Sermons tagged with Pandemic

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thank you for being here with us in person. Thank you for joining us online, if that's what you're doing. I am excited for this Sunday morning. I was probably more excited about this particular sermon in this series than any of the others, because this morning, this big rock is on a topic that I've invested a lot of time and energy thinking about, actually. We're going to be talking about time, and we should spend our time and how we should prioritize our time. And I will confess to you that I have nerded out on this subject. I've listened to podcasts and read books about productivity. If something comes across my news feed about this new study about how to be productive and how to maximize our time in the workplace and all that stuff, I will listen to it. I eat all of that stuff up. Now, it hasn't translated to actual productivity in my workplace, but I'm hoping that if I can just keep learning more things, like for instance, when you're in, when you're just, when you're locked in and you're focused, you're in the groove and you're doing the thing you need to do, you're maximum productive, you're being creative, you're knocking out emails, whatever it is. When you get interrupted, somebody texts you, somebody sticks their head in your office. Kyle starts to talk to someone in the office next to you if you happen to work next to Kyle. When you get interrupted, do you know how long it takes you to regain maximum focus? 26 minutes. Like it takes 26 minutes to regain maximum focus. I could do a whole sermon just telling you stuff like that. That wouldn't be much of a sermon. That would more be like a productivity seminar. So we're going to avoid that. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about time. Because of that, there are myriad directions we could go this morning as we think about the topic of time under the umbrella of God's authority. How would God have us spend our time? What would His priorities for our schedules and our calendars look like? We all know that if you really want to know what a person cares about, look at their calendar and look at their checkbook. And that will tell you what's really, really important to that individual. So we could talk about how to properly prioritize it. We could talk about how much time to make for God. We could talk about how would Jesus have us spend our time. We could do all of those things. And there's a bunch of different directions to go. And when I started out, the way that I write a sermon is I just write down everything I think about that topic, everything I know, all the Bible verses I'm aware of, every time the scriptures address it. And for this particular sermon, I had a big long list. And so the difficulty was on what do we focus on as we think about time? And I really landed on one sentence in the Bible. The first part of one verse that we find in Psalms. And we're going to spend the rest of the morning thinking about the idea of time through the lens of this one sentence that we find in Psalms chapter 46, verse 10. Many of you know this verse. It simply says, be still and know that I am God. Be still, God says, and know that I am God. It's this idea of at some point during your day, during your week, during your month, in your life, at some point, slow down. Be still. Quit doing all the things. Quit going to all the places. Quit stressing out about all the stuff. Quit being distracted by all the different things that can distract you. Be still. Stop moving. Stop going. Right now, I have a five-and-a-half-year-old who cannot be still. She cannot be still. When she's in trouble, I'll tell her, you sit on the stairs, and you sit there, and you do not move, and you do not make a noise. She cannot do it. It's impossible. And for many of us, with our schedules and with our temperaments, it's impossible for us to be still, to just slow down and be still and know that he is God, to focus on God, to focus on what Jesus has done for us, to remind ourselves of the gospel, to remind ourselves of God's goodness in our life. I think many of us struggle mightily to obey this simple psalm, to simply have regular times in our life where we are still and we know that he is God. This is why, incidentally, I think church attendance and involvement is so important. Because even if we're not prioritizing it at any other time in our week, even if our weeks just get away from us and it's just busy, busy, busy, and we're running 90 to nothing and we come into church on two wheels with our hair on fire, at least, hopefully, for an hour, we will slow down. We will be still. We will do our best to put aside all the other things that we've been thinking about that have been stressing us out all week long. And we will, in this service, collectively as a body, know that He is God. It's why I think the rhythm of church is an important one in the life of an individual and a marriage and a family. And so I want to talk about this idea of being still. And I want to talk specifically about why it feels like such a challenge for us sometimes. I think that there are really two camps of people. There's really two divisions of people as we think about how we spend our time and what kind of stops us from being still in the way that we need to be still. I think there's really two camps of people. And I'm not saying that you're all one or you're all the other. This is a sliding scale, but I would bet that everybody in this room has a lean. There are those who fill their days with nothing and those who fill their days with everything. There are those who with their margins, they fill it with nothing, just a bunch of nothingness. And then there's those who fill it with everything. And we're going to talk about what that means. But as we think about how we fill our time with nothing or everything, I want to be clear that I'm talking about the margins of our time. We all have roles in life to play that require time from us, right? Most of us in this room, we have to get up, we have to work every day. That's something that's required of your time. If you don't have to work every day, hopefully you're getting up and being productive. If you're a stay-at-home parent, you've got to get up and gosh, you definitely have to work every day. And so there's some things that we don't have an option. We've got to go to work. We've got to take care of the kids. We've got to run the house. We've got to do the things. There's some things where we just don't have a choice. But around those ways that we spend our time is our discretionary time. And it's that time that I'm talking about that we fill with nothing or with everything. The time when we wake up in the morning. Whether you realize it or not, I don't want to step on too many toes here, everyone has two or three hours of discretionary time in the morning. If you choose to fill that time with sleep, that's your business. But everybody can get up two or three hours just about before we really have anything that life requires of us. So most of us have discretionary time in the morning before our time is demanded of us. Most of us have a lunch break. We've got to drive to work, drive home from work. We have time in the car where we can choose what we're going to listen to and choose what we're going to do and choose what we're going to consume. We have time when we come home. I don't know what the rhythm of your house is. Maybe you have some dead space before dinner. Maybe it's just a mad rush to get the kids to bed and sit down and take a breath. And then you've got from then until whenever you go to bed as your own discretionary time when your parents have young kids to regain your sanity. You've got the weekends, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, where there's probably not much of a demand on your time. So now we've got this discretionary time, these times in the margins. We're trying to decide what to do with it. And my contention is that we tend towards either filling that time with nothing or filling it with everything. I would love to say I'm an everything guy. I'm really more of a nothing guy. So what I'm about to say, I'm saying to me too. But when we fill our time with nothing, we just jump from one thing that doesn't matter to the next thing that doesn't matter. We wake up in the morning, first thing we do is we grab our phone and we start to scroll. We check Instagram, we check Twitter, and we check Facebook, and we check our email, and we check our news outlets, and whatever it is. And we just lay in bed, and and instead of getting up and being productive doing something that we would probably be wiser to do, we just scroll on our phones, right? We come home, we turn on the TV. Kids go to bed, we zone out. We binge watch The Office again. We're in the car, we have some time that we could use to fill ourselves with some Jesus, and instead we just put on something mindless. We listen to music that just kind of puts us in a good mood or whatever it is that it does, or we listen to like sports talk or political talk or whatever it is that women listen to in the car that's talk. I don't know what you guys listen to. But we just, every gap that we have, we just fill it with more nothing. How many of you, don't raise your hand, can't sit at a traffic light without looking at your phone? I think that maybe, this is just a side note, maybe the most damaging thing about cell phones is how incapable we are of not being entertained for just five stinking seconds. If the line's too long at Jersey Mike's, well, let's see what's going on in the news. And we just jump from nothing to nothing. Our time's required of us. We're focused on this. Now I can do whatever I want. What nothing can I fill this with? How can I entertain myself? What's the next drama that's going to happen? What's on Yahoo News front page? What's the next thing going on? And then political stuff happens. So I mean, I was doom scrolling Twitter a lot in December and January. We were all locked into that stuff. And we just wake up in the morning and we waste a little time. We go to work. We have lunch and we engage in a little bit more nothing and we come home and we get the kids. We take care of the kids and we do whatever it is we're going to do. We eat dinner and then we engage in a little bit more nothing. Watch a little bit more trash TV and then we go to bed. And we sleep in and we do the same thing the next day. And it's just a day filled with nothing. As I was doing research for this, I came across a sermon by a guy named Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards is one of the great American pastors and theologians. He was a key figure in the Great Awakening in the late 1700s. One of the smartest, best theologians that's ever lived. And he did a sermon on time. And he noted within that sermon the unique scarcity of time. It is a uniquely limited resource that we cannot get back in ways that we can recover other resources. And about time, Jonathan Edwards says, there is nothing more precious and yet nothing of which men are more wasteful. There is nothing more precious than time because we can never get it back, and yet there is nothing of which men are more wasteful. I think, if we're honest, that we tend to waste our time like NBA players waste their money. I heard a story this last week as I was in the car listening to the sports talk radio show that I like to listen to, which incidentally was not a waste of time this week because I'm using it in a sermon. So how about that? And there was this author who wrote a book. She wrote a book on Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is the, he is the MVP of the Milwaukee Bucks. They just won the NBA finals. He is a phenomenal athlete and he is like, he's a gem of a person. If you could, if you could create an athlete in a mold, it would be this guy. He's a really neat guy. And he grew up really poor in Greece. And they would sell, he and his family would sell trinkets on the beach to rich tourists. And it was not a very easy upbringing. And so when he came over to the United States, he was drafted in the first round of the draft. He's playing for the Bucs. He has money for the first time in his life. He doesn't know what to do with it. And so he still brings over these sensibilities and he's very conservative. And this author said that he relayed some stories to her about how he was blown away about how some of these guys spent their money. And she said, well, give me some examples. And she said, well, one guy, one guy gave me $500 for a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He just, the dude was a veteran. He said, Giannis, go give me a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He did. And the veteran gave him 500 bucks. That's wasteful. Other guys, he had two guys on his team who liked playing PlayStation 4, but they didn't like to be encumbered with like packing it. So they would literally on a road trip, they would go into a new city, buy a PlayStation 4 and the games they wanted to play, and then leave it in the hotel room and buy another one in the next city. Just appalling waste of money. I just saw a financial planner shake his head like just, oh my gosh. Just an appalling waste of money. But I waste my time like that sometimes. I look at my weeks and know that I've just doled out my time as if it's $500 for a Mountain Dew in the way that I invest it and spend it. And if you think that's ridiculous, if you think I'm overstating that, what's your screen time report at the end of your week? I don't know what Android phones do, but Apple phones, every weekend you get a screen time report. You average this many hours per day, it is up or down this percentage from last week. You ever see that and feel good about yourself? It always brings deep, deep conviction. It should send us straight into prayer and confession when that screen time report comes up. I think we waste time like some people like to waste money by just jumping from one numbing entertainment to the next thing without ever considering what's important. And then I think on the opposite end of the spectrum are those of us who fill our days with everything. It's just one thing after the next, just a deluge of activities, one after the other. A workaholic could fit here because there's hours that your job requires of you, and I'm all about going above and beyond. I don't want to decry working hard to get ahead and to provide and to be successful and all that stuff, but I do want us to realize that when we get to work before we're supposed to, that's a choice, and when we stay longer than we have to, that's a choice. It's a way that we're choosing to fill our schedule. When we volunteer for something, that's a choice. We all know people, and some of us are people, who volunteer for everything and say no to nothing and then just do and do and do and do all day long. We just run around with our hair on fire. I am convinced that the busiest time of anyone's life is families, particularly if families have two working spouses with children from ages 8 to 18. I don't think you can ever be busier than that season. It's crazy. And kids have stuff and we have stuff and we fill every single iota of our calendar with something that we're supposed to do. We'll come up with projects on the weekend and disappear and do those. And we allocate our time to this and our time to that. We have no way to pause. We run around frantically and we just do and we do and we do and we jump from one activity to the next activity without ever stopping to be still and know that he is God because our schedules are so full that we feel like we don't have space for anything else. And to those people, I would just say gently, is it possible that the rhythms of our homes are so frantic that