Sermons tagged with Isolation

Thank you, guys. Thank you, band. Thank you, Jordan, for the scripture reading this morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. It's so good to see everybody. You know, normally I've been making a very intentional choice to try not to differentiate between the in-person crowd and the online crowd, because I want folks who are not able to attend in person to feel no guilt or feel like second-class citizens for choosing to watch online, because I understand that's a necessity for a lot of you. But I will make an exception this morning and say that if you are here in person on Time Change Sunday, showered and attractive in appearance, you are a better Christian than the people who are at home watching. That's just how it goes. And I want you to know that. That's an encouragement to you from your pastor. This is week two of our series called Greater as we move through the book of Hebrews together. And it's called Greater because the author of Hebrews approaches the book through a lens of comparisons, of four main comparisons. Last week was a comparison to angels. We didn't get there. I don't regret it. You can read it in the Bible yourself. I think where we ended last week was more necessary and effective for the church. And this week we arrive at this comparison with Moses. And because of the way I'm wired, once I finish one sermon, I immediately begin to think about the next one because it's just, that's the life of the pastor. It's coming up in a week. You better get it together, pal. You got this many days to do the next one and do your thing. And so normally I finish prepping a sermon on a Wednesday or a Thursday, which means Thursday afternoon of last week, my mind immediately starts to work on this sermon that I'm giving you this week. And I know that it's on Moses. So I'm working out in my head this comparison to try to help us understand how important Moses was to the Hebrews in this culture. You'll remember that the letter of Hebrews was written to Hellenistic Jews who had converted to Christianity. So remember, a Hellenistic Jew is a Jewish person who grew up practicing Judaism or the Jewish faith, and then at some point or another converted to Christianity. And they're called Hellenistic Jews because they live outside of Israel. They grew up in a Greek context while being practicing Jews and then converted to the faith. And it's important that we also remember from last week that the recipients of this letter were undergoing persecution from without and within, from the Roman Empire violently persecuting them for declaring their faith, and from within, from their own Jewish communities that were trying to lull them and lure them back into a Jewish faith to walk away from this new radical Christian faith that they were claiming. So as we approach chapter 2, he makes a comparison that we're going to read in a second of Jesus to Moses and makes the point that Jesus is greater than Moses. And to help a 21st century American church understand the weight of this comparison. I was working on an illustration in my head that had to do with the framers of the Constitution and the original document of the United States and trying to figure out which founding father is Moses most like, which I've landed on George Washington, even though that is a perilous stance, I understand. But this is where I am. So I'm working all this out in preparation for the sermon. And then I sit down on Tuesday and really start to get into the text to figure out how I'm going to marry all the pieces together. And I read through chapters 3 and 4. And I realize the comparison that the author of Hebrews makes of Jesus to Moses is an important one, and we will look at it. But it's really a jumping off point to another comparison that he makes of the people of Hebrews to the ancient Hebrews in the desert. And that comparison actually allows us to apply this text to our lives today and is going to give us today a plea and an encouragement about our faith that I hope will inspire us and help us walk out the door more determined than ever to continue to walk in our Christian faith. And what I found in these chapters is actually this beautiful message of encouragement that I hope inspires you this morning. But to get there, we need to start where the author starts at the beginning of chapter 3 and look at the comparison that he makes between Jesus and Moses. And then I think what we'll do is we'll find something unexpected in the following text. Look with me in Hebrews chapter 3, verses 3 through 6. If you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. We're going to be all over chapter 3 and a little to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son, and we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope. So let me explain what's happening in these verses as he begins this comparison to Moses. He brings up Moses because, again, the audience is trying to be lured back into their old faith, into their heritage. And the author of that faith is presumed by the Jewish people to be Moses. He's the founding father of their faith. You can make a good argument for Abraham, but Moses is the one that wrote the first five books of the Bible. The first five books of the Bible are called the books of Moses, the books of the law that were authored by him. He's the George Washington. To a Hebrew person, Moses is what George Washington is to an American, like the founding father. This is the guy. That's how we understand him. We still look back on him. He was one of the framers of the Constitution. He helped with all that stuff. And like Thomas Jefferson, he's like a combo platter there. But that's the reverence that they had for him times like 10. He's the framer of everything that they believe. They would have said that Moses was the framer of the religion that they practiced. And what the author of Hebrews is saying is, no, no, no, no, no. He didn't frame this house. He didn't start that religion that they're trying to lure you back into. He didn't write those rules himself. That came from God. God built that house. He gets the honor from that. And the house isn't even the laws that you follow. The house is you. The house is the church. We are the kingdom of God and the body of Christ. The house persists now, 2,000 years later on a whole different continent. That's the house. And Moses wasn't the builder of the house. It's actually kind of shocking that he would say this. He's a servant in the house. But the beautiful part is, if Moses could be there in the audience hearing this read aloud, because that's what they would do with these letters, is they would, the pastor, the equivalent of the pastor would stand up and read the letter to them. And if Moses were in the audience hearing that letter, he would go, amen, I'm just a servant, you guys make too big of a deal out of me. I was just doing what God asked me to do. Jesus is the one that we should focus on. And so he sets their expectations from the very beginning by saying, it's not Moses that we should focus on. It's Christ. Christ is the framer of the house. You are the house. And Moses is no different than you. He's a servant within the house. We're cut from the same cloth. Peter tells us that you and Abraham, you and all the heroes of our faith are hewn from the same quarry by God. We all have the stuff in us of Moses. There was nothing special about Moses. Moses murdered a dude, went and hid out in the wilderness for 40 years, and then was called by a bush that wouldn't stop being on fire. And he argued with God five times until God finally says, just go do it, man. It says the wrath of the Lord was kindled against Moses, so then he went, okay? He stepped into the role that God asked him to play, but there's nothing fundamentally different about Moses than you. He was just obedient. He was a servant in the house. And this is what the author of Hebrews is setting up. But after he sets this up, he pretty much leaves the topic of Moses. It's kind of dumbfounding if you think about it. You think you're about to enter into this discourse about Moses. I've got this whole thing in my head about, okay, yeah, good. Let's dive into this Moses thing more. And I'm trying to figure out why does it matter to the American church, to the 21st century church, that Jesus is greater than Moses? Because listen, you all know that's not a new thing for you. You're not having a problem about which one to prioritize like they were. But then as you read the rest of the chapter, the comparison of Jesus to Moses is really not his focus in these next two chapters. He really jumps to another comparison that encourages them in a unique way and I think encourages us today. And so what we see is that Hebrews 3 and 4 are designed to be an encouragement by comparison. And not by comparison of Jesus to Moses, but by a comparison of generation to generation. He's not really going to belabor the point about Jesus being superior to Moses and all the ramifications of that. He jumps right from Moses into talking about the perils that were faced by the generation of Moses and the perils that are being faced by the Hebrews in this generation that he's writing to now. And I think that if we pay attention, then we can be encouraged in the same way the Hebrew audience was encouraged. He jumps right into this discourse that's summed up at the end of chapter 3. Chapter 3, verse 16 through chapter 4, the first verse. Chapter 4, 1. When we look at this verse, this is a good summary of what's going on in these two chapters. And I'm going to read it, and there's a good chance that a lot of us won't really know what any of it means. But then I'm going to explain it for several minutes because I really want us to understand what's going on here. In the time of Moses, you guys are probably familiar. If you go all the way back, second book of the Bible, you can read through the story of Moses. It is one of the most prolific stories in the Bible. If you've never read it, I would highly encourage you to do it. At my house, we have gotten into the habit of telling Lily a Bible story almost every night before bed. Before you go, oh man, that's impressive. We just started it like three weeks ago, okay? Because I realized I am way behind the eight ball in teaching the Bible to my own kids, so we need to get this started. And we started into the story of Moses, and I told it to her in like six parts, and she loves it. And it's really hard to tell the story of Moses to a five-year-old dodging, dancing through, like there is the inconvenient part about God killing the firstborn of all the Egyptian people. Probably not going to cover that with a five-year-old yet. So you kind of pick the parts that you can share, but we've walked through the story of Moses and she's compelled by it and I think you would be too. So if you never read it, you need to do it. And in the story of Moses, what we find is that after his time in the desert, God tells him, calls him through the burning bush, go back to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. The Hebrew people had lived as slaves in Egypt for 400 years, generation after generation of slaves. They never knew what it was to be free. And so Moses takes his brother Aaron, goes back to Pharaoh, insists that Pharaoh lets his people go. Pharaoh refuses. Then we have the 10 plagues that culminate in Passover that we still celebrate to this day. And Pharaoh lets the people go. The armies of Egypt who are in pursuit of the people perish in the Red Sea. And now they are in the desert and they're wandering through the desert for 40 years. And they're wandering through the desert until God feels like it is time for them to enter into the promised land. You've probably heard that phrase, the promised land. We throw it around in pop culture meaning different things in different places. But it really means the land that was promised to the descendants of Abraham. Back in Genesis 12, God makes three promises to Abraham. One of them is land. Your people will inherit this land on which you are standing, which is the land of Canaan, modern day Israel. And so they are working their way back to the promised land. And the way that it's phrased in Hebrews chapters three and four, the author talks about entering into that land as entering into rest. Because it's this idea of when it was Abraham and his family, they were nomads. They didn't set up permanent camp. They didn't have civilization to set up camp in Israel then. And eventually they had to move down to Egypt because of famine. And then in Egypt they lived as slaves. And now they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years, unpacking their stuff, setting up their tent, doing life for a couple of days, and then packing everything back up and moving down the road. Can you imagine trying to do that with elderly people and with children and how difficult that way of life would be? So 400 years of being slaves, 40 years of living in the desert, these people were not a people who knew what rest was. And so he says you're going to enter into rest because now you can finally, you can cross over the Jordan River, you can go into the promised land, you can build a permanent home, all the women can nest and do the things. I'm sure there was ancient Hebrew Kirklands where you could go buy all the clutter that you wanted and put it on your shelf, and now my house looks great. And they wanted to do this, and the men could go outside and work in the yard and all the stuff. Now we can set up camp, and we can do life, and we can just rest. And that's good. But all of that, while it was literally going on for the Hebrew people at the time of Moses, they were wandering through the desert, and there were struggles in the desert, and they were anticipating entering rest, entering into the promised land, and when they got there, they could finally rest. All that was literally true, but it's also one big, long metaphor for your salvation. The time in Egypt under slavery is when we are slaves to sin. It's a part of our life when we don't know Jesus. When we don't know who it is, we have no choice but to sin. Romans at length, in Romans, Paul tells us about how we are slaves to sin. We have no choice but to do evil, even when we want to do good. And then once we come to know Jesus, we're freed. We skip like a calf loosed from its stall, says Malachi. We're free to walk in the freedom of Jesus and to follow him. But in that freedom, we're in the desert. We're in life. We're going to face trials and struggles. We just talked about that in Ecclesiastes. But if we persevere, we will enter into the promised land. We will enter into God's rest. If you were here or paying attention in January, you'll remember that we did a whole week on Sabbath and what it means. And that this Sabbath rest is really a picture and a reminder of the eternity that waits on us after death, this eternal rest that we enter into with God. And I even in that sermon referred to Hebrews 3 and 4 and talked about the rest that this author describes. And so it's important to understand as we think about that story of Moses, they were intentionally taken through those seasons to mimic the seasons of your life, your time before Christ, and your time with Christ in this life in the desert when we're still not in eternity yet, and then entering into God's rest in eternity, spending eternity in heaven with God in the promised land. It's a metaphor for you and me. Do you understand? And it's important to understand that because one of the things that happened in the desert was that people would groan and complain. They were fed every day by manna. They would wake up in the morning and manna had fallen from the sky and that's what they ate. And the word manna literally in Hebrew means, what is it? We don't know what it is. It's just this nutrition brick that sits on the ground and everybody eats it. And as I was telling this story to Lily, she said, what's manna? I said, it's just a thing. Like we don't really know what it is. And she was like, I would get tired of that. I would want God to give me other food, like chicken nuggets and goldfish. That's what I want. And I thought, well, that's what the Hebrew people wanted too. They got ticked. God gave them quail and it made them sick. It's a whole different story. We didn't get into it. But they started to grumble, as would be natural. They were really thirsty sometimes. And they weren't being led to water. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night and they're just hoping that maybe tomorrow is the day that we get to the oasis of the river and we can finally drink some more and we can fill our vats again. Maybe that's when that will happen. We're sick and tired of man and there's all these struggles of living out in the desert and if you put yourself in that life, you can understand very quickly why people would complain about that. But in their complaining, they began to betray God. In their complaining, they began to say things like, Moses, take us back to Egypt. We would rather be slaves than live in the desert with you because at least there we had access to water every day. At least there I could cook, like, I don't know, a radish. Like, at least we had options back in Egypt. This stinks. One time they got so fed up with life in the desert that while Moses was away, they pulled all the gold that they had stolen from the Egyptian people and melted it down and fashioned it into a golden calf because they thought maybe this God will take better care of us in the desert than our current God. And they began to betray the very God that brought them out of slavery. And so this is what the author of Hebrews is referring to. When he talks about the people in the desert that failed because of unbelief, what happened was because they didn't believe, because they grumbled, Moses' generation that were the chief grumblers passed away. That's why God kept them in the desert for 40 years because he was waiting for that generation to go away so that the following faithful generation would be the one that would enter into the promised land. Those who grumbled and fell away and cursed God and built the golden calf and walked away in disbelief, those who walked away from their faith in the desert, they didn't enter into God's promised land. They never entered into God's rest. And so he's using that to encourage the Hebrew people in the first century A. Because they know the story very well. They know what happened in the desert. They don't need the robust explanation of these tight verses. Because they know good and well what happened to those people. They know what the author of Hebrews is referring to. And remember that they're facing persecution. They're facing violence and threats. If you proclaim Christ, they could take your life. They could arrest you. They could throw you in jail. They could harm your family. It was a really perilous time to be a believer. Their culture is ostracizing them and trying to woo them back to their old way of life, to what they would consider their heritage. You had to really, really want it to be a Christian. And you get the sense that there were some people within these churches to whom the letter was written that were falling away. You get the sense that these churches were going through a season of contraction, not expansion. You get the sense that it would have been really, really easy to just kind of quietly walk away from the faith and embrace an old way of life. And remember I told you last week that Hebrews is written to compel a persecuted church to persevere in their faith. And so in these chapters, he's trying to convince them to persevere by saying, remember the generation that came before you. Remember the story of your forefathers in the desert and how the ones who fell away, the ones who walked away from their faith, never entered into the promised land, never entered into God's rest. Well, now the same is at stake for you. Stay true to the faith, Hebrews. Don't walk away from the faith. Don't give in to persecution. Don't give in to ostracization. Don't give in to isolation. Stay true to the faith because there is a rest waiting for you. There is an eternity waiting for you. And he warns them at the end. He's imploring them and pleading with them. Hang in there. Don't give up on your faith. Don't walk away from God. I know it's hard. Stand firm in your faith. Look what