Sermons tagged with Patience

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you have a Bible with you, go ahead and open it up and turn it to Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. We have been spending the month of January in this prayer, this prayer that Paul prays over the church in Ephesus. And I've mentioned that he prays similar prayers over the other churches that he helped to start or founded, and then ministers to through letters and through visits as he continues his life. So this prayer is indicative of what I believe Paul prays for all of his churches. We've got a lot of work to do today. This Sunday we arrive at this two-fold petition at the end that we would know the love of Christ and that we would be filled with the fullness of God. And it's pretty much the whole point of the series. Today is what I think about when I think about this prayer. So my prayer today is that God would give me clarity of thought with what to share and how to say it, because this represents for me like four or five years of thought that I really want you guys to get today. So let's get going as we finish up this prayer. I'm going to read one more time with feeling the whole prayer all the way through, and then we'll focus on verses 18 and 19 and really kind of dig into Paul's request and what he's asking for and what it means. Verse 14, And so we arrive at the climactic request, the climatic petition of the prayer where we see here in verse 18 that he's saying, because you're saved, first of all, the very first thing he prays in verse 14 and 15 is that you would be saved through God's goodness, through the power of the Holy Spirit, that Christ would indwell in your hearts through faith. That's that you would be saved, that you would be a Christian, that you would know Jesus. Now that you know Jesus, you're rooted in his love. We talked about those deep roots and how important that is to anchor our faith. We talked about how the communal nature of our faith along with all the saints, but now that he's established those things, he punches. He gets to the thing that he's really asking, and what he's really asking is this twofold petition that you would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and that you would be filled with the fullness of God. That's what he's praying for in this prayer. That's what he prays over them. That's what he prays over you. So this morning, we have to wrestle to the ground what it means to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and to be filled with the fullness of God. We have to talk about what that means, which is a really difficult task. When I'm studying, and I'm in particular studying a verse, I really want to understand a verse. One of the places I'll go is a series that a pastor from Minnesota named John Piper does online. He's retired now, but I think he still does some of these. There's a ton out there. I think it's called, and I should have done my research on this, but I think it's called A Look in the Book. And it's just, it's a black screen with a verse on it, and he's not in the video. It's just his voice in the video, and he just explains the verses to you. He's circling this and drawing lines over here and making notes at the bottom and references to other things. If you are one who enjoys Bible study, if you want help in understanding different passages, Google John Piper, a look at the book, and there's so many verses that he walks through. It's such a helpful resource. That may be the most helpful thing I say to you this morning. The rest of this may be garbage, but hopefully not. But I went and I was, and I was, he did, he does a series, like a 10-part series on these verses. And so I was watching the one where he explains the knowledge that surpasses understanding and the fullness of God because I wanted to see what he had to say about it. He's one of the most theologically deep and professorial pastors I've encountered in my life. And so I wanted to know what he thought. And he made a great point that we're going to make up front here. This is him from that video. He says, the phrasing itself, talking about the verse, admits that we are over our heads in attempting to rationally understand these things. If in the verse, Paul says that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge, and then it's kind of this nebulous, wispy phrase filled with the fullness of God. What does that mean? It's intentionally nebulous. It's intentionally difficult to grasp because it's bigger than we can comprehend. We cannot rationally understand these things, but rather we must experientially understand God and Christ if we are going to understand what Paul is talking about here. And so that's the first thing I would point out to you if we're going to say, what is the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge? What is that? Well, I think the best way to approach it is to say this, a true knowledge of Christ comes from experiencing him, not simply learning about him. A true knowledge of Christ comes from experiencing him, not simply learning about him. I think about it this way. I don't want to brag, but I've been in the ocean a few times. I've been in the Atlantic and in the Gulf. I've been in the Pacific. I've seen where the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean meet off the southern coast of South Africa, which I'm just bragging there. But I have seen it. I've swam in the ocean. When I was a kid, my grandpa lived in Florida. He had a sailboat, and they lived off the intercoastal, and so we would go up and down the intercoastal and look at Christmas lights and stuff, and one time, we went out in the ocean, sails up and everything. I got horrifically seasick and realized I'm a sissy, and that's just my life. I just have to deal with that. So no more sailboating for me. But I've been around the ocean, not as much as some of y'all. Some of y'all have beach houses, you love the water, you've got a boat, you're out there. You'll never find a Salt Life sticker on any car that I own. But I have been there, and I do like it. However, I don't know anything about the ocean compared to a sailor. I don't know anything about the ocean compared to a fisherman who does it professionally. Those guys with the thousand-yard stare, and you look at them, and you're like, those eyes have seen some things. They have some tales to tell about the sea. I don't know the ocean like they know the ocean. They've lived in it. They've experienced it, the good and the bad and the ugly. They know it. We can read about it. We can learn about it. You can learn facts. We can Google pictures. We can look at it from the beach. But until you've lived in it like they've lived in it, you'll never understand the ocean like they understand the ocean either. Jesus works the same way. When we walk with Jesus, we abide with him. When we pursue him day in and day out, we have a lifetime of walking with him. We know him in a way that you can't get to know him by simply listening to sermons or simply reading about him. We should do those things. But those things are introductory things. As we grow to know who Christ is with a knowledge that surpasses understanding, it's an experiential knowledge. These people we know who have been walking with Christ for decades and just seem to have a peace that we don't have. Those people have walked with Jesus. They know him in the way that Paul is describing here. So the question then becomes, if we know Christ through experiencing him, then we have to ask, and I hope you're already asking it in your heads, how do we experience Christ? How do I do that? How do I allow Jesus to show up in my life? I think we experience Christ by this. We experience Christ by taking steps of faith that allow him to show up in our lives. We experience Christ by taking steps of faith that give him the opportunity to show up in our life. I think of a trip I took to Honduras somewhere around 2010. I was a school teacher at the time, a high school Bible teacher and a chaplain. Those were some very lucky kids. And I took the senior class to Honduras. And while we were there, one night, one of my students, this girl named Allison, a really sharp, bright girl, wonderful parents, she kind of came to me and she said, I'm just, I'm really struggling with my faith. And I said, okay. And she said, I just, I'm having a hard time believing in Jesus sometimes. I just, I just kind of feel unsure. I