Sermons tagged with Hypocrisy

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..

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We are in the second part of our series called With, where we're going through a book by a pastor named Sky Jethani. It's a book that I read back in 2013, and I've shared with you before, caused me more times than any other book to stop and put it down and get on my knees and repent and say, God, I absolutely see these things in my life and in my heart and in my motives for following you. Please eradicate them from me. I was having a conversation with someone right before church started. Actually, full disclosure, it was after church had started and half of the congregation was still out in the parking lot. Sorry, Steve, for that. That's our bad, buddy. We'll get it better next week. Join me, guys. We'll do better next week. But I was having a conversation, and they said, gosh, I'm loving this book. I've been reading it, but I see myself in all the postures. And I said, yeah, that's kind of it. If you're paying attention, you see yourself in this book as we read it. So as we get together every week, I want to go through the postures. I want to look at the different ways that we can approach God, the different motives we have for approaching him. And then the last week, look at the right motive we have for approaching him. Really, it's five weeks of discipleship, of looking at our relationship with Jesus, the one who saved us. And one of the things we said last week is we kind of asked where we were. We did a little spiritual diagnostic test, and I kind of helped us see, I think many of us, that to be a Christian is to be in a rut sometimes. It's to see other people having this flourishing relationship with Jesus, this really seemingly intimate knowledge with Jesus, and we can't seem to hit the nail on the head. We can't seem to connect the dots for ourselves. And kind of the phrase I'm using that's driving the way we're thinking about ourselves and our walks with Jesus in this series is to say, perhaps our walk with Jesus isn't what it could be because our posture before him isn't what it should be, right? And so then last week we looked at the life under God posture. The life under God posture acknowledges that the universe is big, the world is difficult, it's bigger than me, it's challenging, there's unknown pain and suffering that I can't prevent out there, but God created everything and if I can find a way to get him on my side, if I can appease God, then he'll protect me. And so it's this exchange. If I offer you obedience and you offer me protection, it's how we regain control of an uncontrollable universe. And this week, we're looking at life over God, which is really the natural conclusion of the life under God posture. If life under God says, man, the universe can't be controlled, but God can control it, so I'm going to get him on my side so that nothing bad can happen to me, then life over God is what happens when we start to learn a little bit. It's what happens when we start to get a little bit of knowledge. It's what happens when we realize that, you know what, creation is really a machine, and there are laws to the way it works. And if I can begin to understand these laws, the way the machine works, then it becomes more controllable and more predictable. This is what it looks like in years past. If we had a road trip, we might pray to God. We might go to God and say, God, protect us on this road trip. And now with a little bit of knowledge, we just check the weather app and we do the road trip when it's not going to rain. Now we're safe. We're good. In years past, a pandemic hits and we hit our knees and we pray, God, take this away from us. Now we scramble to create a vaccine. Life has shifted. So in a lot of ways, this life over God posture is a natural conclusion. It's just another way to arrest control back to ourselves and say, God, thanks for everything. We figured out your machine now, so we're going to take it from here. Now we'll be in control again. A great picture of what life over God looks like is actually this. If you go to the Smithsonian, you can see this Bible. That's Thomas Jefferson's Bible. Famously, he took the Bible and he looked at the teachings. That's in the Gospels. He looked at the teachings of Jesus that he didn't like and he simply cut them out of his Bible. It's called the Jeffersonian Bible. And I've always looked at that and thought, what audacious arrogance would it take to begin cutting passages out of the Bible that you don't agree with? But now I tend to think, at least he's honest. At least he has the guts to admit it. Because don't we all do this? That's what life over God posture is. The life over God exchanges God for best practices. As we think about life over God, that's what it is. It just simply exchanges God. It exchanges a relationship with Jesus for best practices. It exchanges a relationship with Jesus for simply the best practices that come out of his teachings. And we know what it is to distill things down to best practices, don't we? We've all done this. This is a thing that we can all fall into. When I first became a small groups pastor, I started reading all the books about small groups. And it would have been a mistake to take one book written about small groups for a church of 20,000 people and try to do a one-to-one exchange into my church of 1,000 people at the time. It would have been a big mistake to try to do that. So I didn't do everything that the author would recommend. I just took a couple things, a couple best practices that I could apply to my situation, and I would do that. And I would take a couple best practices from over here and over here and over here, and I would amalgamate the ministry that we did. Not looking at any of the books as authoritative or any of the individuals as authoritative, but giving myself the right and the license to take best practices from all these areas and then install them in my life. This is what life over God does. It looks at the Bible as just a simple group of instructions, an instruction book for life. And we extract from it the best practices like Thomas Jefferson did, and we apply those to ourselves. And then the ones that we don't like or we don't agree with or that seem too problematic or antiquated, we do away with those. And we begin to pick and choose which portions of the Bible we want to obey. We begin to pick and choose which portions of the teachings of Jesus we want to submit to. And we exchange God for best practices. Now at its worst, this posture is atheism. God's not real. He doesn't exist. The Bible clearly is a book. I'm going to take out of it the things that apply to me. There's some good ideas in there. I'll apply those. We might even feel good about ourselves for doing that, but I'm not going to take it all wholesale. At best, it's deism. God exists. He's real. He created the universe. He created this machine. But now that I have the Bible, now that I understand some of the mechanics of this machine, I can take it from here. I understand. God, thanks. I don't need you anymore. I don't need to pray to you anymore. I don't need to pursue you anymore. I don't need the actual relationship with you. I just need your principles and practices. And now that I understand how to manipulate things under my own control, I've got it from here. That's the life over God posture. And like I said, at least Thomas Jefferson was honest about what he did. We might think that this posture is a difficult one for Christians to adopt. It might be easy to believe that as believers, we wouldn't do this. Life under God, I'm going to obey him so that he watches out for me. Sure, that makes sense in the Christian life. And the other ones, from and for, if you've read ahead or as we get to those, those are easy to apply to the Christian life. But this is the posture of all non-believers. I'm going to take the authority of myself over the authority of God, and we distill him down to best practices, if anything at all. But what's important to see is that this one is sneaky too, and it works its way into our hearts and into our motives as well. And it has for the history of all believers. We can go all the way back to Moses. Sky points this out in the book, and I think it's an appropriate example. We can go all the way back to Moses to see this life over God posture. We're not going to turn our Bibles there this morning, but in Exodus chapter 17, the people of God have been wandering through the desert led by Moses for a number of years now. And they're thirsty, and they're complaining. And they're like, at least in Egypt when we were slaves, we have water. In the desert, we have nothing. What's the deal? They were upset. And so Moses goes to God on their behalf, and he says, God, your people are thirsty. What should I do? And God says, take your staff, take Aaron's staff, and go to a rock, and I want you to strike the rock in front of the people, and water's going to come out. And that's what he did. Amazingly. The miracle. He takes Aaron, his brother's staff. He goes to the rock. He strikes the rock. Water comes out. Everybody has their fill. Speaking of water, I just got thirsty. Everybody has their fill. Then, a little while later, it happens again. They start to grumble and complain again. They start to whine again. And this time, Moses is kind of sick of it. This time, Moses is kind of tired of it because here's God. God's used Moses. They've led him out of the desert. He defeated the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. God is visibly leading them every day by cloud, every night by fire. He gives them manna to eat. He feeds them in the desert every day. And yet still God's people are saying we had it better as slaves. And I think Moses is exasperated and can't believe that people find ways to continue to complain. But if we know anything about human nature, it's that if we were there in the desert, we'd be complaining too, wouldn't we? And so Moses is frustrated. And this is what happens the second time they complain. If you want to look in Numbers chapter 20, it'll be on the screen if you want to read along with me. Verse 7, before the Lord as he commanded him. So God says, go this time. I want you to speak to the rock and water's going to come out. Then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, like they were told. And he said to them, here now you rebels, he's ticked, shall we bring water for you out of this rock? And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice and water came out abundantly and the congregation drank and their livestock drank as well. Now, the people are thirsty again. They're grumbling again. They're complaining again. God, Moses goes back to God. Your people are complaining. What do you want me to do? And God says, I want you to go to the rock. This time, I want you to speak to it and water's going to come out. And Moses says, okay. And he goes to the rock, and he assembles the people, and he says, you want some water, rebels? Which I think is probably the nice way of saying it in the Bible. And then, instead of speaking, he strikes the rock two times. God told him, I want you to speak. Moses says, no, I don't need your direction anymore. I understand this machine. I understand how it works. I have a set of best practices. The staff has worked for me in the past. It's going to work for me now. And he hits the rock twice. And God, in his goodness, allows water to come out. But Moses exhibited the life over God posture and said, no thanks. I don't need your authority. I'm not going to follow your rules. I know the staff works. I'm just going to do it this way. I've got my best practices. I figured out your machine. I know what's best now. And as a result of that sin and usurping God's will in that way, he's not allowed to enter into the promised land. It's actually one of the more tragic scenes in the Bible when Moses allows his frustration to get the better of him in this way. But he exhibited the life over God posture. Because Moses was susceptible to it, because it's been around for thousands of years, we should know by now that we are susceptible to it as well. You may have taken this posture if you've ever in your own life chosen selective morality, chosen a portion of Scripture. There's this thing that you know is wrong, but you've just decided in your life, you know what, I don't really care. I'm just going to do it. I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine this weekend. It came to light. I have a group of friends. There's about seven or eight of us. We talk every day. And it came to light that one of my friends is one of these people that will just buy a TV for a weekend knowing he's going to return it at the end of the weekend. Or he'll buy an iPad for a couple days to use it and then take it back. And I'm like, yo, I can't believe that you do this. That's stealing. And he's like, oh, come on, you guys don't take a handful of the candied pecans at the Sprouts when you're going through there? And we're all like, no, we don't. That's theft. But he does it. And when we get to the bottom of it, what he said is, I'm not hurting anybody. It doesn't really matter. And we're all like, yeah, it's stealing. And he's like, eh, I know. And as I was getting on to him for it, he said, Nate, this may be an issue for you, and you may be able to condemn me for it, but I'm pretty sure if we looked at your life, we could find a place that I was more moral than you, and we could condemn you for that. And I thought, that's a fair point. We should probably wrap this up. Right now, I don't really want to explore this any further. We all do that. We all have these places and pockets in our life where Scripture tells us who we need to be. We know from God what He wants from our character, and we just refuse to hand those things over. We choose to keep a little bit of worry because it makes us feel like we're in control. We choose the right to be unkind or to not like people, even though we know that we don't have that right as believers. We elevate other things in our life over biblical importance in our life. If we have ever had, and I think we all have, selective morality, we've exhibited this life over God posture. Sometimes this posture takes on the form of a spiritual to-do list, of moralizing our faith, of I don't need to pursue God. I don't actually need him. If you'll just give me the best practices to be a godly parent, that's what I need. And we'll do sermon series. And listen, as I read this, I told you I had to repent. As I'm reading it this time, as a pastor, I'm having to repent, realizing I skirt the line of this often. We'll do a series on how to have better relationships. And sometimes instead of simply emphasizing our need for Jesus in our life, we'll