happened in the previous generations. Don't you want to be the people who entered into the promised land instead of the people who perished in the desert, never experiencing God's rest. Hang in there. And I think that that's a remarkable message for us. The thing I love about that point, about what the author is doing here in chapters 3 and 4, is that it doesn't just apply to them. It doesn't just apply to this generation of believers. It applies to every generation of believers. This message echoes throughout the millennia since it was first preached to hang in there, to persevere in our faith. It applies to us as well. As a matter of fact, the biggest thing I take out of these passages is that your faith will never face a storm a previous generation hasn't weathered. Your faith, as you walk through this life, as you in a sense wander through the desert waiting for your turn to enter into the promised land, to enter into God's rest, your faith will not face a trial that a previous generation has not weathered. It is not unique to you. Consider the ones who came before you who persevered. If you have a godly parent or a grandparent, you stand on their shoulders, you watch them persevere. Do you think that their faith was always easy to them? Do you think that the spiritual heroes that you have in your life, that they didn't at some point in their life have a crisis of faith where they felt like walking away? I think now, as much as ever, there are those of us in our church. I mean, with the size church that we are, which is totally uncertain to me right now, there has to be people who feel like they're on the brink of just giving up on their faith. There has to be some of you here or watching or listening later in the week where 2020 has been really hard on your faith. I know that I had my own crisis of faith this year. I didn't realize it at the time, but when we had to go dark and only pre-record messages, and there was no people in the room when I would preach. At first, it wasn't that big of a deal to me because in my previous context at my old church, we used to pre-record our messages for our other campuses on Thursday every week anyways. We couldn't live stream. That was in the early times of live stream, and we just couldn't do it. And so it wasn't a big deal to me to come record a message in a room. That was fine. But it came to begin to feel like a performance instead of a spiritual exercise. And what I realized is when there's people in the room, when I get to look you in the eye, when I get to see head nods, when I get to sometimes see tears, when I know that the things that are connecting with me are also connecting with you, I feel like a pastor. I feel like I'm helping. I feel like I show up on Sunday morning, and maybe this isn't for everybody, and maybe everybody doesn't walk out of here going, man, Nate pitched a fastball today. Maybe you walk out going, that was terrible. That was the worst one he's ever done. But maybe for somebody else, it connected in such a way that was incredibly spiritually encouraging. And that's so much fun for me. That's so nourishing to me. And so in the week when I'm prepping and when I'm searching and when I'm praying, it's so helpful to me to know that when I get up and preach, it's going to be a spiritual exercise. If I've seemed more emotional since we've come back and began to gather again, that's why. Because when I just record onto a camera on Thursday or show up on Sunday with no one in the room, it just becomes a performance. And it was sucking me dry of anything spiritual that I had. And I don't say that for your sympathy. I say it so that you know I can offer you mine. So that if you've walked through a crisis of faith this year, that you know that you have company. The isolation that we felt this year, it would be really easy to fall away from faith. Matter of fact, my biggest fear in preaching this is that the people who need it most have already wandered off and are not going to hear it. And I would just say, if this is the first message you're listening to in a long time, this is why, pal. I'm glad you're here. I have spent a lot of time this year concerned about the people of our church beginning to drift away from God because the regularity of schedule hasn't been there that continues to draw us back into him. The meeting every week I think is powerful and effective. That's why we're told in Hebrews not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. There's an efficacy to that that I don't think we all the time understand on a head level. It's more of a soul thing. And the ease with which we could just simply drift away. Stop watching on Sunday and no one will know. Stop paying attention to small group because we're not meeting in person and we can't go anyways. Just how easy it would be to drift away from faith this last year has made me think that these chapters should resonate with us more deeply than maybe they ever have. And maybe some of us have walked through grief. Grief is always this big crucible of faith. I'm inclined to believe that faith isn't really mature and hardened and steadfast until it's walked through some sort of grief that makes you question the foundation of it. But then when we come through the other side of that strong, that's good, but some of us find ourselves in the middle of questioning. Some of us have doubts that we just continually push away and we never confront out of fear. And those work to weaken our faith. And you may be thinking, Nate, listen, man, yeah, sure, there's temptations to fall away from faith, but gosh, it's kind of difficult to compare us to those generations. Like, we're not wandering through the desert eating nutrition bricks every day, and we're not facing death and persecution for coming here on a Sunday morning. So take it easy on comparing us to that generation, and that's fair. But I actually think that all of us face a testing of our faith that those people never had to encounter. And I would actually argue with you that atrophy may be the biggest test of our faith. I think the atrophy of our faith may be the actual biggest test of our faith. I've been talking with some folks recently about sometimes I develop theories on life that are not really worth public consumption. But for the sake of an illustration, I'll share this one. I have this theory that our ability to handle stress and manage tasks atrophies as we get older and life doesn't require us to do as many things. So I think that if we go through life and we don't have daily demands on our schedule, we don't have problems that we have to solve, there's not stress that sits on us, that eventually what happens is our ability to manage tasks and to manage having full days and our ability to manage stress actually atrophies. So that when you get older, and I'm sorry, I'm going to get blowback from the generation that is my parents' age and older. I'm sorry. But what I've noticed is that sometimes you'll ask folks like, what are you doing Wednesday? And they're like, well, I was a kid. It's a busy day. I'm like, oh yeah, what are you doing? And they're like, well, you know, I gotta take my friend to the doctor at two. Okay, and then what? They're like, well, I'll probably just pack it in after that. All right, yeah, no, that's, get some good sleep on Tuesday, you know. And I think to them it feels full, but it's because for a long time they haven't had to have the fullness of schedule that I think, I would argue that when you have little kids and when you have kids in middle school, life demands a lot of you. Your capacity to handle stress and tasks is as high as it's going to get. But if you don't flex that muscle, it goes into atrophy so that taking a friend to the doctor at 2 o'clock feels busy. And that's fine. But it happens. I think our faith works the same way. I think when we're not forced to exercise our faith, it begins to atrophy. So that little tasks, little things that require little amounts of faith feel like these huge hills of godliness that we have to climb. Their life, the life of the people in these chapters, they required faith. Those people wandering through the desert, they don't make it through the day without faith. God literally lands food on their front yard every day. That requires faith to be hungry at night and believe that it's going to be there when I wake up in the morning. They're literally, they're formed in the desert. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night. They have to trust that that pillar is actually God and is actually taking them where they wanted to go. At one point or another, there was snakes in the camp and if they would bite you, you would die. And the only way to not die was to look at a cross with bronze serpents on it and know that that was God's blessing to you. You had to look at that cross in faith. It's the only way to heal you from death. Every day of their lives required their faith. Some of them got tired of that exercise and walked away. For the Hebrew people, every day of their lives required that faith. God, I am going to go walk in your presence today. I'm going to go proclaim your name today, and I'm trusting you to protect me and to protect my family. And if you don't, I trust that's okay too. It required faith. It is entirely possible to be a good Christian and yet have a life that requires very little faith. Parents, you want your kids to be Christians. And here's the good news. Statistically speaking, kids that grow up in a Christian home with a mom and a dad who both love Jesus, they're going to love Jesus too. The statistics are on your side that that child will accept Christ as their Savior. And that's a good thing. That's the most effective plan for evangelism that's ever existed. I love that truth. But I would also argue that because that's true, it doesn't really take a lot of faith on our part, a lot of hitting our knees and pleading with God to reach the hearts of our children and to enliven them to him. Because if we just bring them to church and put them around other people who love Jesus, they're probably going to get on board too. Raising good kids doesn't require a lot of faith. But if you want to release adults into the world, unleash disciples of Jesus who will impact their community and draw others to faith like a magnet and go and spend the rest of their lives making disciples. If you want to release eternity changers into the wild, then you better hit your knees. You better pray over that because that task is too big for you. We need to live lives that require faith of us. We need to set goals for our children that aren't easily attained by just coming to church every week, but by requiring us, by compelling us to get on our knees and pray for them and pour over them during the week while they sleep in their beds. Let's go into their rooms and let's get on our knees and let's plead with God to make them exactly who he created them to be and let's plead that they're better than us and that we don't get in the way. That takes faith. You want to go to work? Be a good worker. Be a good employee, employer. Have a good influence on the people around you. That's great. You don't really need faith to do that. You can figure that out all on your own. We know how to play the game and say the right things and not cuss when we're not supposed to and not get mad when we want to be mad. We know how to do that. You want to be a pastor and evangelist in your workplace? You want the people who work around you to come to know Jesus because they see him shining through you? You want that person that when you started that job who is very far from God, who is a militant atheist, you want them to come to faith? You better do more than just show up and be nice. You better hit your knees and pray for them. Grace, listen, American Christians have this unique privilege of living lives that look like good Christianity that really require very little soul-searching faith of us. And I'm deathly afraid that because of that, our faiths have atrophied to a place where one task, where one little thing seems like a mountain climb of faith. I would implore you this morning, not just to persevere in your faith, but to choose to live lives that require it. To dream God-sized dreams about, not about things that you will accomplish, but about people that you can impact, about things that you see happen in the lives of those around you. Let's begin to live lives that require faith. Anybody can lead a small group by just showing up and having a discussion and being nice. It doesn't require any faith. But what about if you decide that you want to disciple these people and see them have vibrant spiritual lives and vibrant marriages and see them disciple their children and see them radically reprioritize your lives? Then we need to pray. Let's choose to live lives that require faith of us. The other encouragement that he gives is the one that we actually started with today that Jordan read for us. It's the lone encouragement he gives in the chapter or piece of advice he gives in the chapter. He basically says, hey, hang in there. Stick with it. Don't fall away like the people in the desert. Be like the people who entered into the promised land. Persevere in your faith. He givesverance is virtually impossible without community. Perseverance is virtually impossible without community. And I just included that word virtually there because I was scared to say totally impossible without community, but that's really what I think. And I love it. Brothers and sisters, encourage one another in your faith today as long as it is called today. Every day, encourage the people around you. You may be listening to this sermon and think, Nate, you know, listen, I know other people are faltering in their faith. I've certainly moved through those seasons in my life, but I feel good right now. Me and God, like I'm walking with God and there's things I need to improve on, but like my faith is strong and that's great. Use that faith to encourage the people around you every day as long as it's called today. If you're struggling in your faith, if it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, then I did. I'm just kidding. If it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, if you feel weak in your faith, then draw on the strength of others. Look at other people who might be weak and say, listen, we don't have this all figured out, but let's encourage each other. There's practical ways to encourage each other. I don't want to get caught up in doing that because you're smart adults and you can figure that out. But I will say that one of the things that I'm in the practice of doing when I'm really focused on God and when I'm pursuing Him well is in my quiet times and in my prayers, He will always bring people to my mind. Oftentimes it's folks I haven't thought about in a number of months or a year or more. And I try to be obedient to sit down and to text them or to sit down and write them an email and just let them know I'm thinking about them and I'm praying for them. And you'd be surprised the number of times I get an email back that says, man, I can't believe the Lord put you on my heart this morning. This is what I'm dealing with. So I would leave you today with two encouragements. Let the message from Hebrews 3 and 4 echo down through the millennia to you and hang in there with your faith. Persevere. Don't walk away. Face your doubts. Face your fears. Face your grief. Persevere in your faith. One of the ways we can do that is to live lives that require it. The other way that we do that is to encourage those around us to live out their faith today as long as it is called today. This is something I think that grace is so good at. Let's lean on our community and use our community not just to make people feel welcome, not just to make people feel loved, but let us use and leverage our community to encourage one another in our faith. Let's infuse our friendships with spiritual encouragement. And let's be obedient and inspired, obedient to and inspired by the message of Hebrews 3 and 4. My prayer for you this week is that if any of you are on the brink of walking away, if any of you have been struggling in your faith, that this would be a week that encourages you to hang in there. And that the people around you would come around you even without you saying anything to them and they would encourage you in your faith today as long as it's called today. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for you. We are grateful for how big you are. We are grateful for how much you love us, for how much you strengthen us. God, I pray that we would see the shoulders that we stand on, the generations that come before us and the storms that they have weathered, that we would be heartened by that and that we would stand firm in our faith lest we fall away. God, for those of us for whom our faith is in atrophy, which is such an easy thing now, would you help us and show us how to choose lives that require faith? That force us to lean on you, knowing that if you don't come through, we will fall. God, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We know that it is in him that we can hope, that that is the hope that will not put us to shame, that that is the faith that we can have. I pray that if anyone doesn't know who he is, that they would today. For those of us who do know God but are tempted to walk away, would you help us to stand firm, pick us up by attending angels and draw our souls near to you even as we sing here in a minute. It's in your son's name that we pray these things. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. This is the fourth part in our series that we've launched the year with called Things You Should Know. The idea is that as Christians or as church people, there's things that we talk about, things that get mentioned that we all kind of nod along with and seem to understand, but maybe we've never stopped to slow down or had the courage to ask the questions that we have about these things. So we wanted to take a month and just kind of look at some of the different topics that come up in church world, that come up in Christendom, but maybe we have never delved into on our own, and maybe we have some existing questions about those things. Last week, we looked at the Sabbath, and I hope that your view and framework around the Sabbath was changed and that some of you are coming off enjoying one of those yesterday or have chosen today as your Sabbath, and I hope that it goes very well for you. This morning, we want to talk about the devil. I think that there may be one other time when I have preached about Satan. It's not a fun topic. It's not fun research to do. If someone got a hold of my browser history this week, they might be really worried about Nate and all the things that I've Googled that have to do with Satan and his influence. So it's not something that we talk about a lot, but it's something that we definitely need to address. I think in church circles, we hear about Satan. We hear about the enemy. We know that he's called Lucifer. We know that he's against us. We know that he hates God. We know that he hates us. But maybe we don't know very much beyond that, beyond what's maybe been put forth in pop culture or something like that. And so I thought it would be good to take a week and focus on Satan, focus on the enemy, on who he is and what he does and really what he wants, what he wants with you and what he wants with me. The best place to do this clearly is scripture. So one of the things I did this week is I sat down and I just started keeping a list of all the places where Satan shows up in scripture or references to him are made in scripture. And I made a master list of all of those and then looked at that list and found the commonalities and tried to distill down some of the essence of what the Bible has to say about the enemy. And so I found four passages that I think sum up who Satan is in an effective way, and I wanted to look at those. And then I wanted to ask the question, okay, that's who he is. How does he accomplish his goals? So to understand who Satan is, one of the first things we want to do is look at his origin. And it's worth saying that we're not exactly positive where he came from or what he does. Now, we think that we know. We think we know where he came from. Most scholars agree, but it's important to point out, and I need to be intellectually honest and say that there's no one explicit place in Scripture where it says for sure this is where Satan came from. But our best guess is found in Ezekiel and then more pointedly in this passage in Isaiah. This is what Isaiah writes. He says, This is primarily where we get the origin story of Satan. It's believed that Satan was an angel. His name was Lucifer. That's what Odaystar means, morning star. That's what Lucifer means. And we believe that he was one of the archangels. He may have even been in charge of worship in heaven. He was a powerful angel, which means if you could see him, you would see that he was beautiful and intimidating and mighty and incredible. He looks very little like the cartoon depictions of him. And one day he told a lie to himself that he could be like God. He looked at God ruling over heaven and he said, I could do that. As a matter of fact, I could rule over you. And so he decided that he was going to lead a coup or an insurrection against God to overtake heaven. And it's believed that Satan was cast out of heaven along with a third of the angels that then became demons. And that began this war, this tension that's existed for all of time that you and I find ourselves in the middle of where Satan and God the Father war over our very souls. And it's interesting to me that the first lie that Satan believed is the lie that he told us. It's the first lie that we believed. It's the lie that we continue to believe. It's the fundamental lie of all of sin, which is, I could be like God. I don't need him. I can do this myself. I can call the shots. Isn't that what he whispered into the ear of Eve? Didn't he go down and slither up to her and say, you know, he's told you not to eat of this tree because he doesn't want you to be like him. He doesn't want you to know what he knows. He grabbed her and he said, you could do that. You could be him. You understand? If you get nothing else out of this sermon, just please understand, that's the fundamental root of all sin, is deciding, you know what? I think I could be the boss of myself. I don't really think I need his standards. I think I can figure this out on my own. That's the root of all sin. And it was the root of Satan's fall, who fell from heaven and set about for all of time, warring against the Father. And in Hebrew, actually, in the language of Hebrew, his name means accuser or adversary. He is the accuser of us. He is the adversary of God. He is opposed to God and all the things of God. And so that means he is your accuser and that he is your adversary. And the sneaky and scary part is he accuses you to you. He runs you down to you. God doesn't believe what he's saying, but you might. So he accuses you and he brings shame and guilt on your conscience and he opposes you. In the New Testament, we get a little bit clearer picture of who Satan is and what he came to do. Jesus says in the book of John, he was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he lies because lying is his native tongue. It's all he knows how to do is to lie and to deceive. And it's important that we point out that these aren't simple lies. These aren't dumb, foolish lies that anybody could see past. It's not lies like the ones in this commercial that I'm reminded of from a few years ago. I think it originally started as a Super Bowl commercial, but I'm not certain. But it makes me chuckle every time I see it. There's this dad, and he's sitting in the living room, right? And his back's against the couch, and he's got the coffee table in front of him, and there's Cheeto dust everywhere. Just this orange dust explosion. It's on the couch, it's on the floor, it's on the toys, it's everywhere. It's all over the place. And he's looking at that, and you can hear kids in the distance, and one of them, looks like about a four-year-old boy, comes running through the living room past his dad and he's got a Cheeto explosion all over himself. Face, shirt, pants, hands, the whole deal. And his dad grabs him and he points at the Cheeto explosion in the room. And he says, do you know anything about this? And the little kid goes, nope. And runs off. And I love it. I think it's great. Satan doesn't tell lies like that. He doesn't tell lies with Cheeto dust everywhere that are easy to pin on him. His lies are far more pernicious. The thing to understand about him that might make us uncomfortable and should make us uncomfortable is that if he's an angel and he's eternal, he's a lot smarter than us. He's a lot smarter than we are. He knows how to manipulate you. His lies look a lot less like, no, I don't know what's going on with the Cheeto dust, and a lot more like, who do you think you are? Why do you think you could ever do that? Why do you think they would ever listen to you? What would make you believe that they could ever believe you? What could make you think that that sort of sin was okay? How could you ever possibly justify that? You are the worst. His lies are a lot more sneaky and pernicious, I think, than we give him credit for. He's excellent at lying and at convincing us of things that aren't true. In part, and this is interesting to me, I almost pulled this thread and preached about this this week, in part because in the lies and the things that he offers us, they're a little bit true. They look like the truth. He very rarely offers us something that we don't have or that we won't get. He just offers it to us right now or just offers it to us in a package that seems more attractive. He's an incredibly effective liar. And then in Peter, we see him say something. And I think it's interesting that Peter chooses to talk about the devil. Because if there was anybody in Jesus's inner circle who wouldn't show as much concern for Satan, it had to be Peter. Peter is the guy who's talk first, think later. Peter's the guy who jumped out of the boat and walked on water. Peter's the guy that when Jesus said to his disciples, you will all betray me and leave me, Peter's the one that stepped up and said, no, I won't, never, God, I will die before I leave you. And we know that he did betray Christ in this really poignant scene. But my point is that Peter was the hard charger. He was the one out in front. He was the one that was all bluster and gusto. And even Peter, who if anybody would say, don't worry about Satan, we got Jesus, he's not a big deal. It would be Peter. But listen to what he says at the end of his life in his letter. 1 Peter 5, verse 8. Be sober-minded. Be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. He prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Listen to me. Listen to me. We don't want to think about it. We don't want to acknowledge it. But there is an active and effective and intelligent and efficient enemy of your soul who is prowling about seeking to destroy you. There is an enemy stalking around your children and around your marriage and around your husband and your wife and around your friendships and your church and your small group and the things that you hold dear, there is an enemy prowling around you seeking to destroy those things. And shame on me for not bringing that to your attention more often. It's an uncomfortable thing to talk about Satan. It's certainly not a fun thing. But based on the frequency with which he's mentioned in the Bible, it seems reasonable to think that God desperately wants us to be aware of His presence. Can I tell you for what it's worth that even as we were starting up this service this morning, things started going wrong with my microphone that have never gone wrong, not since Steve got here anyways. The Lord knows what used to go wrong with it. But things started happening and distractions were going and we came right up to the minute when we're supposed to launch the service like we really haven't in a long, long time. And I really just think it's because Satan would prefer you not think about him. He would prefer I never did this. He would prefer to continue to operate in the shadows, to continue to prowl about like a roaring lion, ever there, ever present, but never aware of him. And shame on me for not bringing him to our attention more often. But the reality is there is an incredibly effective enemy prowling around our families trying to figure out who he can pick off. So I think it behooves us to ask the question, how does he do that? How does he devour us? How does he lie to us? What's his goal? How do we know when Satan is acting in our lives? How do we know when it's just us, just our nature, just circumstance, or Satan is at play here? Well, I think that there's a really interesting conversation that Jesus actually has with Peter that sheds some light on this. And it's really made me reshape the way I think about satanic influence in our life. But towards the end of Jesus's ministry, towards the end of his life, Jesus gathers the disciples around and he tells them, hey, I've got to go to Jerusalem. They were in the northern part of Israel in Galilee. And he says, I need to go south to Jerusalem, to the hub, to where everything's going on. And when I go, they're going to arrest me and they're going to try me and they're going to kill me. And Peter, totally altruistically, with pure motives, says, well, then don't go. You don't have to go to Jerusalem. We've got a good thing going up here, man. Just stay up here and don't die. How's that? And there was no sin there. It wasn't like Peter said, Jesus, we could really monetize this miracle thing if you wanted to. Stick around a little bit. There's some hay to be made here. It doesn't say stay and do these things with us that you shouldn't do. He's not trying to convince him to not follow what he understands to be God's will. He's just trying to convince him to preserve his life. It's a good, honest, altruistic encouragement from a friend who wanted what was best for Christ. And yet, this is Jesus' response in Matthew chapter 16, get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance to me, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. It's always struck me that Peter didn't mean evil by his plea. Please just stay with us, Jesus, so that you don't die. That's a good, kind, loving thing to want for anybody you care about. But because his will was not the Father's will, Jesus calls him Satan. Get behind me, Satan. You're a hindrance to me, for you're not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. So it occurs to me, based on this passage, that to Jesus, satanic influence is anything that doesn't pull you towards God's will, which really opens up this wide swath for how Satan acts. Jesus, I think to him, satanic influence is anything that doesn't pull you towards God's will. It's something that pushes you away or pulls you away from God. I think what Jesus would argue is that there are no neutral forces in our life. There's not things that are blatantly bad and satanic and blatantly good and godly and then all this gray area in the middle. To Jesus, it seems rather binary. Things are either godly and pushing you towards God or they're satanic and pulling you away from him. There's no middle ground. And because in this instance, Peter was exerting influence over Jesus that wasn't pushing Jesus towards God's will, his influence was satanic in that moment. So it makes me think that his forces are at play far more often than we give him credit for. And I think where we should want to settle in is to ask the questions, okay, Satan is there. He's prowling about. He is the enemy. He is the accuser. He wants to destroy me. He wants to take me away from God. He wants to hurt God the Father by rendering me useless, by taking me away from him. How is he going to do that? How is he going to exert his influence in my life? This morning, I want to look at four big ways he does that. Now, if you're looking at the notes and what will appear on the screen, you're going to see this phrase, Satan's greatest hits. And I just got to level with you about something here, okay? A little peek behind the curtain. I don't know why I did that. I don't know why I call them Satan's greatest hits. It doesn't really fit into the sermon. I type these notes up on Thursday. I sit in my office. I think, yeah, that's good. That's going to work. And then I type it up, and then I email it to Steve, and then he makes slides. And every now and again, I get here on Sunday, and I think, why did I say it that way? But I usually just go with it because it's fine. But this morning, I looked at Satan's greatest hits. And listen, I got to tell you, if that seems dumb to you, it seems dumb to me too. But we're just going to roll with it because we put it in there on Thursday, and it's too late now, baby. So let's look at Satan's four greatest hits, how he really influences us, okay? The first one I want to look at is isolation. I think one of his greatest ploys, one of the things that he loves is isolation. Think about it. If he's a prowling lion seeking who he may devour, who do the lions devour? Well, they devour the ones that are off by themselves. They devour the ones that have wandered away from the flock. And if what he does is speak lies to us, if he's a liar and the father of lies, when are we most likely to believe them? When there's no other voices in our life to tell us that he's wrong. If Satan is whispering into our ear that we are unlovable and there's no one in our life that tells us that we are, we're far more vulnerable to believe that lie. When Satan is whispering into our ear that we're not good enough, when he's whispering into our ear that we're not worthy, when he's whispering that we shouldn't try that or that we shouldn't do that or that so-and-so doesn't like us or that they only said that nice thing to you because they're trying to get you to do this. They're only treating you that way because they're trying to manipulate you. When you begin to read the worst into everyone and everything and you're totally isolated and have no other voices in your life, how easy is it to convince you that the voice that you do hear is correct? If we play this isolation out to its ultimate end, we can talk about things like school shootings, can't we? Every time one of those things happens, it's an act of atrocious evil from the very pits of hell that somebody could walk into a school and open fire on children. But look at what they have in common. Who's perpetuating that evil? Young, isolated white dudes. Isolated guys who are either in late adolescence or are coming out of adolescence, whose story is the same. They don't have friends. They don't have people around them. And so they got radicalized by thoughts and whispers. And because they don't have a community, because they don't have anybody around them, they become more and more convinced that these lies that they're being fed are true until they act on them. And it is abhorrent evil. That evil is born out of isolation. And while I don't think anyone listening here is in danger of becoming that, it's a sobering reminder of how isolation works. And I think of why this pandemic is so very dangerous. Let me just implore you, if you've found yourself in this pandemic increasingly isolated, if you've left your small group because Zoom meetings are lame, I totally get it. Or you're missing church, or you just can't have people around you because you don't want to get sick. Whatever the reason may be, if you found yourself in COVID becoming increasingly isolated, can I just tell you in all candor that you're one of the ones he's circling? Can I encourage you to join a small group? Can I encourage you to reach out to some friends? Can I encourage you to pick up the phone today and just have a chat? Can I encourage you to find someone to say, hey, here's what I've been thinking. Can you help me make sense of this? And let's not let the enemy's lies grow in isolation. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm good. I'm not isolated. So far, I've made it. Great. I'm happy for you. I don't feel isolated either. Let's look for the ones who do. Let's think of our friends who might have begun to feel that way. Let's reach out to folks that might feel forgotten. If anybody is in your circle, is in your orbit, your atmosphere, can we just take some personal responsibility and make sure that they don't feel isolated? Can we yell at them as they wander away from the herd? Hey, come over here. Let's do lunch or something. Let's do like a Zoom call. Let's have a Zoom happy hour, whatever you want to do. Hey, come hang out. Can we help thwart the plans of the evil one in that way by making sure no one among us is isolated? The second thing that Satan loves to do, the second greatest hit, the secrets. Satan loves secrets, man. He loves the shadows of your life. He loves those nooks and crannies. Man, when you're hiding things, he can whisper stuff to you like, no one will ever forgive you for that. No one will ever understand those choices. No one can ever offer you grace in this situation. And then he whispers things to you like, just keep it tight. Just keep it there. You'll figure it out. You're going to defeat it. You're going to beat it. You can do it. Sure, that same sin that's been chasing you around for 10, 20, 30 years. But yeah, now's the time when you're going to draw the line in the sand and by a sheer force of will, now's the time you're going to beat it. Satan loves secret sin and he loves convincing you that no one can understand it. And he loves convincing you that you have it under control. Because here's what he knows. Secret sins are a cancer in our lives that will eventually claim it. You understand? Secret sins, those things that we do that if our friends found out about, they would not think the same of us. At least that's what we have ourselves convinced of. Those things that we have tucked away that we don't tell anyone, that we carefully monitor, that we carefully watch, that we make sure stay in the shadows and never see the light of day, those sins, Satan loves those sins because they are a cancer in your very life that will lead to it being claimed. Proverbs says it like this. He says, no man can hold hot coals against his chest and not be burned. Those secret sins, those are the ways that families are broken and that lives are destroyed. If you're dealing with one of those, you're probably sweaty right now. But if you're dealing with one of those, can I just tell you as a friend and a pastor, you're right where he wants you to be. If you have a secret sin in your life that nobody knows about, first of all, I get it. I've been there too. And anybody who tells you they haven't, 95% chance they're a liar. Everybody's dealt with those things. We all have ours. But if you continue to persist in yours, he will get you. It will get worse. It will come to light. You can choose to bring it to light or it will bring itself to light. And when it does, it will tear you down. I just want you to know because I care about you. If you're fostering a secret sin in your life, you are exactly where the enemy wants you to be. The other thing I would say is, when you do the thing that you're so very fearful of, and you allow some light to be shed into that dark corner of your life, certain that this is the end of your life, what you will find is more grace and joy and freedom there than you've ever experienced in your life. This belief that I could never shed light on what I am ashamed of because no one will think the same of me is simply not true. When we do that in a Christian community, we are met with grace and with love and with affirmation, and I want you to be met with that. And I want you to believe for the first time in a long time that this sin doesn't have to define me and it doesn't have to beat me. Shed some light on that and defeat the enemy. Disappoint him and let him slither back into his hole and find another way to get you because that's not going to work anymore. Let's claim some victory this week. If you have a secret sin in your life, I was praying for you before I came up here that you would have the courage to take the steps to shed some light on that so that we are no longer in his crosshairs. Now, you may be thinking, I'm doing great so far. I'm not isolated. I got no secret sin going on right now that I'm ashamed of. I'm an open book. And I would say, good for you. That's a healthy life, and you ought to feel that way. But I think his third greatest hit is one that's going to hit