we've effectively scheduled God out of our lives? Is it possible that we've allowed some of us, that we've allowed ourselves to become so busy that we have effectively scheduled God and scheduled Jesus right out of our life? Somebody told me one time, and this is, it's deeply convicting. It's probably not all the way fair, but it's mostly fair. If we aren't spending time with God on a daily basis, then we're simply telling him that he didn't make our 24-hour priority list that day. Good luck tomorrow, God. I think sometimes the rhythms of our homes get so frantic that we effectively just schedule them right out of our lives. And what I really want us to see this morning is that wherever we are on the spectrum, whether we fill our days with just nothing, just jumping from entertainment to entertainment, from nothing to nothing, or from activity to activity. That nothing and everything are simply distractions from the right thing. All that entertainment, all that pulling out the phone, all that screen time, all that binge watching, all that late night stuff, all that sleeping in, and then all the busyness, all the activities can sometimes simply be distractions from the right thing. I've made this point before, but I think it bears repeating. I think one of the greatest tricks of the enemy, one of the greatest guises of Satan is to trick us into wasting our time, is to distract us with nothing, is to distract us with our phones and with TV and with information and with nothingness and stuff that is frivolous and doesn't matter. And listen, that stuff has its place. You need to veg out and watch something that makes you laugh, that gives you an escape. We need to do that. But when it becomes too much, when it takes over everything, when it's just nothing to nothing to nothing, the enemy has us distracted. When it's activity to activity to activity that fills us with our own sense of self-importance, yet the activities that we're doing have no eternal consequences. The enemy simply has us distracted. See, I think for many of us in the room, it's one of my favorite verses these days in my life is Ephesians 2.10. It says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And it carries with it this idea that God made you, he gifted you, he designed you, and he purposed you. Each one of us. I think some of us walk through life feeling like we couldn't possibly have a purpose. I'm too small for that. And I would say, bupkis, God created you. He designed you in Christ for good works that you might walk in them. And in those good works, we know from other passages, we find the fullness of Christ. We walk with Jesus. Our hearts beat with him. We develop a passion for our Savior. I believe that we find Jesus in his work. So as we do the good works that we were designed to do, we grow more vibrant in our relationship with Jesus. We grow more passionate in our desire to serve God. And we live a fuller life that's filled with more joy because we are walking so closely with Jesus. And the enemy does not want you to experience that. He wants to rip you away from our Father's hands. And the deal is, for many of us sitting in this room, he's probably not going to rip us away with some addiction. There are some of us that he might be able to rip away with some sort of shadow life or sin going on, but for the vast majority of us in this room, it's not going to be some crippling addiction that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's not going to be some secret shadow life that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's simply going to be tricking you into spending your days on nothing or everything, day after day after day, until you look back on the month of the year and you go, what did I do? How much more of the work of Jesus for which we were designed could we do if we didn't allow the enemy to distract us with nothing or everything. I believe it's one of his greatest ploys. And I want to do everything I can to call it out whenever I can so that we can be, so that we can walk in the good works for which we were created. And it's why I landed on this one sentence in regards to time this morning, that we should be still and know that he is God. Because I firmly believe that being still is the first true step in the path to knowing God. I absolutely believe that this habit of being still is the first true step that we can take in the path to knowing God, in the path to our hearts beating like Jesus' heart. And I've said this in a bunch of different ways. I've said this phrase over and over and over again, and I will continue to beat this drum until God says this isn't my stage anymore. But as long as it is, I will continue to repeat, there is no greater habit anyone can develop in their life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. No greater habit. And that's what being still is. And I say that it's the first true step to really knowing God because we can come to church and we can hear about God and we can serve and we can do his work and we can go to small group and we can have conversations, but until it becomes personal, until it becomes intimate, until it becomes a habit to wake up and let scripture speak to us, not me speaking to you about what I think scripture says from my quiet times. Let that supplement what God has been saying to you all week in your quiet times. Until we wake up every day and we spend time in God's word and then we pursue him in prayer. For some reason, for some people, that looks like going on a hike and just allowing God to be with us in nature. For some people, that means contemplative practices or meditative practices. For some people, that means listening prayer. For some people, that means getting on our knees and speaking prayer. For some people, it's reading a spiritual book and supplement to the Word of God. But until our pursuit of the Father becomes an intentional, personal one, it can never become an intimate one. So this instruction in Psalm to be still and know that he is God is, to me, the first fundamental step in actually knowing him. And I believe this to be true because I have seen this in my own life. I have seen in the ebbs and flows of my own spiritual health. That when I am consistent in this practice, I'm a better husband. I'm more patient with my children. I'm even more patient with Ruby when I'm having quiet times. That's my dog that I don't like. I even like pet her and invite her over sometimes when I'm praying and reading the Bible and inviting God into every moment of my life. I'm a better pastor. In those seasons where Jesus is enriching my soul and my spirit every day, I can't wait for Sunday to share with you what I have to share with you. In the seasons where I'm not doing that, in the seasons where I feel like I'm running on empty because I've been filling my days with nothing or everything, just to be honest with you, there are Sundays I don't want to preach to you. I want to get done with the sermon so I can go do whatever it is I really want to do that day. And it's because I haven't been filling my days with Jesus. It's because I've been filling them with nothing or everything. And I'm forgetting to be still. And we could talk about how you should spend the rest of your time and what you should volunteer for and what we shouldn't volunteer for and what really is important and what really isn't. And we can talk about God's priorities for your schedule, but I would just simply say, man, if you'll make it a habit every day to be still before the Father and let Him breathe life into your soul, you're a grown-up. You'll figure the rest of it out yourself. You don't need a sermon about that. If we'll do this, if we'll simply be still, God will breathe into our life in such a way that our heart will begin to beat like Jesus' heart and suddenly all the things, all the nothing and all the everything that we use to fill as a simple distraction from what's actually important, those things will become less important to us and we will pursue more Jesus. I've seen it happen over and over and over again in the lives of others and in my own life. So my encouragement to you this morning is to be still and know that he is God. My encouragement to you this morning is don't let this, what I say, be the only source of God and Jesus in your life. Because I am broken and I am fallible and I am often wrong. Pursue him on your own. Let him breathe life into you every day. This will be the first true step that we can take in our path to knowing God. And so I would say to you this morning, how still should I be? Just a little bit more than you are. Take that step. If you have no habit or pattern of waking up and spending time in God's word and letting Jesus refresh your soul there and in prayer, then just give it a week. Do it for seven days and get to the end of seven days and tell me that that was a waste of your time. Just do it for a week. If you're already in that habit, God bless you for being in that habit. You know that I'm speaking truth. Pick another time too. Do it in the evening. End your day with prayer. Let's all just step up our stillness just a little bit and stop and let God wash over us and fill us up and so breathe life into us that we can be his workmanship and do the good works in which we were created to walk in. However still or not you've been in your life, be just a little bit more still this week and see how God breathes life into you in that stillness. As we close, I have a quote. It's a long quote, but I think it's worth it. Growing up, my pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, was one of my heroes, and he still is. He passed away right as I came up here to take this job, and it is one of my great sadnesses that I can't talk about being a pastor with Buddy. And every now and again, I'll go back and I'll listen to some of his sermons. They have them all archived all the way back to the 80s. And when I listen to them, it's like going home. I feel like a 12-year-old kid, 10-year-old kid sitting in church, just taking it all in. I really like listening to Buddy's sermons. Five or six years ago, I was listening to one. Actually, it was a little over four years ago because it was in my parents' basement when I was waiting for you guys to hire me so we could move up here. I was listening to one of his sermons and he was preaching on time. And Buddy spoke pretty extemporaneously, but this I could tell was prepared. He was reading off of a sheet of paper. He wrote it very intentionally and it was so good to me and so profound that I stopped and I typed it out. I would listen to a sentence and pause it and type it and listen and pause and type. And I've just kind of been sitting on it wondering when the best time was to share it with anybody at all. And it just feels very appropriate this morning to end with these words that have impacted me over the years so much. So I want to share them with you. And when I finish, we're going to have a chance to reflect and worship together. This is what Buddy says. Are we possessed with an inescapable passion to live in an intimate knowledge of God? The problem is not that we are engaged in actively evil. The problem is that we are just too active. It's not that we are criminally engaged. We are just inattentive to the voice of God. It's not that we're heretics. Most people I know are just hectic in their activities of mind-numbing nothingness. It should make sense to anyone that minds empty of God will be empty of meaning. Our hunger for God is numbered by our addictions to substitutes and stimulants that hide our starving souls. We are spiritual anorexics. We've morphed to a point where we don't even recognize what is the spiritual norm. Today's lifestyle is lived at a pace that makes contemplations all but impossible, and most people cannot imagine a life like Jesus lived. We can't imagine a life without constant informational connectivity. We live in a noisy world where there are a lot of things competing for our attention, TV, phones, Facebook, emails. But the unintended consequence of constant informational connectivity is divine disconnection. We are so distracted with inconsequential information, our brains and our hearts are overloaded with timely data, leaving no space for timeless deity. We're called to live with a preoccupation with God who is worthy to be pursued at all costs and is pursuing us. We find ourselves in an age that has pushed the knowledge of God into the margins. We arrogantly assume that God should be grateful for the crumbs of our overcrowded schedule. We call it efficient. But God has not called us first to be efficient. He has called us to be passionate. We are spiritually diseased. Never have we had more to eat and found ourselves more famished. Never have we had more stuff and been less satisfied. It is time we made time for the timeless.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. A little confession, after we shot that video in the back corner, I was on my hands and knees for about 15 minutes picking up all those rocks. So I'm really glad we got it there on that first take, and I didn't have to do that again. Thank you for being here. Like I said, I'm the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. We got a full crew here this morning. That is exciting and good. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online, particularly if you're on vacation and you're still choosing to make this a part of your Sunday. We are grateful for that. