that happen in our marriages. And then the next step is our children. Know your role with your children. I'm going to say this to particularly parents with young kids. We have a five-and-a-half-year-old. Sometimes we like her more than we did when she was three, sometimes less. The summer entering into kindergarten is a challenging one. And there are things that Lily needs to learn. But I need to be constantly aware of and reminded of. My goal in parenting is not to have a six-year-old who behaves herself so that I don't get embarrassed in public circles. My goal is to raise a daughter, excuse me, who fiercely loves Jesus and requires as little counseling as possible. That's my goal. My goal is to raise a son and a daughter who care about the people around them, who love Jesus better than I do, who are humble, kind, meek, gracious adults. That's my goal. And if we get so caught up in parenting our children as if the goal was for them to not embarrass us when there's people around, as if the goal was for them to not be inconvenient during this season, which goodness, that's a great goal. But if we'll parent them knowing that the goal is to release grown-ups into the wild who love Jesus fiercely, who we respect because of that. So when Lily does something that she shouldn't do, when she displays an attitude that she shouldn't display, as a loving, godly parent, it's my role and my job to find the good part of that attitude that she just displayed. Well, you're very defiant. This can be good because you're going to be willing to stand up for yourself when you need it. Try not to stand up for yourself right now. That's not needed here. But at some point, it will be. Our role as parents is to fashion our children into the people that God created them to be as well. And, you know what's funny? That's why they're in your life too. I was talking with a buddy of mine, Shane, over there outside, and he just made mention to me. He said, man, I tell you, I just can't pray for enough patience right now. These kids are driving me nuts. And I just made the joke like, yeah, I never pray for patience. Because when you pray for patience, God just puts things in your life that requires patience, right? So I pray that God, would you give me grace and the patience that you're teaching me and can it be enough yet? Like I never pray for more patience. I'm happy with the current amount that I have because to get more stinks. But in a very real way, those children are shaping his patience into being a more gracious version of Shane. And God is using them as tools. All of the family dynamics are there to bring us closer to God, closer to the Father, closer to Jesus. So let's know our role within those dynamics and see that as our goal to help the people in our families and in our lives become the version of themselves that God created them to be by helping them to walk more closely with Jesus. That's your primary role in your home. Finally, number six is have Jesus-centered conversations. Talk about them. This goes back to the devotions. What are you reading? What are you learning? How's your faith? What'd you think of the sermon? What's your favorite worship song? What do you think God's teaching you right now? How's so-and-so's faith doing? Have Jesus-centered conversations. I saw this in the Bible. I didn't know this. Did you know this? I didn't know that this passage linked to this passage. Did you know that those passages linked together? Have conversations about it. Talk to your children about Jesus. Just bring them up in conversation. Erin puts out, our children's pastor, again, she puts out parent cues. Just these short little one-sentence things, I think on Instagram, she can give you a bunch of them if you reach out to her. Just little prompts to have spiritual conversations. And here's the thing about having Jesus-centered conversations, okay? You've got to bring them up a lot to have a good one. If you have a kid, you know that having a good conversation with your child is a really life-giving thing. It's also a fleeting thing. It's hard to do. Hopefully, if you have older children, you're having better, longer conversations with them, and you're getting to a place where sometimes you have really meaningful conversations with them. But those are still fleeting. And you know that to get to a good conversation with your child, whether they're four years old or whether they're 20 years old, to find a good one, you've just got to have a lot of them. I can talk with Lily all day long. Give me a Saturday. We can talk all day long about this and that as she runs in and out and whatever it is. And then at the end of the night when I think she's about to go to sleep and I'm ready to go downstairs and do something else, she starts talking. I'm there. I'm present. I don't know when the conversation's going to hit, so I'm just here for them. Jen is far better at that than I am. It works the same with Jesus-filled conversations. You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your spouse? You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your children? Bring them up a lot. Talk about it a lot. Make Jesus feel like a regular figure in your home so that it's not foreign when we start talking about spiritual things. And then you know what? They'll know how to talk about spiritual things too. And really and truly, it's not really possible to have these Jesus-centered conversations if we aren't ourselves Jesus-centered. So if you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. If you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. That's as simple as it could possibly be. All of these things, one through six, you could put, you could implement all of them in your house. You could have family devotions, public quiet times, write scripture on the wall, pray together often and always. You can know your role in fashioning others, and you can have Jesus-centered conversations. But if you're not centered on Jesus in your own life, all that's going to feel fake. All of it's going to feel fabricated. All of it's going to feel like you're trying to push a rope up a hill, and you're just going to stop. You're not going to do it. These things have to pour out of you. Now, the good news is they work synergistically. It's impossible to do those six things and that not orient you more on Christ and him be more the center of your life. But you can't do these things if he's not. It's going to feel unnatural and you're going to quit. So if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, and I think we do because you're still looking at me, then we've got to have a Jesus-centered life. Jesus talks about this in John 15 when he says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about these six things. You abide in me. And if we're having a Jesus, if we have a Jesus-centered heart, he's going to spill out of it. We're going to talk about him all the time. We're going to want to read his word. We're going to get caught reading the Bible. We're going to want to go to him in prayer in every instance. If we have Jesus as the center of our life, then we're going to want to fashion other people in a way that he becomes the center of their life too. It would be like Psalm 1 when it talks about the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night and he is like a tree planted by streams of water and everything that he does he prospers. If we want to have Jesus-centered homes we have to have a Jesus life. And if we'll do that, these things will pour out of us naturally. So, I hope you'll do some of these things. I hope you'll have a family meeting. I hope that you'll allow non-hypocritical prayer into your life. Not be hard on each other. Let's be supportive of each other. Let's have family meetings. Let's do it today. Before we go to bed at night, let's talk about this or let's commit to a time where we're going to talk about this. And if it seems intimidating to do all of this stuff, pick two. Do them this week. See what your home feels like when you do that. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. We confess sometimes that we have pro-Jesus homes. Would you help us grow to a place where we have Jesus-centered homes? Would you fill our hearts so much with you that you are what spills out? God, give us the discipline and the determination to have devotions with our family. Give us the openness, the honesty, and the desire to have spiritual conversations with one another. Would you fill our hearts and our lives and our homes more and more and more, God, so that what happens here on Sunday is simply a small supplement to what's been going on every day in our lives and in our homes. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

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..