say, if you'll do these four things, you'll have a better marriage. If you'll do these three things, you'll have a better kid. If you'll do these five things, you'll be spiritually healthy. And sometimes we under-emphasize how much we need to simply pursue Jesus and over-emphasize the things that we need to do, because this is what we like in life. We love a to-do list, don't we? We love having clear steps to accomplish our goal because we can grab onto that and we can control it. And now we're in charge of that. That's life over God posture. And we distill them down to some best practices. And God, you stay over there. I've got it from here. And what I really want us to see this morning is that when we do that, when we engage in this posture, when we exchange God for best practices, we're really making three losing exchanges that cost us so very much. When we adopt this posture, we make three losing exchanges. The first one is this, we exchange wonder for arrogance. We exchange wonder for arrogance. When we once marveled at God and his creation, when we were once at awe at him and everything that he does. The power of a thunderstorm, the beauty of a sunset, the miracle of cures. Now, with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of understanding of how the world works, we become arrogant and difficult to impress. As I was thinking through this one this week, I was reminded that just last year, I think it was, Doug Funk, our favorite church partner and effective church mascot over there, who's now got the wonderful, if you're, listen, if you've been watching online, a whole reason to come is to see Doug's new Bob Barker haircut. It's amazing. And you need to come see it in person. And when COVID lifts, touch it. Last year, Doug got prostate cancer. He comes to me and he says, yeah, and he tells me, hey, I think I've got this thing and I'm going to get some tests. And it turned out that he had prostate cancer. And your immediate response is, oh my gosh, Doug, I'm so sorry. That's terrible. You hate to hear the C word. And he immediately says, it's prostate. It's good. They've got it isolated. They're going to run some tests on me, but they're just deciding how they're going to go get it, but they're going to go get it. And you're like, okay, great. So then you pray for wisdom for the doctors. He goes in for surgery. He gets it. You see him a little while later. Doug, did it go okay? And he says, yeah, it's good. Did I get it all? Yeah, it's great. All right, great. You're back at work. Please straighten the rows for church. Like, let's be ready. Like, let's go, right? Like, okay, great. Praise God. And then you just move on. Do you see the arrogance and the lack of wonder in what God has done? 50 years ago, that's a death sentence. 50 years ago, if you get that, you don't know you have it for a long, long time, and then you die, and we don't have Doug anymore. But because the medical community has advanced so much, because God has given us such wisdom that we can unpack the wonders of his creation, we take a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of understanding and we allow it to turn into bored arrogance so that when my friend recovers from cancer, I go, that's great, praise God. Let's get back to work. What wonder have we lost when we allow cures to pass us by like that? What wonder do we lose when we don't simply walk through nature and appreciate the breeze? When the weather feels this good and all we're thinking in our heads, because we've felt weather like this before, is, is this a false fall? How long do I get to enjoy this? Can I really break out the flannels for like months or am I going to have to wear a polo again? Instead of just going, God, this feels amazing. Thank you. When we adopt a life over God posture, we exchange wonder for bored arrogance. What a terrible way to go through life. Another exchange we make when we adopt this posture is we exchange trust for anxiety. We exchange trust and peace for worry and anxiety and stress. Because in this posture, we figured out the machine, right? We figured out how life works. We figured out what we need to do to get things to go our way. And because we have this understanding and because everything becomes predictable, we begin to heap all of the pressure and responsibility for life's unpredictability onto ourselves. We take on all the pressure. Literally, the weight of the world is on our shoulders because we've said, God, I don't need you to carry that for me anymore. I understand a little bit about how the world works, so I'm going to carry that and I'm going make things go, and I'm going to make things happen. And our souls were not created or designed to carry that weight. That's why God is constantly ushering us back to him. Come to me for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden. That's why he says that we should cast all of our cares upon him and that we should lay our burdens at his feet. That's why he says in Philippians that we should present everything to God with prayer and thanksgiving and that he will guard our hearts and our minds with a peace. He and Jesus Christ will guard our hearts and minds with a peace that passes understanding. And we exchange the peace that Jesus offers us when we walk with him and we simply trust him. And we say, God, we're in the middle of a pandemic. I don't know what to do, but you're bigger than this. I'm going to walk with you and trust you and whatever happens, happens. I'm with you. And instead, we take it and we internalize it and we think of all the different things that we need to do. I can't think of a better example of trading trust for anxiety than the way that we parent now. I can remember, I mean, we've only been parents for four and a half years. But you start to learn all these things about kids. I start to read about how a one-year-old and a two-year-old brain develops, and we're like, oh my gosh, do we use enough words in the home on a daily basis? Is the TV on too long? Should we read to her more? Should she be writing now? This kid colors in the lines. What should our kid be doing right now? Look at her. She's a disaster. This is embarrassing. And then we do coloring practice and the whole thing. Like, you worry so much. And now in a pandemic, what school do we put them in? Do we switch them to in-person? Do we keep them at home? Should we erect a bubble around our house for the rest of our lives? What is it that we should do? And we assume all the responsibility for our kids. And everything that happens, we flip out. Our mind spirals into this death spiral of anxiety where we draw the worst of conclusions. And I just wonder, parents who are given to anxiety over your kids, and this is a not fair question, all right, so I'm in this with you. What's your worry to prayer ratio? Those of us that have anxiety in our life, what's our ratio of minutes of worry and stress versus minutes of prayer and giving it back over to God? With your business, with your career, with your marriage, with your relationships, with finances, with that really difficult thing in your life, all of us, what's your ratio of minutes of worry versus minutes of prayer? When we adopt this life over God posture and we take it all on our shoulders, we trade trust in Jesus for a crippling anxiety that drowns us that we were not designed to carry. And I would simply ask you, if you feel yourself anxious, which has there ever been a time where there's more reason for that than in an incredibly divided country about myriad issues in the midst of a pandemic and all sorts of uncertainty? Is there ever more of a time for anxiety than now? Conversely, is there ever more of a time to realize that that's what we're doing and offering our trust back to God than now? What are our minutes of worry versus our minutes of prayer? The last exchange that we make that's dangerous for us is we exchange seeking for doing. We exchange seeking Jesus for doing the things that he wants us to do. We exchange pursuing the Father for an eight-step program to have a better relationship with the Father. And instead of simply craving more Jesus, instead of that passage in Psalms being true of us, as the deer pants for the water, so my soul pants for you, oh God, the living God. Instead of that being true for us, we're just asking, what do I need to do? I'm reading my Bible 30 minutes a day. I'm praying 10 minutes a day. I'm leading a small group. I go to church. I tithe and I volunteer, and yet I still don't feel like I'm really connecting with Jesus. What do I need to do next? Maybe we just need to pursue Jesus. Maybe we need to do away with the spiritual to-do list and we just need to lay prostrate before the Father and say, God, I want you to show me what that looks like. Our tendency to make these to-do lists, to grasp onto control by giving ourselves bite-sized tasks that we know we can master, is so ingrained in us that I personally believe, and now this is, let me preface this. I've said this in Bible studies before. I've never said this from stage because I feel a responsibility with what I say from stage. So I'm going to say that this is a guess. This is a pastor's best guess. I would love it if you guys would talk about this guess in your small groups this week. Chew on this. Figure out what you think. You guys have interacted with Scripture, most of you, more than me. So you figure out what you think about this. But I think that this is the reason that God waited so long to give people the Ten Commandments. You ever wonder why God waited that long? Adam comes on the scene. He gives them the one commandment. Don't eat from that tree. They're like, got it. And then they ate from the tree. Why not after that, as soon as they fall, as soon as they mess up, as soon as they're out of relationship with God, why doesn't God go, okay, you blew it. Now here are the 10 rules. If you do these things, you'll be good with me. You've already blown it. I don't know what to do about you, Adam and Eve, but maybe Cain and Abel got a chance. Why didn't he give them the law then? Say, here's what I want you to do to be right with me. Why didn't he give it to Noah? Creation floundered and it failed and he hit the reset button and now it's just Noah and his family. Why didn't he give the Ten Commandments to Noah and say, here's what I want you to do. These are the rules. Let's not let what just happened. I don't want that to happen again. Here's the rules to follow to make me happy. Why didn't he give them to Noah? Why didn't he give them to Abraham? He speaks directly to Abraham. Go to the promised land. I'm going to make you the forefather of all of my children. I'm going to make you the founder of a promise. And by the way, here are the rules that you need to teach to all of your followers that are my children. Why didn't he give them to Abraham? It wasn't until we get to Moses and his children are wandering in the desert and clamoring that he finally allows Moses to come down the mountain with the two tablets and the Ten Commandments and the law. Why did he wait so long when he could have made it so clear? This is my guess. You might have your guesses. My guess is he knows our hearts. And he knows that the second we get Ten Commandments, he's giving us a spiritual to-do list. And then we do the same thing we did last week. It makes us legalistic hypocrites. It also makes us control freaks. And now we say, good God, I don't need you anymore. I don't need to pursue you. I don't need to kind of follow this wispy idea of you. I have these set rules that I can follow. I'm good. And what we do, just like last week, is we remove the relationship from a fundamentally relational thing. And now our very relationship with Jesus no longer requires a relationship because we have the rules. We have a to-do list. Have you ever been to a wedding and after the vows, each, the husband and the wife present each other with their 10 rules for marriage? You ever seen that? Here's your rules. Jen, if you'll do these things, I'll be a good husband and I'll be happy and then she gives me my rules. And then when we have this relational issue, when we're kind of at each other's throats, I don't get to go like, what's wrong? I followed your rules. I don't understand. Because rules remove relationship from a fundamentally relational thing. That's why we don't do it in our relationships. And God didn't want to do it to his either, I don't think. He gave us these to help us, but I think he knew our hearts and he knew that we would reduce a relationship to a spiritual to-do list and remove the pursuit of Jesus from our hearts. And I think we've all done this. And like I said last week, we're going to do four weeks in things we shouldn't do. And then we're going to cap it off with what a relationship with God should really look like and what should really drive us to Jesus. And I'm excited. We're supposed to wait until next week to announce this, but forget it. Sometimes I just do what I want. I'm excited. We're going to cap this series off by taking communion together for the first time since February or March. We're going to get you ready at home. We're going to find a way to do it here. But when we talk about being with God, we're going to bring him in with us and have communion together as a church. And I'm excited about that. But this week, I would simply ask you, do you see this posture in yourself? Do we have pockets of selective morality? Do we have places where we've reduced God to a to-do list and not a relationship? Have you made the exchange of wonder for arrogance, of trust for anxiety, or of seeking for doing? And will you allow God to work in your heart this week as you pursue him, to show you where this posture exists in your life, and to begin to ask yourself the question and ready your heart for what it should look like to follow Jesus. Let's do that this week and this month as we move through this process together. Pray with me. Jesus, you are good to us. You love us. You intercede for us. God, you see in us our true motives, and you're patient with us. Father, you know that we can only offer you gross. We can only offer you messed up. We can only offer you our selfishness. But would you help our hearts to learn to beat with yours? Would you create within us an earnest desire for you? Would we not make these awful exchanges and be people who wonder at you, who trust in you and who seek you? Would you work in our hearts even this week to prepare us for what it is to truly know you and follow you. God, would you be with those who are hurting this week? Would you buoy their spirits? Would you encourage them? God, would they see you even in the struggle? And for those of us who are having good times and good weeks, would we see your joy in those moments as well? Jesus, it's in your name we pray. Amen.