pretty close to home for a lot of us. It's simply distraction. Just distraction. Listen, Satan wants you to be as ineffective as possible. He wants to tear you away from God. If he can't tear you away from God, then he wants you to be useless in his kingdom. He doesn't want you to bring anybody one step closer to God. So how does he do that? Well, he's going to try to isolate you, but that hasn't worked. Good for you. He's going to try to get you to develop this secret sin that you can't share with other people. That hasn't worked. Good for you. Well, if I can't do those things, you know what I'll do? I'll just distract them. I'll put a dang cell phone in their hand. I'll give them a TV and a gossipy neighbor. Listen, I'm not even talking about the distraction of what if I've lived my whole life for the wrong things. I'm not even talking about the distraction of getting to the end of our life and wondering if we've invested in it properly. That's priorities. I'm talking about literal distractions, just literal nothingness that keep us from doing anything. So that maybe we think about our life and we think our life is on a good trajectory. We're doing good. We're good people. We're reading our Bible when we can. We're coming to church when we can. We're disciplining our kids or enjoying relationships with our kids the way that we should. We have good, healthy friendships in our life. And on the whole, the trajectory seems good. But on a day-to-day basis, how are we spending our days? It's Sunday. If you have an iPhone, you got a screen time report this morning. What does it say? How much time have you lost doom scrolling Twitter since November 1st? I would not like to share that with any of you, what my answer is. How much time do we lose to the algorithms that try to keep our attention? Scrolling Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. How much time do we lose to the news? That's very likely, and I'm guilty too, just an echo chamber for what we already believe. How much time do we lose to sports? When we wake up in the morning and the alarm goes off or we just simply come to and we wake up, what's the first thing we do? Is it grab our phone and invite in? What distractions do you have for me today, Satan? I am convinced that so very many of us go through our lives convinced that we're doing the right things and that we're good people. And we're right. But we allow so much of our day to be stolen from us with stuff that doesn't matter that Satan has effectively rendered us totally ineffective in God's kingdom. How often, this is for me included, do we put our head on the pillow at night, tired, because I was a good servant of the Lord today. I served him the way he wanted me to serve. And how many of us go to bed distracted and thinking about all the new distractions that await us the next day? I think distraction is Satan's number one strategy to render us ineffective. How distracted are we in our lives? How much of our daily attention do we give things that just at the end of the day don't matter and definitely don't help us build the kingdom of God? The last one I wanted us to look at this morning is division. Satan loves division. He loves to divide us. He loves to pit one against the other. Scripture is replete with God's will that his church be unified, that his people be unified, that we be of one body, of one mind, of one accord, that we march forward and have one plan. There are no limits to what a group of people who love Jesus and who love one another can do. And Satan hates that. He's terrified of it. He does everything he can to make sure that the people of God don't unify under a single banner. He wants to drive as many wedges between us as he can. He wants us to judge other people, even in our church, for stupid things that they do or say or that we take out of context. It is Satan's will that we be divided. It is Satan's will that we choose to not like other Christians. It's God's will that we be unified. This is why I think Satan loves our current political climate. I think he's just eating it up, man. I don't think politically things could be going better for Satan because all he cares about is driving a wedge between those who call Jesus Savior. And right now what we have is this culture where Christians on both sides will make judgments about other people's spiritual health based on how they vote. Christians on both sides of the aisle will hear that so-and-so voted for so-and-so and judge who they are spiritually based on a vote that they cast. With no context, with no discussion, they just assume that what I think of that side of the aisle is what you are, and what I think of that side of the aisle must be what you are. And because you voted that way, you must be ignorant, or you must not believe what I believe, or you must be swept away, or you must be convinced by the media, or you must be convinced by social media, or whatever it is. And Satan just sits back and folds his arms and is happy and grins because, look, I've set in motion this system that's going to cause division in the church. And now, within our churches, we have groups of Christians that are judging each other based on how they voted with as little information as possible. And it's the scheme of Satan. You understand that, right? He chuckles with glee when we do that. He delights when we scroll Facebook, pick and fight. When we pick up our phone and we go, look at what Sansa said. There's such a lemming. We show it to whoever's around us. Can we just do this, Grace? Can we just say not today, Satan, on that one? Not here. Not here. Can we just give each other the benefit of the doubt? When we see someone post pro something that we didn't vote for, can we just say, you know what? I know that person. I know their character. I know they're godly and that they have a thoughtful reason for voting that way, for thinking that way. And I also know that we have in common our Savior, Jesus, and my allegiance is to him. And there is nothing else. There is no other tertiary issue that could break away my allegiance to Jesus and loving other people with that same allegiance. Can we do that? Can we start to be gracious with each other, Grace? Listen, I want to be careful. I'm not saying that I've seen this happening. I'm not thinking of any particular instance in grace. What I am acknowledging is this culture that we exist in now where to pick a side is to claim so much about your life and who you are. And can I just ask that in this place, in this bubble, that we not do that? That we not let that strategy of Satan work? Can we remember that the other people of grace, the other partners of grace, the other people in our orbit who know Jesus are children of God? That they love him? That Jesus died for them? And that everything we know about them is thoughtful and good and that may be the way that they're aligned politically is too. And can we sweep that aside as a tertiary issue and focus as a primary issue on the fact that we love Jesus and our neighbors need desperately to know him? And why don't we be part of our culture that sweeps the rest of that stuff aside and quits letting Satan be so effective in that arena? There's an encouragement if we'll do this. There's an encouragement if we will seek others and not isolate ourselves and if we will not allow ourselves to be lied to. It's not just all bad news when it comes to Satan. You know, I referenced Peter earlier and I said that he tells us that we need to be sober-minded and watchful because Satan prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. But what I didn't do is read you the rest of that passage. This is the rest of this Yeah, he's against you. Yes, he's going to try to isolate you. Yes, he's going to try to get you enslaved in secret sin. Yes, he's going to try to divide us. Yes, he's going to do all those things and try to distract you. But if you'll resist him, if you'll refuse to become isolated, if you'll refuse to allow God's church, his bride, to become divided over silly things, if you'll fight off distraction in your life, if you'll have the courage to shed light on the secret sins in your life, if you will hold fast to God, then he promises you that after you have suffered for a little while, which is a kind thing for God to do to acknowledge that this is hard, resisting all of that is difficult and challenging. He says, if you do it, then the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Ephesians 6. He says, He acknowledges what we're talking about today. And he starts off this passage on putting on the armor of God, and he says, when you have stood firm, therefore, stand firm. When you've stood up, keep standing. When you've fought, keep fighting. When you're tired, keep going. And when we do that, when we persist, when we acknowledge the satanic influences in our life, and we do everything we can to resist those, the God of peace will be with us. He will guard us, protect us, and have defeated the enemy for us. We are frustrated that he continues to fight, that he continues to try to claim us, but God, we are so grateful that you have defeated the enemy for us. We are frustrated that he continues to fight, that he continues to try to claim us. But God, we know that you have won the battle. We know that for every lie he whispers in our ear, that you are blaring truths into the other one. If only we will listen. Give us the ears to hear your truth. Give us the eyes to see his lies. God, if any of us has a secret sin, would we just shed some light on that this week? Give us courage. May we be met with grace. Let us see light and believe the first time in a long time that we can be done with those things. God, if we are a part of the divisiveness in our culture and in your body, I pray that you would give us grace, patience, wisdom, and peace, that we would not be a part of that scheme. God, if anyone is isolated, bring your angels around them. Let them know that they are loved, that they are not alone. Let them know that they are seen. And God, for those of us who are distracted, would you give us the courage and the desire to be focused every day on what matters most in our lives, on the things that you've placed in our lives and the opportunities that we have to influence people towards you? We thank you for winning this war. We ask you for the strength to stand firm in it. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Merry Christmas everybody! My name is Fort and I'm a junior partner at Grace. Now come and join me. This is going to be the best Christmas Eve service ever! I can't wait! I know because I've been here at Grace for my whole life. Thanks for watching. Merry Christmas, everybody. Bye. Well, Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope that you'll stand up and join us as we sing. guitar solo joyful and try Oh, come ye to Bethlehem Come and behold Him Born the King of angels Oh, come let us adore Him Oh, come let us adore Him Oh Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation. Sing, all ye citizens of heaven above. Glory to God all, oh Oh, come let us adore Him. Oh, come let us adore Him. Christ the Lord. Every nation will bow down before You. Every tongue will confess You are God. We worship and adore you. We worship and adore. this happy morning Oh oh Let's birth. Oh, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born. In a lonely manger, the humble Christ was born. And God sent a salvation, the blessed Christmas is born. Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on new content That Jesus Christ is born. Go tell it on the mountain over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born. That Jesus Christ is born. is Hark the herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn King. Peace on earth and mercy mild. God and sinners reconciled. Joyful all ye nations rise Join the triumph of the skies With angelic hosts proclaim Christ is born in Bethlehem Hark the herald angels sing is Lord in time behold him come offspring of a virgin's womb veiled in flesh the Godhead see hail incarnate deity pleased as man with men to dwell Jesus our Emmanuel Jesus But him, born Prince of Peace, hail the song of righteousness. Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings. While he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die. Born to raise the sons of earth, Bye. to the newborn king. Hark the herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn king. The first Noel the angel did say Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay. In fields where they lay keeping their sheep. On a cold winter's night that was so deep. Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, born is the King of Israel. They looked up and saw a star Shining in the east beyond them far Into the earth it gave great light and so it continued both day and night. Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, born is the king of israel is to our heavenly Lord that hath made heaven and earth of naught and with his blood mankind has brought Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel Born is the King of Israel Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel Born is the King of Israel In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place. While Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone went to their hometown to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea. To Bethlehem, the town of David. Because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary. He was pledged to be married to him. And was expecting a child. While they were there, the time out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born. He is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you. You will find a baby wrapped in cloths. Suddenly a great companion of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God, saying, Glory to God. Glory to God. Glory to God. Glory to God. Glory to God in the highest heavens and on His mother Mary laid down his sweet head. The wise men were led. Come see the baby and worship him. His name is Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace, Everlasting Father, Emmanuel, Holy One, Son of God, Savior of the world Come and adore Him On bended knee He came to ransom Someone like me What could I offer? What could I bring? Come and adore him. King of kings, his name is wonderful. Counselor, mighty God. Prince of peace, Everlasting Father, Emmanuel. Holy One, Son of God, Savior of the world. And the greatness of His reign will never end. Let there be peace on earth and all good will to men. Come, us worship him. Wonderful counselor. Mighty God. Prince of peace. Everlasting father. Emmanuel. Holy one. Son of God, Savior of the world. His name is Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace, Everlasting Father, Emmanuel. You're the Holy One, Son of God, isn't a store-bought gift under the tree that we are waiting to open. We've been waiting. Waiting for something much more important. For hope to rise up. For love to embrace. For peace to invade. For joy to bubble up. In the midst of our waiting and longing, the prophet Isaiah from the Old Testament tells us, For unto us a child is born, a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace, there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. When we see it like this, we should remember that in our turbulent world, the government is on his shoulders. For he is our love, our highest governing power. And so right now, we light the central Christ candle because we have found our hope. We have discovered our love. We have realized our joy. We have encountered our peace. Today we celebrate joy to the world. The Lord is come. Choose today to step out of the darkness and into his marvelous light. And as we light this final candle, we ask you, light of the world, to light a fire within us, to burn this a part of your Christmas Eve. You know, earlier, the kids did a great job of reading the traditional Christmas story, and that's a great story. That's the big story. That's the one that we all care about on Christmas. That's what Christmas is all about, is the gift of God's Son, Jesus, the greatest gift that was ever given. But one of the things I like about that story, as we retell it over the years, is that we are actually in the habit of placing people in that story who were never a part of that story to begin with. We see this in our nativity scenes all over the place. If you go through your house or your mom's house or the front lawns of churches, we see these nativity scenes. And in those scenes, we see, of course, baby Jesus. We see Mary and Martha or Mary and Joseph, his parents. And then we see angels and we see shepherds. There's usually a donkey involved, and inevitably there's three wise men, right? And those nativities in symbol tell the story of Christmas. And it's always been interesting to me that we place the wise men at the manger of Jesus as part of the Christmas story, when in all actuality, they had nothing to do with Christmas. Not only are they not a part of the Christmas story, but they never even saw Jesus on a Christmas, let alone the first Christmas. And this is something that's always been interesting to me. It's kind of one of those little Bible facts that I've always thought was kind of neat, but I wasn't sure that it was very significant. But this year, as I was thinking about the Christmas message and rereading the Christmas story, I was reminded of this fact that we always place the wise men at Christmas, even though they weren't even a part of Christmas. And I began to reflect on that, and it became evident to me that there is something in the Christmas experience of the wise men that speaks absolutely to us and is representative of us. And so I thought we would take this Christmas Eve service, this Christmas Eve message, and focus on what Christmas meant to those wise men. I would almost say those three wise men, but we don't even know that that's true. We just traditionally say that there was three wise men because there was three gifts, but there could have been any number of wise men who came from the East. So let's look at the story of these men who came to fall on their face and worship Jesus. The only place we see the wise men is in Matthew chapter 2. So let's look at the beginning of this chapter when we miss all the time. Something that just tradition just glosses over. It's right there in the passage. It says, now after Jesus was born, this was years after Jesus was born, they come to Herod and they're looking for him, which means they were journeying to see him for a while. And it also tells us that unlike our nativity scenes reflect, they weren't at Christmas. And it's interesting to me that they weren't a part of Christmas, but that they came in later to find Jesus because for them, Christmas invited them to Jesus. They weren't a part of the first Christmas, so they didn't get to participate in seeing the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger. No, they weren't participants in the first Christmas. Rather, Christmas for them was an invitation to Jesus. From the east, from very far off, from Iraq, Iran, India, China, somewhere in that region, Christmas, when Jesus was born and the guiding star over Bethlehem appeared, Christmas was an invitation to the wise men to come and find Jesus. They weren't there, but they were invited by Christmas, and in that way they represent all of us. And that way they represent all of who we are. I see the wise men now as representative of the rest of the world coming to Christ after he was born. We couldn't be there for the birth. We couldn't be there to celebrate the first Christmas. But the same invitation that the wise men received is the one that we are offered, an invitation to come and find Jesus. And I think in this story, they represent all of us. All of us who couldn't be there at that very first Christmas. All of us for whom Christmas is an invitation to our Savior to come and to find Him. And so if that's true, if the wise men in the Bible represent us, and Christmas is an invitation to us that they received as well, then what can we learn from their pursuit of Christ? Well, one of the first things we see based on clues in Scripture is that they searched for Jesus for nearly two years. We see that once they got there that King Herod was an evil king and he was afraid that Jesus would be the king of the Jews and take his throne away from him. So he had all