don't want to let anybody down, but I just have some doubts and some struggles. And first of all, that's a wonderful conversation. I think every Christian needs to have that conversation at some point, probably multiple times throughout your life. That's a healthy thing to want to work through. And so we talked about it a little bit, and I said, Allison, I know that this is going to sound funny, but tomorrow we're going to go to this village and we're going to give rice out to the women of the village. And they really need it. So they're going to be really excited to get it. And I'm not going to position you inside the truck where you're grabbing the rice and you're handing it to another student and they're working it down the line. I'm going to put you at the end of the truck handing it out to the ladies. Because Jesus says that whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. And I just kind of believe that if you look those ladies in the eye that Jesus will meet you there. I believe you'll see him as you do his work. And she said, okay. Okay, I'll try it. So that morning, I prayed for her that she would encounter Christ in the service that afternoon. And sure enough, the next night, she came back to me with tears in her eyes, and she said, I saw Jesus. I saw him. I can't explain it. I still have questions, but I believe he's real. Thanks. She made space for him to show up in her life. She said, hey, I need you here. I need to see you today. I need to encounter you today. She made space. She took a step of faith, and he showed up. I can't tell you how many times I've thought, I've had like a nagging sin or a nagging attitude, something that was in my life that I know didn't need to be in my life, but it didn't feel like a big deal. And I got kind of comfortable with it. It was kind of like John every day, my son John, he's two and a half. Every day he grabs a different toy and that's his toy for the day. He's just, there's no favorites. It rotates. It's totally unpredictable what it's going to be. Today it's a puzzle piece of zebra. That's what it is. Great. Tomorrow it'll be something totally different. It'll probably belong to Lily and cause a fight in our house for the entire day. Sometimes we have sins like that that we just kind of carry around. They're just our little pet sin. Not that big of a deal. I'm going to pick a different one, whatever it is. We'll have that. And we don't even want to get rid of it. But I can't tell you how many times I've prayed, God, would you work in me to want to not want to do this? Would you work in me to want to repent of this and get it away from me? And how almost always the same day I pray that prayer, something happens and I get disgusted with that part of myself. And I get so sickened by it that it becomes very easy to just move away. It becomes very easy to repent. And that's nothing more than creating space for Jesus to show up in my life. If you feel like you need to encounter and experience Jesus, pray that he'll show up somewhere. Take a step of faith and make some space for him to show up. Make some space for him to show up in a relationship. Make some space for him to show up in the waiting. Make some space for Jesus to show up in different ways, and he will. And it will deepen your faith, and you'll begin to grow in this experiential knowledge of Christ. So that doesn't wrestle that to the ground all the way, but I think it gives us at least some handles around what it might mean to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. But we still need to understand what it means to be filled with the fullness of God. And I'll be honest with you, I did a bunch of research on that phrase. I did more research on that phrase than the last time I did that much research on anything was when I preached through Revelation for you guys. Other than that, I don't think I've ever done this much research, just trying to get to the bottom of what that meant. But nothing I could find, not even St. John Piper, nothing I could find was sufficient. Nothing I could find made me go, yeah, yeah, that's how I want to explain this to them. Nothing helped me. The one thing that was pointed out that I thought was really helpful and interesting was that being filled with God means there's no part of you left untouched by his goodness and grace. When a container is filled with something, that something touches every part of that container. So to be filled with the fullness of God means that he has touched with his goodness and his grace every aspect of your life, your thought life, your prayer life, your anxieties and your worries, your successes and your failures, your values, your checkbook, your calendar. Do people still have checkbooks anymore? Your credit card and your Venmo account. To be filled with God truly means that he has touched every aspect of your life, which also begats this reality that being filled with God is a gradual process. It's something that takes a lifetime. Because when God hasn't touched a part of our life, it's not because he doesn't want to. It's not because he's not trying to. It's not because he's not telling us that he would like to be involved there too. It's because we're not letting him. Either intentionally or unintentionally, when God hasn't touched a portion of our life, it's not from lack of effort or desire on his part. It's from lack of effort or desire on our part. So it's a progressive thing. I think, honestly, that being a Christian is just to grow in a progressive revelation of the parts of you that God has not touched yet. To grow in a progressive revelation of things that I have not given over to the Father. Through His goodness and grace and His mercy, the Holy Spirit will just show us the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. That's why we say that at Grace we're step-takers because everybody has a next step of obedience that God is beckoning them to take. And it's just going deeper and realizing parts of our life that we have not given over to him yet. But as I tried to wrestle this to the ground and was coming up empty with a good scholarly explanation to offer you guys, I just kind of hit the reset button and thought, well, what is it about the prayer that moves me so much? What is it that I love so much about it that it's on the wall of my office, that I pray it over my family, for myself, that I pray it in every situation, that I pray it over you in every situation that you're in? Anytime God brings to mind somebody while I'm praying, this prayer is what I pray for them. So what is it about this prayer that's so powerful for me? I thought maybe if I could share that, that would be helpful for you as we seek to understand what Paul's praying for here. And for me, the power of the prayer is in the simplicity of the petition that we would know God. The power of the prayer is in the simplicity of the petition that you would know God. That's what he's praying. That's all he's praying. The whole time in a bunch of different ways that you would know God. First thing out of the gates, what's he praying? That you would know Christ. Along with all the saints that you would understand his love that he has for you, that you would be filled with the fullness of God. This whole time through, all Paul is praying is that you would know God. And I pointed out in the first week that I find this remarkable because he's praying for a church that he founded, the success of which he earnestly desires. He wants that church to be successful. He wants that church to grow. He wants that church to impact their community. And yet he does not pray for success. This church is in an era of persecution, high infant mortality rates, low average lifespans. These people knew tragedy. Certainly, I would bet a lot of money or Chick-fil-A sandwich, I bet you Chick-fil-A sandwich, that Paul was acutely aware of suffering happening inside the church. Somebody sick, somebody experiencing grief or loss or persecution. I would bet that Paul knew of specific instances where people were hurting, and yet he does not pray for safety. He does not pray for security. He does not pray for health. He does not pray for circumstances. He does not pray for success. He doesn't pray for any of those things. And I think that speaks volumes because all he does pray is that they would know God. That's it. That's all he wanted for them, that they would know God as if it's a light that shines so brightly that the