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, so it's good to see you on this February Sunday, the third Sunday in our Going Home campaign series. Last week, we kind of talked about the biggest question facing grace. I feel like because we have been brought to a place of health, last week I shared that for a long time the mission of grace has been grace. By necessity, we've looked inward and scrambled to get healthy and to get to a place where we weren't just trying to survive, but now we could thrive. And so in that place, believing that we are in a position of health, the question that we are collectively asking is, Father, what would you have us do in health? Say, God, what would you have us do now? We're in a position where we can really do your ministry. I feel like we're moving into a new season as a church. So the question becomes, what would you have us do in this new season? Part of that answer is to pursue a permanent home in the community that we care about so much. That's why we're having the campaign that's going to culminate on March the 1st. We're going to send out pledge cards this week to our partners, to people who call Grace family, and encourage everyone to bring those in or to send those in by March the 1st, and we'll have a celebratory pledge Sunday on that first Sunday in March. I think it's going to be a big celebratory Sunday for us. But that's kind of what we're pushing towards. But in the midst of that, as we ask God, what would you have us do in health? One answer is, one step is to pursue a permanent home. Now's the time to do that. But the bigger answers are the ones that we talked about last week and this week. Last week, I shared that if you asked Jesus, what would you have a healthy church do? I think he would point us to the Great Commission, to Matthew 28. And I shared with you that verse at the end of Matthew 28, as he is going into heaven and he tells the disciples, here are your marching orders. And I think he tells the church in perpetuity, for all church, for all Southern Baptist King James Church, so go ye therefore. Yeah, that's right. Some of y'all understand that. Let me go into the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father. And so what Jesus would have us do as a church is to seek to grow in both depth and breadth, to see us grow deep and wide. And so the Christian word that we use for growing deep is discipleship. We see that model of ministry in the Bible. And so last week, we talked about how is grace going to grow deep? What is discipleship going to look like here? And I don't do this a lot. I don't promote my own sermons, but nor, well, I won't say that aside. I don't promote my own sermons, but if you missed last week, that was kind of the manifesto on discipleship and what we want it to look like. So I would encourage you to give that one a listen or a watch if you like staring at me for 30 minutes on your work computer. Do that too. And so this week, I want to look at how do we want to grow wide. We looked at depth last week. So this week, how do we want to grow wide? And the church term for that is evangelism. How does grace want to handle evangelism? What do we want our ministry of evangelism to look like? And evangelism is simply sharing the gospel. It's an effort to see other people come to know Jesus. We want to win converts to the faith. And so how does grace want to do that? And even as I bring that up, as I seek to talk about that this week, I felt the need to confess to you that I'm not good at this. I'm not good at evangelism. And not in a way where I think like, well, that's okay because there's other things that maybe I feel like I'm stronger at or whatever, so it's okay to be weak over here. No, no, I'm telling you that historically I have not been good at this discipline. It scares me. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't love the idea of going out and sharing my faith with people. We had a guy from another church show up at our door this week, and he is the evangelism minister at one of the churches. And I thought, good for that guy. You could not pay me enough money to go door to door. It scares me. And so if it scares you, if the idea of evangelism, of sharing your faith intimidates you, you have some company. It intimidates me too. Now, I don't think that's an excuse because I think that the Bible calls us all to be evangelists. If you know Jesus, your job, your expectation is to share it with others, is to be a part of other people coming to the faith. That's the only reason he leaves us on earth. I've said this before. Have you ever thought about when you get saved, when you become a believer, why doesn't God just snatch us right to heaven, into eternity forever, where we don't have to experience any of the cruddy stuff that happens here anymore, so that we can stay here and tell other people about Him? Evangelism is the only reason we're still here, right? Romans 10 says, how will people believe unless we tell them? And how will people tell them unless it's preached? And how will it be preached unless people are sent? How beautiful are the feet that carry the good news to the people who need it? There's a biblical imperative for those of us who know Jesus to be involved in the discipline of evangelism, of growing the church in breadth. So we all need to do this. So even though it's intimidating, what I want to do is try to talk about it today in a way that makes it more approachable, in a way that makes it more doable, and hopefully we are inspired to make this a part of our life in an intentional way. To do that, I think it will help us to look at the way that Jesus framed up evangelism in the book of Mark. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. We're going to be looking at Mark chapter 4, starting in verse 3. In Mark 4, Jesus tells a parable. Now this is a little preview. I'm super excited for the next series. In March and April, we're going to be walking through the parables of Jesus, and I'm really excited to jump into those with you. A parable is a short story. It's totally made up to make a point. It's a short story to make a moral point. And Jesus did a lot of teaching in parables, and this is a very rough summation of why, but often we see Jesus preface things or follow parables like he does in Mark with, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. And so he often taught in parables because he was teaching to an audience of multiple motivations. In this one, he's talking to Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day who were closed off to him. He's talking to regular workaday folks, and he's teaching his disciples. And Jesus only wants you to get what he's saying if you really want to. I know that might sound weird, but he wants you to get what he's saying if you really mean it. If you're open to hear it, if you have a teachable spirit, then you're going to understand the parables. If you don't, then you won't. So he teaches in parables for a time while he does his ministry. And this parable is called the parable of the sower. And this is how he frames up evangelism for us. He says this. I'm going to start in verse 3. Verse 8 is going to be up on the screen because that's the one we're going to talk about for a little while. But this is what he says. Listen. So Jesus tells his parables to the general public and to his disciples. And a little while later, Jesus is with the disciples, and they kind of lean in as they often do, and they said, hey, what do you mean? Help us understand that. What do the different soils represent? And so Jesus explained it like this. He said, the sower is one who is spreading the word of God. He says, spreading the word. So when we sow seeds, we're telling people, Jesus loves you. Jesus died for you. God created you in his image. You are his beloved daughter or son. We're telling them truths from the Bible. We're opening up their eyes to the existence of Jesus and his love and care for them. And so that's what the word is. So the sower is spreading the word, telling people about Jesus and his love for them. And so sometimes that lands on the pavement, it lands on rocky soil, and the birds come and snatch it up. And Jesus says this is a picture of Satan actually snatching up those seeds before they can take root. And I've said before that we don't talk a lot about Satan here, but when we do, I like to remind you that if we believe the Bible, then we believe that he is real and he is against us. And so sometimes when people hear the gospel, Satan will bring things into their life to snatch that seed away so that it doesn't take root and they don't become believers yet. That's a thing that happens. Other times, it takes root immediately and the plant sprouts up right away. But because the soil isn't good, because it's shallow, because the roots aren't good, as soon as strife comes, as soon as difficulty occurs, as soon as tragedy happens, as soon as something challenges that new faith, it's scorched, it's washed away, it goes away just as quickly as it sprouted up. I've seen this dozens of times in ministry, and you probably have too. There'll be somebody who comes to the church for their first Sunday because of whatever's going on in their life. They're walking through a hard time. Guys just open their eyes up. They're just curious. They have a friend who invited them. Whatever it is, they'll come in, and on their very first Sunday, they sign up for all the stuff, man. They're serving on three teams. They wanna join three small groups. Is there anything else I can do? They're all the way in. They're coming to a meeting right after the service for the thing that they wanna do. And part of me says, that's great. But part of me knows because I've seen it so many times, they're gonna fall away just as quickly as they jumped in. Sometimes the soil just simply isn't ready yet for the gospel. And so we have to watch that and we have to know that and we have to try to tend to it. Other times it says, and this one is really tragic to me, that the seed gets into soil, the plant sprouts up, it's a good plant, but the thorns, it's among thorns, and the thorns choke it out so it doesn't produce seed. Jesus doesn't say it kills the plant, it just says this plant doesn't produce seed. It never does what it's supposed to do. This is the picture of someone who hears the Word of God, accepts the gospel, believes in Jesus, grows up, the plant sprouts, becomes a believer, but because of the concerns of the world, they never do what they're supposed to do. It's entirely possible to know Jesus, for the gospel to take root in your life, but for the concerns of the world to keep you from being effective in what God's asking you to do. For work to crowd out what life is really about. For the pursuit of money or power or possessions to crowd out what life is really supposed to be all about. For the pursuit of pleasure, for a habit or a hang-up that's in your life to choke out like a thorn the gospel