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series as we talk about exactly what I addressed in the video. This idea of coming kind of back to life, the world feeling normal again, or at least approaching it. If we can avoid this Delta variant, but that's a whole different conversation. But it feels like we're approaching that. And as we do it, we have this unique opportunity to kind of reconstruct our life around the things that are most important to us. And really, we have this opportunity to reconstruct our life around Jesus. So for the next four weeks, we're going to talk about what our big rocks are. What are the things that are the most important to us and how do we orchestrate those things around Jesus and around this pursuit of God the Father. And I said specifically that I'm looking forward to the rest of the weeks of the series because I'm not looking forward to this morning in this series. I did not wake up this morning excited for this sermon. Some Sundays I wake up and I'm really, really, I can't wait to share with you what God has laid on my heart. Last Sunday is a great example of that. This Sunday, I'm preaching about money. So when I got up this morning, it wasn't like, yes, the tithe, here we come. Nor did you get up hoping that this would be the Sunday that I talked about money. So listen, I'll just confess up front. I'm no more interested in preaching this than you are in hearing it. Okay, but we're here now. So this is what we're going to do. And really, the reason that we're talking about this is first of all, first and foremost, I don't talk about this very much at Grace. The last time we talked about this was in February of 2020, and I didn't even do it. It was Doug Bergeson, all right? So we don't do it a whole lot, but this topic is all throughout the Bible. Scripture is replete with instructions on giving about big rocks in life, if we're going to talk about the things that matter most to us and how to prioritize those around Jesus, then we have to talk about finances. We have to ask the question, what does God want us to do with our resources and with our money? And the Bible talks about it so much that it would be irresponsible as a church and I'd be irresponsible as a pastor if we didn't revisit it with some regularity. So we arrive at it this morning and as we arrive at it, I'm kind of approaching it like this. This is why I'm sitting down for this one at a table instead of standing and gesticulating and walking around wildly and trying to keep calm and not yell at you because I'm approaching this as if you and I could have a conversation about it. If you and I were able to meet for lunch or if you could come to the office or we meet somewhere and we could talk and your question was, what does the Bible have to say about giving anyways? Or maybe even, why does God want me to give? Then this is the conversation that I would want to have with you. So I'm staying seated to remind me that this is what I would like to say to each of you if we had the opportunity to sit down and talk about this together. And as we do that, I would even say to you this, that as I wrote and approached this sermon, I really had in mind the person who is new to church. Maybe you are someone who, for the first time in a long time, church is important to you again. For the first time in a long time, spiritual health is important to you again. And so maybe you're kind of trying to get reengaged spiritually. Maybe you haven't been in church a lot for the past five, 10 years, and so you're kind of starting to re-engage and maybe have never really thought critically about giving and what the Bible has to say about it. This is for the new and the non-believers, for those of us who hear that we should give in church, who probably understand that the Bible tells us to do it, but maybe we don't know all the whys around it and maybe we don't have a developed theology of why we should be generous. So this sermon in particular is for you. Now I know that at Grace, and I see the evidence of it over and over again, we have plenty of you who have a really good theology of giving, who understand tithing and being generous and why we do it. And so for you, I hope that we hit on some things that are encouraging, particularly the first point that I make. I think we should apply it to everything, not just giving. And so I hope that there's some encouraging ways to think about it. But this is really for folks who, if I sat you down and I said, what does the Bible say about giving or why should we give? This is for you if you feel like, gosh, I'm not sure how well I would answer that. So like I said, I'm approaching it as a conversation and I want to approach the conversation with what the Bible even has to say about it. And as I sought that out this week, you know, the Old Testament has a lot of very specific instructions that we are to give. The Old Testament introduces this idea of giving in generosity like a new idea. Leave the corners of your field for the sojourners, for the poor, for the widow, for the aliens, for the people who don't yet have a home. We're told to bring our tithe to the storehouse in the Old Testament. We're told there's a whole portion in Leviticus that tells us exactly, tells the children of Israel exactly how they are to give. So in the Old Testament, it's given as an instruction. It's introduced almost as a new idea. But what you find in the New Testament, if you want to read New Testament verses about giving, and the New Testament is simply the part of the Bible that comes during Jesus's life and after. And Jesus kind of changes everything. So what does the Bible have to say about giving once Jesus gets on the scene? Well, once Jesus arrives, the instructions about giving become a little bit presumptive, as if this is a thing that we already know. This is actually what Jesus says about it in the Sermon on the Mount. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 6. I'm going to read you verses 1 through 4. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' first recorded public address. It's the first time he talks. And he has performed miracles and those people began to follow them and then he begins to preach to them and he hits on myriad topics. But then he lands on giving for a different directions. But the interesting part to me about this verse, if you want to ask what does the New Testament teach about giving, is the two uses of the word when. When you give. When you give to the needy. Jesus is talking to the huddled masses. Talking to thousands of people in the middle of the day, presumably jobless folks for the most part. And he still assumes that they know, without ever introducing giving as a new idea, he assumes that they know that they should give. He assumes that they know that God expects them to be generous people. And so he says, when you do it, do it in such a way that you're not doing it in a showy way. Do it in secret. Be discreet about it. And there's a whole teaching there. But again, what's interesting to me is when you give, when you do it. And I bring that up because I think that that's how familiar a lot of us are with giving. We might not know why we're supposed to do it. We might not know what for. We might not know how we should be compelled to do it. We just know that we are supposed to. And so the interesting question is why? Why are we supposed to give? Why does God ask us in the Old Testament when he's setting everything up and then just assume of us that we know that we ought to in the New Testament? Why does God do that? And so we're going to spend the rest of the morning kind of answering that question, and this is the conversational piece of it. Why does God want me to give? The most important reason, the most important reason and most underrated reason we give is because God tells us to. The most important, and this is key, most underrated reason that we give is because God tells us to. Now, listen, here's why I say this. When my mom was growing up, she grew up in the 60s and 70s, and Linda, her mom, my mom, all wonderful woman, she ruled with an iron fist, man. This was back in the good old days, all right, when it was nice to be a parent. You rule with an iron fist. That was a funny slip. You ruled with an iron fist. Kids are to be seen and not heard. When the company comes over, you go upstairs. You do not interrupt. And when my mom would get out of line when she was told to do something, and she said, why? She had the audacity to say, why do I have to clean your room? Why? Because I told you to. Fire would burn in Linda's eyes, right? And mom would know. She better do whatever it was she was asked to do, even if it makes no sense at all to her, because there is going to be some serious repercussions if she doesn't. She saw the fire, and so she got right. And so when my mom grew up, because I told you to, was all the reason that a child needed. Well, when that's the only reason you get, that develops in you a little bit of resentment, right? This heart of resentment because my mom is kind and sweet and not rebellious like me and really was asking genuinely why I don't understand. Why do you want me to do that right now? It seems like I should be doing something else. Why do you want me to do that? But she wasn't allowed to ask that. And so that left her frustrated and resentful. So when she had children, she decided that because I said so is never a reason. I will always take the time to explain to my children why I'm asking them to do something. And to her credit, she did that. But when you're raising Nate, that becomes a real hassle. And I was always allowed to ask why. And I love that quote. There's some quote I picked up years ago that a reason is an invitation for an argument. And that's very true. And so I was always invited into that argument. Why? Go clean your room. Why do I have to do that right now? Go mow the grass. Why? And listen, if the why wasn't good enough, well, I didn't have to do it. In my head, if the why is not good enough, if it can't justify the request, well, then your request is dumb. And so what I learned in that environment is asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It manifests this idea of, okay, I understand what you want me to do, but I'm not going to do that until your reason justifies your request. And if it doesn't, if it falls short of King Nate's gauntlet of reasons, then you can forget it, buddy. So in our house, our response with Lily and then with John, which John can't talk yet. And I remember when Lily couldn't talk and people were like, just be grateful for these times. And I thought, you're jerks. You're not jerks. That makes sense to me now. John can't talk yet, but Lily can, and she likes to ask why. Lily's my daughter, for those of you who don't know me, not just some girl I talk about. But she likes to ask why. But the policy that we've adopted in our house is, first you obey, then you ask why. And this is gonna be what solves it forever. She'll have no issues when she's a parent. She'll replicate this exactly, right? But first you obey and then you ask why. First show that you're gonna be obedient. First show that you're going to submit. First show that the question is genuine and not an attempt to get out of it. And then come and we'll talk to you forever when you have a good attitude about the whys of why we should do something. And I bring this up because I think it's really important as we think about how we respond to the instructions of God. I know that very often when we are met with a teaching from Scripture that we should give, that we should read the Bible, that we should be selfless, that we should forgive as we are forgiven, that we should be generous to others, that we should turn the other cheek, that whenever it is possible for us, as far as it concerns us, that we should seek peace in others when peace is just not the thing that we want right now. Often in my life, and maybe yours too, we want to know the why before we offer our obedience. We want it to make sense to us before King Nate deigns to obey the instructions that I find here. And I will confess to you this, as I thought about this this week. This is not so much an indictment on your attitude, that's up to you, as it is sometimes an indictment on my preaching. Because when I preach and I give us instructions from the word, I always start with a why. Because I don't want to paint God as this ruthless dictator who sits in heaven giving you rules. I always want you to understand why it's what's best for you. But when we jump straight to the why before obedience, I think that begats in us this sense of entitlement. That if God's whys don't stack up for me, then I'm not going to engage in that behavior until they do. And I think it's important for us as believers to accept that the most important and underrated reason why we give is because our Father in heaven told us to. And I think this applies to everything. I think this applies to our quiet times. This applies to our grace with other people. This applies to any challenge that we would face. Anytime God's word tells us to do something, the first and most important reason we do it is because God told us to. Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that sometimes for me, I walk through life entitled as if I am owed a why, and God does not owe us that. So an important reason to apply to everything in our life is because our Father in Heaven told us to. Now once we accept that, and we adopt that posture of obedience, and I also want to be very clear, when I say that, I'm talking only to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, you've never signed up for this. You've never said, I submit my life to God. You've never said, you're the Lord of my life. I'm second. I'm going to do what you want. You've never said that. And so to you, I wouldn't say that you even need to give. And I definitely wouldn't say it's because God told you to. You haven't signed up for this yet and said, I'm going to submit myself to God's word. But if you are a Christian, then you have. So first we adopt a posture of obedience. And what we understand in that posture of obedience is that God wants what's best for us. This is what we talked about last week. What we believe is the verse I preached last week, that God actually leads us to paths of life, that in his presence there is fullness of joy. At his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. We actually believe that our God in heaven wants what's best for us and takes us to the best possible places. And so if he tells us to do something, it must be what's best for us. So we trust that about giving too. So the question really becomes this morning, not why does God want me to give, but why is giving best for me? That's really the question that we are asking this morning. Once we adopt this posture of obedience and say, yes, Father, I am a Christian, and because I am, I am submitted to you, and I will be a person who is a giving, generous person. But I also understand that as I do that, it's what's best for me, and I'd love to understand why it's what's best for me. So I've got a few reasons for you that we're just going to kind of go through. The first thing I would say to you when you ask why is giving what's best for me, I would say it's because God is generous to the generous. God is generous to generous people. Now, I have to be careful with this because this is how you get to health and wealth, right? This is how you get to me preaching to you. If you give, God's going to give back to you a hundredfold. If you give to the church this much, God's going to give you this much. Meanwhile, I'm asking you to fund my private jet and you can't figure out how to pay for a civic, okay? So that's, I don't want to go there. I'm not preaching health and wealth. I'm not telling you that the more you give to God, the more money he's going to give to you. However, this principle that God is generous to the generous is unavoidable in scripture. Jesus talks about this in Luke chapter 6, verse 38, when he says this, give and it will be given to you. Good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Corinthians says, he who sows little reaps little and he who sows much reaps much. There is a principle in the Bible that is unavoidable, that God is generous to the generous. And I'm lying to you and dishonest as a pastor if I don't say that's one of the reasons it's what's best for you. Because when we're generous to others, God is generous to us. Now what it doesn't say anywhere is that God is generous to us monetarily. What it doesn't say anywhere is that the blessings that God is going to be generous with are ones that are going to fill up our bank account. It does not say that. It just says God will be generous to you. And God's generosity comes in forms that is so much better than money. You understand? When you are generous with your resources, God is generous with his. It's an unavoidable truth of scripture. So God's generosity looks like good, rich, and deep, spiritually nourishing, life-giving friendships. God's generosity looks like a marriage that's seen some seasons but is hanging in there and loving one another. God's generosity is good relationships with your children. God's generosity is a place to go every day that you don't hate. God's generosity is when you're walking through a hard season but you know that there is a good season coming because your God is good and you know that every day won't feel like this day. God's generosity doesn't always come in the form of money. I know a family, I know a couple who they have living with them right now, a family member, and this is a family member that should not be living with them, okay? They shouldn't be there. They should be able to live on their own, but they're not. And it is really, they are expressing a great deal of generosity to this family member. And one of their friends learned about this and happens to have a cabin, a nice one, and said, go, stay at our cabin for a weekend. You need that. That's God's generosity being expressed to someone who's being generous. Do you see that? It's not always a one-for-one