the firstborns, all the sons ages three and younger killed in Israel. Which means that their journey was at least two years long before they found Jesus. Do you understand that that means the wise men searched for Jesus for two full years at minimum before they really experienced him? Before they really were able to worship him? Before they really were able to find him? I wonder how arduous that journey was. I wonder how many times they wanted to quit. I wonder how many nights the storms that came blocked out the light that was guiding them. I wonder how many conversations they had about turning around and going home. I wonder how many people called them ridiculous for their pursuit. I wonder how long it took them to work up the courage to leave and to go. Two years is a long time to search for one thing. But I love that they had to do that. I love that they searched for Jesus for two years before they experienced him. Because that search and the arduous nature of it and the necessary persistence of it is so true to life. Some of us experience Jesus like the shepherds did that night in the meadows. In the Christmas story that the children read, we're reminded that the shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night. And then the angels appeared in the sky and sang to them and ushered them over to the manger so they could see this baby Savior. And for some of us, our experience with Jesus is like that. We're minding our business, tending our flocks in the fields, and angels appear to us and they sing from on high and we're whisked into the presence of Jesus and we experience it right there in that moment. And some of us have stories like that where our experience of Jesus and our understanding of him and being swept away by him was just instantaneous. But for many of us, our stories with Jesus are a lot more like the wise men. We had to search, and we had to persist, and we had to overcome discouragement. And there were times when the storms of life might block out the light that is guiding us. There may have been times where we have wanted to quit. There may be times when we wanted to walk away. We may have had discussions with those around us about just going home and saying, this is too difficult. The truth of it is, we are told in Scripture to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We see in Scripture that there is this process where we grow closer to Jesus and that sometimes finding him is difficult. It's not that he's not there. It's not that he hides himself from us, but it's just more true to life that the search for Jesus is arduous, that it requires persistence. And it also makes me wonder about these men. How did they know to follow that light? How did they know that that star in the sky right there, that's the one, and we're going to follow that for two years. The only answer I can come up with is that to recognize the star, they had to listen to the voice of God that was in their lives. It's interesting to me that Herod and the men and women in his court could see the same star that the wise men saw. But when the wise men know that that was the star and the people in Herod's court didn't? I think the only difference is that the wise men were listening to the voice of God. I believe that Scripture teaches us that God has written himself on our souls. That our Creator God breathed in us spirit. He breathed into us the breath of life. And he gave us souls that yearn for him. He gave us souls that pine for him. He gave us souls that year. They listened to that yearning. And so they had the faith to follow the guiding light. And I'm comforted by the fact that that same yearning is written on our souls. Our souls were designed and intended to be united with Christ. Our souls yearn to be united with our Savior. And because of that, God always provides guiding lights. God always provides a flicker of hope. He always maintains a course of direction. He always beckons to us. He always invites. He never shuts the door. He never gets stamped out. His invitation never goes bad. He always shows us guiding light, sometimes in stars, sometimes in a flicker, sometimes in a pillar of fire, sometimes in a voice in our ear. But make no mistake about it, God? What did the wise men do when their journey was done and they're experiencing Jesus? Well, look at what offered Him themselves and they offered him their treasures. They immediately, haphazardly, without hesitation, offered themselves and their treasures to this baby Christ. And it wasn't, it's important to note, it wasn't out of the sense of ought. It wasn't out of obligation. It wasn't, well, I guess this is what we need to do now. It wasn't even out of a desire to placate this deity or to get God on their side or to endear Jesus to them. It wasn't for any of those things. It was this spontaneous and natural response to fall on their face and worship the creator of their soul and to rejoice that they had been united with their Savior and to offer everything that they were and everything that they had. That's the natural response when we encounter our Savior. I believe that so ardently that I would even say this. If we feel like we've experienced Jesus and our first inclination in that moment isn't to fall on our face and worship his majesty, isn't to be overwhelmed by his goodness and to celebrate his kindness, if our first response isn't to fall on our face and worship him and offer all that we have and all that we are, then we haven't yet fully experienced him. Maybe we have a notion of who he is. Maybe we have an idea or we've heard a teaching or we've seen a glimpse and our soul has lurched and responded. But if it's not this full, submissive worship, then we haven't yet experienced who Jesus is, and our search continues, and we have to keep looking for him. But I think it's interesting that we exist in this culture that ebbs and flows and is progressive and is conservative and cares about Christian values over here and over here, not so much, and sometimes it's hard to tell what those Christian values are, and we all experience this culture in different ways. But amidst all the changes in our culture over the years, Christmas stands as this guiding light every year. Every December, our culture stops and we focus on Christmas. It starts as soon as Halloween is done. Things get swept aside and we throw up the Christmas decorations and we start to decorate our house and we start to do all the things and we look forward to celebrating the holiday and Christmas music started in my house very early this year because I think 2020 needs a little extra Christmas. But if we'll sweep all the extra things away, what we see is that we live in this culture that has exalted Christmas, that God has strategically placed in the middle of our joint attention as this guiding light, as this beacon calling our souls home to Jesus. And what we have in Christmas is the same invitation that was offered to the wise men. We can't participate in the first Christmas. It's already happened, but in that light, in that star, in that very first Christmas was an invitation to come to their Savior. And the same invitation that was offered to the wise men is offered to you. It's offered to you right now, the opportunity to come and sit at the feet for whom your soul was created to desire. Now some of you have been looking forward to this all year. Some of you make it a habit to regularly sit and worship at the foot of your Savior. Some of you have been looking forward to Christmas because it allows you to celebrate the one that created you. It allows you to celebrate the one that saves you and who conquers death for you. It allows you to celebrate the one who loves you. You are already like the wise men. You have made your journey and you are experiencing Jesus and you are sitting at his feet and worshiping. And for you, I hope that this service is only a help in doing that. For others, we've tasted and we've seen. We've experienced Christ. Maybe even got glimpses of who He is. Maybe felt His warmth from time to time, but for one reason or another we've wandered off. And maybe we're a little bit further away from Him at the end of this year than we have been in previous years. Maybe we haven't paid attention to that light in a while, even as it beckons us back. My hope and prayer is that this Christmas you'll hear that invitation anew. And you'll turn and you'll take a step back towards your Savior. And you'll begin that search again. Or maybe we've never begun our search. Maybe we're like Herod in his court. And the light is there. The invitation has been extended. But we haven't been listening. So we don't hear it and we don't heed it. My prayer is that this Christmas would be the first time that you open your eyes to the beckoning of God. That you would listen to Him calling to your soul. That you would acknowledge that He is the one who created it. And that you would begin your journey towards Christ and experiencing Him. The great news is, if we seek him, we are promised that we will find him. We are told that if we ask, we will receive. That if we seek, we will find. That if we knock, the door will be opened to us. That's Jesus himself speaking to you. So my prayer this year for all of us listening is that we would heed the invitation of Christmas to come to our Savior. That this year we would take a step further in our journey. That we would take a step closer to Christ. And that all of you, whether it's right now in the service, whether it's this month, whether it's in months to come or years to come, but that all of you within the sound of my voice would have a moment where you fall at the feet of Jesus and you offer all that you are and all that you have and you worship him because you are experiencing your Savior. I hope that you know that Christmas is an invitation to do that. In just a few minutes, our great children's pastor, Erin Winston, is going to come with her family, and they're going to light the Christ candle to close out Advent. And when that flame lights on the wick, I hope that you will look at that and you will see that as God's guiding light. That you will see that as his invitation that he offered and extended to the wise men that he is extending to you in this moment to come and to be a part of Christmas and to come and to find your Savior and to know him and to fall down and worship him. I hope that you'll accept the invitation of Christmas this year. Let me pray for you. Father, thank you for always beckoning to us. Thank you for always inviting us, for always calling for us, for never giving up on us, even when we give up on you. May we, God, all who are listening, accept the invitation that you extend through the birth of your son in Christmas. May we be guided by your light. May we have the privilege of experiencing Christ. And may we be so overwhelmed by him when we find him that we fall on our feet and we worship. Father, I pray that through song and through reflection and through communion to come in this service that the rest of our time together would be a time where we sit at your feet and we worship with grateful hearts and spirits at the miracle of the invitation of Christmas. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for the greatest gift that's ever been given. It's in that gift's name we pray. Amen. are brightly shining, it is the breaks a new and glorious dawn. Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices. O night divine, O night when Christ was born. O night, O night Oh truly he taught us to love one another. His law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease. Sweet hymns of praise in grateful chorus raise we Let all within us praise his holy name Christ is the Lord O praise his name forever Oh is proclaim fall on your knees oh hear the angel voices When Christ was born O Holy Night O Night Divine If you have been around Grace Raleigh on Christmas Eve in the past, you know that communion is a very special part of our evening. And we wanted this year to be no different. So we're going to give you the opportunity to participate in communion at home, giving us the opportunity as a body of believers to come together in fellowship and in communion. And so if you joined us and picked up a participation bag over the last week, you received in your participation package this cute little cup. This is what we will be using during communion. If, however, you were unable to pick up a participation package or you're joining us from somewhere, a different state maybe, and don't have access, then we ask that you take a journey into your kitchen and find some juice or some wine or some bread and then come back and join us. And while you're doing that, we will walk through a little tutorial on how to best utilize these cute little cups. So first of all on our cute cups there is a pointed side and if you bend it upward you will notice that there is a piece of aluminum foil and a piece of cellophane. The first thing that we want to do is take the piece of cellophane off. Underneath there, you will find your wafer or your bread, which we will use later. The next step is to then take your edge and to pull it back ever so slowly. And I caution you to do it slowly because if you just rip it off, you're liable to baptize the person sitting next to you or end up with a beautiful grape juice stain on your pretty carpet. So ever so slowly, pull back on the aluminum foil and you will reveal the juice that we will use in communion. And so now, I hope that those who have gone to the kitchen have returned. You have had the opportunity to open your elements. And now I'd like to prepare our hearts for this moment of communion by reading a piece of scripture from 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 23 through 26. And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is the body of Christ broken for you. Take and eat. The blood of Christ shed for you. Take and drink. And now I'd like to take the opportunity to pray for us. Heavenly Father, thank you. Thank you for moments like this when we have the opportunity to remember who you are and the sacrifices that you gave for us. Thank you also, Lord, that you give us the opportunity to come together as a body of believers. Even though we are separated and in our homes, we still feel that communion with you and with each other. And thank you, Lord, most of all, for loving us so much that you sent us your son on this very, very special night. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your son's most holy name that we pray. Amen. And now I would like to invite my family to join me on stage as we light the Advent candle. John 1, 1 through 5. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Tonight we light the final candle of Advent, the Christ candle. This candle represents the light of life. It is the same light that we began talking about on that first Sunday of Advent when we spoke of this light crashing into the darkness of the world with the arrival of Jesus. It is his arrival, it is this precious child and the promised king that invites us to seek him, to follow him, and to become people who walk in and share his light. So therefore, go into the world with great joy, love, hope, and peace, knowing that he is with you on and go ahead and light them. Now, normally the worship team would sing Silent Night, but this year, being so strange, I thought it was fitting to show what it was like singing Silent Night last year. So here's some footage of Grace singing Silent Night in 2019, and we hope that in 2021, we can all be together again. Merry Christmas. All is calm, all is bright Round yon virgin, mother and child Holy infant so tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace. Silent night, holy night, shepherds quake at the sight. Glories stream from heaven afar. Heavenly hosts sing alleluia. All sing hallelujah. Christ the Savior is born. Christ the Savior is born. Silent night, holy night. Son of God, love's pure light radiant peace from thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace Jesus Lord at thy birth Jesus Lord at thy birth Jesus Lord Merry Christmas, everyone. Heavenly Father, this has been a difficult year, a year fraught with challenges, hardships, isolation, tension, anger, and uncertainty. We know, Father, that you have seen your church and your people through more trying times, but for us, this year was hard. It was unlike any we've known. Yet in your word, you tell us to behold, for you are doing a new thing. You tell us that you make paths through the wilderness and streams in the desert. So even though at first glance it seems this year is one defined by pain and uncertainty, even though it may feel like we've been left alone to wander, God, we know that you are doing new things. You've done new things in the families of grace, allowing us to welcome new blessings into our homes. You've enabled couples to experience the life-giving fullness of holding their child for the first time. You've made it possible for children to feel the sense of privilege and responsibility that comes with being an older brother or sister. We see new things as this dark year has been brightened by announcements of children yet to come and blessings yet to experience. Even in a season of profound isolation, you've orchestrated the lives of those you love for our pleasure and your glory as parents saw the personification of years of prayers in the marriages you formed this year. We saw baptisms to celebrate and new families to welcome and small groups that tenaciously persisted. We do not deny that this year was trying and even for some of us, marked by loss. But we also acknowledge in that loss the years of profound gratitude for the time shared with those we love so much. More than that, we know that Christmas carries with it a promise that we will see them again. As this unique year comes to a close, we are more certain than ever of your presence and your goodness, bringing us together in socially distant circles and parking lots and driveways and backyards and drive-by birthday parties. Father, you've brushed away the fog of pain and uncertainty with moments of laughter and joy. We remember you on our soccer fields and baseball fields and Zoom calls and family outings and see you in the blessing of soul-warming friendships. After all that, we say thank you to our good Father. Thank you for the blessings in the midst of our struggles. Thank you for always making new paths for your children. Thank you for 2020 and all the new things it held and the future hope it has preserved. Amen. you