Thank you, Steve and the band. I don't know if you guys realize this, but that's the first time we've had a full band since like March the 1st. So that was really great to get to have them. For those of you that I haven't gotten to meet, my name is Nate. I am the pastor here. Thank you for joining us online. Thank you for being here in person. Every week I get to see a few more new faces, folks brave enough to return, and it's always so, so good. And if you've been watching Faithfully Online, we are so, so grateful for you, and you're continuing to do that. This is the first Sunday of a new series called With. We're looking at a book called With, written by a pastor named Sky Jethani. I first encountered this book in 2013 and I have never read a book that caused me to pause, stop, put the book down, literally get on my knees and repent more than this book did. I identified with so much of it. So we've been encouraging you guys for a couple of weeks to pick it up. Normally, we'd buy a bunch of copies and we'd leave them here, but that's a lot of touching and handling of money and the whole deal, so we can't do that right now. So hopefully you've ordered your copy online. If you haven't done that, just Google With and Sky, S-K-Y-E. It'll come up. I've sent out email links. You can email me. I'll send you another link. I believe in you, okay? It's 2020. You can all find things online. Get the book. Read along with us. Speaking of reading along with us, we have a reading plan that will help pace you through the series. Kyle Tolbert, our great student pastor, comes up with reading plans for the church. If you don't know about those, they're on our live page, and we actually have new plans that are on the information table kind of spread out for you so you can grab them on the way out if you'd like to do that. Those give you a portion of the Bible to read every day. We talk about how important that is all the time, but in this particular reading plan, Kyle has paced out for you the chapters that you can read in with to keep up with and be ready for the upcoming sermon as we go through it together. This series, more than any other series I've ever done, is one that you really need to see all the Sundays. The first four weeks are going to be invested largely in talking about what we shouldn't do. And the last two weeks are going to be invested in talking about what we should do. So if today you leave and you feel beat up with no resolution, that's all right. Come back in four more weeks and we'll give you some resolution, okay? Because we're moving through the book together. So this is going to feel a little bit different. As we begin, I want to help you see why I believe you should be interested in the contents of this book. I'm going to take you through an exercise that I do with all the couples that I do premarital counseling with. When I do premarital counseling with a couple, I tell them that we're going to do three sessions of 60 to 90 minutes. They think I'm going to counsel them about their marriage. I'm not. I'm not a counselor. I don't know how to do that. I just disciple them for about three hours, talk to them about spiritual things, and try to get them prepared for marriage in that way. And so the first question I ask them is, granted, it's silly, okay? There's all kinds of theological issues with this question, but I just want to ask you to play along and play along there at home. Let me ask you this question, okay? On a scale of one to ten, one being completely apathetic or maybe even adversarial towards God, and ten being apex Christian, super spiritual, ten is Elijah on Mount Carmel calling down the fire to defeat the prophets of Baal, okay? One to 10, where are you spiritually? Spiritually speaking, in your walk with God, your walk, your relationship with Jesus, your spiritual health, however you phrase that, where are you on a scale of one to 10? Where would you place yourself right now on that scale, okay? You figure out your answer. Now, let me ask you this question. Where would you say you'd like to be five years from now? Five years from right now, today, you get to make decisions, you get to project forward, and hopefully you've progressed a little bit. Five years from now, what do you want your number to be? Now, with the couple that's going to get married, I usually at this point talk about, okay, well, what's the gap between where you are now? Most people will do four to six. No one's going to cop to a two or a three, and no one's going to claim or a seven or an eight. So most people's first answer is four to six, okay? So you're a five now. What do you want to be? And then most people say seven or eight. I've never had anybody say 10. I don't know why, nobody wants to be a 10. Nobody's like, I don't wanna be that spiritual. That's too much. Nobody wants that, I don't know why. I think that's an issue. It's another sermon that I need to do. It's probably a failing of their pastor to not paint a great enough picture of ultimate spiritual help. And I asked them, okay, how do we get from like a five to an eight? What are the gaps? What are the things in the way? And we kind of plot a course for spiritual growth for them. Really, it's an exercise to help them prioritize spiritual growth. But to you, I would ask this question. You have your answer now. Here's what I am now. I'm a five. What do you want to be in five? I wanna be an eight. Okay, great, you have your two numbers. Let me ask you this question. If I could have talked to you five years ago, how would you have answered that question? If I could right now go back to five years ago you, what are you now, what do you wanna be in five years? What would your answer have been? Probably the same as the answer you just gave, right? Yeah? To be a Christian is to know what it is to be stagnant. To be a Christian is to know what it is to see other people who seem like, they seem like they're flourishing. They seem like they know Jesus in a way that I don't. They seem like they respond to worship in ways that my soul doesn't. They are able to get up and read their Bible every day. I can't seem to do that. They pray all the time. I can't seem to pray. They have this spirituality that I'm not sure I'll ever understand. To be a Christian, I believe, is to be frustrated with our spiritual walk. It's to feel stagnant and discouraged, like we should be further along than we are. Now, some of you five years ago, you were a totally different human. You didn't know Jesus. You weren't saved. So maybe for you, the question is, where were you two years ago? But I think that to be a believer is to be very familiar with that feeling of inadequacy, with that feeling of I should be further along. Because if I asked you five years ago, what are you? And you said five, and the answer is eight, then today you should have said eight, and I want to be a 10. But I think that to be a Christian is to sometimes be discouraged about our spiritual lives. And this is directly what this book speaks to. This is why if you can relate to what I just said at all, if your answers were the same five years ago and now, then I think this book can help you tremendously. And I want to begin this series by simply making this statement for you to consider. And we're going to talk about what this means. Maybe your walk isn't what it could be because your posture isn't what it should be. Maybe your walk with God, your relationship with God, isn't what it could be because your posture before God isn't what it should be. We're going to talk about what postures are, but in this book with, Sky takes five postures before the Lord. He calls them postures. I kind of think about them as motivations. He takes five postures before the Lord. If you haven't figured this out yet, four of them are bad. One is good. If you haven't figured out what the good posture is yet, just stick around. You'll pick it up with context clues. I believe in you. So the next four weeks, we're going to go over these postures that we often assume without necessarily knowing it and try to understand why these aren't helpful. And in the last two weeks, we're going to look at what the right posture is before the Lord, and I hope help us find ways to begin walking in a depth that we've never experienced before, so that five years from now, you would answer that question totally differently. This morning, we're going to look at the first posture called life under God. Very simply, to understand this posture, life under God is this. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. I forgot there in your notes, there's a spot that says, what do you really want from your relationship with God? That's a good diagnostic question. If I ask myself this, what do I want from my relationship with God? That's a good way to figure out what our posture is as we go through these. But the life under God posture says, I offer you obedience and you offer me protection. This is a posture that's present in every religion ever because this is what this posture acknowledges. The world is big. The world's crazy. Sometimes there's pandemics. There's things outside of my control. There's school shootings and there's cancer and there's illness and there's difficult phone calls and there's loss and there's undue pain and there's all kinds of crazy things that happen in this world that are outside my control, that are beyond my control. This posture acknowledges that and it acknowledges and there's a God in heaven who's controlled none of these things are outside of. There's a God in heaven who's sovereign and he's in control of everything. So I'm going to figure out how to get that God on my side so that he will protect me. This is the life under God posture. I said this was every religion ever, right? This is, think about the ancient Mayans performing sacrifices to try to appease the gods to get them on their side for a good crop or for a good war or for a good rain or whatever it is. We know that things in this world are outside our control. We know that there is a sovereign God who can control them. And so we orchestrate our lives in such a way to please the God so that he will look out for us. The life under God posture assumes that if things are going well for you, if you're blessed, then you must have behaved. If you are going through difficult times, you must not be right with God. And though none of us would admit readily that this is our posture before the Father, this attitude and mindset shows up all the time in everything that we do. I hear it every time I golf. Every time I go golfing, on the tee box, someone hits a drive that is going very clearly into the woods. This is never me. I strike mine 275 down the middle every time. But if you're golfing with like Harris Winston or something like that, it's definitely going to go really far into the woods. And as it goes really far into the woods, it's clearly going to be lost. You'll hear the solid sound. It will have bounced off a tree miraculously and bounced back into the fairway. And someone will say, it's total luck. And someone will always quip. Someone's been living clean. That's clean living. Someone had their quiet time this morning. As if you have been following God's rules, so now on the golf course, he's going to throw you a bone and a squirrel's going to kick it out there for you. You're in a parking lot. It's crowded. It's Walmart. It's Sunday afternoon. In the middle of COVID, there's only one entrance and everything's so far away. And then this one spot opens up. God is looking out for me. You must be living right. That's life under God. Life under God is an exchange. It says, I'll follow your rules and you protect me. And we laugh about it, but it shows up in far more insidious ways than that. And see, there's issues with this posture, with this exchange, with this transactional relationship that we would engage in with God. And I want to point out to you three big ones this morning. The first real issue with this posture is it inevitably leads to disillusionment. It leads to disillusionment every time. If you adopt this posture and your posture before God is, I'm going to follow your rules and you're going to protect me. It's this transactional contract that we enter into with him. 100% of the times, it will make you feel like I felt standing in the middle of Papa Murphy's pizza. I went a couple years ago. A couple years ago, Jen and I decided that we wanted pizza. It was once a year that we eat pizza. We're very healthy people. We don't do this a lot. We went to Jets. There was a Jets close to our house. Love Jets pizza. Love their thick crust with pepperoni. It's so good. And so I went to Jets. I'm so excited. I was just all in on fat day. Let's just go. I'm going to have it. I'm going to eat it all. And I get to Jets and there's a sign that it's closed. They moved to Creedmoor. I like Jets. I don't like Jets that far away. I don't like it that much. So there's another place that opened up in that same shopping center called Papa Murphy's Pizza. And I'm like, all right, pizza's pizza. I'll go to Papa Murphy's. So I go over there and I'm looking at the menu and this is just like an old man, angry old man rant. It has nothing to do with the sermon. But I at the menu, and there's no like proper names. I want like, I need like Supreme and Meat Lovers and Pepperoni. Like I need just normal pizza names that we all agree on, and they're getting cute with it. It's like Papa's Favorite, Mama's Best, and I'm like, I don't want to read all the ingredients. I just want a Supreme, you know, like just name it Supreme. Anyways, I get up to the front. The girl says, what do you want? And I said, do you have just like a supreme pizza? I don't want to read all the things. And she goes, yeah, that's mama's best. I'm