that's in your life so that you never produce what you're designed to produce. That's a sad thing to see and to watch. It's one of my biggest fears that I'll be like that. But Jesus said, there's good soil. And when the seed, when God's word lands on good soil, the plant sprouts up and produces 30, 60, or 100 fold, which is another subtle way for Jesus to say the whole point of this exercise is for you to reproduce yourself. The whole point of the gospel being in your life, the whole point of knowing Jesus is to reproduce yourself in the life of others. It's so that other people can know Jesus and the gospel can take root in their lives as well. That's the whole point of it. So that's the parable of the sower and that's what it means. And as I read that parable, there are two questions to me that jump off the page. There's two things as I look at that parable that I immediately want to know the answer to as I'm thinking about it. The first one is, and this is just me being overly practical probably, is how do we share the gospel effectively? In the story, it seems so random that this sower's just throwing out seed willy-nilly. Just whoever can hear the word, however it goes, wherever it lands is fine with me. And I look at that and there's four options and three of them aren't so great. And I look at that and I'm like, there's gotta be a better way. How can I make sure I'm throwing it on the good soil? Because I don't know if you know this about me, this drives my wife Jen nuts, but my biggest pet peeve in life is inefficiency. Anybody that's taking too long to do anything, I lose my mind. Like parking lots are the worst. I hate inefficiency. I will be in an instant bad mood because something's going slower than it should be. And Jen's like, what in the world is wrong with you? And I'll give the eight step explanation about how this thing could go quicker if everybody would just get on the same page with it, right? And it drives her nuts and probably the people around me nuts, but I want to do things efficiently. So I'm not content with the idea of just throwing out seed and just letting the gospel take root wherever it lands. I want to know, how can we do this more effectively? How can we ensure that if we're going to be people who are going to share the gospel with others, who are going to spread the word of God to others, how can we be sure that that effort is going to be as effective as possible? To that end, after watching ministry for a number of years, watching people come to faith for a number of years, hearing stories of people come to faith, and talking to people about how they came to faith, I've come to the conclusion, you guys can try this on if you want to, but I've come to the conclusion that the human heart is best prepared through relationships and circumstances. The human heart becomes the best possible soil. It's best prepared and best work and best prepared for the reception of the gospel through relationships and circumstances. This is incidentally why I think the street preachers are incredibly ineffective. You're going to the ball game and there's that person on the corner and they're holding up the sign and they're yelling stuff at you about Jesus and maybe it's a good message and maybe it's just a threatening one, but it's almost always ineffective. And listen, I do, there is a part of me, I have a respect for those people because they got bigger guts than I do, you know? Good for you for believing so strongly in what you're doing. I think you believe it incorrectly. I think what you're doing is a terrible idea, but I admire your zeal, right? But it's so ineffective because there's neither a relationship nor the right circumstances for the gospel to be received, right? He doesn't have a relationship with any of the people walking by him. They don't know him, and if they do, they're probably not going to act like they do in that setting. And then it's the wrong circumstance, because people are like, bro, I'm just trying to make it to the game. Like, I'm trying to get into this concert, man. Like, it's not the right setting. But I think that relationship and circumstance works the soil to prepare the heart for the gospel. I cut my teeth in ministry doing Young Life, and there was a phrase in Young Life that we used all the time about ministering to students, and it's no different ministering to adults and to our friends. They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. You guys have heard that before. It was true. To walk with somebody, to do life with them, to show them consistently that, hey, I care about you as a person. You're not a target to me. You're not a project to me. You're not a holy tick box to me. You're a person that I love and care about tremendously. And then for them to watch you exude the gospel, do what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians, and it says that we are a procession led by Christ, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. If they're in your life and around you, and because of the relationship they have with you, that fragrance regularly passes by them. Or like Jesus says, that others would see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. There is a quote attributed to Francis of Assisi. He did not say this, and it is not the quote, but it still makes a good point. Share the gospel at all times. Use words when necessary. A relationship does this. It allows us into people's lives so they can get to know us and see how we live and see how we love. And it prepares them to trust us when we point them towards the gospel and plant the seeds of the gospel in their life. Now, here's the thing. We have to conduct the relationship in such a way that when we share the gospel with them, it makes sense. That when we share what Jesus does for us, they see that in our lives. That's the responsibility that we carry. As if one day I'm going to tell them I love Jesus and hear all the great things Jesus does for me, then it better not seem contradictory and hypocritical. But a relationship tills the ground so that they're ready to receive the gospel when we share it. The other thing that prepares us for the gospel is circumstances. If you think about what happened in your life that brought you to God, for many of us, it's life milestones. A lot of our stories are, we grew up, had some awareness of church. We were involved in it a little or a lot. But when we got to college, early adulthood, we kind of fell away from it. We deprioritized our faith. Not even really sure if we were Christians during that time. And then we got married and we had kids. And when we had kids, we looked at this baby and we went, oh man, I've got a responsibility here. And so we got back into church. And then when we got back into church because of the circumstance, because of this life event going on, our hearts were ready for the gospel, open to how to be good moms and good dads. And we began to grow spiritually. For a lot of us, that's our story. For a lot of us, we trace our faith back to a catalytic event in our life that made us question spiritual things. Sometimes it's when people hit rock bottom. Sometimes people have struggled so much and have made such a series of poor decisions that have led them to a place in life where they don't know what to do, and they are finally willing to go, you know what, God, my way of calling the shots is not working. I'm gonna start trusting your way. Circumstances. I don't think anything prepares the heart for the gospel better than relationships and circumstances. And here's a great illustration of how those two get married up so very often. I have a good buddy here who goes to the church named Ben. Ben's been at the same company for years. And Ben's kind of known in his work group, you know, in his peers, as he's the Christian guy. He's the one that loves Jesus. And so whenever anybody has a spiritual question, they go to Ben. And he talks to them about Jesus, and he kind of gives them the advice. Or when somebody has an issue going on in their life, often they'll go to Ben and say, what do you think about this? And he'll counsel them, right? I call him a pastor at his workplace. And there was somebody that he was buddies with that was a peer that would ask him these questions over the years, and Ben would give him books. And this guy was a total atheist, did not come from a spiritual background at all, didn't have any idea what he believed, but Ben tilled the ground with the relationship. And one day after years of doing this, the guy's wife got in some legal trouble. And so he came to Ben distraught. This is happening in my life. I don't know what to do. I'm kind of questioning everything. What do you think? I really want to have faith, but I don't know how to approach it. And so Ben gave him books and then they would talk about it. And then he would point them to a podcast and that guy would listen and they would talk back and forth. And months after this happened, the dude came to Ben's office one day and he kind of stuck his head in the office and he said, hey, I just want you to know that over the weekend I accepted Christ. I believe. I'm all in. And it was the kind of all in that now a year later, he and his wife are super involved in a church down south of the city. They do children's ministry down there. They're there every week. They give to the church. They're all in. The gospel took root in their life, and that ground was cultivated through years of relationship and then a circumstance that made them ready to receive the gospel. So I would say this to us. If we want to be people who are evangelists, if we want to share the gospel, see people come to faith, which is one of my big prayers for grace in 2020, that we would see more and more people come to faith this year, then I would encourage you to do it through relationships and be sensitive to circumstances. I think