brighter it gets, the more everything fades away. When I stand up here on Sunday, these lights are in my face. I hate them, but it's part of the deal. They're at like 40% right now. They were so bright a few weeks ago, I couldn't see any of you. I forget, I think it was the rooted sermon. I couldn't see any of you. It was so distracting for me. I was in my head the whole time. These lights can get so bright that everything else fades. And if we have in our hearts a burning desire to know our creator, that light begins to burn so brightly that everything else just kind of fades in importance. There's really nothing else that matters outside of pursuing God. It is the apex pursuit in life. Success doesn't matter. Relatively speaking, health doesn't matter. Failures don't matter as long as they bring us to a place where we know God more deeply. And my prayer for you is that that light will burn so brightly in your life and in your mind and in your conscience that everything else will begin to fade in comparison to knowing God. And this is biblical. Paul talks about it, David talks about it, and Jesus talks about it. In Philippians chapter 3, verses 7 and 8, Paul says that he considers everything rubbish compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing God. David says in Psalms, better is one day in your courts, Father, than a thousand elsewhere. This is a king that has experienced the highest highs that life has to offer, and he says you can keep a thousand of those days if I can spend one of them with you. Jesus in Matthew chapter 13 describes the kingdom of God as something that you sell everything that you own to go claim because of the surpassing value of knowing God. It is the chief desire of Paul. It is the chief desire of God himself that you would know him. And it should be our chief desire that burns so brightly in us that everything else fades away. That's why this is the prayer that I pray for you. That's why this is the prayer I pray over the church, for myself, and over my family. And when I pray it, it sounds like this. This is what I pray. I put it in writing so that maybe it will help you as you pray, but this is the thought that's in my head whenever I pray for anyone or anything. It's this, Heavenly Father, would the events of this circumstance conspire to draw them into a deeper knowledge of you? Whatever the situation is, whatever's happening, my first thought, dear God, with the things that are about to happen to them, to this family, to that place, would those events conspire to bring those people to a deeper knowledge of you? Towards the end of last year, many of you know one of our great partners, one of the great people of grace had a stroke. And we did not know how he was going to be doing. Praise God, he's doing a lot better. But as soon as I heard it, I dropped to my knees and I prayed. And I did not pray that he would be healed. I did second. I did not pray first that his family would be okay. I did not pray first for his safety or his health. The first thing I prayed was, God, would the events surrounding this circumstance somehow conspire to draw him and his family into a deeper knowledge of you? This is an awful thing that's happened. And we don't have to make it a good thing, and we don't have to pretend like it happened because God has a lesson to teach us. I don't think that's how it works. I think cruddy things just happen in a broken world. And when those cruddy things happen, we ought to remind ourselves to say, God, I care deeply about the circumstances and the people in them. But before that, would you please use them to conspire to draw him and his children and his wife into a deeper relationship with you? Would you use this opportunity to show up and show off, Father? I think it's such an important prayer to pray in success and in failure. And I think it's such an important prayer to pray because it does this. I'm going to read this slowly because I think it's important. This prayer brings peace and purpose in suffering, patience in waiting, perseverance in trial, and humility and gratitude in success. When we pray that prayer, God, whatever happens here, whatever's going to happen, would what we take out of it be a deeper knowledge of you? When we pray that prayer, it imbues our suffering with purpose. It imbues our waiting and our grief with purpose and peace. Some of you are in moments of waiting. You're in a season of your life where you're praying for a prayer to be answered and it's not yet and so you're waiting. Some of you are in a season of trial. It's difficult. It's trying. It's hard. Some of you are in seasons of grief. I want you to know, if we pray this prayer over them, those are holy seasons. Those are holy moments. I know that you're hurting. I know that you want the thing. I know that the wait is tough. And I know that it seems unfair. But that's a holy place where God is shaping you. And he's beckoning you. And he's drawing you into a deeper faith in him. Whatever the outcome is of your waiting, it will be a marker in your life when God showed up. So we do not always pray away those things because they're holy moments. And I don't want you to be so drugged down in your waiting and in your hurting that you miss God's drawing in the midst of that suffering. Similarly, when we pray this prayer in the face of success, it begets humility and gratitude. When we sell the company, when we get the job, when our kid wins the thing at the place, when we make the sale, when life goes really good, our very first response should be, God, this success is great. It's really fun. Thank you. Would the events of this success conspire to bring me to a deeper knowledge of you? Whatever happens, however it goes, whatever we decide to do, whatever the next thing is, as I celebrate this God, and maybe even sometimes look to a new reality because of the opportunities that you've just brought me, as I do that, God, would you not let me lose sight of you? Would the events of the circumstances of this success conspire to bring me to a deeper knowledge of you? That puts the success in its proper place, which is simply a positive experience to be used by God to draw you close to him. If you have the success and it doesn't bring us any closer to the father, then the success has no point. Nobody cares. And they're not going to talk about it at your funeral. I know you think they will. I do funerals. We do not talk about your business success at your funerals. Yeah, it's going to hurt. It's going to be hard to walk through. But God, I pray that I would grow to a deeper knowledge of you through it. Yes, this is great. This is wonderful. It's a good thing that happened. But God, let me not lose sight of you. Let it help me walk in a deeper knowledge of you. So I hope and I pray that you'll make this your prayer in 2024. I believe Jordan told you at the beginning of the service, we have magnets on the table right out there. You can put wherever you want to see them. It says one per family, but if you're lingering for like 10 minutes and there's still a bunch and you want a bunch, grab a bunch. Nobody cares. I hope that you'll make that your prayer for yourself and for your family this year. I hope that this prayer will be pressed into your conscience the way that it's been pressed into mine and that it will be your abiding prayer for your family and for your children and for your friends and for your loved one and for your church for the rest of your days. And I hope that the desire to know God will burn so brightly in all of us that everything else will simply fade as we pursue him. Let's pray together. Father, I don't know what's going to happen this year. The way it's shaping up, it's probably going to be nuts. Lord, would you use the things that happen in our lives and around our lives to conspire, to draw us more closely to you? Father, would the desire to know you burn so brightly that everything else fades? Would we be people who desperately want to know and experience the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge? Would we be people who invite you into every part of our life so that we may be filled with your fullness and your goodness and your grace and your mercy. God, we make that our prayer over grace this year, our prayer over our families, our prayer over our friends and loved ones. Help us to know you more, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is the second part of our series