like, great, give me that. So she goes, okay. I said, take a large. And I said, I'm going to go get some groceries. I'll come back and pick it up. She said, that's great. So I go, here's Teeter, get my stuff, put it in the car, go back in, Papa Murphy's, I'm sitting down looking at Twitter or something like that and just messing around. And then they say, hey, your order's ready. So I get up and go, okay, I walk over to the girl and she hands me this thing. And it's cold. It's in like this foil pan with cellophane on the top. And I go, this isn't my order. And she goes, you're Nate, right? I said, yeah. She goes, mama's best? I'm like, yeah. She goes, yeah, that's it. And I go, what, do I have to cook it? What are you talking about? What? And everybody in the store turns and looks at me and starts giggling. The manager looks at me and just starts laughing. I go, I can cook this? And I'm about to say, here, you take it. Like, just give me my money back. I don't agree to this deal. You just take the chore that you just put in my hands. You take that back. And the girl, she was so sweet, she's laughing and she says, sir, I promise you it's really good. Just put it in the oven for like 12 minutes. It's gonna be great. Okay, fine. So I take it home. I'm so angry that they violated the pizza contract. I go home, I put it in the oven, I get it out. I don't have a way to remove the foil from this large pizza, so I've got like a knife and fork situation where I'm sweating now, I need a towel. And I'm trying to get this pizza out of the thing. And then I realized I don't have a pizza cutter and I don't have a stone big enough to cut this pizza. So I have to put it on the countertop with like paper underneath it with a butcher knife, like burning my knuckles as I try to cut this pizza. They handed me a chore, man. I was so angry because what they did is they violated the unwritten American pizza contract. The American pizza contract is simply, listen, I give you $12. You give me a hot pizza cut in a box. That's it. I'm going to take that pizza home. I'm going to put those pieces on paper plates, and I'm going to throw it all away, and I'm going to sit in my shame after I'm done. That's the deal. And you violated this. You gave me a chore. I don't want to cook. If I wanted to cook, I would have gone there and gotten the ingredients and cooked, but clearly that's not what I want to do. You broke the contract, man. I want my money back. When we adopt the life under God posture, we will have a moment just like that. Where we sit before God and we think, this isn't the deal. You broke the contract. I gave you my obedience. Now you give me protection. That's the deal. And God says, I never made that deal with you. I won't be reduced to that. If you've been a Christian for any amount of time and you've adopted this posture, and I believe we all have at different points, you've experienced that disillusionment. You know exactly what that is. That disillusionment almost always comes at unwarranted pain. When you experience a time in life where you feel like you are enduring unfair pain, unfair stress, you lose a loved one, someone gets sick, you get a difficult diagnosis, you face a tough loss, you watch a relationship in shambles, you don't have the job that you identified with anymore. When your life sits in shambles, that is usually when we have our moment of disillusionment and we look at God and we felt like I felt in the middle of that pizzeria that day, this isn't the deal, I want my money back. For some of you, that disillusionment wrecked your faith years ago and you're still recovering. If you haven't had this moment, you will. And the life under God posture sets us up to be disillusioned and frustrated. It sets us up to shipwreck our faith. There's no better example of someone who had this mindset and had to be set straight than Job in the Bible. Job is actually, he perfectly illustrates not only this first problem, but the second problem as well. The second problem with this life under God posture is it reduces and seeks to control God. It looks like we're following the rules. It looks like we're submitted. It looks like we're being obedient, doing everything that we're supposed to do. But in our hearts is this motivation, this murkiness that's pushing us to seek to control God. I can't control the universe, so I'm going to appease the God that can, and then you owe me. I've behaved well, now you owe me protection. It seeks to control God. And we see this posture all over the story of Job. Job is the first wisdom book in the Bible. It was the first book of the Bible ever written. The Monday Night Men's group is actually going over the book of Job this semester. So if I say something in here that interests you or that sparks you, I would encourage you to sign up for that. But some of you are familiar with the story of Job. Others may have forgotten and some may not have heard it yet. So just as a primer, I'll tell you what's happening. Job is the most righteous man that's alive at the time. And God allows Satan to torment him. And he torments him in devastating ways. Job is a very wealthy man. He loses all of his wealth. He loses all of his real estate holdings. He loses all of his servants and employees. He even loses his children. He has boils on his skin. His wife's advice to him is curse God and die. You want to talk about someone that experienced unwarranted and unfair pain? Job. And the first 36 chapters of the book are his friends giving him advice in three different cycles. And this advice is riddled with the life under God posture. They come to him and they say, Job, what have you done? What have you done to deserve this kind of punishment from God? You've lost your real estate. You've lost all your buildings. What did you do? Certainly you are hiding some secret sin, Job. And Job says, no, I'm not. Like, I'm not doing that. I promise I'm not. And then they come back a second time. They're like, no, no, no, Job, you're not listening to us. What is it that you're doing? What have you done? Because clearly you have sinned against the Lord, and that's why you're being punished in this way. Clearly you violated your side of the contract, and that's why God's not keeping up his end of the deal. It's this life under God posture. And after three cycles of this, where they become really pointed with him, Job still refuses and says, no, that's not what I'm doing. I don't have some secret unrepented sin. So he demands an audience with God. And he goes to God to shake his fist at him and to say, hey, this isn't fair, man. This isn't part of the deal. I've always honored you. I've always worshiped you. I raised my kids to follow you and love you. I offer you everything and you're letting this happen to me. This isn't fair, God. And any of us that have ever experienced that moment of disillusion where we would look at God and we would go, this isn't fair. I've shared with you before, mine and Jen's struggle to have kids. With every new young couple that would so easily have two and three and five children, I would look at God and go, what gives, man? This isn't fair. This isn't the deal. I think we've all said that to God at one point or another in our own ways. God's response to Job is profound. And it is not at all what you would expect. Job asks for an audience with God to say, hey God, what's the deal? This isn't fair. And God's response is one of anger and frustration. Look at what God says to Job. This is amazing to me. It's one of the most profound things in the Bible. Chapter 38, then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man. I will question you and you will make it known to me. Does that sound like a God who's about to go, yeah, my bad, I didn't keep up my end of the deal. Here's why I broke contract. Sounds like God is angry. I had a professor one time say, Job wanted a man-to-man conversation with God. The problem was he was one man short. God says, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? You want to talk to me like a man? Okay, dress yourself like a man. It angers God. And then God, for two chapters, proceeds to ask him questions. He says, where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the world? Surely you know. Surely you understand, Job, the inner workings of the universe. If you're asking me this question, you want to understand how I orchestrate everything, how I run the universe, you're questioning my leadership, then maybe you can explain to me how the Leviathan and the behemoth came into being. Maybe you can explain to me how the world works. Surely you were there when I told the oceans that they can go this far and no further. When I drew the boundaries of the continents, surely you know Job. And God's response is very clear to Job. Job, most righteous man to ever live, who in the season of his life adopted the life under God posture. God says, hey man, you've forgotten your place. I'm the creator. You're the creation. I won't be reduced to your contracts. I will not be reduced to your control. You don't get to follow the rules like I'm some pagan God and then hold my feet to the fire about the contract that I didn't enter into. That's not the deal. I'm God. You're not going to understand me. And I think one of the most difficult things about the Christian life is to understand there are going to be parts of God that we can't understand. God's point here with Job is, even if I explained it to you, even if I set you down and told me everything that I was thinking with what's going on in your life, even if I told you everything that I could, it would be like you trying to explain yourself to a six-month-old. It's just not going to work. We don't have the capacity to understand. And when we adopt this life under God posture, it seeks to reduce God to our level and it seeks to control him and it angers God because he's not gonna enter into our contracts with us. The last problem is highlighted by Jesus himself. The last problem with this posture that we wanna look at this morning is that it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. If we adopt this life under God posture, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. Because in this posture, what we assume is those who are blessed are obedient and those who are struggling are disobedient. This attitude was around when Jesus walked the earth. They came upon a blind man one day and the disciples, his disciples looked at him and they said, what did he do or his parents do that made him blind? What's their sin? That's life under God posture. And what this does is it reduces relationship to a set of rules. It takes the relationship that Jesus wants with us, that he created us for, to be in relation with him, and it reduces it to a set of rules. And it makes it, this posture makes it entirely possible to appear outwardly spiritual because you follow the rules and your life seems blessed when inside you're rotting away because there's no relationship at all. It robs the relationship of all emotions and the actual relationship that it should be. It's kind of like church over the summer. The thing that broke my heart about church during COVID is that church is a fundamentally communal institution. And I had to get up in this room and preach. And it felt like a performance to an empty room. And hope that you guys would watch it three days later. And I don't know about you. But church got to feeling pretty empty for me over the summer. Because there was no community in the church. And that's what makes the church the church. From a human standpoint. And we do the same thing with our relationship with Jesus. If we reduce it to a set of rules, things I have to do to be right with God, we remove the relationship from it and it becomes empty. There's no better example of this than the Pharisees. The religious leaders in Jesus's day were experts at this. Outwardly, they looked great. They were living the blessed life. They were good. Everyone looked to them and tried to get on their level. If I asked the Pharisees, where's your relationship with God and where do you want it to be? They'd be like, I'm currently at a 10. I would like it to remain at a 10. That's the Pharisees because they have it all together on the outside. But here's what Jesus says to this group of people in Matthew 23. In Matthew 23, verse 27, he says, you're like a dirty cup that's been cleaned on the outside, but inside you're filthy. He looks at the religious leaders of the day, the ones who are supposed to know better. And he says, you're hypocrites. You're whitewashed tombs. It's a pretty tombstone with a rotting carcass underneath it. When we adopt this life under God posture and we reduce our relationship to a set of rules, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites who on the outside can look like they have their life together and on the inside are rotting away. This incidentally is how someone can know more Bible than anyone you've ever known in your life and be a jerk. So I would ask you as we finish, and I warned you, I'm not giving you a resolution here. I'm not saying, so this is the right way to do it. I'm just saying that's bad. And I would end this week by asking you this question, and this is what caused me repentance. And if this resonated with you, I would really encourage you to read the chapter and follow along with it. But I would ask you this week, as you're introspective and look at yourself, how much of this posture do you see in you? How much of this do you see in you? How much over the years have you followed God because somehow by following him, I'm going to appease him and win favor? Have you ever had something big in your life coming up and so all of a sudden you get real spiritual? You ever had something super bad happen and then