that evangelism is so intimidating because we think I'm going to have to convince somebody to become a believer. I'm going to have to have an answer for all of the rebuttals that they would have. I'm just going to have to approach a perfect stranger and say, hey, where would you go if you were to die today? And all that stuff is really intimidating. But really, I think the best possible evangelism plan, when I first started, somebody at the church said, hey, what's your evangelism plan for grace? And I said, not in a flippant, not in a way that I was joking, I was being serious, make friends. That's my plan. Go make friends. And I think that's still the best plan. Now the question becomes, do you have, those of you who are here who know Jesus and who love him and who want to tell other people about him, do you have friends in your life that are not church people? Do you have friends in your life that don't know him yet? Often in churches, we get in our little holy bubbles, our little holy huddles, and we don't know anybody outside of the faith. So the idea of sharing our faith forces us to go to strangers and have awkward conversations, but it's much more effective if we can have these conversations with people who know that we care about them. Do you have friends that don't know Jesus? That may be your step of obedience today, to start making some of those. The plan for evangelism at Grace is for you guys to go out and make friends on your tennis team, in your PTA groups, in your volunteer groups, in the things that you care about in your neighborhood. Stop and have a conversation when you go to the park. And listen, I'm preaching to myself here because I'm the very first one to just want to go to the park, watch Lily swing, and go back home. But stop and open yourself up to the opportunities around you and start having conversations and cultivating friendships with people. That's how we want to begin to share the gospel. And in those friendships, be sensitive to the circumstances going on in their life so that when they're ready to receive the word of the gospel, you can give it to them. Now, if that's how we're going to evangelize, if that's the best plan to do it, is to go make friends, be sensitive, have intentional conversations with them, and over time share the gospel with them and see them come to faith, which I do think is the most effective way to do it because it's the deepest roots. If that's what we're supposed to do, my question, the other question I ask as I look at this parable is, what's my motivation? Why am I supposed to do this? What should motivate me to share the gospel as much as possible? I think this is an important question because so often the motivator here is because we're supposed to, right? So often the motivator here, hey, you guys should go share the gospel. Why? Because Jesus told you to. And listen, that's enough, right? I mean, that's good enough. Jesus told us to. If you're a believer, you're living a life in submission to Jesus and what he wants for you, so go and do it. That should be enough. But if you're like me, because you ought to isn't very motivational to you. Matter of fact, I tend to hate that reason. Some of the biggest arguments Jen and I get into in our marriage are because she says we're supposed to do a thing, and I say I don't want to do the thing, and says, you're just supposed to do it. And I'm like, I just don't want to. Like Christmas, right? We're going to some gift exchange and everyone's doing a $30 gift card. And I'm like, why don't we all just keep our own $30 and spend it on what we want rather than I give you $30 at a place that you don't like and then I'll get $30 at a place that I don't like. It's dumb. And she goes, Nate, you ruin everything. I'm like, I know, but I'm right. I don't want to. And she sighs and she goes, and I said, why do we have to do this? And she sighs and she goes, because it's just what people do. You're supposed to. And I always push against it. There's never a motivator for me. Now in Christianity, Jesus is the Lord of our life because he said so is a good reason. But I think that there's even a better one. I think there's a better motivator that should inspire us to go be evangelists. The best motivation to evangelize is excitement about what Jesus is doing. The best motivation to evangelize is excitement about what Jesus is doing. And here's why I think this. Here's one of the things I learned at Grace. That first year at Grace, when I first got here, I didn't want you guys to invite anybody to church. People would be like, hey, hope it's good this weekend and we're inviting our friends, and I would think to myself, it's not gonna be. I wish you'd give us some time. I wish you'd just chill out a little bit. I'm glad you're excited, but this is still kind of a dumpster fire, so let's just chill out. We were lucky in that first year if my mic worked the whole time. I'll never forget that first Christmas Eve service. It was cutting in and out so bad that I shut it out and yelled at you. It wasn't good yet. I was scrambling to try to get all the pieces in place so that when you would invite your friends, I felt like we were giving them something that we could be proud of that would really serve them. We were trying to get other areas of the church set up. We were trying to lay the foundation for our small groups. We simply weren't ready for people. But you guys kept inviting them. Do you know why you did that? Because you were excited about what's happening here. You were excited about grace. And even though I never asked you to invite anybody, even though I would have preferred you just wait and give me a second. People kept inviting their friends. And what it taught me was the simple truth that we tell our friends what we're excited about. We tell our friends what we're excited about. If we're pumped up about something, we tell the people in our life about it. It's as simple as that. And because of that, what I know is that everyone is an evangelist for something. All of you are evangelizing something. All of you are spreading the good news about something. And here's how I know that's true. Take a look at this picture. This is my buddy Keith Cathcart in Mexico with somebody that's become a dear friend to his family that we call Chewy. Every year, Chewky, every year when we go down there, he's not my good friend, he's Keith's good friend. Every year when we go down there, Keith takes him more Steelers gear. And every year when I go down there, there are more Mexicans wearing Steelers gear. There's other churches that give t-shirts, you see those every now and again, but you see a bunch of guys working in Steelers gear the week that Keith is there, and I call him the Steelers evangelist. He's spreading the good news of the Steelers all over the place. And all kidding aside, he's excited about the Steelers. So he tells people about them, and he's evangelizing them. We're all evangelists for something. It might be the Netflix show. It might be the podcast. It might be the book. It might be the diet that you're on. It might be the job that you got. It might be your kids. We're all evangelizing something because we're all excited about something. So I think if we want to be effective evangelists, then we need to be excited about what Jesus is doing in our lives. As a matter of fact, I think the most effective way to evangelize is to have the mindset of, man, I am so blown away by what Jesus is doing in my life that I want you to experience this too. I am so excited, I am so impressed, I am so grateful that Jesus is a part of my life that I want you to experience this as well. That's the motivator to share Jesus. And when you're excited about him, this is why new converts share their faith the most, because they're the most excited. So I think for some of us, what we need is to pray a sincere prayer and say, God, make me excited. Excite me about what excites you. Find something to be excited about. If you're in a small group, to me, there's so much to be excited about. In the young couple small group that I'm in, we get to watch people come in. This last week, we had a couple come in. It was their second time in small group. Even though they kind of grew up around church, this is the first time they've been in a small group ever. And she's sharing something with the group and she starts crying. And I made fun of her and I said, typically we like to wait four groups before we cry, but you know, go ahead. She starts crying with what she's sharing. And then after she's done, her husband says, man, I'm so glad that we found a place where my wife can share things like that. And on the outside, I go, oh, that's so good. And on the inside, I'm like, yes! Like my pastoral heart is going crazy. That's exciting. I want other people to be a part of that. So I want to tell people and invite people to what's going on there. Sometimes the excitement is getting to watch what happens with other people. Sometimes the excitement is what's happening with you. But I think excitement about what Jesus is doing is the best motivator to evangelize. So that's what we do. We go and we make friends with people who don't yet know Jesus, and then we tell them about the things that are exciting to us in hopes that they come to Jesus. It's a simple plan of evangelism. That's how we want to do it. And you'll notice, nowhere in this that I tell you, go and make disciples and bring them to grace so that they sit in seats. That's not the point. But I will say this, you can let us help you. The community here, the camaraderie here, is the best thing we got going for us. Bring other, see? Bring other people. Was that Cindy? Bring other people here and expose them to the love and the friendships that are happening here. Can I tell you that that's why we do Big Night Out? We do Big Night Out now twice a year. Grace's Big Night