called The Songs We Sing. Last week, we opened up and we did Graves in the Gardens. I gave you kind of a background of worship, and I started to, it's kind of trickled into me some good feedback that you guys are excited about this series, looking forward to it, looking forward to seeing what we've been singing in the Bible, what we will be singing in the Bible. And so I am thrilled to be going through this series with you because like I said, it's one that I've been wanting to do for a while. And last week when I got done preaching and we sang together, I was so encouraged at the voices being lifted up. And this morning we'll have the same opportunity. I'm going to preach about the song that we just sang because it's pulled straight out of Psalm chapter 8. And then we'll sing it again, knowing it better, having a better understanding of what it means in a full-throated, open-hearted way. And then we'll sing some other songs that are really special to us. And then we'll go into our week. So I'm feeling really good about this Sunday. And I just feel like it's worth saying sometimes that I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for my church. I'm so grateful for the love and the community that we experience here, for the handshakes and hugs and laughter and the lobby for the stories of the team coming back from Mexico I'm just grateful for y'all I'm grateful to be here and I'm excited to teach to you out of the book of Psalms this morning now to do a series focused on worship and to not have at least one morning out of the book of Psalms would be sacrilegious. It would be absolutely awful because Psalms is the hymn book of the Old Testament. It is the hymn book of the Hebrew people. It is intended to be sung. A vast majority of the Psalms are intended to be sung. And sometimes there's even instructions about it at the beginning of eight. You don't have to look there yet, but the very first thing it says is to the choir master, according to the Giddeth, nobody knows what that is, a Psalm of David, but they think it's a certain tune to which it's supposed to be sung. So David is even giving this to the choir master. I wrote this to praise our God. Let's sing it to this tune. Let's sing it together. A vast majority of the Psalms were written with the intention of God's body of believers singing them his words back to him, which I think is remarkable. And Psalms is a remarkable book. It sits in the dead center of our Bible. It's the longest book in the Bible with 150 chapters. It's divided into five separate books within the book of Psalms. It has the longest chapter in the Bible in Psalm 119, which comes in at, I believe, 176 verses. It's a super long chapter of the Bible because it's a beautiful Hebrew poem. There's 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, and each stanza, every line begins with that letter of the alphabet as the psalmist moves through. It's the one thing in the Bible that really makes me want to learn original Hebrew so I could hear that psalm read and sung in the original language in which it was intended because I've got a feeling that it is beautiful. I'll just wait until I get to heaven. I'm not actually going to do the work to learn Hebrew. That seems super hard. The seminary I chose, I chose it so I didn't have to learn original languages, so I'm not about to reverse course now, you know? But it's the longest book with the longest chapter, and it's filled with songs. And they're not all praise songs. They're divided up in different ways depending on who you ask and who's doing the dividing. You can find some people that divide them into five different types of Psalms, some as many as 20 and everything in between. But just a few examples of the types of Psalms that you can find in your Bible as you read through Psalms. And shame on me, I realize I haven't done a series in Psalms in the six and a half years I've been here. Shame on me for that. So I am promising you that coming up, we will do a series in Psalms at some point. But if you want to know some of the divisions of the book of Psalms, the different types that we have, there's Psalms of praise. Obviously, there's royal Psalms, Psalms of lament. And we're actually going to talk about those next week. I'm so grateful that our Bible has Psalms of lament, expressions of sadness and grief. There's what's called imprecatory psalms or psalms that are prayed and sung to seek vengeance over our enemies. David had a lot of reason to sing those. You probably don't. You probably don't have many enemies that you should sing imprecatory songs over, but they're in there. Psalms of enthronement and then psalms of pilgrimage. And I think these psalms of pilgrimage are really interesting. And I want to actually point you towards a book for my people who are readers. There's this book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson. Eugene Peterson is the pastor that faithfully translated the message to make scriptures a little bit more approachable for people who have never encountered them before. I read his biography last year, and I think it was an autobiography, a memoir, and it was one of the more moving books I've read in a long time. I was really, really touched by the heart of Eugene Peterson. And probably his most famous book is a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. And A Long Obedience in the Same Direction actually moves through what's called the Psalms of Ascent, this group of pilgrimage psalms And I've wanted to, that may be the Psalm series that we do. I'm either going to do it as a series as we walk through the book together, or I'm going to do it as like a Wednesday night course where those that want to come and we move through it together. But if you're a reader, I would highly encourage you to go grab or write down or put in your Goodreads, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. But in the book of Psalms, we have all these different categories. We have all these different verses. And one of the things we see that I think is remarkable is that a majority of them are written by David. They're not all written by David. There's some authors that are just referred to as the sons of Asaph. And Asaph was, I believe, the choir master, the worship leader. And then these are his sons that he has passed this responsibility down to. And they've written their own Psalms in there. But one of the remarkable things about the book of Psalms is to see the heart of David just kind of filleted open on the table for you. And I love that God in his goodness includes the Psalms to offset the other stories of David. Because if you read the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, you can also see the stories in 1st Kings but more of details of the story are in 1st and 2nd Samuel and if you read the story of David you see this traditionally masculine macho guy who's fighting and killing and he kills Goliath and he fights lions and bears with his bare hands which you know who hasn't and then there's a song about him him. David has killed his tens of thousands. Saul has killed his thousands. It's just like, yeah, spear-throwing, meat-eating dude. And then you open Psalms, and here's a guy that's brokenhearted. Here's a guy that's highly emotional, highly vulnerable, who displays his tears and his lament and his repentance and his hopes and his fears and his deepest prayers for all of time to see. And the juxtaposition of Psalms and 1 and 2 Samuel kind of brings together this vision of what we can be as people and how multifaceted we can be. So I'm grateful that Psalms reads almost like a prayer journal of David at times. But to me, the most remarkable thing about the book of Psalms is that when we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. When we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. And you can sing the Psalms. Write this down if you want to, if you want something else to listen to. There's this, I don't know, I guess they're just a duet, a duo, I don't know the rules, a band, Shane and Shane. And they have an album called Psalms, where they have set the Psalms to music, and it's one of my favorites. I love it. I've loved it for years and years. You can go find it. It's on Spotify. It's on all the things. And you can sing the Psalms. I would highly recommend it. When we sing the Psalms, understand this, we are joining in to an ancient chorus of all the saints. I spoke last week about how when we