you get really spiritual? I don't want this to happen again. That's a life under God posture. And when we adopt this posture, it will lead to disillusionment. We reduce God and we try to control him. And ultimately, we end up legalistic hypocrites who have removed the relational part from the relationship with Jesus and replaced it with rules. And we become whitewashed tombs. So how much of this exists in you? Let's pray and then Steve's going to come and introduce to us a new song for the series. Father, we love you. We're grateful for you. Lord, I know that within us, those of us who know you, is a desire to know you more. I know that within us is a desire to grow. Within us is a holy dissatisfaction with where we are and a divine yearning to know you better. God, I pray that you would make a path for us. Would you give us the honesty in our hearts and in our minds to be honest with you and with ourselves about where we stand and how we've approached you? God, if we have come to you simply because we want you to protect us, simply because we want you to bless us, and not because we want you, would you convict us of that? And would you show us a better way? It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to be here again with you in this way. We are in now the middle of a series called The Time of Kings. We're going through the books of 1 and 2 Kings, which is probably worth saying. I don't think I've mentioned this yet. When the book was written, when the books of 1 and 2 Kings were written, they were one big long book. But for the sake of the length of scrolls back in the day, they just cut it in half and call it 1 and 2 Kings. But more accurately, we are together as a church going through some of the stories in the book of Kings. This week, we arrive at what is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I would argue this is one of the greatest stories in the Old Testament. This story has everything. I love it so much. This is the story this week of Elijah and his showdown with the 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. We see this story in 1 Kings chapter 18. So if you have a Bible there at home with you, please go ahead and open that up. I try to encourage you every week, open up your Bible, go through the story with me, interact with the text with me, look at the parts that I'm not able to cover or that I don't bring up, and get a more holistic view of the story than just the perspective that I'm giving you. In this story, we see, I think, one of the greatest figures in Scripture, the prophet Elijah. Elijah and Elisha are these tremendous prophets that we see in the book of Kings. They don't get their own book later in the Old Testament, so we don't often pay them as much attention, but they were remarkable figures. Elijah was so righteous that God didn't even want him to experience death. He sent down a chariot to pick him up and carry him to heaven before he could even die. Elijah is a remarkable figure, and this is kind of his big moment. In this moment, he's going to interact with a king named Ahab, and we need to understand who Ahab was and the background that they have at this showdown. So I hope that if you've never heard this story before, that you are delighted, that you love it, that it flings you further into Scripture and brings it to life for you. If you do know this story, I hope maybe today we'll see it in a different light than perhaps what we've looked at it in in the past. So Elijah comes on the scene in 1 Kings chapter 17. That's when we see him. He's interacting with a king named Ahab. Ahab shows up in Kings 16. And when Ahab shows up, the writer of Kings, the author of Kings, tells us a couple things about Ahab was more evil than all the kings that came before him. And that he, more than any other king, because of his faithlessness, provoked the Lord to anger. Ahab was the king of Israel, the northern tribes. We learned last week that Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, had so much pride that he refused to listen to wisdom. And because of this, the kingdom descended into civil war. And for the rest of the Old Testament, continues on that path with the northern kingdoms of Israel being led by one king and the southern kingdom of Judah being led by another. Ahab is a king of Israel, the northern kingdoms. Jeroboam, the guy that went to war with Rehoboam, built some temples to some false gods and made up his own religion for tax revenue, really, if you look at it, in the northern kingdom. And so Ahab is one of these kings in the northern kingdom. The southern kingdoms had a handful of good kings who obeyed God. We're going to learn about some of those in this series to come. The northern kingdom had no good kings. Every king was evil. Every king was apostate. They were all bad. Ahab was the worst. He provoked God to anger more than any other king because of his deeds. He married a lady named Jezebel who had her own religion of Asherah that she followed, and she had 400 prophets that she kept at her table. Ahab had 450 prophets of Baal that he kept at his table. So they are funding 850 prophets for these counterfeit religions. Because they're doing this, God speaks to his prophet Elijah, who goes to Ahab, and he tells Ahab, because of your sin, because of who you are, I'm going to bring a drought on this land, and it will not rain again until I give the word, Elijah says. Ahab, of course, is incensed. He's furious. He tries to kill Elijah. Elijah gets away, and he flees, and he wanders around in the wilderness for three years. From there, God says, Elijah, I want you to go to this place where there's a brook. So Elijah goes, and he drinks from the brook, and every day God sends ravens with bread and with meat to feed Elijah in the morning and in the evening. I think this is the first recorded place in history that we see Uber eats. So they bring him bread and meat every day, and then eventually the brook runs dry because of the drought, and he hides out with a widow and her son. The son dies. Elijah lays himself over the son and prays and brings the boy back to life. It's this remarkable, remarkable story. This whole time, Ahab is trying to hunt him down and kill him, but he can't find him. And so there's this drought happening. Everybody is mad at Ahab for allowing the drought to happen because it's happening under his rule. No one's growing any crops. The country is doing terribly. And in Ahab's view, it's Elijah's fault. Three years later, Elijah decides it's time to meet up with Ahab. So he meets up with an old prophet friend of his, a guy named Obadiah. Obadiah has a book at the end of the Old Testament in the Minor Prophets. And he tells Obadiah in this really interesting conversation, and honestly, you should go read it. It's before this. This conversation with Obadiah is in chapter 17 and then part of 18. You should read this conversation that Elijah has with Obadiah. I don't have time to jump into it this morning, but it really proves for us that when God asks us to do hard things, he's going to see us through in that difficult season. So he goes to Obadiah. He says, go tell Ahab that I want to come see him. And then eventually they meet up. And when they meet up, Ahab says, oh, you troubler of Israel, to Elijah. And Elijah says, that's not me, man. That's you. That's you. And as a matter of fact, we're going to settle this. I want you to go gather all 450 of your prophets of Baal. And I want you to gather the 400 prophets of Asherah. And I want you to meet me on Mount Carmel on this day. And we're going to assemble all of Israel. So that's the stage. They're on Mount Carmel. I had the opportunity when I went several years ago to Israel to go be on Mount Carmel and look around. In northern Israel, there is lush farmland that is a lot more green than you think it would be. And Mount Carmel, you're able to see all of that from there. And you can look across the way and see the Mount of Transfiguration for those that know your New Testament well. And it was kind of a surreal experience to be there knowing that all of these events that I'm about to tell you about took place on this small hill, really, in northern Israel. And so they assemble all of Israel. Everybody comes. The families come and they assemble on the mountain, around the mountain, at the top of the mountain. All the 450 prophets of Baal are there. Ahab is there. Elijah is there. And Elijah begins to address the crowd. And this is what Elijah says. I pick it up in verse 22. Then Elijah said to the people, I, even I only, am left a prophet of the Lord. So he says, I'm the only one left. I'm the only prophet standing. Now, it's important to note put no fire on it. They're in it. They are there. And he says, here's the deal. We're going to get two bulls. I'm going to give one. See how they've got 450 people and I've just got me? I'm going to give one to the 450, to the prophets of Baal, and I'm going to take one of the bulls. And then I want you guys, you go and you build an altar. You cut the bull into pieces and you put that bull on the altar. I'm going to go over here. I'm going to build my altar. I'm going to cut the bull into pieces and put it on my altar. And then here's what we're going to do. We're going to pray to our gods. I'm going to pray to God, the father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the people of Israel, the God of the people who are here. And you pray to your God. You pray to Baal. And whichever one sends fire down first to light these altars on fire and burn up these bulls, that's the God. All right, that's it. And then we're done. Everybody good? And everybody says, Ahab says, the prophets say, the people say, it is well spoken. Deal. We agree. They spit in their hands. They shook them. Back when you could do that. This is the showdown. So Elijah, kind of like the cat that swallowed the canary, he's like, listen, Baal, you guys, go ahead. Just go ahead, build your altar. I'm just going to chill out over here. You just, you go over there, you pick the bull you want, you'll cut it up, put it on the altar that you make, And then you get to praying. And I'll be over here, and I'm just going to chill out for a second. I picture Elijah getting one of those camping chairs and kind of folding it out and sitting it down. And then maybe cracking something open and sitting in the camping chair and just kind of chilling out watching. Going, good luck, suckers. And they get to it, man. Those prophets of Baal, they get to it. They start weeping and wailing, and the Bible says limping around the altar. They're doing this and that. And you've kind of seen probably some clips somewhere in your life, some pagan ceremonies where there's this weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and crying out and dancing and chanting and whatever it is that they do. And they did this. Can you imagine the scene of 450 prophets crying out to their God who doesn't exist, trying to get him to bring fire from heaven, what they must have been doing, the show that they must have been putting on. Meanwhile, Elijah's just sitting over there watching them, right? It says they did this until noon. They did it all morning long for hours. They're just dancing and prancing and chanting and raving and ranting and weeping and wailing, and nothing is happening. And so Elijah decides to talk a little smack. I love this. I love this line in the Bible. I love that Elijah says this. The fact that this is included in Scripture tells me that there is space in God's kingdom for sarcastic jerks. And it just, man, it warms my heart. It makes me think there might be space in God's kingdom for people like me because this is what Elijah says to them. He says in verse 27, and at noon Elijah mocked them. Okay, so the Bible, I'm not making this up, the Bible's saying he is making fun of them. He said, cry aloud, for he is a God. Either he is musing or he is relieving himself, that's my favorite one. Surely he's there. Maybe he's musing. Maybe he's just messing with you. Maybe he's just up there just kind of waiting until you do something right. Maybe, now I don't know what's going on with Baal's constitution, but maybe he's got a little tummy ache. Maybe he's in the bathroom. I don't know how long it takes him in there, but he's a god, so it could be pretty serious. I'm not really sure. Maybe, I tell you what, maybe he's on a journey. Maybe he just went out of town. Maybe he ran to Asheville real quick. He's going to be right back. Just keep it up. He is making fun of them, man, and it is great. And after he makes fun of them, it says that they began to cut themselves with swords and lances until the blood gushed as was their custom. So now they're ranting and raving and prancing and dancing and chanting and now they're screaming out and they're cutting themselves and they're stabbing themselves with lances and the blood is flowing all to appeal to this God that does not exist. And there's this great sentence in the Bible after all this happens, it says, but there was no voice, no one answered, no one paid attention. Isn't that a sobering sentence for what happens when we cry out to gods that don't exist? Isn't that a sobering response for what happens when we place our hope in a thing that doesn't deserve it? When we do that, eventually we're met with the response that no one listened, no one pays attention, no one is hearing what we are saying. And no one heard the prophets of Baal. There's no God there to hear them. They were wasting their time. They looked foolish and Elijah pointed it out. After they had done their thing, Elijah goes back over to his altar. Now the first thing he does is, he says, people of Israel, gather around. Come here. Come here. I want you to see this. Get in real tight. And he