Out. We go hang out. The other two times have been at Compass Rose. We've got one coming up March 27th. Mark your calendars. Be in town. It's going to be the best one yet. I'm super excited about it. I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag of what it is, but oh man, it's going to be good. We do those with no agenda other than to hang out and to give you easy invites. An easy way to reach out to your friends who don't know Jesus yet and say, hey, come hang out with me and my church at Compass Rose. Because maybe it would feel awkward to invite them to church. Maybe the soil isn't ready for that invite yet, but maybe they'll come hang out with us and they'll see the way that we do community. They'll see the way that we love one another. Let us help you in that same way. Grace, let's evangelize as a team. When somebody brings in a friend, let's be kind to them. Those of us who have been here for a long time, let's be cognizant in the lobby to not just talk with the people that we know at length every week. Let's have our heads on swivels and look around. And if there's folks that we haven't met yet, let's go meet them. Let's evangelize as a group. Let us help you. And really, that's all we're trying to do at Grace. We're trying to do things on Sunday morning and in our small groups and in our various ministries that are so exciting to you that you think to yourself, man, I am so grateful for what's happening for me and my faith and my family at Grace that I want it to happen for other people too. And then we go out, we plant the seeds and friendships that we've cultivated. We're sensitive to circumstances going on in their life. And we watch people come to Christ and we grow in your personal ministries in 30, 60, and 100 fold. So in the spirit of last week's sermon, I would ask you this week, what's your next step of obedience in terms of evangelism? Is it to go make some friends that don't know Jesus? Is it to simply pray an earnest prayer and say, Father, would you excite me about what's happening here in your church? Would you excite me about what your son is doing in my life? Is it to intentionally reach out to people and start extending those invites? I think everybody has a next step of obedience in terms of evangelism, and I would encourage you to identify yours and think about how you can begin to take it. And let's make this a church that's really good at inviting and then trust them when you bring them here that this is a team sport, that we evangelize together with the community that we have. All right, let's pray, and then you'll be dismissed. Father, thanks so much for this morning. Thank you for giving us a place where we can come in and slow down and focus on you. God, I pray that you would inspire us to share your word and your good news. Make us evangelists, God. Father, I pray that we would see people come to faith this year, that we would see conversions happen, that we would hear stories and repeat them of people who were far from you and over time came to know you and walk with you and grow in you. Give us courage to be the evangelist that you call us to be. Give us the words when we don't know them. Give us the insight when we lack it. Give us the sensitivity when we don't feel it. And help us be effective in the ministry of sharing our faith. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

20 years ago, Grace was launched by a courageous group of faithful believers with a dream to expand God's kingdom in North Raleigh. Part of this dream was establishing a permanent home to serve as a launching point for this ministry. Through the years, God has used Grace to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping and dreaming, now is the time for Grace to go home. Good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor. This is a big, special morning. I'm so excited to get to share with you. I am in the habit of praying before I get up to preach, and in both services, I've just prayed that God would give me the strength to kind of keep it together without just blubbering like an idiot, because it's just, I feel so excited about what Grace is stepping into and getting to share this with you. On most Sunday mornings, on all Sunday mornings, I feel like my job as the pastor is to get up and open the Bible and share with you what I believe is teaching us together. My job is to teach scripture. I try to anchor everything I say in scripture and simply open it up and explain it to us in a way that is hopefully compelling or convicting or inspiring, whatever God has for us that morning. I feel like that's my job. But this morning, I'm going to take a little bit of a departure from that and just share with you what's been going on for the last 18 months. If this is your first time with us or your first couple times with us, this is not a typical Sunday morning, but it's the right one for the life of the church now. So if you allow me that license, I'm just going to share with you this morning and not preach at you this morning. Hopefully, I never preach at you, but you understand what I'm saying. In September of 2018, we went on an elder retreat to a farm in Youngsville. We had our sitting elders, and then we had three of our elders that had been recently nominated and appointed but weren't yet voting. They were junior elders. I still consider them junior elders. And we all sat around talking and dreaming about grace. And two of our elders, Bill Reith and Burt Banks, said that it was time that we start discussing the 10-year plan for grace. What's our 10-year plan for Grace Raleigh? Their very corporate 10-year plans seem important in that world, and so they thought we should have one too. And one of the items that they had on the agenda to discuss was the question of, do we want to own our own permanent home in North Raleigh? Do we want to be owners or renters? Historically, we've been renters, and so this was the question of, do we want to own one day? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, the response of the room was, yes, this is what we want to do. And uncharacteristically, during this discussion, I remained quiet. You may find it hard to believe I'm vocal in meetings. I don't have a problem saying what I think, and sometimes I feel like that's the role, so I should share my two cents. But in this particular elder meeting, as these decisions were being made, I stayed very quiet. And I stayed quiet because I carry with me an acute awareness that this is not my church. This is not my building. These are not my dreams. The church's goals are not my goals. This is our church. This church existed long before I got here. This church existed and did things and people poured into it and developed a life here long before Nate arrived. And so I'm acutely aware of the shoulders that I stand on and that my job is to steward the dreams and the hopes of us, not me. And because that's such a huge decision, I didn't really want to be the driver of that. So I stayed quiet. They quickly decided, yes, we want to be owners. And so then the natural question is, okay, what's the timeline for that? When do we want to begin to make decisions to take us down that path? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, again, the answer in the room was right away. We need to start making decisions right away. We need to start moving towards that now. And I remember thinking, I can still remember where I was sitting. I was sitting on the fireplace looking at those couches and chairs and couch, and I can see the dim room around me. And I remember thinking as everyone discussed this, why don't we pump the brakes a little bit? Let's just, let's chill out. Like I'm, it's a big enough challenge to fill a 200 person auditorium. Let's not build a 400 person auditorium. Let's just wait. I'm not really sure I need that pressure in my life, you know? And then in my head, I'm also thinking, and I'll tell her story in a second, but we had just then that month moved out of a season of tremendous debt. We haven't even announced to the congregation yet that we were out of debt. And now here we are signing up to go into more debt. And I'm going, gosh, maybe we should just like chill out. Can we just be healthy for a little while? But these were the decisions that were made. And I began to understand why we were making those decisions. And so that had set in motion a series of events. Shortly after that, we formed a building committee. And it was their job to go out and figure out how much are we going to need to spend to accomplish what we need to accomplish. So they went out and they looked around and they came back to us and they said, this is kind of what we think. This is what it's going to cost. This is what we think monthly debt service on it would be. And so this is kind of our goal. And so then once we had that goal, we realized we needed to get capitalized. So we formed a capital campaign committee last spring and asked them the question, this is what we want to do. Let's come up with the best way to do it. And so we've been working behind the scenes for 18 months now and are ready to present to us, the church, everything that we've been hoping and dreaming and praying and thinking about. But to understand the decisions that have been made and why we feel like now is the right time, I think we also need to understand the story of grace. Because we have some here who have been here since the very beginning. We have others who have come recently, and I'm not sure we all remember exactly how we got here. So like the video said, in 2000, there was a core group of faithful believers, a group of people from St. Andrew's Presbyterian over on Falls, that said they had a vision and a dream for starting their own church. A church that would be a light in the community that they love so much. A church that would strengthen faiths and strengthen families and watch