All right, good morning everyone. My name is Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace, and I am so thrilled to be able to be preaching this morning to you. Before we get into it, I've got to give you a quick warning. Because of just how excited that I've been for preaching and just excited anticipation, I didn't sleep very much last night. And so I say that to say that this morning I got here and as I was going through my message, making sure everything was good, my voice started kind of cracking a little bit and got a little hoarse. And so feel free to laugh at that if it happens throughout this message. But I also did want to let you know that because of that, you could possibly hear me cough once or twice. And I just wanted you to know that it's only the annoying type of cough, not the dangerous one. But anyways, we're going to be continuing in our study of Acts this morning. We're going to be jumping into Acts 16 and really focusing on the story that starts at verse 25. And so I would love for you guys to grab your Bibles, open them up, and read along with me. Before we jump into actually the verse 25 and beyond, I want to give a little bit of background of what's going on. And so definitely be opening up your Bible as I'm doing that. And so as we start off, we see two men named Paul and Silas. We've talked a lot about Paul and Nate did a whole sermon about Paul's conversion, that the Lord brought Paul out of this place of killing Christians and brought him and said, Paul, you are going to be my tool. You are going to be the person who brings my joy and the joy of myself in Christ to the Gentiles, to all people that are not Jews. And so if you didn't listen to that, go and check it out because I think it was incredible. But here we have Paul doing just that. He's going and he and Silas are bouncing around from place to place, city to city. They're worshiping God. They're finding places to pray and worship. And even more so than that, going and finding places to preach the good news and tell people about who Jesus Christ is and who their God is. And that is absolutely awesome. And so in the middle of chapter 16, we find them coming to a river in Philippi. Now, as they go down, they encounter this group of women, and there goes my mic. Let me just pull that back real quick. They encounter this group of women that they're like, hey, these are people. And so they go up to them and they start preaching to them. They start telling them who God is and, you know, about who Jesus is and what Jesus did for them and that this salvation is offered to them, not just to Jews, all this stuff. And so as they're saying these things, a woman named Lydia is so excited to hear and so excited to learn about God and about Jesus and everything that they're talking about that she actually gets baptized on the spot. Her heart is saved for eternity. And how incredible is that? And then in the next small passage, they encounter another girl. This girl doesn't have a name. She's called a slave girl that they come in contact with. And she was possessed by a demon spirit. Now, this spirit was one that gave her the ability, or the spirit through her was able to be a fortune teller, was able to tell people their fortunes and predict the future. So this obviously made her really valuable to her owners. Her owners had used this ability and used the spirit and this demon that was inside of her to gain just a ton of money. Well, Paul and Silas encounter this girl and as she kind of follows them around, the spirit continues to call out through this girl. And finally, Paul turns around and he basically says, through the power of Jesus Christ, I tell you to leave this girl now. And the spirit immediately exit this girl's body. This girl is set free from the spirit that had taken over her entire life. And so once again, you're like, wow, look at how incredible this is. Look at the amazing things that Paul and Silas are getting to do through the power of God. And it's just awesome. And it's super exciting. But the bad part is that what made this girl valuable was her ability to tell fortunes. And so her owners were furious. And so they go over, they grab Paul and Silas, they forcefully take them to the marketplace and take them to the magistrate and say, these people are just doing all of this stuff, all of this awful stuff. What is it? They say that he, I don't know. It's funny. But they basically lie. They say these people are running amok in the city. The whole city is going nuts and they're freaking out and they're doing all of these things that Roman citizens should never do. These are Jewish people who are doing things that are anti-Roman and they deserve to be punished. And they're in the marketplace. So what happens? People start joining, and people start seeing what's going on, and they begin to get furious as well. And they're all yelling and freaking out about it as well, basically saying, these people deserve to be punished. So the magistrates say, okay, we agree with you. So they said, have these men stripped, have them beaten, and have them thrown into prison. Not only just thrown into a jail cell, but have them bound by the stocks. Have them bound by the stocks in a way that they have to be upright to where they can't even lay down and go to sleep. And this is where I want to pick up and actually just start reading through the scripture as they are beaten and as they're thrown into prison and what happens once they're thrown to them. Suddenly, there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once, all the prison doors flew open and everyone's chains came loose. The jailer woke up, and when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted, don't harm yourself. We are all here. The jailer called for lights, rushed in, and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, Now I want to do some quick living room participation. I know that I can't ask for hands to be raised and I can, you know, call people out that are raising their hands and whatnot. So I'm calling you out to raise your hands if you've heard this story before. All right, take it one step farther. And the reason why I'm really asking is more because who has heard this story a lot? Because I know I have. I know this is the type of story that you grew up and you learned like constantly when you were a child. You know, like when you're able to look at the little cartoon drawings or watch the cartoon about them sitting in the jail, and then you hear how God brought a hurricane that was able to set them free, but they actually stayed and they saved a man's life and his family's life for eternity and all this stuff. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I absolutely love this story, and I love to hear it preached and talked about over and over again. But as I read it this time, there were a couple things that stood out to me. There were a couple things that I thought, that I thought, man, I hear this, I hear these stories preached in a way, in the same way super often. But I think that there's more here. I think that there's some underlying things within this passage that may be even bigger and more important than what we often talk about. The first thing that I think people talk about is, man, look at how great the Lord is. Look at how the Lord has worked through Paul and through Silas to save these two women. One, save them for salvation. The other, to literally get rid of a spirit, to remove a demon, evil spirit out of this woman. And then look at how big and how strong God is that he can bring a hurricane that is so big that it makes a guy say, I want to know who this God is. And let me tell you that all of those things are so right. They're so incredible. They're so accurate. And praise God for how incredible he is. And praise God that he uses his people like Paul and Silas to do his work. That is amazing and that is awesome. But I think sometimes what skipped over as I think a huge factor for why that jailer was interested in being saved is not just the hurricane that he witnessed, but what actually happened and took place in verse 25. So let's return to that. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. Can you imagine what the other prisoners were thinking? Can you imagine what the prison guard was thinking at that time? Like, I'm sure they were super confused. Like, these are two guys that had just come off of getting beaten and thrown into prison. And here they are in the middle of the night, just joyfully singing praises and hymns to their God. I imagine it was shocking for a couple of reasons. The first is because I bet that it wasn't just shocking because there was like noise, right? Like, of course, people probably in jail were like, you would probably hear grumblings or people that were like aching or hurting from being beaten before thrown into prison. Or maybe, you know, probably what's more common is people are yelling at the jailer or heckling the jailer because the jailer had thrown them into prison. You know, probably a few expletives were yelled at this prison guard in his day because they don't want to be in prison. But instead, they get this joyful singing and praising, and it didn't make any sense. I'm sure it was a 180 from what they were used to hearing from two people sitting in a jail cell. And the other reason I think that probably had them wondering and listening and a little bit confused is, why are they praying to their God, and why are they singing hymns that are praising their God and the goodness of their God in the midst of them sitting in a jail cell after being beaten? What do they have to praise God about? Sure, like praise God when you saved Lydia. Praise God when you released a girl of an evil spirit. But while you're sitting in a jail cell after you had been beaten, what are you doing? And I'm sure it just confused them. And I'm sure it, like, I would probably be the same if I didn't understand who God was of just sitting there and being like, I've got to listen to this. I've got to understand what these people are doing. One, because I don't get it and I need to understand. But two, maybe even in a deeper and more spiritual sense, they've got just as much going wrong in their life that I do. How is it that they're able to have peace? And how is it that they are able to have joy in the midst of going through the same thing I'm going through, sitting in a prison after being beaten? I love the way that William Barclay puts it as he talks about Paul's worship. He could sing hymns when he was confined in stocks in the inner prison at midnight. The one thing you can never take away from a Christian is God in the presence of Christ. When God, with God there, is freedom even in a prison, and even at midnight, there is light. And bouncing off of that, the other thing that you hear when you hear this passage taught and when you hear this passage preached is how incredible it is that the Lord is always there, is always with you, is always providing this joy and this peace in your heart if you will just turn to him. That if you can learn to worship and to love God, not simply because of the blessings that he's bestowed upon you or not simply because of all the great things that are a part of your life, but because of how good he is and because he has gifted you with this eternal salvation, guess what? The joy of how great God is and the joy of an eternal salvation is never soured. It never goes away. It's never changing. And guess what? Once again, what a beautiful, incredible message that is, that we are able to experience that peace and that joy, and our hearts can forever be impacted by that love of God, not simply when things are going well, but when things aren't. But oftentimes people stop there, but I think that there is one more thing going on underneath all of this that isn't quite as talked about, but I think may be an even more valuable component of worshiping through hardship. And that is that it not only impacts your hearts, their worship didn't only bless the hearts of Paul and Silas, it didn't, the presence of God wasn't simply within their hearts, but because of their worship, because of the joy that they exuded and the peace that they exuded, it impacted the people that were around them. When we are able to worship in the midst of tragedy and hurt and anger and frustration, anybody who's around you that's able to experience it is going to be impacted. Especially, especially, especially non-believers. Alistair Begg is a pastor and he puts it this way. He says, While I think he is in general saying this, I would rephrase it to even go further. And I would say not only is praise possible when the circumstances seem to dictate otherwise, but worshiping in the midst of those circumstances can be used to evangelize in a uniquely special way. There's something uniquely special about not simply worshiping when everything is great, but worshiping when nothing is. It's special for you, but it is impactful to people who don't understand. Think again about how the jailer and how the prisoners thought. Like what must have they been thinking? All it says is they sat and they listened. I'm sure they were curious. I'm sure they wanted answers. I'm sure they wanted to understand like what is this? Why is this happening? I need more facts. I need more information, just like the curiosity within them. But underlying that curiosity, I bet it's more of a hope because though they didn't know God, they knew the exact suffering that Paul and Silas were going through. And I bet that the thought of being able to experience joy and peace like they had been exuding is something that they surely could get on board with. This reminds me so much of a story of my best friend Brandon from senior year. Brandon, super electrifying personality, just fun, energetic, funny, hilarious. Like people, like when he's in a room, people gravitate towards him. He's hilarious. He's funny. He's goofy. Just all of the above. He just has this type of energy that it's just like, I got to be around this guy because he is just great to be around. And I say all of that, but I think probably the main reason why people love to be around him and love even more than that to befriend him is because he just loves people well. He just loves people in general. He just loves people so much. And while I think that's definitely just a character trait and a characteristic of him, I think that that has been sown so deeply into him because, man, there are not many people who I know that love the Lord more than Brandon. And because he loves the Lord so much and because he also loves people so much, he wants everyone to be able to know and love the Lord the way he does. He wants people to experience the love he's received from the Lord. And so he does everything he can to be that love to everybody that he comes in contact with. Not just his family, not just his youth group, not just his close friends like me and our group of friends in high school, but every classmate, every teammate, all of these people, whether they know who God is, whether they're completely anti-God, he wants them to know how much God loves them, not simply through his words, but by his actions. That's the type of dude Brandon is. Brandon, he's got the heart of like, we used to do this thing called prayer chapel where Brandon has, he's an incredible worship leader. So he was normally the one, we would go to this small chapel just at a local church and we would just take some time where normally it'd be Brandon. He would just sing and lead worship and we would sing and worship with him or we would pray silently or pray for people, read scripture. It's basically just a time to come and to celebrate and worship God. And we all loved it. It was just kind of our group of friends that went and did it. But man, every single week, Brandon would go all through classes and invite everybody to come and do it with us. Or he would throw it on Facebook or he'd send texts to all of these people. And not just like believers, like people who weren't believers, people who he just like was friends with in class. And he just wanted everyone to come and do it. And people didn't really come, you know, like it wasn't a thing people did, like, you know, which kind of makes sense. Like going to something called prayer chapel, that's just kind of this intensive type worship type thing is probably not the most like exciting thing for someone who doesn't, you know, believe in God or is not a Christian. And so, you know, but it's just kind of the guy that Brandon was. He wanted anyone who, he wanted everyone to know they were welcome. And more than that, he wanted everyone to just have some opportunity to get to know who God was. So fast forward to the end of senior year. Only a few weeks left in the school year. And Brandon feels a lump on his lymph node. And so he goes to the doctor and obviously he gets it tested. And so you have the kind of limbo, the amount of time that you kind of sit and you wait before you get any results. During that time, Brandon had really devoted himself to just praying, devoted himself to really like going to the Lord and saying, you know, like, God prepare me for this. And as he did so, two things he said were just very clear and very evident to him. The first is that God had him. He said more than ever before, he felt the presence of God and he felt, he heard God's voice in a sense and just felt God saying, Brandon, you are in my hands forever and always. I love you. I've got you. We're going to get through this together. And so because of that, he was able to experience the same type of peace and the same type of joy that Paul and Silas had even when they had been beaten and thrown into prison. The second thing, and I think probably because of his experience and how vastly he was able to experience God and God's protection over him, is he knew for sure he had cancer. He didn't need to hear the results. He didn't need to get them back. He knew. And so that whole time while people are sitting and praying and waiting in fear, Brandon was pretty certain of what was to come. He was pretty certain of the result. And the Lord had prepared his heart in a way that he was completely at peace about it. So the day comes that he gets the results and it hit us pretty hard. And by us, I mean me, his close friends, I mean his family, my family, a lot of grief, a lot of hurt. But I also extend that to say kind of the school. It kind of just hit the school really hard, all grades, but especially seniors and the people that were in his classes, because this is the same Brandon I was just talking about that is just so loves people so well and so therefore is loved by so many people. And so when this happened and when people heard this, there was just utter grief and hurt and like this sense of just like sadness and melancholy and depression within the student body. People were mourning because guess what? At the time, not many of us even understood cancer in general anyways. We didn't know what it meant. And so we were like, we've heard of what cancer does to people. And so everyone's just kind of terrified and freaking out. Well, guess what? In the midst of that, in the midst of people reacting in that way and reacting out of fear and sadness and just overwhelming sense of just like, what is going on? Guess who's not responding that way? Brandon. Why? Because Brandon had trusted in God and Brandon had the heart to go to God in worship and in prayer, knowing that this is the same God it had always been. And the same Jesus had died for him now, just like he had before Brandon had cancer. And within that, Brandon said, you know what we need to do? We need to have a prayer chapel night. I want to do prayer chapel tonight. Why? Because I want to worship my God. I want to lead a time of worship and I want to lead a time of just getting to pray to God and praise God with the people that I love. So I wish I could say I had the same type of faith, but obviously I was going to be there for him for that. But I was not excited about that. I was pretty frustrated with God at the time. But anyways, we do that. You know, he does all the same stuff. And you know, hey, we're doing prayer chapel tonight, whatever, on Facebook, text, all that stuff. And we show up to about 90 to 100 people in this small little chapel. Not just family, not just close friends, not just people in the youth group, people in the church. I would say the vast majority of these people are these classmates and these teammates and these people who Brandon had spent his life loving, that though they had been turned off or though they had been closed off to Brandon's faith and to Brandon talking about God and all of those things, they still loved Brandon so much because he just loved them so well. And so at this moment, I think they thought two things. One, I think they thought, man, I want to be there for Brandon. Brandon has loved me so well, and he's been there for me for anything that I needed. I want to do the same for him. But you know what I also think? What I also think is these people for the first time were asking the question of, what? Are you kidding me? Are you serious? Why in the world would you want to put together a night of worship where you stand up in front of everyone, the person who just got the news that he has lymphoma, you stand up in front of everyone playing piano and singing praises to God. Why in the world would you want to do that? And I think they needed to find out. Because it made sense to them before. While they didn't believe in God, they fully understood that somebody who did believe in God would just absolutely radiate joy and absolutely praise God just with all of his might. While he's got just all of great friends and great family. And he's an excellent tennis player who's going next year to play tennis in college on a scholarship. He's got his health. He's got all of these incredible things. And guess what? It makes a lot of sense to worship God when all of those things in your life are going well and going right. But when Brandon wanted to worship, when Brandon wanted to praise his God for how good his God was when his whole life had just fallen apart. When he went from going next year to play college tennis to now not in a month, his whole