grabs 12 stones, and he makes an altar with those 12 stones. And he does that very intentionally. Whenever people from Israel see 12 stones, they are reminded of the altar that their forefather Joshua built when God in his goodness brought them across the Jordan River out of Egyptian oppression. The very first thing he did is build an altar of 12 stones as a sign and a symbol and remembrance of a God who is righteous and keeps his promise. And so Elijah, by building this altar with 12 stones, is telling them, do you remember this God? This God that brought you here? This God that gave you this land? Each stone represents a tribe of Israel, represents God's goodness. So he's doing this to make a point. Look, gather around. And he builds an altar with 12 stones. Then he takes the wood and he puts it on top of the altar so that there's something to burn. Then he takes the bull, he cuts it up, and he places the bull on top of the wood. Then he looks at the people and he says, go fill these barrels with water and come back and dump it on the altar. And he makes them do that three times until water is running down the altar, everything on it is soaked, and then there's a trench dug around the altar, and that is filled with water too. And then it's time for Elijah to cry out to his God to see if his God won't send some flames, because Baal hasn't done it yet. And rather than ranting or raving or dancing or chanting or cutting himself or making this big, huge scene. This is what Elijah Lord. Answer me that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God and that you have turned their hearts back. I'm going to pause right there. Can you picture in your mind the juxtaposition of the two prophets, two sets of prophets, the prophets of Baal who were just carrying on and ranting and raving and causing this huge scene, 450 of them just messing around all day, just causing this huge stir and this huge scene all day, cutting themselves and being dramatic about it and just all this over-the-top flailing. And then for Elijah, when it comes time to appeal to his God, he simply gathers the people around and he prays quietly because he knows that his God can hear him. He knows his God doesn't have to shout out. He doesn't have to shout out in a certain way to get God to pay attention. He knows that he doesn't have to do a certain dance or a certain chant to get his God to pay attention. He knows that God hears all the minds of his head and his heart and his mouth. And so he starts to pray. And I don't even think he prayed to make sure that God could hear him. I think he prayed for the benefit of the people around him. And he prays that beautiful prayer. The Lord God of Israel. He appeals to him to send down fire. I love the juxtaposition of those two types of appeals. And when he finished, when he prayed God. The Lord, Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the great I am from the burning bush that rescued us from Egypt, that delivered us into Israel, that gave us the ground that we're standing on, that Lord, he is God, not Baal. That's the story of the showdown between the prophet of God, Elijah, and the prophets of Baal. And I love that story. I love so much about it. Many of you know it and love it too. And as I approached it this week, I knew I was going to be preaching about it. I thought, goodness, I was kind of excited to sit down and begin to study and just kind of say, God, what are you going to show me this week? What's going to leap off the page this week? What point is going to come out of this? How would you have us apply this to our life? And as I read, I saw this verse at the beginning of the story that I intentionally skipped as I began today that suddenly reframed the entire story for me. I've read this story a dozen times, but for some reason I've never noticed this verse before. But as I noticed it this time, it reshaped the whole story for me, and I hope that it will reshape it for you. What I see here is that this story of the showdown between the prophet of God and the prophets of Baal, the story is bracketed by these two verses that are absolutely incredible. The second one, the take home, is what we just discovered, is the people going, you are the Lord. He is God. Repeating it, the Lord, he is God. Which in that moment is a confession. It's an admission. It's a repentance and an apology. Yes, the Lord is God. Baal is not. But I want you to see this verse at the beginning of the story, verse 21, that when I read it, it reshaped for me the entire way I think about this story. Now, look at what Elijah says to them. I told you that he gathered them up on the mountain. I told you that he got everyone around him and he laid out the rules of the game. But before he laid out the rules of the game, look at what he says. This is amazing to me. Verse 21, and Elijah came near to all the people and said, You say, listen, listen Israel. And this is a depiction of what a prophet is supposed to do. When we think of a prophet, we tend to think of people who tell the future and mystical in some way. But this is what a prophet does. A prophet says hard things to a hardened people. And he looked at Israel and he says, how long are you going to keep straddling the fence between God and Baal? How long are you going to embrace Baal when that works for you and embrace God when that works for you? How much longer will you insist on doing this? And you get the idea that these people of Israel kind of worshipped whatever God was going to serve them best in the moment. That around some people they feared the Lord and around some people they honored Baal. And in some places they put on these masks and these clothes and other places they put on these masks and these clothes. Neither of their following was sincere. None of their faith was authentic and deep and meaningful. They were just putting on whichever God was good for them in the moment. They weren't committed to either. And Elijah says, enough of this. How long will you continue to straddle the fence? How long will you continue to limp along between two opinions? Let's settle this today. And if Baal brings fire from heaven, then great, we're going to worship Baal. But man, if God brings fire from heaven, then knock it off with the Baal stuff and let's follow God. Do you realize that that's the reason for the whole showdown? Do you realize that the whole reason that Elijah did this, that he comes out of hiding, that he goes to Ahab, that he says, assemble your prophets, do it on Mount Carmel, that all this fanfare, that he tells the people of Israel, come and be here, that he tells them, gather around me as I pray. Do you understand that the entire exercise was done not because Elijah had something with Ahab, not for Elijah to defeat Ahab, not for Elijah to overcome the prophets, but for the Lord to win back the hearts of his people. That was the goal. And he starts off the whole day by saying, how long are you going to straddle the fence, guys? How long are you going to pretend to follow God sometimes and pretend to follow Baal other times? Let's just settle this right now. And if God proves that he is God, then let's knock it off with the Baal stuff. And then the showdown happens. And at the end, we see their wonderful response. The Lord, Yahweh, He is God. And they worship Him alone. The whole point of the showdown was for God to win back the hearts of his people. And as I read this this week, it was an absolute punch in the gut to read that sentence, how long will you go limping between two opinions? Because how many of us can relate to that? How many of us listening do that? How many of you listening? Listen, it's just you in your living room, okay? And the people around you already know if this is true of you or not. So you're the only one you're trying to fool. How many of you in your living room have a face that you put on at church and a face that you put on at work? How many of us, me included, have a face that we put on around church people and a face that we put on around comfortable friends? How many of us straddle the line between these two opinions that in work and in our profession, we go out and we kill it and we crush it and we kill and we eat and that's great. And we act a certain way with certain morals and a certain moral compass there and then when we get around church people we have a different moral compass here. How many of us straddle the line between standards that we have for ourselves and then things that we accuse other people of? A lot of us, a lot of us, we're being honest, we're going to be super critical of what so and so over here does and not have any grace for them while we forgive the same sin in ourself over and over again. How many of us, listen, I'm sorry, this is so personal, how many of us teach our children things that we don't even do? How often in your life have you said what you believe with your mouth and then shown what you really believe with your actions? This kicked me right in the teeth this week. All of us, at some point, go limping along, straddling the line between two opinions, between two versions of ourselves. And I believe that this showdown wasn't just for the people of Israel, but that it's here in 1 Kings 18 to echo through the centuries for us today so that it would get our attention and that when Elijah looks at Israel and says, how long will you go limping between two opinions? He's looking dead at you, asking you the same question. How long are you going to straddle the fence, man? How much further is this hypocrisy going to go? Because I thought about this for myself this week. These two opinions that war within our hearts, they manifest themselves in different ways, right? The standards that we have for ourselves versus for other people, the face that we put on here versus there. They're going to manifest themselves in different ways, but at the heart of it, the difference of opinion that's happening is really this war between two ideas. And I think we claim one of these ideas every day. It's what we want to claim, what we know we should claim, what the people of Israel claim, which is the Lord, He is God. And then there's what happens in our heart, which is He may be God, but I'm the Lord. Those are the two opinions. The Lord, He is God. He is good. He is the Alpha and the omega. He is the Lord of my life. I will follow him. This is the fundamental confession of salvation, is that the Lord is God and that I will follow him. I am submitted to his leadership in my life. And then the idea that wars with that, which is the Lord may be God, or he may be God, but I'm the Lord. Yeah, he's God, and I believe in him, for sure. But today, I'm doing what Nate wants. Today, Nate's calling the shots. Today, Nate decides what's good and what's not. He's God. Absolutely, he's God. I believe he's God. But today, I call the shots. These are the opinions that war in each of our hearts. The Lord, he is God. He is good. I trust him. I will follow him. I will live according to him. I will submit to him. And then, yeah, the Lord, he's God. But today I'm the Lord. Today I'm doing what I think is right. And I think that this showdown happened not just to show us that God was superior to Baal, not just to wake up the hearts of his people in Israel and ask them, when are you going to draw the line? How long will you limp between these two opinions? But I think the reason this is here is to look at us thousands of years later and have us ask the question of ourselves, how long will I straddle the line between two opinions? How many more days will I get up and will I say, yeah, he's God, but today I'm Lord? How many more times are we going to do that? I think being a Christian is to make that claim that he is the Lord, he is God. God is the Lord of my life. And every day it's a battle to reclaim that and say, yeah, he's God, but I'm the Lord. And I wanted to preach this this morning and really be forceful with it so that we might ask, in all honesty and transparency, how long will I straddle the line between these two opinions? How many more days will I wake up and say, yeah, he's God, but I'm the Lord? And so I thought I would leave you with this simple question. What are you going to need in your life to make the confession that the Israelites made and make it every day? Will this showdown be enough? Will 1 Kings 18 be enough? Will what Elijah did thousands of years ago when once and for all God is the God of gods and it's settled and it's done, stop limping between two opinions, knock it off with the Baal stuff and follow God. It was enough for the people of Israel. Will it be enough for you? Or will you require your own showdown? I can only speak for me and say that I hope it's enough for me. I have no interest in a showdown with God. I hope that for many of us listening, we will quit straddling the line. We will quit confessing that he is God, but then believing that we are Lord. And that we will walk in such a way that with both our mouth and our heart and our actions, we will declare every day, the Lord, He is God. Let's pray. Father, Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You are God. You are good. You sent your son so that we might call you Lord. You sent your son to invite us in. And yet so many of us in so many ways, seen and unseen, felt and unfelt, we often reclaim that lordship. I, more than anyone, limp along between two opinions. Father, would you help those of us who are limping? Those of us who are wandering, would you draw us back? God, would you let this showdown be enough so that we don't require our own? Lord, let us feel even this morning your warmth, your embrace, your love, your approval, your desire for us. Let us declare from this day forward that you are the Lord and that you are God. In Jesus' name, amen.