people come to know Jesus and watch faith get deepened. Watch people walk with Jesus with more depth. They wanted to impact the community of North Raleigh, and so they banded together and they launched, at the time, the church called Grace Community Church. The very first Sunday, this church met on the lawn at the YMCA, and they had no idea what to expect. And that first Sunday, over 1,200 people showed up and sat on the grass and listened to that preacher preach and sang songs together. Everybody was blown away by what happened. And it was that Sunday that God, for the first time, whispered into the ears of those who cared so much about grace and believed in this place, hey, this church is special to me. My hand is on this place. I'm gonna use this church. I'm gonna use this place. Grace matters to me. And so that core of people believed that and believed that God's hand was on this place and believed that God had big plans for grace and believed that God was moving to make this an effective church in his kingdom. And so very quickly they needed space. So they started to meet at a storefront that used to be a Michael's. It affectionately became known as St. Michael's. And the idea was never that that would be a permanent location, but that that would be a temporary space until they had the health and the finances to build a permanent home. That's been the goal from the very beginning. It was just deferred because they needed space so quickly. But then having outgrown Michael's and not yet being totally prepared to go out in health and build a building, they made the decision to rent a space over on Meridian Drive. It was a larger space, 600-person auditorium. They were filling it up and going and blowing, and it was a really, really special time where it was easy to be enthusiastic about grace. Understanding that they weren't yet home, but that soon, when they were ready, they would have a home. And during that season, it was incredibly evident that God's hand was on grace. It was evident that God cared about that place. There was a thriving student ministry, a thriving children's ministry, wonderful people and wonderful families being strengthened and coming to know the Lord, and God worked in that place. But it was also during that season where there was some turmoil and some tumult in grace. There were struggles and trials and dreams got deferred and difficulty to walk through as a church. And it was during this season that some of that hopeful core that helped to start grace with all those dreams began to wonder if God's hand was still on grace, began to wonder if God still had plans for this place, began to wonder if the brightest days of grace were still ahead or if they were already behind. And so grace began to dwindle, and grace began to struggle, and those dreams got deferred. And it was in this season, in December of 2016, that my story intersected with grace. I still remember it was December 8, 2016. I had my first interview with the Pastoral Search Committee. They had asked me to block off enough time for a two-hour Skype interview, which I thought was excessive, but what do I know? I'm not making the rules. So that day, I started to prep and plan for the interview. So if you know me, you know that I don't like to be unprepared. I don't like to be caught off guard. I like to know what to expect. If you ask for a meeting with me, I'm probably going to say, yeah, that's great. What do you want to talk about? Because I got to know it's going to eat me up inside if I don't, if I can't prepare and think through everything that needs to be said. And so going into an interview, you better believe I'm going to be ready. So I started to dig into grace. And at the time on the website, they had a history of grace, just the events that happened year by year. And so I read through that history and I saw the ebbs and flows and the triumph and the trials. And then they had their elder minutes online. So I started to read through the elder minutes for the past couple of years. And I got done with all of that and I thought, yeah, I'm going to cancel this interview. I don't really want to be a part of this church. I got done with that research, and honestly, my conclusion was, I just don't see God's hand on this place. I don't have a lot of hope for that church. So I don't think I'm going to go there. I don't want to waste anybody's time. I need to cancel the interview. And as I opened up my computer to email Holly, who was then chair of the committee, it occurred to me like, come on, big time. You're 36. You don't have big enough britches yet to start turning down interviews. Just take it. Use it as practice. Let's see what happens. So I did. And I did the interview. And it was funny because in the interview, I gave the most honest answers ever because I didn't care if these people liked me. I wasn't trying to get anybody to like me. I was just telling the truth. And then at the end of the interview, they said, do you have any questions for us? I said, yeah. I mean, I've looked at your history. I've read through it all. Grace has been a hard place to be a part of for several years. And they all kind of started smiling, nodding their heads. I said, so there's a lot of churches in Raleigh. What are you doing there? Why do you go to that place? What's so special about it that you're clinging on? And Holly got a big smile on her face. And she said, because we love this place. These people are special to us. Our kids grew up here. Grace means a lot to us. It's our community. And we believe that the best days are still ahead for grace. And everybody nodded and smiled and agreed. And I believed it too. And I realized that God's hand was here and that there was reason to hope for grace and that I too believe that the brightest days were still ahead. It was hard to believe that when I visited in February for my like official visit interview weekend and I came to a service and there's less people in the service that Sunday than there are in this room right now. But I still believe that God wanted us to be at this place, and that God wasn't done with grace. And so in April of 2017, my wife and I, Jen, and our then one-year-old daughter, Lily, moved up to Raleigh, and we assumed we became a part of grace. And when I got here, it was not going well. We were very far in debt. Our line of credit had been maxed out. The bank had frozen our credit cards. There were some people who told me like, thanks for coming, but you'll probably be moving home in about six weeks. We just weren't sure about this place. But there was all kinds of things that happened in that first year that I felt like was just God whispering in my ear, Nate, I still care about Grace. My hand is still in this place. I still have plans for it. I'll never forget the Memorial Day offering in 2017, that first year that I got here. My whole goal was to get through the summer without incurring more debt, without begging and borrowing and stealing more money, right? I just wanted to try to get through the summer without going into greater debt. And in the month of May, we were running a deficit. And going into the last week of the year, we needed an offering of $15,000. That year, we were averaging about $10,500 a week. So we needed 50% more, almost 50% more in the offering to come in that week for us to remain solvent and not have to go into greater debt. And I don't know if you know this about church world, but Memorial Day weekend is the worst, okay? It's the worst. Nobody comes and nobody gives. And I don't blame you because if they didn't pay me, I would go to the beach too. Nobody's harboring ill will about that. But the reality of it is, that's the lowest giving Sunday of the year, every year in every church in the history of churches. So to be praying for 15,000, 5,000 more than what we normally get is an absurd prayer. And I prayed it all week and I asked the elders to pray. We didn't send out an email. We didn't ask for money. We just prayed. If I'm honest with you, I didn't really believe that it would happen. That Sunday, $28,000 came in. Not a single huge gift, just faithful giving from people who cared about grace. Without being asked, I was blown away. That will always stand out to me as the first time I felt God's hand on my shoulders saying, hey, listen, pal, you just worry about preaching. I'll figure out the rest. Let's go. And I knew that God's hand was on his place. Later that year, a couple months later, we owed $17,000 to World Overcomers that took over our space on Meridian Drive. And the deal that we got to get out of there, we still owed them money. And I emailed a lady that I didn't know on a committee that I had never talked to and said, hey, listen, I'm new here. This debt is gonna crush us. Can we please defer to the end of the year because we can't afford to pay it over the summer. And she emailed me back and she said, we love God and we love his kingdom and we love his church and you are forgiven of that debt. Don't worry about it. Again, God tells us his hand is on this place. He's not done with grace. And over these three years, I will have been here three years in April, over these three years, we've seen some of the people who thought that maybe God was done with grace begin to come back and breathe new life into it as well. We've seen people come back and believe that, yes, God's not done with this place. We've seen families added. We've seen our young family small group, Virgin, our three-year-old class is stinking full every week. We've seen more kids on the roster than Erin's had in the history of her tenure at Grace, which is now seven years. We're seeing small groups filled up. We have two established services. We're totally out of debt and saving money for the building already. We are in now a healthy place where we are watching faiths being strengthened. We are watching people being connected