body is going to just break down because of chemotherapy and he's clearly not going to be able to do that anymore. Fear of losing his life, fear of what's to come, fear of next steps, all of these things. Now this doesn't make sense. Brandon, how are you still worshiping this God for being good? I don't get it. I've got to come and I've got to figure it out. And so they came. They showed up. And boy, did they witness the presence of God. I talked to Brandon a couple weeks ago on the phone as we were kind of reliving that night and as I was talking to him about the sermon and stuff. And we just both agreed that there was maybe never a time before or since then that the presence of God was so prevalent and so present in a room. Filled with people who didn't know the Lord, filled with people who didn't know about Jesus and about Jesus's sacrifice. And there they are sitting in this room, listening and witnessing people worship and people give their lives in worship to God, talking about and just praising how good he is and experiencing for the first time how incredible, how amazing, and how immaculate the presence of God is. Nothing changed. Nothing about Brandon changed. Nothing was different about him. He loved God the same way. He treated all of those people the same way, And he worshiped the exact same way. He didn't make the night anything special. He simply just wanted to have another prayer night. He just simply wanted to have another night to do prayer chapel. The only difference was his circumstance. And that circumstance led to such a large, more vast audience and in such a larger space for God to impact people's hearts and to impact people's lives. There's simply an aspect of worshiping in the midst of tragedy that captures the attention of non-believers who otherwise might just be completely indifferent. I can't stand in front of you and say that there were tons of people who gave their lives over to the Lord. I can't tell you that all those people became Christians. Unfortunately, I would say a lot of them didn't. But for the first time, they were willing to be open to hearing it because they saw something that didn't make sense and they had to figure out what it was. And that was somebody who had just received the worst news in their entire life saying, I want to praise God for how great he is and I want to show my love for him. And it was the same with Paul and Silas. Paul and Silas had experienced the goodness of God. They've experienced God doing great, incredible, powerful things. seen, as soon as the jailer found out that Paul and Silas were still there, he sprinted to them. He fell at their feet and he said, how can I be saved? Was that because he witnessed the amazing size and power of God who had just brought a hurricane? Yes. But I think it was also because prior to that, he had found and he had been able to hear that this is clearly a God that loves his people so well that even in the midst of brokenness, even in the midst of bruises, even in the midst of prison, they would still praise his name. That power mixed with that love is something he needed to know and needed to be a part of. And because of that, he and his entire family heard the gospel that night and were saved. Not only is praise possible when circumstances seem to dictate otherwise, but worshiping in the midst of those circumstances can be used to evangelize in a uniquely special way. Worshiping amidst tragedy, amidst heartache, failure, isolation, struggle, not only impacts your heart, not only does it provide joy to you and peace to you in a time where there might not be either on earth, but it impacts the hearts of the people around you. It impacts the hearts of people who don't understand and want to. It piques the interest of people who cannot understand why you would be praising God for his goodness when everything is so bad. And it impacts them because while not everyone knows they need Jesus, that they need a Savior, pain, struggling, hurting is universal. And intrinsic to that pain is the longing for peace and the longing for joy that seems absent within it. Everybody who hurts wants to feel peace. Everybody who's feeling pain wants to feel joy in the midst of that peace or in the midst of that hurting and in the midst of that pain. Intrinsic to that pain is the longing for peace and the longing for joy that seems absent within it. And so when non-believers catch a glimpse of someone whose faith leads them to joyful worship in the midst of pain and in the midst of suffering, they want to know more about what it takes to experience the same, to see that joy, to feel that peace, to know those in the midst of anything that life throws at them. And what a beautiful way to share with someone the goodness of God. Let's pray. God, thank you. Thank you, God, that you are the same today, tomorrow, forever. God, thank you that your blessings, that though they come at times and at other times we maybe feel like there aren't so many around, that the blessing of you and that you have saved us forever is the only one we need and therefore the only one that should provide us with the joy and peace we need to roll through this life. God, I pray that you give us the faith to be able to praise you in the midst of anything going on. Give us that joy and give us that peace in our hearts, God. Even more than that, God, allow us to share that with people around. Allow us to never miss an opportunity to praise you, not simply when things are going well, but when things are going poorly. Because it's noticed. Because you can't fake praise and you can't fake all glory to God when not everything is going well. Allow us to be your vessels in this way, God. Allow us to show people what your joy looks like regardless of circumstance. We love you so much. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. I hope that you're having a great Memorial Day weekend. If you're one who has the opportunity to be watching from the beach or a mountain cabin or a lake house or something like that, good for you. I hope that you've had a good, restful weekend. For the others of us, I hope that you enjoy this unique Memorial Day weekend. And thanks, as always, for watching this morning or this week. This morning, we continue in our series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts and looking at some of the practices, philosophies, and principles from the early church that still apply to us today. And hopefully we're getting a sense of the shoulders that we stand on and the roots that we share in common as the book of Acts details the beginnings of this fledgling church trying to find its way and figure out who it is and what it is going to do. And that was 2,000 years ago, and here we are 2,000 years later, and the church has looked very different over the years, has it not? Over the years, the church has changed in dramatic ways. And historically, there have been churches where people, the pastors would dress in robes and wear fancy hats. And then in other churches, you wear suits and dresses. And then in other churches, you wear jeans. And now in isolation, we wear sweatpants. As we watch this together, there is about a 98% chance I will be in my sweatpants as the pastor. And so church has changed a lot. There's churches that are high church and are in cathedrals and ornate buildings shaped like crosses and everything has a meaning. And there's different conclaves and there's different areas and there's different prayer centers and then other churches are in places that are next to aquarium stores and in warehouses with a pole in the middle of them. Some churches are highly liturgical, meaning they observe this order of service that was passed down generation after generation and do the same chants and the same verses and the same songs and they stand together and they kneel together and they pray together and they cry out together. And other churches don't have any liturgy whatsoever. We just do whatever we want to each week. Some churches observe the Lord's Supper every day or every week and others a couple times a year. In some churches, there's no microphones at all. And in others, there's a light show and laser show and smoke machines and everything else. And it just kind of makes you wonder over the years as we've adapted and adjusted and evolved and changed from this early church in the book of Acts and all the different iterations and expressions of church over the years, it makes you wonder how we even know we're doing it right, right? I mean, I don't know about you, but I've wondered a lot if Jesus or Paul were to walk into the doors of grace on a Sunday morning, would they look around and go, you guys are nailing it. This is exactly what we intended to start. Would Jesus go, yes, this is exactly what my bride should look like? Would Paul say, yes, this is what I gave my life to begin was what's happening here at grace. I kind of do wonder if we're doing it right. It reminds me of a story as we think about how do we know if we're doing church correctly. I've told this story before. It's a short fictional story. It's a parable that's made up, but I think it helps us make a good point this morning. The story goes that there is a man walking along a country road, and in the distance he sees a barn, a red barn. And on the side of this barn, there's a bunch of different targets. And in the middle of every target is an arrow just in the dead center of the bullseye. And then he sees a young boy with a bow and a quiver of arrows who's been apparently hitting these bullseyes with remarkable accuracy and consistency. And so the man goes to the boy and he says, listen, you're incredible at this. Can I watch you fire these arrows? Can I just see how you do this? I want to watch you do what you do. You're so good at it. And the boy says, yeah, sure, if you want to. And so the boy takes an arrow out of the quiver and loads it up into the bow and just kind of haphazardly aims towards the barn and fires away. And the arrow just lands in the middle of a sea of red. No target in sight. And the man feels badly. He says, my gosh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to mess you up or mess up your system. And here you've missed the target. And I feel bad. I feel like that's my fault. And the little boy says, oh, no, no, no, no. It's no problem. And he walks over to the barn and he grabs a can of paint and he starts to paint a target around the arrow that he just fired. And I think so often in life, we start things or we do things or we try to execute things without a clear target painted for us. We just charge forward. We just charge ahead. We just do what it is we think we're supposed to do. And then when we get to the end of the road, we paint a target around wherever it was that we landed and we go, success. And sometimes I wonder if we're doing that with church. Sometimes I wonder if we just all get together and we preach the word and we sing together and we pray and we do what we think we're supposed to do. And then when we get to the end of a year, the end of a decade or the end of an era, we go, did we do a good job? And we go, well, yeah. And then we just paint a target around whatever it was that we did and say that was the goal. And so as we think about that, are we doing this right? Would Jesus and Paul show up and look at our church and say, yeah, that's the target that we painted. You're nailing it. How do we know if we are? How do we know if we're aiming for the right target? How do we know if we have the right bullseye in mind as we do church together as grace and as we pursue God as individuals? I think it's an important question to ask because we arrive at a passage in Acts chapter 2 that effectively paints the targets for all churches for all time. I think it's an incredibly useful and helpful passage. I'm going to be in Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47. It is the description, the quintessential description of the early church. If you want to know what should the church look like, what should characterize and define the church, what did God design the church to do, we find it in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47. If you want to ask a question like this, what target was painted for us as a church by Jesus and by Paul? It's this. We find it here. And in this passage are some distinctives that we want to pull out. I'm actually going to pull out seven distinctives. We're going to look at three this week and four next week. I've expanded the Acts series by a week so that we can just sit in this passage, in this text, and walk through and look at the different things that define the early church and should therefore define us as a church. So this is early church distinctives. Look at what we find here in Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47. By way of reminder, what's going on as we enter into this passage is in Acts chapter 1, Jesus has been alive for 40 days after resurrecting from the dead. He goes up into heaven, and as he goes up into heaven, he tells the disciples to build the church, to go into all the world, spread the gospel, baptize them, make disciples, build the church. And then he says, wait for the Spirit. Wait for the gift of my Spirit and then go out and build the church. And so they sit around in the upper room waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Acts chapter 2, they receive the gift of the Spirit. They walk out on the porch and they preach. And the results of that message that they preach about who Jesus was and about, hey, you, the crowds, killed the Messiah, the Son of the living God, their response is that they were cut to the heart. They said, what do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. And last week we talked about that repentance as repentance of who we thought Jesus was. That's the foundational repentance of the church. And about 3,000 people, the Bible says, repented that day and joined the church, became Christians. And so now we have this church of about 3,000 people in Jerusalem. And what do they do now that they're a church? Now that there's this infant organization, what do they do? We find exactly what they do in these verses, 42 through 47. And in these verses are the distinctives or the target that was painted for us that we're supposed to be hitting now 2,000 years later. So let's look at the things that defined the early church. It says in verse 42, That's the beginning of the church. That's where you and I come from, is that incredible cataclysmic time of the church's infancy where it's learning to find its footing and learning to walk and figuring out what they're going to be about as an organization. And in this passage, in those seminal verses, are some distinctives of the early church that we should seek to emulate today. And you know, different authors and scholars pull out the distinctives in different ways. I saw one person sum up everything in four basic categories of characteristics, and others might have nine or even more than that. For us, we're going to look at seven distinctives, three this week and four next week, things that define the early church and should define us. So for those of you who like listy sermons, this is good for you. We're going to have seven things. You can number your paper. You can write the thing that I say and then take notes underneath it. If you're a note taker, you're really going to love this. So the first one that we're getting to right out of the gates is exactly what they said. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. So the first distinctive of the church that we are to emulate is that they were eager learners. They were eager learners. They wanted, they wanted, anytime an apostle was speaking, they were listening. They were, they were eating it up. They were vociferous in their desire to learn more about God and his church. And this seems like something that might be obvious, that they were devoted to teaching, but it's important that we understand why they were so hungry for this teaching. We don't think about this a lot, but this was a really uncertain time in church history. We're so used to church. For those of you who are church people, even if you're not a church person, you just have a cursory understanding of church and what we believe. We're so used to having an authority. We're so used to having a Bible, to having a place where we turn to, where we go, is what you said true or false? And we can go here and we can determine if it was. We have a grid to determine truth and we have a rich history of teaching tradition. We have a rich history of theology that we walk into so that we kind of know some of the basic tenets of our faith. We know that most Bible-believing churches are going to affirm that Jesus was the Son of God, is the Son of God, that he was 100% God and 100% man. Most churches are going to affirm that God is a triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that the Bible is God's word and that it is inerrant and that we can trust it and that it is the authority in our lives. Most churches are going to affirm that God is the creator God and that Jesus are the very words of God. There's some basic tenets of our faith that we can agree with that aren't murky at all. But in the time of Paul, in the very early church, those things were incredibly murky. They didn't know what to think of Jesus. They didn't know for sure if he was a son of God or if he was an incredible prophet. They weren't quite sure what to believe. Can you imagine the different beliefs that existed in different groups of friends in the different communities? Can you imagine the old stubborn man who was just certain that he knew what it was that he thought he knew and told everybody that you should do this and you shouldn't do that based on nothing at all but his own presumptions. Can you imagine the difficulty of being a Jew with all the laws of Judaism and then trying to transition into this New Testament, into this new way of believing, into this new era of faith, not sure which things to leave behind and which things to bring forward with you. Can you imagine the difficulty of grafting in the Gentiles? Before this Jewish faith was just for the Jews. They grew up generationally understanding it. And now all of a sudden this faith is for everyone regardless of culture or ethnicity. Can you imagine the difficulty and the tension in grafting that in? A lot of the tension in Acts is that very tension of how do we graft Gentiles into this ancient faith? It was really murky and uncertain. It was a lot like it is now trying to figure out any truth whatsoever about COVID. As I thought about the situation that they were facing, trying to get certainty around the teachings of this new church without any written documents and void of authority outside of the apostles, I thought of us trying to figure out what's true about the coronavirus. I don't know how deeply you've delved into trying to learn the truth about even the numbers and the reporting around coronaviruses, why our cases are spiked or why they're not spiked, or if they really are spiked, or if they really are going down, or if there's going to be a surge or a second wave, or any truth at all around what's going on with the pandemic. I had a friend just this week I was talking to who read an article in one minute. At one time, he sat down, he read an article, and this article said that the hospitalized cases of COVID in the state of Georgia are down around 1,000 right now. And that state has a population of about 8 million, so that's a really small percentage. That's really good, right? Well, then he flipped the page or scrolled down and he read another article about a woman who's created a model online to track COVID cases who was approached by a particular state that asked her to flub the numbers a little bit to under-report the cases so that things look better so that they could open back up. Two totally different stories, and you don't know which one to believe. Who has authority? And listen, I know that that could get political about who says what about COVID, but the truth of it is we can all understand that it's difficult to know what's true. This is the era of the early church. For them, it was difficult to know what was true. It was difficult to know who to trust except for the apostles. The apostles were the authority. The apostles, the disciples of Christ, had spent time with Jesus. They