worship, when we praise, when we sing out, that we join our brothers and sisters in Christ in unity. It unifies us according to the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. When we sing together, it unifies us in this remarkable way. When we walk in Republican and Democrat, we walk in 80 and 20. We walk in stressed and not stressed, successful and not successful in a season of plenty and a season of need. And we lay all of those things down and we praise our God together and it unifies us. And I've just, I just got to tell you, I shared this with the band and the tech team before the service. But this is just a, just such a good picture of how it unifies us. if I don't say it I might die a little on the inside. So I'm just gonna have to Yesterday I was at the funeral for a friend of mine's wife 40 years old perfectly healthy Went on a girl's trip Heart heart attack, died in the bathroom. No other explanation. Incredibly sad thing. Two kids, sixth grader, third grader. So I drive down, I go to the funeral, and the husband's name, my buddy's name is Jeff. There's about 750 people in the room. And in between speakers, they put up a slideshow of Jodi and her family. And they started playing under that slideshow a song called Gratitude. We've sang it here a couple of times. It's going to be the last song that we sing this morning. They started playing Gratitude. And when that song started, Jeff, the husband who lost his wife a week ago, stood up and raised his hands in worship. And so, if you're at a funeral and the husband of the deceased woman stands up and raises his hands, you stand up and you raise your hands. So 750 people stand up and raise their hands to this song too. And then they spontaneously started singing it. And I'm six hours away from my church family, with my old church family, singing a song with myriad other church families, with our hands raised, choosing to praise in a moment of grief, and it just unifies you in a way that nothing else can. It was a remarkable moment. And when we sing it this morning, we join them and their praises to a God in spite of grief. We join Jeff in our prayers for him. We join the other congregations that sing that too. So when we sing the Psalms, we join into the ancient chorus of all the saints. Do you understand? When we sing in a few minutes, Psalm 8, back to God, we are singing it with David. We are singing it with the generations of David and Solomon and the faithful generations of Jeroboam and Rehoboam. We're singing it with Hezekiah and King Asa. We are singing it with the faithful generations, with the remnant that gets taken to Babylon. We are singing these psalms with Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. We are singing these psalms with the Maccabees who lit the menorah in Roman oppression. We are singing these psalms with the generations that cried out in the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Matthew We are singing these songs with Jesus himself and with the disciples And with the early churches that met in the basements in Rome when we sing the Psalms We are joining with the underground churches in China and in Lebanon and in Istanbul, singing God's songs back to him. One of my favorite quotes about the Psalms is by Charles Spurgeon, and I'll tell you why he deserves to be the one who writes this in a second. Also, I'm just going to compose myself. We've got a long way to go here. This is premature. I can't afford this. I only have one tissue. Jen's laughing at me the hardest, she knows. It's been an emotional weekend. Back off. All right. Spurgeon writes this, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. I love that. The book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. That when we sing Psalms, we are mounted on wings of eagles and we soar in the presence of God. Now let me tell you why Spurgeon has a right to write that sentence and should rightly be pointed out in any sermon on Psalms. If you don't know who Charles Haddon Spurgeon is, he was a preacher. He was loud. He had combed back hair and a beard and a belly, and he suffered from gout, and he liked to drink whiskey. So, just saying, he was called. He was and is called the Prince of Preachers. He holds the world record for preaching to the most people in one space at one time without a microphone and being heard. One time he was preaching in an auditorium. This is in the late 1800s in London. He was preaching in an auditorium, going through what he wanted to say, and some janitor in a hallway that he couldn't see bowed on his knees right there and accepted Jesus listening to Charles go through his sermon. It's an amazing story. The volume of work of Charles Spurgeon is unbelievable. The amount of books that he wrote. You can look up any of his sermons online, and they're long, wordy, lengthy sermons. And it was said of him that people would come from all over the world to hear him preach, and what they would say is, yeah, the sermon's great, but you need to listen to the man pray. He was known all over the world. He wrote tons of books. He ran a seminary out of his church. He wrote books for the seminarians that I have, that I refer to regularly, that still help me and my approach to pastoring and preaching and all the things. But his whole life, he worked on one book that became a three-volume set called The Treasury of David. It's a commentary on the book of Psalms. And he carried it with him wherever he went. He worked on it for decades. He would work on it for a bit. He'd put it back down, he'd pick it back up. You better believe that I've got the treasury of David in my office. And that every time I preach out of a psalm, that's the first place I go. If you're someone who appreciates materials like that, go get it. It's not like super expensive. Find it on Amazon with a cheesy cover. And he writes in the intro to his magnum opus, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. The book of Psalms is worthy of our study and it's worthy of our singing. And we ought to acknowledge when we're singing it back to God because when we do, we join into that ancient chorus of all the saints through all the decades. Now this morning, we're going to be in Psalm chapter 8. So if you have a Bible with you, I would encourage you to turn there. And I'm going to say this this morning. I don't try to get you to do a lot of stuff because I want it to matter when I ask you to do something. So I intentionally don't try to put pressure on you to do things. I just want you to be a good Christian adult and do what you want to do and do as the Spirit moves you. But I'm going to encourage us as a church to begin to bring our Bibles to church for Sunday mornings. Some of you like to read through apps. That's fine. Read your app. Bring it. Have your phone out. I'm giving you permission to have your phone out in church. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not scrolling something that you shouldn't be scrolling during a church service. And if you are someone who likes to read the Bible on your phone, that's fine to have it out. Just make sure that the screen is visible to the people next to you, okay? So that they can smack you if you're cheating and you're checking a score or something. But let's be people who bring our Bible to church. Because here's what I want for you. I want you to sit, and I want you to have your Bible open. And when something strikes you, I want you to be able to write a note. When you see a verse that you like, that you want to remember, I want you to be able to highlight it. I want your Bibles to serve you as kind of these spiritual journals where when you flip through them, you see where you've been. You know that God's spoken to you there before. When you go to different places, you have notes on the sides and you have dates and you have prayers so that as you flip through your Bible years from now, you see times when God was faithful. I can't tell you how many passages I have written beside them. What does this mean? God help me understand. And then I'll hear sermon on it, or I'll hear somebody teach about it. I'll read a book on it, and I'll turn to that passage, and I'll go, oh, I think I understand this now. Thank you, God, for your faithfulness. I want to encourage you to bring your Bible to church. Open it up. Make notes about what I'm saying or what God is saying to you. And then let me just tell you this. If things get boring, as they often do, you can