reciprocal return of money, but God is generous towards the generous, and so it behooves us to be generous. The next thing I would tell you is that giving acknowledges stewardship. Why is giving what's best for me? Well, because when we give, we acknowledge this concept of stewardship. Stewardship, the whole sermon could be about stewardship. The whole sermon could be about all four of the points that I'm making. But stewardship in particular is this idea that once we are believers, we understand that the things that we have in our life are not our own. They're God's. And he's entrusted them to us. To use them for the purposes of advancing his kingdom in the most effective way possible. Back in May on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. And we had 11 children that we dedicated that day. It was great, super exciting day for Grace. And part of the dedication of the children is for the parents to acknowledge, both literally and symbolically, that this child is not mine. He is yours. She is yours. We are raising them in our home, but they belong to you, God. They are your children, Jesus. And we are raising them the best we can in the way that they should go according to your standards. But these children are not my children. John and Lily do not belong to Nate and Jen. They belong to God. And he has entrusted them to us because he believes that we have a unique capacity to form them and shape them into who they need to be for Jesus so that they move through life advancing his kingdom. They're not our kids. They're God's kids. Your house is not your house. It's God's house. Your finances are not your finances. They're God's finances. And once we realize that, that we are stewards of the things that God has given to us, then it becomes incredibly important. The primary question we ask about all the things with which we have been entrusted is, Jesus, how do I use these to further your name? How do I use these things to bring attention to you? How would you have me organize this part of my life? And so when we give, when we write the check weekly or we click the button monthly or we set it up or whatever it is we do, when we are generous and we give, it reminds us. Every time we see that come out of our account or hit our credit card, whatever it is, that's a reminder. None of this is mine anyways. It's God's. It's God's to use as he sees fit. And if he wants more, he can have more. So giving reminds us that we are stewards, not just with our money, but in everything in our life. Another thing I would say to you is that giving allows us to participate in what God is doing by being a part of the body of Christ. Giving allows us to participate in what is happening in the church, in the kingdom, in the body of Christ by being a part of the body of Christ. I love 1 Corinthians 12. I've never preached on it here, and I need to do a whole series on it because I think it's just an amazing teaching. But in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lays out this idea that the church is a body and that everyone who's a part of the church has a part to play. The body has arms and legs and feet and hands and it has all kinds of things that are incredibly important. It has lungs that nobody ever sees, but if we don't have lungs, then the rest of it doesn't work. And it all intricately works together to get things accomplished. And I love this teaching because it reminds me as a pastor, I'm just the mouth. That's it. But y'all are the hands that touch people who need it. Y'all are the arms that are wrapped around folks who are struggling. Y'all are the feet that take the good news of the gospel into work. Y'all are the lungs that make this thing go. None of us, none of us, not me, not an elder, not somebody who's been here 30 years, none of us are more important to what's happening at Grace than anybody else. We simply have our part to play. My part is to run my mouth. Sometimes I wish somebody else would take that part. Because maybe I'd like to be the ear sometimes. But everybody has a part. And I think our part of being in the body of Christ, a church in an affluent suburb is to use our resources to serve the greater body of Christ. And when we do that as a church, we get to participate in things going on just outside of grace as well. And so to me, it's a wonderful picture of why as a church we should want to have a generous heart. Right now, we give 10% of everything that we get to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. It is one of my big long-term goals for the church to see that percentage increase a lot so that we play our part in God's greater body and who we are. But not just as we think about reaching outside of the walls of grace, but as we think about what happens within grace and how when we give, we are part of the celebrations that God allows for us here. We are part of the victories that Jesus wins here. We participate in that by giving and doing our part and being a part of the body of Christ. I think back to October of 2017. That was the first time I got to go down to Reynosa to go see the folks at Faith Ministry. Colleen of Faith Ministry fame is with us this morning. Hello, Colleen. That's a ministry in Mexico that builds houses for people who otherwise would not be able to have them. And Grace has been partners with them since before Grace existed. So more than 20 years. And I got to go down there in October of 2017 to see it for the first time. And it was a really great experience. And I'll never forget, we're sitting there and I wanted to say it's the parking lot, but that's generous. It's the place where the cars go. And we're sitting in the van and we're waiting to pull out. And I hear a car crank up and and it was as if that poor thing was being tortured. Like, it did not, every noise it made was, please, please don't make me do this. Like, and I turn around, and the bumper is in shatters. It's being held with bungee cords, and to say that it was a beater is generous to beaters, and it was being driven by the pastor down there, a younger guy named Pastor Carlos. And Pastor Carlos, he works 10 times harder than me. I could not do what he does. I asked him one time what his weekly schedule was and just the Bible studies that he has and the different towns and stuff that he touches on and the different people in his orbit. He needs a good car. He's shuttling kids back and forth. He works so hard. This is not what he should be driving. And so I kind of leaned over to some folks that were on the trip and I said, hey, I think Grace could raise enough money to buy him a truck. Can we do that? And I talked to the folks at Faith Ministry. Would it be cool if we bought him a truck? He seems to need it. And everybody was good with it. And so I came back to Grace and I said, hey, this is, as we enter Christmas, this is the thing we want to do. We want to have enough money to buy a truck for Pastor Carlos. And we did. What kind of car did we buy him? Do you remember? Yeah, Ford Escape or Ranger or something like that. But it was nice and new and way better than what he had. And some of our folks from Grace got to go down and deliver it to him. And when I watched the video, I had tears in my eyes because he was so grateful. And so blown away by the generosity of the church. And it was a really sweet moment. And the next time I went down there, the first thing Carlos wanted me to do is come see his truck and say thank you again for it. Now listen, if you were here and you gave to that Christmas offering in 2017, that joy is your joy. That happiness is your happiness. That's not watching other people do a good thing like when we watch on the internet and our heart is warmed and then we scroll to the next thing. That's your joy. You did that. You participated in that. You made that possible. That was God using your gifts and your finances making you a part of the body of Christ so that you could participate in the good work that he was doing. That joy was your joy. If you give to grace, those 11 kids that were up here being dedicated, that's your joy. When we baptize somebody, that's your joy. When you see somebody come into the church, that's your joy. We have, I think, nine people coming to Discover Grace after church today coming out of a pandemic. That's your joy that those people are becoming a part of what we're doing here at Grace. Every win that Jesus claims here at this church, when we give, we are a part of that. Because those wins don't happen if we don't give. So we give because we are a part of the body of Christ. And that allows us to participate in the work that Jesus is doing, wherever he's doing work. The last point that I would make about why it's best for us to give is that giving invites us to mirror the generosity of God that's lavished upon us. It invites us to mirror the generosity that God has given us. Now, this too could be a whole sermon, and it was. The last time we talked about giving, Doug Bergeson, one of our elders, preached on it in February of 2020, and I don't do things like this, but it's the best sermon on giving I've ever heard. If you haven't heard it, and you'd like to explore this idea more, go back into the archives. It was Grace's Going Home series, February of 2020. Find the Doug Bergeson sermon. It's an excellent one on what I'm talking about right here, How we participate in God's generosity when we give. But what I would say to you this morning is simply this, that this is to me the most compelling reason to give. Because the longer you are a believer, the deeper you grow in gratitude to the Father. There's no two ways about it. You might think that if you've lived a life however you want it, in total selfishness, in total depravity, you've done all the bad things that anybody could do. You can check off all the boxes and and then at like 35, you come to know God, and you're amazed that he's wiped the slate clean, and he's accepted you into his kingdom, that that moment is maximum gratitude for God's generosity and forgiveness. No, it's not. Because to walk with God is to understand that when you become a Christian, he doesn't just forgive you for all the stuff that you did up to that moment. He forgives you for all the crap that you're going to do too. He knows every terrible thought that you're going to have. When you get saved, whatever your lowest point is after that, whatever rock bottom looks like after you become a Christian, God was already in that moment whispering to you that he loves you and he forgives you and he wants you to come back to him. He's already in that moment. Whether that moment's behind you or ahead of you, God was in it telling you already, I've covered this too. So to walk with God and to fall short again and again and again, to arrive at that place that Paul arrives at in Romans 7 that is to me the most redemptive verse in scripture, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. To arrive there and be refreshed anew with God's overwhelming forgiveness and generosity to us. For it to hit us like a wave again that Jesus condescended, took on human flesh, lived with us in the muck and the mire, died on the cross for us, knowing that we would crud on that very death over and over and over again in our life only to require his forgiveness yet again and then he offers and then he goes about, once he dies for us, ascending to the right hand of the Father to advocate for us and to whisper in God's ear that, yes, I've covered that too. When we sit daily in the realization of the gospel and we let the waves of Jesus' forgiveness wash over us and God's generosity flood us, we cannot help but grow in our gratitude towards God. Whatever gratitude we experienced at salvation is the starting point for how it grows through our life. And so we give as an expression of that gratitude. We give because something so incredible is happening to us that we want to find a way to be conduits of that generosity that God has given us. God has given so much to me. God has given so much to us. God has enriched our lives so much that we can't help but want to desire to enrich the lives of others. We can't help but want to express the generosity that God has lavished upon us. And so giving in his best, most pure state is simply a reaction to the overflow of God's giving in our life. That's why Paul teaches in Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver. Don't give out of compulsion, but give because you want to. And how can we grow our want to in giving? By focusing on the face of Jesus and remembering the generosity and the forgiveness that he offers us every day. And so giving is what's best for us because it reorients us to the gospel. It reorients us towards God's goodness in our life. God has been good to me and provided me this. I am going to give this portion of this, understanding that he can replace it or he can't, but God has been so generous to me that I want to be generous to others. That's why we give. I love this verse in 2 Corinthians 9-11 says, you will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. There's this part of the Sermon on the Mount that I find incredibly intimidating, where Jesus says, let others see your good deeds, see your good works, and shine for the Father so that your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your father who is in heaven. And I always think to myself, how do you act like that? A really easy way is to be generous. That's what Corinthians tells us. That God has enriched us. He's given us resources in every way. Why? So that we might enrich others. And then both you and them will turn that to thanksgiving to God. And it will point us back to the Father and our Savior Jesus. That's why giving is what's best for us. It's good for us. It develops a spirit of generosity that constantly, constantly orients us back to Jesus. So I would end this morning with a simple challenge for you. Trust God and give. Trust God and his word and give. How much should I give? Just a little bit more than you are. That's always the answer. 10%? No, that's an Old Testament thing. How much do we give in the New Testament? Just a little bit more than we are. Whatever that means for you. Who do I give to? I'll be the first to tell you. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that you have to give all of your giving to the local church. I've sat in churches, I've heard pastors say, your first 10% goes to this church and then on top of that, other places. That's not in the Bible. I'm not going to sit here and teach you that. I'm not preaching this as a self-serving thing for grace. If you believe in grace and what's happening here and you feel compelled to participate in the victories that Jesus is winning here, then give to grace. But you give wherever God is advancing his kingdom. Wherever God is working and Jesus is moving, you give there. Just give. Trust God and do it. I have never talked to a single person in my whole life who has said, you know what? I heard what the pastor said about giving and I decided to start being more generous. That was a huge mistake. I really regret it. Wish I could have that back. Never heard anybody say that. So this morning, it's simple. If you and I could have a conversation, I would simply end it by saying, just trust God. Obey Him. Be a person who's generous. Let's give together. Let me pray for us. Father, we do love you. We are so grateful for the goodness and the gifts that you've lavished upon us. God, I pray first and foremost that we would let those wash over us. I pray more than anything else that we would simply leave here increasingly overwhelmed with your goodness to us. Father, for those of us who need this, who need to think about this in our own lives, I pray that because you said so would be all the reason that we ever need. I pray that we would trust that and walk in that. Knowing that even when we don't understand obedience sometimes, that it is going to lead us to a path of life. God, give us the heart and the gratitude and the spirit to be people who are generous. I pray that each one of us would leave here determined to be just a little bit more generous than we were when we walked in today. And God, for those of us who are obedient and who respond and who give. Would we find you there, please? Would you show us yourself in that giving? Can we ask that through the generosity that you compel us to that we are brought closer to your son and so inspired and enlivened to continue to be generous. It's in his name, the one who died for us and who advocates for us, that we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning and happy Father's Day. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. As I think about dads and wishing people happy Father's Day, I really think of two groups of people most of all. To those of you who are expectant fathers, this is your first kind of official, unofficial Father's Day. Boy, that is exciting. So good for you guys. I think of y'all today and I'm very excited and hopeful for y'all. And then I also think of those for whom Father's Day is hard because while everyone else celebrates their dad, you just miss yours. And that's hard too. So I'm sorry about that. And I'm praying specifically for you today. This is not going to look anything like a Father's Day sermon. As a matter of fact, I would even tell you that this isn't even a sermon, okay? A sermon is designed to teach you the Bible and point you to Jesus, point you to God. That's really what a sermon is. This is more of a message. This is more of just something that as your pastor, I want to communicate to our church. So I would also say this, that this morning is unique. It's different. We're pausing from the series that we've been in. We've been doing a series called One Hit Wonders, and we're taking a break from that this morning. And I have a special message, some things that I want to communicate with you. In light of that, I would tell you that this morning is for the partners of grace. If you don't know what that means and why I'm saying partners of grace, it's because at grace we like to say that we have partners, not members, because in membership there is this attitude of rights and privileges. I'm a member now. What do I get to enjoy? What rights are bestowed upon me? But partnership is a sense of ownership. I'm partnering with this organization. I'm taking ownership of the success of this place. What can I do? How can I ply my hand to move it forward? So we say at Grace that members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So we have partners, not members. And so this morning is for the partners of Grace. Which means that if you're here, your dad drug you here, you're visiting, you've been kicking the tires, you've been watching online, you wouldn't yet call Grace home, then I have good news for you. You picked a great Sunday. Because this doesn't apply to you. You don't have to do any of the stuff that I say. All right. You had, you feel no guilt. You feel no shame. You feel no sense of compulsion. You don't have to worry about it. You just kind of sit back and take it in. And you also kind of get a peek behind the curtain to decide if this is the kind of place that you want to be involved with. So please know if you don't call grace home, if you don't consider yourself a partner of grace, and if you're thinking to yourself, gosh, am I a partner? Listen, I always say a partner is what a partner does, all right? So I don't know about official classes and things and anointed and stuff. If you act like a partner, you're a partner. So if you consider yourself one, you are. If you don't, then you're not, okay. Now, if you're not, just take it in. Okay. The things that I'm about to say, I'm not saying to try to compel you to do anything. You just enjoy it. For the partners of grace, I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to specifically you, whether you're here in person, whether you're watching online or you catch up later this week, because there's just some things that have been on my heart, and I've been thinking through, gosh, how do I address those things? How do I share with the church about those things? And as I began to think and pray through that, I had a couple key conversations that kind of, they didn't intend to do it, but it pointed me in this direction, and I thought, I just want to take a Sunday and talk to the partners of grace. Kind of a State of the Union address, as it were. The State of Grace. Carly did a great job throwing that together last minute. Good job, Carly. And really, my desire to talk to you guys this morning as partners comes from this question that I get all the time. I get this question from people who love grace ask me this question all the time. Whenever we get one-on-one time in the lobby or I see you through the week or we hang out or whatever it is, at some point or another, people who care about grace always lean in and they ask me this question. How's grace doing? How's grace doing? That's what they want to know. A lot of you guys have asked me that. How are we doing? How's it looking on Sunday morning? What's it like in there? How's grace? And it's a fair question, right? Because here's the thing. Nobody really knows. We've been in a pandemic for 18 months. We were at this all-time high in February 2020, and then we just stopped meeting for 15 months, right? And listen, nobody knows how Grace is doing. I make the joke with other pastors. I've heard them say it too. I have no idea who goes to my church. I have no clue. I think of people every week that I haven't seen in 16 months, and I'm like, gosh, I don't think I've seen them at all. And I'll ask after them. I'll ask Erin. Erin's our children's pastor. She knows everything about everybody in the whole church. So I usually ask Erin, Erin, the sons and sisters still go here? Oh yeah, they're good. I was talking to them last week. They're still engaged. They just haven't come back yet for, you know, X, Y, Z. And there's all kinds of good reasons out there and that's fine. But it's good for me to know that they still call grace home. But the reality is, it's a fair question because it's difficult to know how is the church doing. So I wanted to let you know that we're doing pretty darn good. Grace is doing pretty well. I'm pretty proud of us. This last 16 months has been hard, man. It's been hard on a church. It's been hard on pastors, but it hasn't been as hard on this pastor because you guys are great. I think maybe the thing I might be most proud of about our little church is the unity that we've displayed in this last year. We've faced a pandemic together. We faced COVID together. And you guys were keeping up with it with all those addresses I did. I'll do little videos in my office and send it out to the church. Hey, here's how we're going to handle this. It'll hearten you to know that I have friends who don't go to the church that I used to work with at my other church who now make fun of me for those videos. Every time I send out a video, it shows up on their Facebook feed and I get texts with them making fun of me for them. So that's a thing that's going on in my life. So I've sent out a lot of those. I'd like to be done so my friends will quit making fun of me. But in every one of those videos, when I have to say, hey, we're going to come back in person. Hey, these are going to be, this is the caution that we're going to observe in the room. Hey, we still need to wear masks. Some people need to, some people don't. Hey, this is how we're going to sit. This is how it's going to be. I've known with every video, the elders have known with every decision that we've made that there's going to be some people who aren't happy with it and some people who are. And to watch a church full of people who at some point or another in this last year have been unhappy with one of those decisions, still come here and still call grace home and still love this place and still believe in what God is doing here and still trusting us. That's pretty great. We're a pretty darn unified church in a time when it would be really easy to start being a fragmented church. And it's not just COVID, right? This last, during the pandemic, for whatever reason, it felt like things came to a head politically, and our country is more divided and entrenched politically than it's ever been. We've walked through that with people on both sides of the aisle in unity. Racial reconciliation was thrust into the forefront of the national conversation in a way that I would argue it hasn't been since the 60s. And yet we remain strong. We've been unified this last year as a church, and it heartens me, and I think is maybe the most important thing that we could say about ourselves, that we still love Jesus, we still love each other, and we still love this place. I've been heartened to see momentum building on Sunday mornings. Every week a a few more people come back. Every week, I meet some new people who have been watching us online, who have come back again. Every week, I get here really early in the morning, earlier than I should because I don't want to mess up my sermons. I get here, and then I sit in my office, and I kind of slowly watch the parking lot fill up. And I kind of, who's going to come this week? Who do I get to see? Whose neck do I get to hug? I got to see Miss Ginger Gentry this morning. She came back. Oh, my gosh. It was so great. And I wonder at what's going to happen, right? And every week, it feels like a little bit of momentum gets picked up, and every week, the room feels like it's getting a little bit more full, even here in the middle of the summer. And I think that we could be doing better about that. I'm going to talk about that here in a little bit, but every week I feel a little bit of sense of grace kind of coming back to life. And if we think about coming back to normal, I don't think we're going to see February 2020 for a long time and I'm not worried about it. February 2020 was an all-time high for Grace Riley, and then we stopped meeting. So I'm not worried about that. I'm excited to see what the new normal is going to be, and I think we're going to see it in September. I think what we have in September is what we're going to be, just so you guys know where my thinking is on that. But I've been kind of anxious to see Grace kind of come back to life. We're doing incredible in our kids' ministry. Our rooms are full. I don't know if you know this. Our kids' ministry rooms, they're full like every week. When we had to take out chairs to meet and be able to socially distance, we took a room up in there with all the chairs. And about a month ago, Erin came to me and she was like, yo, you gotta get your chairs out of my room. Like, they gotta get out of there. I need space. I need this room. Our children's space is filled up every week. Our small groups have continued to grow. Our small groups have continued to meet and graft in new people. We've actually added to our small groups rather than detracting from them in a time when we can't even meet together for a large period of time. Many of you know that right as we went into the pandemic that we did a campaign because we believe that it's time for grace to go home. We believe that it's time for grace to have permanent roots in the community that we love so much. And so we pledged $1.5 million to that end. And in a year, when we didn't even need a building, we've raised nearly a million dollars already for a building that we think that we will need one day. I think that's amazing. And we haven't even talked about it. The chair of the campaign committee emailed the elders and said, just keep doing the nothing that you're doing because it seems to be working really well. And we have. I think we're going to crest a million dollars in September thereabouts and we'll let the church know about that and we'll make this final push to February when the campaign will officially be over. But all those things are going well. And I think that the pandemic has been hard on every church in the country. And the pastors that I talk to, it's a struggle. But I think for us, for Grace, we're doing very well as a church. I also think that there's some areas of the church that need our attention. I think there's some areas of the church that our partners need to focus on. And I want to talk to you about those areas. I think we've got some work to do, some parts that are maybe broken down a little, and I think it's time to get to work and to fix them. To talk about those areas, I want to share with you a ministry principle that I learned years ago. I learned this, I don't know where, but somewhere back in church world, somebody taught this to me and it stuck with me, and so I'm going to teach it to you. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Luke chapter 5. We're going to look at verses 1 through 6. This little interaction, we're going to focus in on one part of it and kind of use that for the ministry principle that is going to apply to the whole church today. But we find it in Luke chapter 5. Steve is going to be mad at me. I'm reading out of the King James Version. You're going to see the English Standard Version on the screen, so it's not going to make much sense. But this is my dad's Bible. I keep it in my office. And I thought it would be pretty good to preach out of my dad's Bible on Father's Day because I love that guy. So bear with me. If you're mad about this, shove it. All right. I didn't mean that for Steve. Steve, I love you. I don't know where you are. I didn't mean that for you. Oh, no. All right. Luke 5. And Simon answered, said unto him, And when they had done this, they enclosed a great multitude of lake, and the people are pressing on him, so much so that he's kind of like backing into the water just to get some space. So he looks and he sees two boats and he sees the fishermen, the owners of the boats, washing their nets. And he asks them, can we get in this boat and can you push off a little bit so I can get some space? And then he finishes teaching. And then he says, hey, go throw your nets out there. There's going to be a big catch. And Simon, who we know him as Peter, says, we've been toiling all night long. We've been out there all night. Like, we're done. We just did the night shift. We're finished up. And Jesus says, no, go ahead and throw them in the water again. And Simon Peter says, all right, fine. And he goes and he throws his net back into the same place where they've been fishing all along, catching nothing for hours on end. And then all of a sudden their nets are filled so full that they begin to break. And they have to call over, if you read the verses following, they have to call over some other guys in the boats and say, can you help us with this catch? Now what I want us to focus on in this story is this principle that was taught to me years ago, that when Jesus looks at Simon Peter, who is later to become a disciple, when Jesus looks at the disciples for the first time, they're washing their nets. This is a thing that fishermen have to do. Another way to think about this is mending the nets, because when you go fish for a night, you get debris in the nets. You get stuff in there that could cut the nets. You get stuff in there that could clog it. You get things in there that could tangle it up. So you've got to do the tedious work. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to take a net that's been used over and over again all night long, a huge fishing net, and spread it out and tediously undo all the knots and tediously mend it, grab new thread and reattach it and weave it back in there and care for these nets and wash them and get them ready for the next time. But listen, what those fishermen knew was if they don't mend the nets, if they don't prep them, they won't be ready for the catch. So from this, I've learned the ministry principle that we have to mend the nets to prepare for the movement of God. I've known as a pastor that if we're going to prepare for the movement of God, we have to mend the nets. We've got to get ready for the catch. This is actually a biblical principle. There's a verse I have highlighted in the Old Testament that says, I am the ax and God is the one who hews me. And so I have a note in my Bible, stay sharp, be ready. We don't know when the father is going to pick us up to use us for his will, but let's be ready when he does. Simon Peter had no idea that Jesus was about to tell him to cast his nets out and have the biggest catch of his fishing career. He didn't know that was about to come, yet he was still tediously preparing the nets for the catch. And so what I know about ministry and about church is, if we want to be ready for the work of the Lord, for God's movement, then we have to mend our nets and prepare for the catch. The first time I really felt this impressed upon me, it was a principle I've been familiar with for years, but the first time I really felt like God pressed this on me was actually in this room. In the summer of 2017, I got here in April of that year. In the summer of 2017, I was in this room during the day and I was praying, as I'm known to do on occasion. And I was just pacing around and praying for the church. And I felt God impress upon me. I'm not going to say speak to me. I'm not a God speaks to me guy. I get scared when people start claiming this just as a disclaimer. But as clearly as I've ever heard God in my life, I felt him say, mend the nets. Mend the nets. Get ready. There's a catch coming. Get things in order. Which was a tall task. Because at the time, if you were here, you know, we didn't have a staff. We didn't have a reliable microphone that I could preach from for an entire sermon. It used to cut out all the time. I literally yelled my first Christmas sermon ever at you guys because my mic cut out halfway through it. We didn't know if our songs were going to work. I didn't know if ProPresenter was going to pull up on the computer. All of our ministries were in disarray. There was a lot of net mending to do. And it didn't seem like at the time we were a church of like a hundred and it really didn't feel like anything big was about to happen, but I felt like God impressed upon me, hey, mend the nets, get ready. And I can tell you that he told us to do that because he had a catch prepared for grace. The first time I stepped foot in this room was in February of 2017. I was being interviewed to be the senior pastor. There was 96 souls in this room. Remember, I counted twice. In February of 2020, the last time we were normal, we averaged 335 people in this room every Sunday. That doesn't count the record number of about 45 kids a week that we were running. God brought a catch. He had me, he had us mend the nets for the reason. I'm not the only one that was working to mend the nets. I was just the only one who was using that phrasing in my head to get ready for what God was going to bring. And so now as we sit here in 2021, I feel the Lord pressing upon us again that we need to mend the nets, that we need to get ready, that we need to prepare for the catch that he is about to bring us. Except this time, I don't want to be the only one that's thinking about it. This time, I don't want to be the only one that's using that language. I want our partners to use that language too and let us build the nets together. I think right now in 2021, we need a church full of net menders. We need a church full of partners to work alongside and to get ready for what God is about to do. Why do I feel like God's about to do something here? First of all, I think we're incredibly strong as a church. I think that we're doing incredibly well coming out of a pandemic. I'm very proud of Grace. I'm not lying to you or exaggerating to you when I tell you that every week that we meet in person, I meet somebody who is here for the first time. I meet somebody, I have a conversation that goes something like this. I see a face I don't recognize in the lobby or in one of the seats because visitors always come in early, so I can kind of be in here and say hey to them. They don't have anything else to do. And I'll walk up to them. Hey, I'm Nate. It's nice to meet you. And they say, yeah, we know. We've been watching you online. It happens every week. Every week new people come. Every week you're inviting your friends as things open up again. Every week God brings us more families. I don't know if you know this, but on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. It had been a year since we did one, so it was a lot. We dedicated eight children that day from nine different families. Now, some of y'all might not know this, but before we were Grace Raleigh, we were Grace Community Church. In December of 2017, we changed our name to Grace Raleigh. And do you understand, do you know that of the nine families that dedicated children on Mother's Day of this year, eight of them have only ever attended Grace Raleigh? Eight of them God has brought to us in the last three years, three, four years. We are growing like crazy in that area of the church. God is doing a thing. And we've got a group of 20-somethings. They're about to start getting pregnant too, and they're going to just add to the trouble. When we go back to normal, when things open back up, I think there's a chance we might have to go to two services in the fall. I think people are ready and chomping at the bit. I think people are ready to start meeting in person with their small groups again. I can feel, you can feel our culture just yearning for normal. And I think a big part of that is church. So I think God's about to do big things here. Even more than that, just the reality of this, this is long-term thinking, but while we're here, we already have a million dollars in the bank ready to buy a building when God presents an opportunity. When we set down permanent roots, when we have a place, when we have a building, that's going to bring some people. That's going to bring some tire kickers. Y'all are going to get excited about grace and be willing to put up with my sermons again and start inviting your friends to this thing that's happening. We need to get ready, guys. Somebody was asking me, a dear friend of mine who's a partner here, we went out to lunch and he just kind of said, hey, what's the vision of grace right now? Like it kind of feels like we just kind of go week to week. We're just kind of going along, maybe hoping for normal again. Like what's the vision of grace? Like what are we doing? And I thought about it for a while. And I thought, gosh, I'm not floating along. The staff's not floating along. The elders, maybe. But the rest of us, we're not floating along. I felt like I'm doing everything I can. I'm fighting and scratching and clawing for this place. Every week I want to see who comes. Every week when somebody does come, I wonder are they going to come back consistently or are they just dipping their toe in and then we'll see you in a month. I wonder when is this place going to come alive again. Every week I'm trying to preach my little heart out to bring people back, to give you something worth showing up to. Every week Steve's doing the best he can to lead us in worship with who shows up in the room. And so I feel like we're fighting like crazy for this place, but it makes sense to me that someone who comes on a weekly basis might not know that because I don't tell you. So I'm telling you, let's mend the nets. Let's get ready. So it makes sense to ask, what does a net mender do? All right, Nate, I'm in, fine. What are you asking of me? How do we mend nets? Well, the first thing we do is we prioritize Sunday morning attendance. We prioritize coming to church on Sunday. Now, this is honestly a thing I never wanted to preach about as a pastor. Because when I wasn't the senior pastor, I always thought it was real self-serving for the senior pastor to do the sermon where he guilts you into Sunday morning attendance. And I never really appreciated it. And so I've intentionally gone in the other direction, even at times making fun of the idea of coming to church on Sunday. I think it's possible that I've made the joke that if I didn't get paid to be here on a holiday weekend, I wouldn't be here either. But what I'm coming to realize is that I've really misled you in our attitude towards Sunday morning attendance. I've always had the attitude about people coming on Sunday that we, the staff, and the volunteers that make up the Sunday morning, we're going to do the best job we can to make it worth it for you to come here on Sunday. We're going to do the best job we can so that when you come on Sunday, you go home and you go, I'm glad I came. And my thought is, if we don't do that for you, then you're not going to come. So what's the point of trying to guilt you if you're not getting anything out of it anyways? And I still believe that that's true. And I still believe that the onus is on us to make it worth it, to get the family up and to come and to be a part of church. But I've also noticed this about our thinking about attendance. And this is really what I want to mention to you guys. I think it's really easy to think about the decision of whether or not to attend church. Isolated. As if it only affects you or your family. Do you want to go to church this Sunday? I don't know, I'm kind of tired. It just affects us, right? It just affects me. It doesn't really have any impact on anybody else. It's just a question for me. And I think that the pandemic and online church for a while has only exasperated that mindset. Because now it's become a thing that I can watch online. I can take part in church at the beach. And I'm still good. I'm still doing my Jesus thing. I'm still participating. I'm watching. I'm listening later in the week. And that's good. That's better than nothing. But I think increasingly the decision to attend church has become one that we believe is about ourselves and whether or not I want to consume the product that's being presented to me on Sunday morning. That sounds like member talking, doesn't it? Sounds like a consumer mindset. And that's hard for me to say because that's not what I do. If you've been here since I got here, you've been here with me for four years. I never talk down to the church. I never set myself up as moral exemplar. I never bring conviction on a Sunday morning that I don't sit in with you. So my part in this is how I've perpetuated the mindset about attendance, and I'm sorry for that. But I do believe that I have seen a more consumeristic approach to whether or not we're going to attend church on Sunday morning, if it fits into my schedule, if I'm not doing anything else, if we're not busy, if the kids aren't crazy, believing that that decision only affects you. But what I would impress upon you this morning is that no, it doesn't. The way that I want us to begin to think about church attendance is just with the layer of thinking. This is all I'm asking for. You're not asking me to cancel trips and make any new commitments. I'm just asking you to think about attendance in this way. Understand that your decision about whether or not to come to church on a Sunday morning impacts the whole church. It impacts everyone. It's not just about us and our families. And you know this to be true intuitively, right? When you show up on a Sunday morning and it's full in here, whoa, look at this. People commenting out in the lobby. Well, you really brought them in today. You really packed it out. People are excited. You know that you get excited when people are in the room. You know you get excited when there's energy in this room. You know. If you were here when we went to two services, you know that the hardest part about going to two services is sitting in here with the other 35 people in the 11 o'clock service. That stinks, man. Ain't nobody want to do that. And I know that people are curious about this. I know that people online want to know how many people in the room. How does it feel in there? I got comments that people, when we first started coming back in person, that people would appreciate when the camera person would kind of pan back so they could like see, are my friends there? Like, who's there? Who's in the room? How much energy? What's going on in there? And there was some Sundays when I would go to that camera person, I would say, hey, listen, we don't need to pan back today, okay? We'll just keep this, just we 25, okay? Just stay nice and tight, just zoomed. You know that when we attend, it adds energy to this place. That's important as we seek to rebuild, as we seek to mend nets. You know if you've brought a friend, if you've invited a couple or a family to come with you, and they show up and the energy's a little dead, you die a little bit on the inside. That's hard for you because you invite people here because you're proud of this place. And then when this place doesn't show up, that's a disservice to you and your friend. When we worship together, tell me that worship isn't better when this room isn't full. It is full. Tell me it's not better when we sing and we raise our voices together. Tell me worship in this room isn't better with 200 than it is with 40. There's something to it. There's something to the energy of a church. There's something to looking across the room, and maybe I don't even talk to them this week, but I see them and they're here, and they're committed and we're committed. And as we come back, as we come back out of the woodwork to see those faces again and again and know that they're committed to this place like you're committed to this place. That's heartening. That's good. Your attendance even passively matters to the whole church. It's not just a you decision. And how many conversations do we miss out on? Just a few weeks ago, I had another one of those conversations. A woman walked in. She looked at me. I looked at her. I knew that she knew me. I knew I didn't know her. And she said she'd been watching me online and she was ready to come back. And she was here and she wanted to be involved in Stephen ministry. And I said, that's great. The guy who leads at Bill Reith is right over there. Let me introduce you. And I got them hooked up. What if Bill just decided that day that his attendance was only about him? Maybe she connects via email. Maybe she doesn't. Every week people come in. I was just talking to a couple this morning. They came in, they're wanting to join a small group. Well, what if I had a small group for them to join and I thought, oh, so-and-so would be great for them to talk to and then so-and-so wasn't here. Our decision to come to church impacts the whole church every week. It's a big deal. It adds to the energy in the room. It adds to the sense of camaraderie and commitment from one another. It allows us to these introductions of two people's friends to people that might get plugged in with us. One of the best things in the world, I love it so much, is you cannot, you cannot, I'm looking at you guys right here, you cannot drop your kids off on that hallway without them inviting you to their small group. You just can't do it. What if they just decide this week's not the week and we miss a chance to connect some people? Our attendance doesn't just impact us. I want you to think of it as something that impacts the whole church. Moving forward, it's important. The other way we mend nets is to serve on service teams. The other way we mend nets is to volunteer in the church. Now