It's good to see all of you this Sunday. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I appreciate you being here on this December Sunday as we continue to gear up for Christmas together. I'm really excited about what we have in store for you, not only for Jingle Jam, but also for our Christmas Eve service. This is our series called Joy. Kyle, our student pastor, opened up the series talking about the joy of the light, of knowing Jesus and of sharing that light with others. Last week, I talked with you about the joy of forgiveness, and I really hope, my sincere prayer is and was, that God used that to bring about maybe some reconciliation in your life and in some of your relationships. I hope that you found that to be a helpful way to think about forgiveness. This morning, I want to talk about the joy of gratitude, the joy that we get when we can be people who are thankful, who are grateful people. The Bible has a lot to say about gratitude in the same way that it has a lot to say about forgiveness as it encourages us to forgive over and over and over again. The Bible encourages us to be grateful many, many times in many ways in many different places. In the Old Testament, David tells us that we are to enter God's courts with thanksgiving in our hearts, that we enter his gates with praise. And so it's kind of gratitude is the posture through which we approach the Lord. In the New Testament, we're told over and over again to be thankful in all things, be thankful always, pray without ceasing, and be grateful for everything. Everyone tells us that. As Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord's Prayer, He models for us a daily gratitude, thanking God for the blessings that we have in our life. We're even told by at least three different authors in the New Testament to be grateful when life is hard, to be grateful when we are in struggles, to consider it pure joy when we endure trials. So the Bible has a lot to say about gratitude. And I think it's because gratitude is one of the more underrated things or character traits that we could have. Fostering a spirit or a heart or a character of gratitude, I think, is something that we forget to do, but it's underrated in its power and efficacy in our life. And I hope today, as we leave, as you guys go back out into your week, that you have a new appreciation for what it means to be grateful and to have a grateful heart. To do that, I want to first talk about a picture of ingratitude, what the opposite of gratitude looks like. So last week I was doing my weekly Sunday tradition, particularly in the fall, which is to kind of go home and collapse. My whole week, the rhythms of a pastor kind of build up to the sermon. You're stressed about the sermon all day. I hope it doesn't suck and that people aren't disappointed who brought their friends and the whole deal. And I hope this honors God. And I hope that I'm not an apostate and the whole deal. And so you just kind of, you focus on the sermon all week and then I give it and I go home and I'm like, ugh. And I just kind of want to shut down for a while. And so in the fall, it's perfect because I get to watch TV. And so last week I'm watching football and the four o'clock game comes on. It's the Chiefs and the Patriots. And something incredibly interesting happened at halftime of this Patriots game. Now, for those who don't know, you may not know who the Patriots are. You may not be, that's football, by the way. You may not be into football, and that's all right. You don't have to know football to appreciate what I'm about to say. I'm going to kind of lay some groundwork for you, all right? So for those who don't know, the Patriots have had what I think is the best 20-year run of any sports team in the history of sports teams. I'm not talking about the best 20-year run in the last 20 years. I'm talking about besides maybe the 1920s Yankees have had the best 20-year run of any team in the history of teams. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely historic. I went back and counted. In the last 20 years, the Patriots have made it to the Super Bowl nine times. They've played in almost half of the Super Bowls. The other years, they came almost just one game short almost every year. To be a Patriots fan is to over and over and over again get to cheer for a winner. It's an incredible privilege to be a Patriots fan. I know this because I'm a Falcons fan. Okay? It is not a privilege to be a Falcons fan. I'm from Atlanta, and statistically speaking, if you combine all of the seasons without a championship, so you take in Atlanta at one point, that was four seasons in one year, hockey, baseball, basketball, and football going consecutively without a championship. Atlanta is the losingest city in the country. And that's statistics. That's not hyperbole. I have longed to be a Patriots fan. I wish that I could celebrate that sort of success. During those 20 years, they've been to nine Super Bowls. They've won six of them. There's only one other franchise that's won six Super Bowls, and they would even trade their last 20 years for the Patriots' last 20 years. They have the best coach to ever coach a sport. They have the best quarterback to ever play the game, and that pains me to say because Peyton Manning's my favorite football player of all time, but Tom Brady, man, you can't argue with rings. To be a Patriots fan has been an incredible privilege for the past 20 years. Yet, on Sunday, the Patriots are playing, playing the Chiefs, and the Patriots this year are having a good season, not a great season. There's some rumblings in their fan base that they may not be as good as they once were. It's looking like they may not win the Super Bowl this year. And at halftime, the Patriots are running into the locker room down two scores, 21 to seven. And as they're running into the locker room at Gillette Stadium, do you know what those Patriots fans did? Booed. They booed them. Can you believe this? After one bad half of football, and it wasn't even that bad, they booed them. They let them know loudly and clearly, you stink and we're dissatisfied and we deserve more from you. And I sat on my couch in shocked disbelief and I thought, and I'm sorry, you bunch of entitled jerks. Do you have any idea what I would do for the last 20 years that you've just gotten to enjoy as Patriots fan? If you're a 10-year-old Patriots fan, you just figure that they win the Super Bowl. That's just what happens. It's your birthright. Do you know what I would do to trade places with you? Try being a Falcons fan for like a season, you jerks. Like, it made me mad. They were so entitled. And as I thought about that, and listen, we have some Patriots fans at the church. They're lovely people. Steve, our worship pastor, he's kind of a Patriots fan. He's not really a sports guy, but if he were, he claims to be a Patriots. From everything I can tell, he seems to be a great guy. And so I'm not trying to run down all Patriots fans, but the ones in that stadium that day, my goodness, the entitlement on them. And I sat on my couch and I was kind of stewing and calling the names in my head and couldn't get over the audacity of it, texting my friends, did y'all see that? But of course, as I sat there, anytime you cast blame on somebody else, my mind begins to go, well, am I guilty of the same thing? And I realized we all are. We're all of us in that way, this pains me to say, we're all in that way Patriots fans. We all act like that because they were simply entitled. And to be entitled is to be forgetful of the past and desirous of the future. To be entitled is to forget everything that got us here, is to forget all the blessings and all the things I've enjoyed up to this moment, and then to not be aware or cognizant in this moment and just desire us of the future. And isn't that what they were? As they're in the stands and they're watching this one singular bad half of football, totally forgetting the last 20 years that they've had, that they've gotten to enjoy being a fan like nobody else on the face of the planet. In that moment that they booed and expressed their displeasure, aren't they simply forgetting all the things that they've enjoyed up to that point and only thinking about what they want in the future? Haven't they forgotten their past and become desirous of the future? And isn't this what we do? Haven't in our lives, all of us, at different points, been entitled jerks? If you don't think you have, look at your kids at Christmas. Come on, your kids expect stuff, right? They're not like hoping that maybe they get a present. They gave you a list in September. My three-year-old already has this figured out. Everything she saw over the course of the list, can you make sure and tell Santa that that's a thing that I want? Our kids grow up entitled. Entitlement says, I deserve this. It's my birthright. This is something that I've earned. You should give it to me. I don't have to be grateful for it because I deserve this anyways. That's what entitlement is. If our kids aren't enough to help us realize that this is a path that we are all on, how long does it take you and your life right now to get tired of the new shiny thing? How many weeks or months after that promotion, you finally get the job, you finally get the promotion, you finally get the thing, you get the position that you wanted, you've closed the sale that you've wanted, you're so happy about it, praise God, this is great. How many weeks does it take you to resent those coworkers too? How long does it take you to think, I wonder what's next? How long does it take you to forget what got you there and be desirous of what's ahead? How long does it take for the new car to become the one that you want to sell? How long does it take after we buy a new house to put the Zillow app back on our phone and just see what's out there? How about this? How long did it take you after you got married and all the happiness and all the pomp and circumstance around that day to have an evening where you looked across the living room and you thought to yourself, I could have done better than this. For Jen, it was about three days. How long does it take us to be dissatisfied with the blessings that we have, to forget our past, to be totally lost to the present and be desirous of the future and in our own way be booing our life because of a simple bad half? To be shaking our fist at God and saying, God, why do I have to deal with this? Why do I have to go through this? Why can't I have that thing with no mind at all to everything that he's already given us? How long does it take us to become entitled? And the problem with entitlement is it's the antithesis of gratitude. If the Bible tells us to be grateful, to be thankful, to give thanks in all things and at all times and in all circumstances, if that's a characteristic that we're supposed to embody, then we should acknowledge that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. It's the exact opposite of gratitude. And we should also acknowledge that there is a natural drift towards it. You haven't all been entitled jerks because just in your soul you're a bunch of jerks and we're a bunch of brats. It's all us. We're all that way. Gratitude is something you have to choose on purpose. We don't naturally drift towards gratitude. We naturally drift towards, I deserve, I earn, this belongs to me. We naturally drift towards being forgetful of our past and desirous of what's in the future with no mind to what's going on in the present. That's a natural drift that we have. I don't think, and I'm not here this morning so that anybody feels badly about it. I'm just here so that we will acknowledge it and understand that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. Because entitlement says, I deserve this. And gratitude actually confesses something. I learned this in my research from an Irish monk, and I thought it was a good way to think about gratitude. Gratitude is a confession. To be grateful for something confesses that this is a gift that I do not deserve. Gratitude says, this thing that I have in my life, this person, this relationship, this material possession, this house, this opportunity, this skill set, this location in time and in space and in geography, all the things in my life, gratitude acknowledges this is a gift that I do not deserve. To go back to our original illustration, those Patriots fans have not done anything to win those Super Bowls. Nothing. They've not done anything that any other fan base hasn't done. They just have the luxury of being born in New England and getting to cheer for Patriots. And good for them. But it's a gift that they got that they did not deserve. Being a Falcons fan is a punishment that I've received that I do not deserve. God and I are still working that out. But to be truly grateful for something is to confess, this is a gift that I've received that I do not deserve. If you feel like you deserve it, if you feel like you've earned it, then you can't be grateful for the thing. If you're a salesperson and you go out and you slay the dragon and you get the big commission check that comes from slaying the dragon, you don't walk into your boss's office and go, thank you so much for this check. This is such a sweet thing for you to do. No, it was negotiated. You earned that. You deserve that. The gratitude comes in when we reflect on the skills and abilities that got that deal done, and we thank God for blessing us with those. But gratitude has to confess that the thing that I'm grateful for is a gift that I do not deserve. The other thing that gratitude does that I think is so very powerful is it anchors us in the present as we remember the past. Gratitude anchors us in the present as we remember the past. We're not fast-forwarding ahead. We're not looking to the next thing. We're not anxious or desirous about the future. We haven't forgotten the past. We're reflective on the past, the moments that conspired to bring us here. We're anchored in the present, and we remember the past. The best example of this I've seen that I think of often is, I call him my Uncle Edwin. He's really Jen's Uncle Edwin. Jen's dad, John, has a twin sister named Mary. She married a