start flipping through your Bible like you're source checking me or you're just interested in something. And then you look double spiritual. The people in your row are going to be like, yo, they're cross-referencing Nate. That's, look at, look at them. That's super spiritual. So just bring it, man. We'll probably make you an elder if you start doing that stuff. And you're just doing it because you're bored. It's so many benefits. Let's start bringing our Bibles if we don't already. But right now, what I want you to do is grab the Bible. If you don't have one, grab the one in front of you and let's read Psalm 8 together. It's only nine verses and I thought it would be well worth it to spend some time reading it together this morning. Find Psalm 8. It says this. When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Verse 9, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. What a wonderful, declarative psalm of praise. This is the psalm that we sing from. This is the psalm that when I'm done talking, we will sing from again. And as we look through it and we go through it together and see what it has to offer, I think there's such depth of wisdom and goodness here. I love the way that the psalm starts. Verse 1, if you look at it in your Bibles, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. What I love about this, and this is a point that Spurgeon made, not me. What I love about this is the inadequacy of that declaration. This is a psalm that is clearly meant to glorify the majesty of God, that is clearly meant to frame him up among the stars, that is clearly meant to swoop us up and to carry us away into a reverent awe of the majesty of God. This is a big deal psalm. This needs to resound through the generations. And so we would expect some honorifics to go along with the Lord's name, wouldn't we? We would expect some more adjectives to be there. How majestic and all of your grandeur and the worthiness of your ways and whatever else. We would expect it to be this grand entrance as we open this declaration about God. And yet it's not that. It's this humble, oh Lord, our Lord. That's the best David could muster. Oh Lord, our Lord. It feels so inadequate for the moment, but that's why it's so good. Because to start a majestic psalm that way, so humbly, is to confess without even having to say it out loud, my words are inadequate for your greatness, oh God. What else could David say but oh Lord, our Lord? What else is fitting? What honorifics should he put there that would adequately capture who our creator God is? There's nothing worthy enough of writing. So he just humbly puts, oh Lord, our Lord. And so when we sing those words in a few minutes, when we say, oh Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name, we are admitting in that song and in that declaration and with our voices and in our hearts that we are inadequate to adequately title God's glory and goodness. We are inadequate to adequately express and explain and capture who he is. And so we surrender to the simple, humble, oh Lord, our Lord. How majestic is your name. It's such a good beginning of the psalm to start it with humility and with simplicity as we confess through our words and our spirits, our inadequacy to capture who our creator God is. Verse two, we're actually going to look at in a second. That becomes important when we start to think about how Jesus employed this psalm. But verse 3, I love, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. Psalm 8 proclaims that God has told the story of himself through his creation. The song that we are singing based out of Psalm 8 is called Tell the Story. And it talks about how creation tells the story of God and how we participate in that. When we look at creation, when we look at a sunset or a sunrise, when we're on a plane and we can look out and get that unique view of God's creation and his earth, when we hike and we see beautiful things, when we look into the heavens and we marvel at God, when we get away from the city and we can actually see the stars, when we do those things, the heavens are declaring the glory of God. They're preaching to us about the presence of God. The purpose of creation is to tell the story of the creator. And since you are his creation and you are the only one imbued with a voice and entrusted with a voice, then it is our responsibility to cry out to God in ways that the rest of creation cannot do. It is our responsibility to make sure that the rocks don't have to cry out to our God because we're going to do that because we are the part of his creation that was made to praise him. And so we do it loudly. We do it vigorously. We do it openheartedly. And I'm reminded in verse three, as it points to God's creation, kind of declaring who he is of Romans one, Paul writes about this. Paul in Romans 1 says that the Lord has revealed himself in creation so that no man is without excuse. Through the millennia, men and women and children have looked at God's creation and marveled at the creator. The sun, the moon, and the stars tell the story of our God and who he is. And then we move into verses four and following what could be a little bit of a confusing portion. Because as I read it earlier, you may have picked up on the difference. If you were following along in an NIV, if you're using one of our Bibles this morning, then you're reading an N NIV maybe you pulled up an NIV on your app or that's what you carried in this morning but what you saw is in verse 4 when it says what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him your version says them so the ESV and some other versions say him and your version and some other versions say them. And so the question becomes, why is there a difference there? Why does that matter? Why is that important? Well, the Hebrew word there can be translated either way. And so some translations choose to say them because clearly some of these verses are referring to us, to humankind. I mean, when we read it, especially verse 4, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? That's not talking about Jesus. Who is Jesus that you would care about him, that you are mindful of him? Obviously, it's not talking about Jesus. It's us. Who are we that you would care about us? And to this point, just to bring this home, I do like that verse. I'm going to pause here. We're going to get back to him and them. But I like this thought, who am I that you would care for me? Why do I matter to you? I don't know if you've ever experienced someone singling you out in a way that made you feel special. You're like, why are you paying attention to me? Years ago, a few months before I moved to Raleigh, my pastor growing up died. He had had an aortic aneurysm, survived for a few years, developed an infection, and he passed away. He was very old, though. He was about 62, I think. He was too young. And his church had grown pretty significantly, and they had started other churches. So the people who were there were in the thousands. There was so many people who wanted to pay their respects for Pastor Buddy that they had to have a visitation the night before at the church. And the line was over an hour long to talk to the family. And when I got there, I hadn't been going to that church in years. I worked at another church. I grew up with, I grew up at that church and Buddy has three kids, Gabe, Joy, and Spring. Joy's my age. Gabe's a few years older than me. But Gabe and I, we were buddies growing up. We played Goldeneye together. He was my Goldeneye buddy. I don't know if that resonates with any of you. Like four of you, they're like, yes, Goldeneye buddies. But we weren't like super tight. And I really didn't expect to talk to anybody. I was just showing up because I have a lot of respect for Buddy and I love that family. And before I could get in line, I heard Gabe call my name. And I'm like, cool, I get to skip the line, which I love doing. And I go up to Gabe, and he hugs me, and he says, it's such a funny question. He goes, dude, what are you doing? Like, you got anything going on? I'm like, I'm at your dad's visitation, man. This is what I'm doing. You know, like, I didn't say that, but I said, no, I'm not busy. And he goes, come on. And so he leaves the line, and he takes me back to a hospitality room where there's Zaxby's. I'd love to say it was Chick-fil-A. It wasn't. There's Zaxby's. And he sits down, and he just wants to talk with me. And I just remember thinking, why are you talking with me of all these people why do i why am i the one that gets your time why are you treating me like this and in that case i really do think it was because i knew him when we remember growing up we we were at the church running around together we were the ones running around in in the service after it was over before there was thousands of people going there. And I guess nobody else kind of knew the family like I did. But the whole time I'm sitting there, I just felt such privilege of why in the world do you care about talking to me right now? And I feel like that's what the author of Psalms, David, is describing. God, why do you even notice us? Why are you calling me out in a crowd? Why do we matter to you? That should not be something that's lost on us, that God sees us, that he calls our name, and he says, hey, come here, let's talk. That's a remarkable thing. And so back to the he, him, and them. There are some verses that are very clearly talking about humankind, us. But there are some verses that are very clearly talking about Jesus. Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You gave him dominion over the works of your hand. You have put all things under his feet. Clearly that's talking about Jesus. And so the question becomes in Psalm chapter 8, in verse 5, is the psalmist talking about us or Jesus? Yes. He's talking about both things. He's talking about both us and Christ. Again, because clearly there are some verses here that could not apply to Christ. Who is Christ that you should consider him? That doesn't really work out. He's part of the Trinity. So that has to be for us. But he has not put everything under our feet. He's put everything under Jesus' feet. So clearly that's for Jesus. And I'll tell you how I know that's for Jesus, because Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews also thought that it was for Jesus. If you turn to Hebrews, you'll see, I forget the chapter. I think maybe I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah, chapter 2. The author of Hebrews is comparing Jesus to the angels, saying that he's superior to the angels. To do that, he quotes Psalm 8 and uses it to point back to Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15, verses 25 through 27, this is one of the times that you could flip and check me if you're bored and you'd look super spiritual. Paul is talking about Jesus and he's telling the people this is who Jesus is. He's the one that Psalm 8 was referring to. He's the Messiah that we are waiting on. The whole earth is in subjection to him. That is who we serve. And then Jesus himself uses this psalm to prove to a group of Pharisees that he's actually Jesus. He uses it to tick them off, which, you know, I'm a fan of. But this is what he says. Matthew 21 verses 15 and 16. I cheated. I had it marked. So I got there extra fast. Jesus says this, well, this isn't Jesus yet, but he'll talk soon. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did and the children crying out in the temple, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant. Now they're indignant because for, for someone to declare Hosanna to the Son of David is to declare them the Messiah. It is to declare them God incarnate. And they were not willing to accept that about Jesus. So the children acknowledged who Jesus was before the adults were willing to acknowledge it. They were indignant. Verse 16. And they said to him, Do you hear what these are saying? Like, you need to tell them to be quiet if you have any sense. And Jesus said to them, Yes. Have you never read? Which is hilarious. Have you never read? That's like asking a Tennessee fan if they don't know that they got their tails kicked yesterday. Yes, of course they know that. Of course they do. Have you never read? It's ridiculous. Have you never read? Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise. It is a direct reference to Psalm chapter 8, where Jesus says, yeah, have you not read that Psalm? It's about me. So how can I be sure that Psalm 8 is about us and Jesus? Because Jesus told me. He uses it as a proof text to say, yeah, I am Hosanna, the son of David. And so what this means, what all this means, and I don't want you guys to miss this. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of our God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. That's what's packed into these nine verses. We declare the majesty of God. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. We declare God is grand. God is big. God is huge. We declare it along with the churches down through the centuries. We declare glory unto God. We marvel at his wonder for us. Who are we that you should pick us out of a crowd, that you should call us, that you should talk to us, that you should care about us, that you should know us, that you would want my praise. Who am I that I matter to you, God? Why in the world did you send your son for me? So we marvel at God's love as we sing. And then, and then we declared glory for the risen Savior. We shine him in glory, understanding that Psalm 8 is also a messianic psalm that talks about Jesus and declares his glory and puts him in dominion and says the world is under his feet and we are in that world so we are subservient to him. So in this psalm, as we sing it and as we move through it, we declare the glory of God. We wonder at his love for us and we declare the glory of our risen Savior all in those nine verses. And if this all doesn't stir your soul to sing, I can't help but think I must be a terrible pastor. Because as I studied this, as I prepared this morning, as I thought through this, I couldn't wait to sing with you guys. If I were you, I would want me to shut up so I could start singing. That's what I would want right now. And so I'm going to do that right before I do. I just want to show you the words we're about to sing. And I want to show you the verses that they come from. So when we sing this song together, when we, in a few minutes, join the ancient chorus of believers who have been singing this song through the centuries. When we join the churches all over the world who have been singing this song and who might even sing this song or sing from the songs this morning. I want us to know what we're singing. So let's look. The first verse, the first words, O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name. That comes directly out of verse 1. Directly out of verse 1. We're singing that right back to God. And then the words right after that in the song are your glory on display. The works of your hands show us who you are. That's verses 2 and 3. Do you see? That's verses two and three when it says the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. We're singing those words back to God. That's where they're pulled from. On down we see verse three highlighted again where it says, O Lord, our Lord, you light up our world, the sun, moon, and stars. Declare who you are. Declare who you are. And then finally, we see verse 4, and O who am I, unworthy one, that you would give your only son? Who are you to care for me? Amazing love, how can it be? That's where directly out of verse 4, we wonder and marvel at the love that God has for us, that he would notice us and care about us. And then the whole psalm declares the glory of Jesus. Anytime we sing about Jesus, who am I that you would send your only son? That's Jesus. That's who we're singing about. And then we say and we declare, tell the story. As we sing, God use me to tell your story of creation. I would remind you, all of creation was made to tell the story of God and declare praise for him. We're the only part of that creation that was given a voice to praise him. So let's use it together as we close out in these songs together. I'm going to pray and then Aaron and the band's going to come and we're going to sing together. Father, you are worthy of our praise. You are worthy of our adoration. Our words and our praise and our declarations are insufficient for you. They are inadequate for you and who you are. We admit that, God, as we look to sing to you. Lord, would you fill our lungs with praise for you? Would you fill our hearts with your grace and your goodness and your love that we might pour it back out to you? Would what we experience as we sing now not simply be something that makes our Sunday morning better, but will it carry us on a wave of praise into our weeks and maybe wash back up on these shores next week ready