here's a reality across every church in the country. All their service teams are broken down. None of them have as many people as they used to. I talked to Phil Leverett, our head usher. Sometimes he lets that title go to his head. He's got quite the ego and it's difficult to deal with, but he does a good job nevertheless. And I said, hey, we want to go back to full capacity. We want to start, get your ushers together. We want to start handing out the notes again and things like that. And I said, how's your team, by the way? And he goes, well, I used to have 10 people every week, and now I have four. And two of them are me and Doug Funk. So he's got two, okay? We need people across the board. We need people to serve on service teams. And as we've come back to church, we might not resume into the same role that we had. We might not have had a role previously when last time we were normal. And so we might not feel an impetus to serve again, but I'm telling you as your pastor, all of our teams are broken down. We need more people. We need help. So what I'm asking is, if you're coming to church, serve. If you're attending on a Sunday morning regularly and you're a partner of grace, be a partner. Serve somewhere. And listen, if you're watching online this morning and you're increasingly angry at me because you're like, Nate, I don't feel comfortable coming back. Leave me alone. I get it. And I would never try to convince you to come back before you're comfortable doing it. Ever. But what I would say is, when you do come back, be ready to get to work. Because that's what I'm asking of everyone here too. If you're coming on Sunday, serve. In some capacity. Because our teams are broken down. And people need your help. I talked earlier about the idea of mending a net. Can you imagine how tedious it would be to mend a whole net by yourself? Listen, we have some people who since August of last year have just been slowly but surely washing their net, waiting for other people to come alongside them and help them out. I think of Cindy Hayes back there. I know I'm going to embarrass her, but Cindy runs sound back there. You have this sheet in your seat. It's got urgent needs. There and there. Those are the urgent needs. When Cindy's not there, she's over there with the kids. Every week. Doing her part. Just slowly mending the nets. Waiting for some people to come alongside and help her. We've got other people like Keith. Keith is back there running the feed right now. He helped us set up the live stream. If we didn't have Keith in the summer, you guys would have been watching stuff recorded on YouTube for the duration of the pandemic. We have some faithful people who sit over there and they hold fussy pandemic babies all morning. And they do it week after week. We have the Phil Leveritz of the world who shows up every Sunday to help fill in the gaps. We have Doug Funk who continues to show up and do what he can. I could go on and on and on. We've got some folks in the church who have been mending some nets. But I'm telling you that they need help. So you've got these sheets in your seat. I want us all to take a look at them. Oh, and I'm supposed to say, together let's mend our nets and get ready for all that God is doing and will do at Grace. But really, let's do that. Let's not pastor talk about what I believe is coming. And let's not pastor talk about what our needs are. We need your help. To give you an idea of how badly we need your help, I asked Erin, last time it was normal, how many regular volunteers did you have in children's ministry? And she said, I had 55 people who were regularly a part of children's ministry. Not 55 people on the roster, because there's always people on the roster who are there, they exist on the roster, but they haven't done anything in like six weeks. So in a two-month period leading into the pandemic, 55 different people served. And I said, how many people have served who are not on staff in the last month? 18. And some of those are repeats, and they're doing it every week. Some of those are elders. Some of those are elders that when we went to two services, I looked at the elders and I said, this puts a lot of stress on Aaron and the children's ministry. So I'm asking the elders to all volunteer to do this for a Sunday at least. Some of those are band-aids. We need incredible help in the kids' ministry. And I know what you're thinking. Why don't their parents volunteer? They do. They do. And also, their parents live with three children under five. So let's give them a break. Or go babysit at their house. And then they'll come here and they'll watch the rest of the kids. They do volunteer. No, it's not an option. It's not really going to happen. And we have folks from an older generation that volunteer, but that number is getting smaller and smaller. So we need you to volunteer with the kids. We need people on the tech team. We need people to work back there in the sound booth. Those are very urgent needs. Every week I have conversations with Steve and Aaron about what can we do to find more help. They've done all the shoulder tapping they know how to do, so I'm just telling you corporately, we need help in those places. If those places feel like they just don't make sense for you right now, we need other things too. And those are under the other opportunities. We need you to serve there as well. But I would also tell you, this isn't just a plea to mend the nets of grace, which we need to do. We need to get ready for what God is going to bring us. And I really do think that starts by committing to Sunday morning attendance and changing the way we think about it. And it starts by serving on a team and helping move this thing forward every Sunday morning. But I would also tell you that Jesus is found in service. There's a part of Jesus that is found in his work that you will never find anywhere else. You can read all the Bible passages you want to. You can go to all the small groups you want to. You can have all the good conversations you want to. You can worship him all you want. But there is a part of Jesus that cannot be found outside of his service. And I can tell you story after story of just people on our elder board who their catalyst in faith was taking a small step to serve on Sunday morning. So if you do this, you won't just help mend our nets and get ready for what's next at Grace, but you will also, I believe, find Jesus in that service. So we're going to do this. In a few minutes, I'm going to pray. Steve and the band are going to come up and they're going to play through a song. During that song, we're going to ask you guys to stay seated and just kind of prayerfully go over this and consider being a net mender with us. Fill it out. And at the end of the service, when everyone's dismissed, there's offering boxes as you leave. You can fold these up and put those in there. If space runs out in the offering box for some reason, just hand them to me or anybody else on staff. We'll get it figured out. But I would really love for you to take a minute. If you're a partner, if you're committed to coming, pray through this sheet, fill it out, and let's mend the nets together. Can we do that? Let me pray for us. Father, you are a good father. For those who are on the precipice of knowing what it is to be one of those, God, I just pray for so much joy and happiness and peace for them. For those for whom this day is difficult because they miss their dad, they would give anything just to spend a little bit more time with them. God, I pray that you would just nurture their spirit today in a way that only you can. Father, we are also so grateful for how you've brought us through this difficult time in our country and in our culture. We're grateful that we have a church at all to go to and that you have shepherded us so well and that we do feel so strong right now. But God, I also pray that we as partners, as people of grace, would take ownership of what you are doing here and that we would do our part to get this place ready for what you're doing next. And I pray that in doing that part, we would find you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this morning. Apparently, what it takes to get Grace excited about church in June is a pandemic that lasts 18 months. Look at this. This is fantastic. We are in the second part of our series called One Hit Wonders, where we're basically, I said last week, we're basically just using this as a vehicle to look at some of the verses in the Bible that are pretty famous, pretty significant verses, ones that we treasure, but maybe a typical series doesn't hit on them, or even a typical Bible study might not arrive at these verses. So it's a time to kind of grab some of the verses and some of the passages out of Scripture that we may not land on in sermons and in Bible studies, but focus on them here in the summer as we come together each week. And so this week, I actually want to talk to you, ironically, about the danger of doing that. I want to talk to you about the danger of One-Hit Wonders, of just seeing a verse that we like. I like the words in this verse. I like what it says. I like what God is telling me. So I'm just going to grab it out of the Bible and I'm going to use it to encourage myself. This is a thing that brings encouragement to me and we kind of cling on to it. If you grew up in church, okay, how many of you, I want to see a show of hands actually. I didn't plan to do this, but I'm just now empirically interested. How many of you have ever heard someone else claim to have or have ever had your own life verse? How many of you have ever heard someone claim to have a life verse? Yes, this is a big time, this is a church thing, okay? If you're like, what in the world is that? You're one of the fortunate ones. But if you know what that is, to have a life verse, this is the verse, this is me. When I see this verse, I feel seen and heard. This is my life verse, okay? This is kind of my theme for life. And so what we do is we'll pull out these individual verses and we'll allow them to mean something of great significance to us. But sometimes when we do that, it can be dangerous. As I talk about this this morning, we're going to look at probably the most famous one of these verses. It's probably the most famous verse in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 29, 11. We're going to look at that verse today, and we're going to talk about why is it dangerous to just pull a single verse out of context. But I would preface it this way. My wife, Jen, she told me that I needed to be kind and gentle as I did this, because she noted that oftentimes I take glee in bursting people's bubbles. She may have cited the fact that every Christmas, I'd like to point out to you that the wise men were nowhere near the manger on Christmas and therefore all your nativity scenes are wrong and dumb. But I'm not allowed to crush this verse with that sort of careless flair. And I actually learned the lesson about this the hard way. Several years ago at my previous church, I was asked to come and give the devotional for the Loganville High School Red Devils baseball team. And you have no reason to know this. If you do know this and you're from North Carolina, you're weird, okay? But the Loganville Red Devils were really, really good at baseball. They won several state tournaments. They had a really good program over there. And their head coach was a guy named Brian Mills. And he went to our church and he asked me to come and give the devotional to the boys as they, because in Loganville, things are different. You can go talk about Jesus in public schools and everyone's just like, cool. That's not how it goes in Wake County. But I went out there, I went out there and I gave them a devotion, right? And they had this kid on their team named Clint Frazier, who at the time was the number one baseball prospect in the country, right? A big old mop of red hair. I never had any interactions with Clint, and this was the only time I ever really did get to interact with him. And I'm going to give a devotional to the team. And at the time, you may remember this, those of you who have been involved in church culture, there was actually an athletic gear, like Under Armour or Nike, like athletic apparel company called Phil 413, Philippians 413. And they would put Philippians 413 on all their stuff. And that's the verse, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, right? And so they're giving it to athletes. You can run that mile through Christ who strengthens you. You're going to hit that jump shot. You're going to hit that home run. You're going to complete that pass, you know, or make that sweet set, volleyball players. You're going to do it through Christ who gives you strength, right? And so they're like claiming this. They're emblazing it on their chest and on their equipment and they're going and God is powering me and I'm going to do good here. But the verse really, it's written by Paul and it comes in this context where Paul has said, I have learned how to be joyful with plenty and I have learned how to be joyful with little in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying, no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in God. I've learned how to find that contentment in him. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And so really, if we wanted to apply it to a baseball team, I explained to them, it would be about being okay with winning or losing, being happy whether you win or whether you lose. And I said, it's not going to make you hit the ball harder. It's not going to make you throw it further. It's not the verse to claim for your playoff run. If you want a verse, and then I went to Proverbs, and it was a verse on hard work and how God honors hard work. So claim this verse and outwork the other teams. But don't claim that verse like it's going to make you a better athlete because it won't. The whole time I'm talking about this, the boys kind of just, they all just have this smirk on their face. They're all just kind of smiling at me, you know? And so when I'm done, I'm like, all right, look, what gives? What did I step in? What's going on? Clint Frazier walks up to me, and he pulls back his sleeve, and he freshly minted Philippians 4.13 tat on his forearm, just right there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I'm so sorry. Clint is now the starting right fielder for the New York Yankees. I'm not making it up. You can look it up. He's there. He's a great ball player and he's still got the tattoo. So apparently I was wrong. It did make him hit the ball further and throw better. I don't know. But that was where I learned to be gentle as you talk about verses that are near and dear to people. And Jeremiah 29 11 is one that is really special to folks and really does give us a sense of hope and a sense of peace. You may know it. If you don't, you can turn your Bible there. If you don't have a Bible with you, it's in the seat back in front of you. But Jeremiah 29, 11 says, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. It's a really great verse. I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. If you're in a place where you feel uncertain, I don't know what's coming next. I need this relationship to work out. I don't know how in the world, in this market, I'm ever going to be able to afford a house. I don't know where the next job is going to come from. I don't know if I can close this deal. I don't know if this thing is going to work out with my kid. I don't know if this relationship is going to pan out. I don't know, God. And then for someone to speak that peace into your life, that God has a plan for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. That's a real hopeful, life-giving verse. And a lot of people claim it for