with Jesus. We are watching a community being built. And for the first time in the history of grace, we really are walking in health. And that's why we believe that after 20 years of wondering and wandering, that it's finally time for grace to go home and realize the dreams that we've dreamt for 20 years. Now, when we say that, that it's time for grace to go home, that we believe now is the time to pursue a permanent home, a permanent building, there's a couple things to understand. The first is when I say permanent home, I'm careful to say that because we could buy land and build or we could buy a building and upfit. We're open to all options. And I think the question becomes, why now? Why build? Why is it that we want to own our own building? Why is it that we want to own our own permanent home in this community that we love? And there's a lot of reasons for this. And in some business meetings that I'm going to tell you about, we're going to cover those reasons. But I think there's two really compelling ones that I would share with you this morning. The first most compelling reason that this is the time for us to go home and have a permanent home to call our own is to simply look around at this space. Now, we're grateful for this space. If this little room didn't exist, we would not exist as a church. No question about it. God gave us this space and allowed us to get our feet underneath us here. But look around. Does this feel like home to you? If you're not sure, sit behind the pole one Sunday and then answer that question. Where I have to walk over here to be able to see you. Hey, guys. Look in the corners because we have no storage. So we just put extra chairs on the sides and put tablecloths on top of them. That's less than optimal. We have a lobby. We say we're about connecting people to people. And a big part of that is our lobby and talking and being able to catch up with friends. The lobby time, honestly, is some of my favorite time of the week every week where I get to buzz around and catch up with everybody and see what's going on. It's too small. Try to hang out there right after the first service. It has to spill out into the front, whether it's cold or raining or whatever. Speaking of going outside, even if it's cold and rainy, have a kid in elementary school and have to walk outside every week, whether it's cold or whether it's fair, whether it's rainy or whether it's dry, and walk past the aquarium store and down the hallway of offices and get your kid in the repurposed children's space. We're grateful for that space. It just doesn't feel like home. If you think this feels like home, get here early on a Sunday morning when we have to get the air and the fans going because it smells like an aquarium. That's a thing. Come on Thursday, I'll show you. We'd love to have a restroom available in the lobby so that people don't have to walk down the children's space to get to it. If you've ever tried to, when that door's open and kids are trying to get into the nursery and other families are trying to get out of the nursery and you're just trying to get by to go to the restroom, there's a choke point over there that definitely does not feel like home. We'd love to have a playground for our kids to play on. I would love for our students, our sixth through 12th graders, to have their own space. Right now they meet in this space, and Kyle, our student pastor, is doing a phenomenal job with them, and he's gotten that. We're growing. We're running about 40 kids a week when everybody comes. But this space still swallows them up, and there's a limit on what they can do. Students like to be rowdy and rambunctious, and that's great, but we have to kind of keep a lid on that because we have not put enough money in Kyle's budget for auditorium repairs, so he's got to stay within some certain parameters. They need their own space that feels like home for them too. We need to invest in our student ministry. We want adult spaces during the week that feel more like living rooms where it's comfortable to sit in and meet in and have small group in so that our adults who come don't have to sit in repurposed children's spaces around white plastic tables and metal folding chairs. We're happy to do that, but we want other people to come too. We want you to be able to invite people to small group and have it feel comfortable and like home when they come. I dream of having some of our folks who work from home to take a day every week and come sit and work with us as a staff and as a community and make it kind of a hub during the days where people just are. We can't do that in our current space. And more importantly, all the things that I just mentioned, the pole and the chairs and the small lobby with the very nice hutch. If you go to Grace and you call Grace home, we don't think about those things. We don't care about those things. Those aren't really that big of a deal to us. But when you bring somebody for the first time because you want them to experience all that you've experienced at Grace, everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over in order to come here. The fact that you can't even see us from the road. We have signs on our building, but it's useless. Why do we even have that? You can't see it. You have to find us. We've joked that we're like a secret club. You only find us if you get invited. Everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over, that they have to get past so that they can be fully engaged here. As they assess whether or not they want to be a part of grace, those are all things that they have to be willing to move past too before they can really receive what God has for them here, before they can be encountered with the beauty and the grandeur of the gospel. And I just want as few things between people and Jesus as possible. I want people to notice as few things as possible that are detriments to what we're doing here so that they feel at home too and they feel freed up to encounter Jesus in this space. And so I think it matters. The next compelling reason that I think it's wise to build now is because it's really, this is not exciting, but it's true. It's fiscally responsible to own. It's the more financially wise thing to do with the resources that we have. Most of you in this room, you own your home. A vast majority of us do. Why do you do that? Because you know that financially it's the best decision for your family. The same is true for us as a church. We believe that it's the wisest thing to do with the resources that we have. Another thing you understand as you invest in a home now in whatever season of life you're in is if you'll do it up front, if you'll be financially wise in the early years of your life and you make sound choices, then later in the decades to come, you'll have the financial freedom to do what's really special to you with your money. You'll have the financial freedom to really spend your resources on what matters most to you. And we wanna do that as a church too. Right now we give 10% of our offerings to missions, to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. And I'm so proud that we do that. But I wanna see that number grow. What if we can get into a facility and get that manageable? And as our numbers and as our budget grows, our property cost doesn't have to and we can give 30, 40, 50% of what we have to things going on outside the walls of grace and be a generous church. It's more fiscally responsible to buy now so that we can be generous later. And just to kind of further drive that point home, we were in that facility on Meridian Drive for 16 years. In 16 years, we spent $5.4 million on rent. And that's conservative because for a season, we rented some extra space that cost more money. It's probably much closer to $6 million. And coming out of that space, we had debt to show for it. We want to make good choices so that that never happens again. That's why we believe that now is the time to act and move and go home. Now, with those things being said, there's some details that I do want to share with you this morning. And then I'm going to tell you about the informational meetings that we have and why we've chosen to go that route. The nitty gritty of it is, and this will be covered in those meetings, so you don't have to remember all this right now, but you're probably very curious. Our goal in the campaign is to raise $1.5 million over two years. We're going to ask everyone to make a two-year pledge and try to have that by the end of two years so that we can do what it is we think God wants us to do. The reason it's $1.5 million is because in the estimates that we have, we want to build a building that's between 400 and 600 people. The auditorium is between 400 and 600. In church world, once you have the auditorium size, you have the algorithms for all your other space. So it's really a decision about how big of an auditorium do we want. This one seats 200. The elders want us to have a 600-person auditorium. I want us to have a 350-person auditorium. I don't need that pressure in my life. But that's the decisions that we're making. We're open to buying land and building, but we would rather buy a building and up fit. Buying land and building takes more time and takes more money. The only reason we would do that is if there's a piece of land that's so attractive that we just couldn't pass it up. We want the building to be as close as possible to Capitol and 540. This puts us in range of everyone who calls Grace home. That's an optimistic goal. I was having lunch the other day with somebody who's been buying and selling land in the Raleigh area for probably 30 or 40 years. And when I told him where we wanted to be, he audibly laughed at me. But we think that God is going to look out for us. He'll give us the place that we need to be. If we were to buy and build, that could cost as much as $4.5 