had face-to-face interaction. They were the carriers of the keys to the kingdom. They had the authority. If there's somebody over there in Bible study or small group or after church who is teaching something about this new way of faith and it contradicts what the apostles said, then that person's wrong and the apostles are right. The apostles had the authority. They were the truth tellers of the early church. So people clamored around them every time they opened their mouth to hear what it was they had to say and had to teach because they were the authorities that brought clarity around this new faith. And over time, these apostles wrote down what they were teaching in the form of letters to other churches. And then they wrote down what they were teaching in the form of the Gospels, the account of Jesus' life and his ministry and what he came to do and accomplish and everything that he taught and what was meant. And over time, these writings were compiled together and they became known as our New Testament. And so now, as a modern church, if we want to be committed and devoted to the apostles' teaching, if we want to be eager learners, if we want to hit that target that's painted for us, what that means is we are eager learners of the New Testament. That the New Testament, the books from Matthew to Revelation and our Bible are the ones that we would pour ourselves into, that we would pour over, that we would learn from and pull out from. And it might sound to you like I'm downgrading the Bible or I'm downgrading the Old Testament, and I'm not doing that at all. I love the Old Testament. And as a matter of fact, it's impossible to understand the New Testament without understanding the Old Testament. You can forget understanding Acts, Galatians, Romans, Hebrews without an understanding of the Old Testament. You can forget understanding the Gospels if you don't know the Old Testament. You can forget understanding Revelation if you don't understand Daniel and Ezekiel. But if we want to be committed to the apostles' teaching like the early church was, that means we're committed students of the New Testament, that we are eager learners about God's Word, that we are never satisfied with it. That's why, that we're never satisfied with what we know about it. That's why on Sundays, as long as grace exists as a church, that preaching and teaching will be a centerpiece of what we do together. Not because the pastor is someone special, but because we are collectively devoted to the apostles' teaching. Because we are collectively eager learners. That's why I believe it's my responsibility not just to provide biblical knowledge and insight for people who might be new believers or non-believers or not as biblically literate or experienced as others. Hopefully, if that's you, then you get something every week from what we're teaching. But I also firmly believe that my job as your pastor is to give you things from God's word, is to teach you from God's word a different perspective or a different insight or a different teaching that you may not have heard before. My hope and my prayer is that even if you've been walking with the Lord for years and years and years and have a very good depth of knowledge of the Bible, that at least more often than not, you're walking away from the sermons of grace and you're going, I didn't know that, or I hadn't thought about that, or I hadn't considered that before. I hope that we all continue to learn together. So as a church, we hit that target by being committed to teaching God's Word. But as individuals, we can continue to hit this target in our own life and be the right version of the church now by continuing to be eager learners, by pursuing other avenues of learning about Scripture. And as I thought about this, I realized that we live in an unprecedented time of availability of the apostles' teachings. There has never in history been a time where we had more information at our fingertips. You can listen to podcasts where people talk about God's Word, where people talk about scriptural things. You can go get a book for very cheap. You can listen to a book. You can play the Bible on your earphones or over your car stereo as you drive down the road. You can listen to the Bible on a greenway as you take a walk or ride your bike. There's so many churches and so many good pastors and so many effective teachers. You can find any of that material online. There is an online conference on church stuff just about every week of the calendar year that you could participate in if you wanted to. We have so many options to dive deeply into the apostles' teaching and to learn more and more and more about God's Word. So my challenge to you in this distinctive is to continue to be an eager learner. Don't be satisfied with what you know about God's Word. Don't be satisfied with what you know about the New Testament, but dive more deeply and with more curiosity and urgency into the depth of God's Word. And let's continue to be eager learners together as they were in the early church. Another thing that I wanted to pull out this morning, the second distinctive that I want us to look at is that they were devoted to spiritual disciplines. They were devoted to spiritual disciplines. We see in this at the beginning of the passage that they were devoted to prayers, it says, plural. Not prayer, but they were devoted to prayers. And as I read and researched this, a lot of people like to go off on what it meant to be devoted to prayer. And that's an important investment of time. However, I suspected that there was more to it than that because it's plural, prayers. And it turns out that it was, that this Jewish audience was in a habit of observing three times of daily prayer. To be a devout Jew at the time was to pray three times a day on schedule, in the morning and in the afternoon at the ninth hour, which is 3 p.m. And let me just, as an aside, if you want to go down a fun Google rabbit hole, Google all the things in the Bible that happened at 3 p.m. It's amazing. I think that there is something significant about that time that we don't even understand yet somehow, because so many things happened at that time in Scripture. They prayed in the morning, they prayed in the afternoon, and they prayed in the evening, three times a day. And different rabbis and different synagogues would have different programs of prayer, different things that you're supposed to focus on during that time of prayer. But what they did is they were a Jewish people who were devoted to prayers, this rhythm of prayers. And then when they converted to Christianity, they continued with that same discipline. They continued with that same rhythm. And I'm calling this a spiritual discipline because they didn't have scripture to read. They had it memorized. They could recite it while they prayed. They could pray it back to God, but they didn't have a Bible to open. And so their version of spiritual discipline was to be praying three times a day. This devotion to spiritual disciplines is why you will always hear me say that there is no greater habit that any person can develop in their life than that of getting up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. A distinctive of the early church was a church that was devoted to these spiritual disciplines, that was devoted to studying God's Word, that was devoted to prayer. They were disciplined to do that in that way. So if you want to be spiritually disciplined, if you want to be like the early church and be hitting that target in your life, then you need to be committed to prayer. You need to be committed to reading God's Word. Maybe pick a time of the day where you say, this is when I'm gonna read the Bible. I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna have coffee, I'm gonna read the Bible. I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna go to work, and on my way to work, back when you used to do that, on my way to work, I'm not gonna listen to anything else. I'm gonna listen to the Bible app and let them read the Bible to me as I go into work. On my lunch break, I'm not gonna talk to anybody. I'm pull out my app. I'm going to read the Bible. Pick a time to make that a part of your daily discipline. And I would encourage the same thing for prayer. And maybe the best way to think about it is like this. A couple months ago in our Grace is Going Home series, we talked about discipleship at Grace and how we're going to define discipleship moving forward as simply taking our next step of obedience. So in regards to spiritual disciplines and prayer, I would just ask you, what's your next step of obedience? What's your next step of obedience in reading the Bible? Is it to be more consistent? Is it to start at all? What's your next step of obedience in being more obedient in prayer, in being consistent in prayer? And listen, you may not pray at all. And that's all right. I mean, you're there by yourself or maybe you just have family around you. You don't have anybody to impress. You don't need to lie and pretend like you dive deeply into the ocean of prayer every day. Like, it's okay if you're just sitting there right now and you're going, honestly, I don't really pray very much. That makes your next step pretty easy. Pick a time at all to pray. If the only time you pray is at meals, pick one of those meals and pray about something besides the food. Intentionally pray about friends or family or loved ones. Intentionally thank God for things that he's placed in your life. If you already have a habit of prayer in your life, think about what it would take to go deeper in that prayer. Can you come up with a prayer plan where on certain days of the week you pray for certain things or certain people? Or could you develop multiple times of prayer during the day? I know there's a season in my life when I set an alarm on my phone, and every day it would go off at three o'clock, and I would stop whatever I was doing every day and set things aside and pray. And sometimes I would dive deeply into prayer. Other times it was a quick cursory prayer, and other times I just skipped it and then felt like garbage the rest of the day for skipping it. But it was a good season. I did it for about a year, and as I've been preparing this sermon and thinking through things in my own life, I've been convicted to start that practice again. So for some of you, I would invite you, set an alarm on your phone, and at three o'clock, let's pray every day. Let's just stop what we're doing and refocus ourself on God, and let's pray. And like the early church, let's be devoted to these spiritual disciplines. As I think about prayer for grace, one of the things that we're going to do moving forward and I'm excited to share with you is beginning this Wednesday, the 27th, from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., we're going to fling the doors open of the church and invite you to come and pray here. Whoever wants to come can come and pray. We'll pray together. We'll pray separately. We'll pray socially distant. If you need prayers, you want people to pray over you, come here and I, along with others, will pray over you. If you just want to pray together with others, come here and we will pray together. And as long as we can sustain it, we will continue to do it. We're going to do the first one this week. on the 27th. I'll open the doors at 7 o'clock. We'll see who shows up and we'll pray together. And we'll be a church that is devoted to prayer and spiritual disciplines. The last distinctive that I wanted to focus on today, the last thing that I see in this church that we need to be emulators of is that they were committed to Christ-centered time together. They were committed to Christ-centered time together. It says that they were devoted to fellowship. And you know, over the years, that word fellowship has taken on a lot of different meanings and been applied in a lot of different ways. And it's become distorted to just mean anytime Christians are together, they're fellowshipping, right? But fellowship really isn't just people getting together who also know Christ. But the idea of fellowship is to get together to celebrate the thing that you have in common, to allow something that we hold in common to bring us together and then to spend time focused on that thing. When I think of fellowship, I think of a time that I spent with Steve Goldberg, our worship pastor, and a guy named Keith Cathcart, one of our great church partners. If you've never had the experience of going to a team bar for a game, I would highly recommend it. I am of the conviction that going to a team bar is the best way to consume a sport. It's super, super fun. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, all over the country in different cities everywhere, there will be fans that are fans of a particular team. And when that team is playing, they will gather in one place and watch it together. And this happens here with Steelers fans because Steelers fans are prevalent. They are everywhere. The Steelers are like a religion to them. To some of them, it is a problem that deserves some good and right conviction. And in a state like North Carolina, where there's really no other decent team to speak of, it is ripe for Steelers fans to blossom here. And so the Hibernian over on Falls is actually a Steelers bar. All the Steelers fans come out of the woodwork and they go there decked out in their gear and they watch the games together. And so one Sunday, I decided that I wanted to go with Keith because I love going to team bars and watching sports with other people who are celebrating that. And we even invited Steve. Steve's not a sports guy, but he's a friends guy. And so he came and he enjoyed it with us. And I love the experience because I go to this team bar and I don't know anybody there. I don't have anything in common with them. I don't know what their names are. I don't know what their week was like. I don't know what they did that morning. That morning I was preaching. They probably weren't. I don't have a lot in common with the folks there that I know of. But man, when those Steelers score, I get to run around and give high fives to strangers. I start hugging guys I've never even met in my life. When there's a fumble, we erupt. When the ref makes a terrible call, we boo him and deride him and have the best possible time. And you get to get fully into it. And I don't even really care about the Steelers or the game. I'm just having fun celebrating them with other people. That's fellowship. This thing that they have in common, their affection for the Steelers, brings them together. And then the time that they spent together is spent focused on the very thing that they share in common. That's what fellowship looks like. Fellowship isn't when Steelers fans just get together and talk about business or talk about the stock market or whatever else. It's when they get together and they celebrate the very thing that gives them something in common. So for us, for believers, Christian biblical fellowship is when we come together acknowledging that Christ is what we share in common and the time that we spend together is focused on him. Fellowship looks a lot like Sunday morning church. Fellowship looks a lot like coming here on Sunday mornings like we used to in the old days, saying hey in the lobby, celebrating triumphs and comforting one another with tragedy in the lobby, coming in, sitting in these seats, singing together, proclaiming to God together, listening, learning about God together, being convicted or motivated or inspired together, and then leaving with a sense of camaraderie as we spent time here in the service celebrating the very thing that brings us all together, which is Christ. This is why we will always meet on Sunday mornings. This is why we will get back together just as soon as we possibly can. This is why community is so important to us at Grace because we want to come together and be focused on and celebrate the very thing that we have in common, which is Jesus. And so I want to challenge you in your small groups. Make sure your small group time is fellowshipping. Make sure that's Christ-centered time. In your circle of friends, it's not fellowship just because we get together and we all believe in Jesus. It becomes fellowship once we're focused on him for a portion of that time. So let's begin to think of intentional ways that we can fellowship with one another when we're spending time together. To help us begin to dip our toes back in the water of community and fellowship, we're actually going to begin to support watch parties. We've moved into this weekend, phase two of the governor's plan officially. So we can do this now. We can have watch parties on Sunday morning. I think it would be great if we would invite people over to the house and say, hey, I'm going to be watching my church's service this morning. Why don't you come with me? Or hey, I know that you guys watch it. Why don't you come over here? Let's watch it together. This is a great opportunity to reach out to your neighbors. I know a lot of us in this time of isolation have grown closer to our neighbors, have met them and interacted with them and spent more time with them than we ever have. What a great vehicle. What a great way to say, hey, this Sunday I'm going to be watching our service. I'd love for you to come over and join us. Let's have a watch party together. I've reached out to the small group leaders and asked them to help facilitate some of these, those of them who are willing. And that's certainly a way to begin to frame up who we would watch these with, but I would just encourage you to watch these sermons with other grace people or other people that you want to invite into your home. And I know that not everyone's going to feel comfortable with this yet. I know some of us are hesitant about that, and that's all right. I don't want you to feel pressure like you have to, but for those of you who are ready to dip your toes back in the water of community, for those of you who are ready to pursue and experience fellowship again, I think the way that we can begin to do that for the next several weeks is to invite people into our homes or to go into the homes of others and watch these services together and begin to experience this community again. And if you want to go early and have breakfast, great. If you want to stay late and do lunch together, great. And if there's kids involved, maybe one parent can take the kids out back and run around with them while the rest of the parents focus on the message. However it is, you figure it out, and however it breaks down, however you're able to accomplish it. I would love to hear more about these watch parties springing up all over the Raleigh area as we experience church together again and begin to dip our toes back into this idea of fellowship. Those are the three distinctives I wanted to look at this morning, to be eager learners, to be devoted to spiritual discipline, and to be devoted to fellowship, to Christ-centered time together. Next week, we'll look at the last four distinctives that I'm excited to go through with you, and hopefully you'll watch this and then watch next week's together, and it can be one concise lesson on who we are as a church, on what we're supposed to pursue, and really answer the question, hey, how do we know if we're doing this right, if we're doing this well? All right, I'm going to pray and let you guys continue on with your Sunday mornings. Father, you're so, so good to us. Thank you for who you are and how you love us. I pray that we would be eager learners. That for those of us who may have set that torch down a while back, maybe you can inspire us again. Maybe you can impassion us again to want to understand more of you and your word. Give us paths and avenues to explore that. God, help us be disciplined in our prayers. Give us the willpower, give us the strength, give us the desire and the earnesty to maintain and to foster these spiritual disciplines. And God, I pray that we would fellowship well, that we would come together and celebrate you, that we would be more intentional about making you the center of our time. And as we consider watch parties, Lord, I just pray that you would watch over us, that you would protect us, that you would bring wisdom there as we begin slowly to experience your community again. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.