those reasons, and that's great. I actually get to go and do a wedding here in a few weeks for Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, by the way, not just a lady that I refer to in my sermons. I'm going to do a wedding for her cousin, and his bride is a girl named Haley. We were planning out the ceremony a couple of nights ago. And part of Haley's story is she had a brother named David growing up who struggled with addiction and depression. And David ended up taking his own life. And to honor him in the ceremony, she still has a voicemail from him where he reads her that verse. And they want it played in the ceremony. And that's a beautiful thing. Because God does have a plan for David. He does have a plan for Haley. He does have a plan for us. But I also think that it's important to understand what that plan is. And to understand what that verse really means. Because I think there's actually greater comfort waiting on us there than we've given that verse credit for. So I want to talk to you this morning about two dangers of one-hit wonders. Two dangers of grabbing a verse, plucking it out of the Bible, not reading anything around it and going, boom, this is what this means for me and my life. There's two big ways that we get in big trouble when we do that. So the first way and the first danger of just grabbing a verse out of context, when you hear someone grab a verse out of context, when you hear someone quote a verse, when you see something on a meme, when you see something on a t-shirt or whatever it is, we need to read it and look around it. And when we don't do that, we don't fully understand the verse, two really bad things can happen. The first one is we mislead ourselves and others. We just grab a verse out of the Bible and we apply it. It sounds nice. We mislead ourselves and others. And I say ourselves and others because each of us has a circle of influence. Sometimes we repeat what we hear to other people. I said something last week to a friend of mine and he goes, is that true? And I said, you know what? Honestly, I don't know. I heard it years ago and I've been parroting it ever since. I need to do some research on that. I have no idea. I think we do this sometimes. So when we just grab a verse out of context, we run the risk of misleading ourselves and others. I know of a church a few years ago that they were doing a building campaign. They were launching another campus. They were kind of relaunching their main campus. And they kind of grabbed a verse as the theme verse for the year. Look at what God is going to do at this place. And this is what's going to motivate us. And so the pastor was kind of casting vision for what's going to happen in the future. And then they found a nice verse to pair with it because when you're doing church right, that's what you do. You kind of decide what you think God wants you to do, and then you find a verse in the Bible that happens to coincide with the plans that you made. I'm kidding. That's not really a good way to go about applying Bible verses, but churches do this all the time, and so this church did it too, and they landed on this verse, Habakkuk 1.5. And Habakkuk 1.5, when you read it, it's like, oh, shoot. Look at what God's going to do here. There's going to be amazing things done in this place. Look at what Habakkuk 1 Ooh. Ooh, what if we did that at Grace? We're doing a building campaign. What if this home stretch? I said, guys, this is our verse that we are claiming. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. I'm going to do something so amazing you wouldn't even believe it. If I told you what I was going to do you wouldn't believe it. And so the church, they claimed it, they put it on their literature, they piped it out there and everyone's like God's going to do amazing things here. We're not going to believe it. Even if he tells us what he's going to do we wouldn't believe him. And then one day somebody picked up their Bible and they read the rest of the verses. This is Habakkuk 1, 6 and following. Look at what the Lord will do here. He will bring great punishment upon our negligence. It's genuinely funny how opposite that verse is of what they wanted it to be. But it's also really sad. And I don't think that the pastor did this in any way to manipulate. I don't think he did it intentionally in any way. I think it was just lazy. Just kind of ignorant. I think he saw that verse somewhere. It was like, ooh, that's a good campaign verse. And then everybody started claiming it. Thinking that's what Habakkuk 1.5 meant. And it didn't. It meant, God, bring your punishment on us. Bring the Chaldeans and their violent faces. When we just pluck a verse out of context, we run a real risk of misleading ourselves and others. And so we don't want to do that with Jeremiah 29 11. We want to understand this verse in its proper context. And in its proper context, the prophet Jeremiah was writing this letter, the book of Jeremiah, to God's children, to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, the Hebrews, however it is you most easily refer to him, that's who he is writing to. And these people are people who are in captivity in Babylon. Israel, Jerusalem has been laid waste to. It has been conquered. It is left in smoke and ashes. And then Babylon carried away the best and the brightest. So the only people who were left in Israel were the old and the feeble and the young and the useless. Everybody else got taken away, right? And these people have a promise from God. Back in Genesis chapter 12, that God made to their forefather Abraham, where God promised Abraham, I will provide you with land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That's Jesus. That came true. Your descendants will be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. There's a lot of Jewish people now. That came true. And I will give you the land of Canaan, the modern-day nation of Israel. So these people grew up being taught these promises of God that he made to their forefather Abraham, claiming those promises from the sovereign God, and now have watched that land be taken away from them. Now they have watched their best and their brightest be carried off as slaves into Babylon. Now they look at the smoldering ash heap of their once proud country and think, how could this be? How could this have ever happened? It's a discouraged people who think that their God has forgotten them or is somehow incapable of keeping his promises to them. They're spiritually and literally destitute. And to them, Jeremiah speaks these amazing words of comfort. Do you see how those hit a little different for the Hebrew people who have been carried away as slaves to Babylon? Jeremiah tells them, God sees you. He knows you. He has not forgotten about you. He intends to keep his promises to you. Hang in there. Have faith. And see, we take that verse and we apply it to the immediate situation. We take that verse and we say, God has a plan for me. I'm going to get the job. God has a plan for me. This relationship is going to work out. God has a plan for me. I know this thing is going to work. I just walked through this tremendous loss, but I'm comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me. So he's going to restore that. And we take this promise that was made to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament who were destitute and enslaved, and we make it mean that we're going to do better in the job interview or that the relationship's going to work out or that we're going to close that deal or that this stress is going to go away in my life. Which brings me to my next point. The next danger of one-hit wonders is that we cheapen the text. We cheapen the text. Now, I've got to be honest with you. This last week, a buddy of mine made fun of me for using ridiculous words in my sermons. So this So this week, when I wrote these notes, I said, we impoverish the text. But I had his voice in my head, and I changed it to cheapen. So if you just want the authentic experience, you need to change that word cheapen to impoverished in your own notes, okay? And giggle at me for doing that, but I can't. Impoverish is such a better word, but I just, I got insecure about it, so we went with cheapen the text. It cheapens the text. We take what it does mean, and we reduce it to what we need it to mean, and when we do that, we cheapen it, we impoverish it, we make it so much weaker than it should be. To show you this, look with me at what Jeremiah writes after the famous verse, Jeremiah 29 29 11. We pick it up in verse 12. Then you will call, I know the plans I have for you, he says, here are the plans. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Let me tell you what my plans are. My plans are that when you cry out to me, I'm going to hear you. My plans are that when you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. My plans are that, listen to this, my plans are that you would know me. My plans are that I would draw you into a relationship with myself. That's what God says his plans are. The very first thing I know, don't worry. I have a hope and a future. I have plans for you. You know what my plans for you are? He tells them in the following verses, my plans are that you would know me, which I love because this is a theme throughout the Bible. It's all that God has ever wanted, that we would know him. This is when Paul prays in the New Testament, when he writes out greetings to the churches, and he tells them that he prays for them. The most explicit of this is in Ephesians chapter 3, where he says, And then the conclusion of the prayer is that you would know the richness of the depth of the knowledge of Christ and be filled with all the knowledge of God, that you would know him. It's this prayer for us that's echoed throughout the centuries, not just in Jeremiah 29, but we see it before that. We see it in the high priestly prayer that Jesus prays in John chapter 17. We see it at the end of the Bible when he brings us all to him, to know him. The plan that he has for the Hebrew people is the same plan that he has for you, that you would know him. That the creator God would have an intimate relationship with you and that you would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cares about the smallest of details in your life. Scripture teaches us that not even a bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing, and that the very numbers of head, the very hair on your head is numbered. He knows you intimately, and He wants you to know Him that much. So does Jeremiah 29 11 apply to you? You're darn right it does. You're darn right it does, because his plan for them and for you is that you would know him. That's the plan. That the things in your life would be orchestrated to bring you down this path where you would know him and see him as the ultimate good. Are the things going to work out in the temporary? Maybe. I don't know. But if they don't, he's going to orchestrate and weave those things as one giant river that flows to him in eternity so that you might know him. That's what he's doing. I don't know what's going to happen in the temporary, but I do know that the result of them are going to be to funnel you towards God himself. And that's his plan for you, that he would know you. And listen to this cool thing. He says in verse 14, I will restore your fortunes and gather you from the nations and all the places where I've driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm going to bring you back to Israel. I'm going to restore your fortune. I'm going to restore your family. Everything's going to be okay. And that's a great thought, and it's a comforting one for them. But listen to this, and this is why prophecy in the Old Testament is so cool. You know what happens in the last two chapters of the Bible? If you flip to the very end, Revelation 21, 22, you know what happens there? You're gonna, because I'm doing a series in Revelation in the fall. It's gonna be like seven weeks, October, November. Get pumped up. I'm gonna answer every question you've ever had about Revelation with absolute certainty. The last two chapters of the Bible, God creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. And he gathers us to himself. And he restores our families. And he unites us. And he rejuvenates us and he completes his plan. His plan that he enacted when he promised it to Abraham, his plan that he reminded David of in 2 Samuel chapter 7 when he said the Messiah will sit on your throne, his plan that he told Mary about when he sent Jesus and his plan that seemed like it was done when Jesus hung on the cross and then the plan that the victory was won for on Easter when the tomb was empty. The plan that Jesus comes back for in Revelation 18 and 19 as the Lion of Judah, no longer the Lamb of God, when he makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and then he claims his creation back to him, to the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem as we surround the throne of God. That's his plan. And that's what he's enacted for you. And that's what he's done for them. That's the goal. That's what it's all about. And see, when we take Jeremiah 29, 11, and we make it mean this temporary situation is going to work out, we impoverish that text because it has such a greater meaning than that. It carries such greater significance than that. And in light of that, how much cooler is it that Haley gets to play that voicemail from her brother at her wedding because she knows that David knew Jesus. And the plan was murky and it was tough, but he's there waiting on her. And one day she will be restored. And one day they will be reunited. And one day they will see each other again because they each know Jesus because God's plan was to weave their lives back to him in such a way that they could spend eternity with him forever and he spent all of time acting out and initiating that plan for you and for them. When we do the work to understand the verses that mean so much to us, we will always find that there is more richness waiting there to be uncovered. So this morning, understand the dangers of plucking a verse out of context and throwing it on a t-shirt and letting it mean whatever we want it to mean. Because sometimes we mislead ourselves and others, and then even worse, we impoverish the text to such a degree that if we would just put in the time, I think we would be met with the richness and the fullness of God through his word as we are met with it over and over and over again. So listen, if you came in this morning and you love Jeremiah 29 11, take great comfort in Jeremiah 29 11. But take it in knowing that God's plan for you is that you know him. Take it in knowing that, yeah, God has a plan for you. It's to orchestrate everything in your life back to this wonderful tapestry so that you might know him. And I think that that's a pretty good plan. Let's pray. Father, I know that there are people here who are heartened by your eternal plan. But boy, God, if you could just kind of give them a temporary one, that'd be great too. So to those folks, I pray you would give them comfort and peace. For those folks, for all of us, I pray that we would see the things that we walk through in our life in light of eternity. In light of knowing that, yeah, you don't just have plans for us in this life, but God, you have a grand plan that you have been enacting since the dawn of time. And that one day you will restore us and return us all to the place, heaven, from which we have been exiled here. God, your word is amazing. I pray that we would all, every one of us, be more enthralled and awed by your word and that you would create within us a heart to mine it for all it's worth, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

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