million, and $1.5 million allows us to borrow what we need to make that happen. If we want to go a little bit smaller, build and upfit, that is going to cost somewhere around $3 million. So 1.5 over two years positions us to do whatever it is we think we need to do. Now, to raise that money, we formed a campaign committee. And the campaign committee began, got a book written by an expert who's done 100 of these. And we started to read, what's the best way to go about this? And what we quickly learned is all the experts have a set way that you're supposed to go about raising funds for a project like this. What they wanted us to do is tear out all of the givers at grace and take like the top 15 families and I would go meet with them personally. Then you take the top 30 or 40 families and the elders go meet with them individually, share all the information, ask for a pledge. And then you take all the other families and we'll just get to you whenever we get to you. We're busy. We've got a lot of things going on. That's how it goes. You tear them out, you have the meetings, and the experts say by going and sitting down in someone's home and presenting to them and making a personal ask, you're gonna get more juice out of that lemon. That's the best possible way to get the funds that you need. That's the way you need to do it. And so because that's the way we need to do it, that's what we set about doing, is figuring out a way to do that. Now that was a challenge because at Grace, we have a long history, nobody knows what anybody gives at Grace. There's one person who knows how much people give. That's a guy named Tom Ledoux. He is our finance manager. He's living his best life in the villages in Florida right now. So you don't have to worry about running into him at Harris Teeter. And in between games of golf, he does our finances. We get a great deal on it. I love that guy so much. And he's the only one who sees what everybody gives. So to tear out our givers, I would have to start learning some stuff that is none of my business. But this was the way we need to do it. This is the money we need to raise. And so we started talking with the elders about it. One of the elders raised a concern. He's like, I'm really not comfortable with that. I don't think that we should do that. I think that we should just ask everybody all at once and let them respond however they want to and let the Holy Spirit move. And my response to him was, I think you need to go play in the forest and sing with the animals. Like, that's Pollyanna stuff, man. We got to get real. But the more I thought about it, and the more we prayed about it, the more I became convinced that that way to raise funds was just not right for grace. The more I thought about going into homes and presenting and asking, the less comfortable I got with it. The more, honestly, the more I saw it being the plans of man trying to figure out the best way to go about this and not making room for the Spirit. And so I thought rather than going to you individually and making an ask that I would just ask you corporately and trust you. I've tried as I've led Grace to trust you to be adults who love Jesus and love this place and trust you to go home and pray about it and allow the Holy Spirit to direct as if he saw fit that you would be sensitive to that and trust the pledges that come in. Another reason I didn't want to do the individual meetings is I began to think about it. And this is really what drove it home for me is, I don't want anybody in the church who gives to the campaign to think that their gift is valued any different than any other gift. We have some families in our church that because they've made wise choices, because God has blessed them, they really do have great means. We have some families in the church who have the ability, if they wanted to, to give in ways that were really impactful for the campaign. They give a lot of money. And that's wonderful. And then we have other families in the church that are far closer to mine and Jen's end of the spectrum that are in their 20s or in their 30s and kind of trying to figure out how to get life together. And some of us even living paycheck to paycheck and any amount that would be given would be really sacrificial. And if these families are able over the next two years to cobble together five or $10,000, I don't want to value that $10,000 any less than I would value the $100,000, $150,000. Because even though the amounts in those two gifts are different, the faith is the same. The sacrifice is the same. The spirit of generosity and obedience is the same. And I don't want to be a part of a system that makes those two people feel any different for what they gave. Because every bit of it is special. Every bit of it is impactful. I got a text this morning from a good friend of mine who just knew that this morning was when we were launching the campaign at the church. And they're a family like us. And he just said, hey, proud of you, rooting for you. Julie and I are committing $1,000 to the campaign this year. I started to cry in my bedroom. It's the same sacrifice. It's the same generosity. The gifts aren't different. And I don't want to treat them that way. So rather than going to your houses and doing an individual ask, we're having these informational meetings and we're asking corporately. There's three informational meetings. You have them on the cards in your seats. They're all identical. We're just asking that you would come to one of them. If you want to come to all three, because you just love this kind of stuff, knock yourself out. But we're asking that you would come to one. We hope that every partner and everybody who calls Grace home will come to at least one of these meetings. At those meetings, we will roll out for you all the things that we would have if I came to your house and sat down with you and talked to you. The type of ask that we're looking for, all the details of the campaign. There's an FAQ sheet on the huts that will give you a little bit more information if you have questions right away. We will go through all of those details. We'll have people from all the committees here that you can ask questions of. There'll be some give and take. And I think that those are going to be some good times for us at the church. That's where that's going to happen. We're hoping that you will come to those. And for the next five weeks, we're going to talk about the next steps of grace. Because I believe that the building, pursuing a permanent home, is just the first step that we need to take as a church that's now walking in health. The question facing grace now is, God, what would you have us do with this health? And so over the next five weeks, we're going to answer that. It's going to culminate in a pledge Sunday on March 1st, and we'll find out if this is a realistic dream. But as I close today, I would just share this with you. I was reminded in my preparation that in July of 2017, we had a business meeting. It was to talk about how to financially make it through the rest of the summer, how to exist as a church. And I remember there was somebody in the back of the room who stood up over there, and they said, hey, and they kind of talked to the room and said, hey, we just need to all give a little bit more and we'll be okay. And I was able to say to him and to everyone, actually, no, you don't. You don't need to give any more. This church is generous and doing everything that it can right now. You don't need to give us any more money. We need to be more responsible with the money that you're already giving us, and we're going to do that. And then I made a promise. I said, as a matter of fact, if you'll trust me, I'm not going to ask you for more money again until we're ready to build a building. So now here I am, three years later, because of God's grace, we've been able to keep that promise, asking you to consider participating in the campaign as we seek to go home. Asking you to consider participating in this above and beyond what you give to operational budget. So the invitation is to go home and just begin to pray and to think and to plan and earnestly ask God, God, how would you have us participate in this campaign? We'll have those informational meetings. We'll have our services for the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, we're gonna come and celebrate and submit our pledges together and we're gonna see what God is gonna do. In the meantime, if you have any questions, my door is open. I will meet with you, talk with you, answer whatever questions I have. If you'd like an individual meeting, we can have that. I'm just not going to impose that on you. But that's the invite. Let's go as a church and pray how God would have us be involved with what he's doing here and the next steps of grace. Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. We know that your hand is here. We know it's on this place. We know that what happens here matters to you. God, we believe as a body that it's time for us to take this step of faith and pursue a permanent home in this community where you've planted us. So God, I earnestly pray that if that's your will, if that's from you, let us marvel at how you make it happen. God, if that's not your will, if this needs to be our home for a while, then make it abundantly clear that that's your will and let us celebrate that too. God, we simply humbly ask that your will be done and that we walk in obedience to what that is. Father, be with these families and these individuals as they go and pray. I pray that they would be sensitive to your spirit. I pray that their hearts would be opened, would be moved by what moves you and that you would guide and direct us to exactly where and how you would have us participate. God, I cannot wait to see all that you do in this season of grace. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.