guy named Edwin, and they live in Dothan, Alabama. If you didn't follow that, Jen's aunt and uncle live in Alabama. And every Thanksgiving, we go down to Dothan, Alabama, and we have Thanksgiving with the Morrises. Jen's family, the Vincennes, go down with the Morrises, and we get together and we have Thanksgiving. And Edwin and Mary have three daughters that are about our age, and they have kids now too, and it's just a really great, sweet time. It's one of the great gifts in my life to have been grafted into that family. I'm very grateful for that. And when we go to Thanksgiving, we have the meal. It's a big, good meal. It's one of the best ones I have of the year. There's still an adult table and a kid's table. The parents sit at one table, and the average age of the kid's table now is like 36, but it's still the kid's table. And we have way more fun at the kid's table. There's always much more laughter going on as we swap stories and catch up and reflect on old ones and things like that. And at one point or another, I've caught Edwin doing this several times. He comes into, he leaves the adult table to have his cup of coffee or a camera or dessert or something, and he'll stand off in the corner. He's not trying to be noticed. He's not trying to speak. He's not trying to get anyone's attention. And he'll look at what's happening in his kitchen, And he'll just grin from ear to ear. And sometimes I'll watch him kind of wipe away a tear. And I've never spoken with him about those moments. But I know that Edwin is a man that loves God very much. And I'm certain that in those moments, he's standing there and he's just soaking in what he considers to be one of the great blessings in his life, of the family that he has. He's anchored in the present and he's thankful for the past. And in that moment, he's grateful, acknowledging this family is a gift that I did not earn. And it's tempting to jump ahead. It's tempting to be desirous of the future. It's tempting to be anxious about what could happen. And there's different times and different seasons of life with the Morrises that he could have jumped ahead. During one of those Thanksgivings, he had a daughter that was going to vet school who dropped out to go to art school, which no parent wants to hear. Now, fast forward that, and it worked out really well for her. Another time, he had a daughter who was dating a guy that he was actively praying against every day. Not in a funny way, even though it is funny, but in a very serious, concerned dad kind of way. And God answered those prayers too. But in that moment, when he's standing there, grinning from ear to ear, grateful for what's going on in front of him, he's not anxious about the future. He hasn't forgotten the moments that have got him there. He's anchored in the present, and he's grateful for God's gifts. But more than those things, more than humbling us so that we acknowledge that things in our life are gifts, more than simply anchoring us in the present and helping us reflect on and be grateful for the past, I think there's something far more powerful that gratitude does. And I think we see that in a story tucked away in one of the gospels, in Luke chapter 17. If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 17. I'm going to start in verse 11, and verses 16 through 19 will be up here on the screen. I want to read it for you. On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by 10 leopards, talking about Jesus, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Okay. So I want to say something very, very clear right here. He's going through Samaria. There's racial tension going on. The racial tension going on there. There's a whole separate set of issues that we could talk about. But there's 10 lepers. And in the ancient world, leprosy was the death knell. It was the death knell. It was the worst possible disease that you could get. It was the worst possible diagnosis that you can receive. If you received leprosy, it was contagious, so you were ostracized. You had to go live in a colony with a bunch of other depressed people who were losing their skin and their limbs and their digits all at once and just marching towards death together. It was a really, really difficult diagnosis. And so there's 10 lepers, and they cry out to Jesus. And look what they cry. They say, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So what do all 10 of them already know? That's Jesus. He's the Son of God and he has the power to heal us, right? They already are acknowledging that that's Jesus and we believe he's the Son of God. They've admitted that. Then Jesus answered, were not 10 cleansed? Where's everybody else? Didn't I heal 10 of you? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at this, this is so powerful. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Let's not miss what's happening in this story as we reflect on gratitude together. These 10 lepers looked at him and they said, Jesus, Master, we believe in you. We believe that you are who you say you are. We believe that you have the power to heal. Will you please heal us? He says, yeah, go and show yourself to the priest and you'll be healed. And so they run off to go to the priest and on their way, they are healed. And as they are healed, we can only assume. Now, we don't know. There's not a lot of details. This is conjecture. But something happened in the minds of nine of them that they didn't think it was important to go back and thank Jesus for what he did. I like to think that their minds immediately became desirous of the future. They became desirous about who they were going to tell and what they were going to do and who they were going to see and all the next things that they wanted to do in light of this healing. Maybe in their head, they went, gosh, that Jesus is a great guy. And they went on and they did their thing. But what they didn't do is express gratitude. What they acted like was that they were entitled, was that they somehow deserved that healing. Jesus is the Savior of the world. He's the Son of God. He has the power to heal. He sees us. He should heal me. He owes this to me. That's what God does. God heals, so heal me. Thanks, great, and then they move on. Only one of them was so moved by his experience with Jesus that he went back to him and he said, thank you. Thank you for healing me. And in that moment, we see gratitude. We see an acknowledgement. This gift of healing is a gift that you gave me that I did not deserve. Thank you. And Jesus' response is fascinating to me. After he notes what the others did, he said, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you well. That dude just got saved. You understand that? We call it getting saved when someone is returned to harmony with God. Our souls were created to be in harmony with our creator God. They were designed to be in union with him. Our sin breaks that union. It is forever broken. There is no way to restore us into that union. So God sent his son to die on a cross so that we wouldn't have to, so that by placing our faith in him, we can be restored into union with our creator God. Your soul longs and clamors and claws for harmony with your creator God. That's what it does. If you're here this morning and there is an unease in your soul, if you're not a believer yet, but there is something that you just can't seem to wrap your mind around, if you've clawed for happiness in your life and then gotten there and found that it was empty, it's because your soul was designed to claw for harmony with our Creator God. And Jesus restored the soul of that leper. Gave him what his soul really longs for. And why did he do it? Because the leper was grateful. Don't you see? It wasn't enough to just go, hey, you're Jesus and you can heal me if you want to. Thanks, see you later. No, the leper came back and was grateful. Thank you for what you've done. And Jesus says, your faith, he doesn't say gratitude. He says faith because the faith is implicit in the gratitude. To be truly grateful, you have to admit, you've done something that I couldn't do for myself. Thank you, Jesus. Your faith has made you well. I'm worried as I read this story that we don't understand that gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God. Gratitude is the gateway to harmony with God. Don't you see that these nine lepers did what so many of us do, particularly in the South, just give mental assent, acknowledge, you're Jesus, you're the Son of God, and if you want to, you can do these things for me, but it never goes beyond that. They had the beginnings of faith, but they weren't truly grateful for who Jesus was and what he did. And because of that, they never received the actual blessing that Jesus came to give them. He didn't go through Samaria that day to heal people of leprosy. If he did, we would have seen him healing a lot more people. He walked through Samaria that day to bring some souls back into harmony with God. He walked into Samaria that day to save people. And the only one that got saved was the one that expressed gratitude for what he did. And I worry about how many of us can sometimes be like the lepers. And once we receive the blessing from God, once we receive the taste of Jesus, once we receive a little bit of the blessing, we go, thanks, that's good. And we don't stick around for the true blessing that God has for us because we're entitled. I don't want us to miss the power of gratitude. This guy didn't have to pray the sinner's prayer. He didn't have to have everything figured out. He didn't have to understand the ins and outs of the New Testament. He was from the priest that Jesus sent him to go see wasn't even a Jewish priest. It was a hybrid religion. He didn't even understand what it meant to have faith or to be a believer. He was simply grateful to Jesus for what he did. And to Jesus, that was enough. Your faith has made you well. We cannot miss the power of gratitude. It's a gateway to harmony with God. And I really think that what happens when we're grateful is that all paths lead to God. I think gratitude always leads to God, which in turn always leads to joy. I think gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God, is a guaranteed pathway to joy. That if we can begin to express gratitude in our lives for anything at all, that what that will ultimately bring us to is gratitude. It doesn't take me very long to do that in my life. If I look at the things I'm grateful for in my life, I look at Jen and I look at Lily. It doesn't take me very long to end up thanking God for those things and to find joy and harmony with God. If you look at the things in your life, it doesn't take you very long to think of the things that you're grateful for and find a path that leads us back to God. I think it actually kind of works like this. As I was thinking about it this week, I thought of this map that I remember seeing online. If we can put it up there. This is a map of all of the streams and rivers in the United States and how they all lead to the ocean. Every last one of them. You can pick any tendril that you want to and at one point or another, it's going to end up in the ocean. A brook is going to lead to a stream, is going to lead to a creek, is going to lead to a river, is going to lead to a bigger river, is going to lead to a basin, is going to lead to an ocean. And I think that gratitude works the same way. Even if you think about the things in your life that you think you've done, the accomplishments that you think you've made, the businesses that you think you've built, the children that you think you've raised, who gave you the gifts and abilities to do those things? Who decided in his sovereignty that you were going to be born in the United States in a first world and even have the opportunity to exercise those gifts? Who decided that you weren't going to be born in the slums of Delhi and instead were going to be born here? God did. Our very gifts, our very location, our friends, all of our blessings are a result of God's goodness in our life. That's why I think that all gratitude is simply a path that leads us back to God, that leads us to joy. That's why I think that the Bible tells us over and over again to be grateful in all things, even in the hard things. I think that even if Christmas is difficult, because for some of us, Christmas is a reminder of loss. If we want to find a path to gratitude, even in the midst of a Christmas that reminds us of loss in our life, that loss hurts so much because there were times that were so sweet. And we become grateful for those times. And we see God working in them. And it serves as a pathway that ultimately leads us back to God where our souls will find harmony with Him and we will find joy. Gratitude is incredibly powerful because it is a gateway to harmony with our creator. All paths of gratitude lead to him. And I am convinced that once we are in harmony with our God, once we are grateful to him, all those pathways lead to joy. So let's go and let's be grateful together. Let's be anchored in the present, remembering the past, and be grateful to our God for the things that He has done in our lives. Let's pray. Father, we love You. We truly are grateful to You. We're grateful for the memories that we have. We're grateful for the scars that we bear and the lessons that we learned as a result of those instances. God, we're thankful for all the different blessings that you've placed in our life, for the relationships, for the possessions that bring us joy, for the places that make us feel safe or cozy or happy. God, we're so grateful for all of those. We're thankful for the means to earn those things, to make the sale, to close the deal, to figure out the account. We're grateful for the discipline to go to work and to learn more and to sharpen our sword. We're grateful that you built us all with our gifts that allow us to go out and serve you and enjoy the blessings that you've given us. God, may we actively fight against entitlement. May we be people who acknowledge every day that the things in our life are gifts from you that we have not earned and acknowledge that in your goodness, you've given them to us anyways. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.