to praise again. God, fill our hearts with praise. Fill our hearts with joy. And let us do now, God, what you created us to do, to sing your praises back to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here with us this morning, especially on a holiday weekend. I always joke around about you being a better Christian if you're here on a holiday weekend, and while I do believe that is true, I also think that it's just really nice and impressive when it is a holiday weekend and you choose to make church a part of that. So that's touching for me and I think good for you on that. And good for you if you're watching online and making it a point to be with us in spirit this Sunday as well. We did it. We made it to the end of the summer. This is the last in our series for this summer called 27. We'll pick it back up next summer when we jump into Paul's letters and finish in Revelation. So this is the last one that we're going to do. We're focused on the book of Jude this morning. And as if you guys needed more evidence that my wife, Jen, is a better Christian than me, when she asked what the sermon was on this week or which one I was going to be writing for this week, I said, Jude. And she goes, what are you going to do it on? And I'm like, I don't know. It's Jude. Like, I don't know the last time I read Jude. And she was like, well, I love this verse. You should do it on this one. And I'm like, of course she knows a random verse from Jude. So that was humbling. And you'd be better off if she were your pastor. But you have to settle for me this morning until she can be convinced otherwise. When I sat down to study Jude, I saw very quickly that it was kind of a microcosm of the entire Bible, of one of the dynamics happening all through Scripture and in the way that we understand scripture. So I'm starting us off here. Jude is a perfect depiction of both the depth and approachability of the Bible. Jude is this kind of microcosm and a picture of both the depth and the approachability of the Bible. Jude in verses 5 through 19, that's 15 verses. I know that's 15 verses because I counted on my fingers to make sure that I would not be wrong when I said 15 verses. In those 15 verses, there are 18 references to other scriptures, to Old Testament scriptures, and even apocryphal writings. Within just those 15 verses in Jude, 18 references to Old Testament scriptures and apocryphal writings. Some of the quotes are from the book of Enoch. For many of you in the room this morning, you didn't even know that was a book. You didn't even know the book of Enoch exists. It's an apocryphal literature. You'll find it, I think, in the Catholic Bible, but you don't find it in the Protestant Bible. But in Jude, there's references to the book of Enoch. There's, again, 18 references and 15 verses. And so if you're looking at Jude and you're trying to understand Jude, which by the way, Jude is probably short for Judah, which was a brother, a half-brother of Jesus. So if you're trying to understand his letter to the churches, how could you possibly understand Jude without understanding those 18 references? And scholars believe that the audience that he wrote this letter to, the churches in Asia Minor, they were people of a Jewish background and had grown up with a Jewish faith. They understood these references. It was like when I would refer to you and I would say, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. You know that, John 3.16. Most of you can fill in the rest of that. These references to them were that ubiquitous and that identifiable. And so as I'm studying Jude, again, I think to myself, how in the world could we seek to understand this book if we don't have any bearing for the 18 references found in the middle part of it that make it come to life and make it understandable. And this, I feel, is a depiction, too, of the depth of Scripture. I'm 42 years old. I've spent almost my entire life studying Scripture. I grew up in a Christian home. My dad was a deacon. He was important and fancy. I went to church every time the doors were open. And this was back in the day, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. I went to the church so often that my pastor felt totally comfortable calling me out in the middle of Sunday night service and telling me to quit talking. And then I would get in big trouble. I got spankings, is what I got. I would get struck with objects when I got home for that offense. Back when we raised kids right, you know. That's right. That's right, Jeffy. Let's let it all hang out here on Labor Day Sunday. Who cares? Beat your kids, Jeff just said. Don't do that. Don't do that. Totally off the rails. Jeff, this is your fault. Shut up, Jeff. But I grew up in church. I did Awanas. I memorized all the verses. I don't know if you guys did that when you were kids, but I memorized verses every week. I memorized them for the test, and then I promptly forgot them because I was eating candy right after that and then playing games. But some of them stick because sometimes I'll start to quote a verse, and it'll be in the King's English, and I'm like, oh, that's from Awana. That's from KJV back in the day, right? I went to Christian private school. I went to Christian high school. I've had a Bible class. I went to Bible college and studied theology. I got a master's degree in more theology. I've studied the Bible my whole life. Now, not as hard as I should have all the time, or maybe ever, I don't know. Not as consistently as I would like to all the time, but far and away, for the balance of 42 years, I've studied God's Word. And I'd be the first to tell you, there are myriad 42-year-olds who know way more about this than I do. But I can also say that I've devoted a life to studying it. And here's what I know. I'm embarrassed by how little I know. I'm humbled by how much more there is in this. I feel like God's word is an ocean and I've waded into it up to my waist and been like, yeah, okay. I think I get the gist. You can spend your whole life plumbing the depths of these pages and you will never get to the bottom. You will never stop learning from it. It will never return null and void. It will never not have more layers. You will never not see more connections, and there's so much of the Bible that's really impossible to fully understand without a grasp of the rest of the Bible. You can never understand the book of Galatians if you don't understand the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. You just can't do it. It's why, it's one of the reasons I say as often as I can, it's one of the reasons that one of the traits of grace is that we are people of devotion. It's why I say that the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. Because the bottom of this is unfindable. The depths of this are unknowable. And some of you have spent your life studying it too. And you know I'm right. Your heads are nodding the most because you've done it. And it always leaves you wanting more. So there is a degree to which approaching the Bible feels a little bit like approaching Jude. You could read Jude on your own with no background and with no study, and you probably wouldn't recognize but a couple of the references, if any, in verses 5 through 19. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know that you're not getting the depths of it. And sometimes I think people get intimidated by the Bible and how deep it is and how much there is to learn because I know good and well. Not all of you grew up being exposed to scripture every day. Some of us, when I say, and you're good believers, you love Jesus, you love the word, but when I say turn to Galatians, you're like, I don't know yet where that is. I want to know, I just don't know yet. And you go to small groups and there's other in the small group, and they're not professional Christians. They don't get paid to be a Christian like I do. That's all being a pastor is, is I just went pro with my Christianity. I'm still doing the same things that you guys should all be doing. I just get paid for it. I don't know if that's right, but I do. And you're sitting there in your Bible study with the other amateur Christians, and somebody knows way more than you. Right? They just know the Bible. We have them in every small group. And maybe you think to yourself, gosh, I don't know how I will ever understand that much. It just, it can feel intimidating. But that's also why I think it's beautiful that Jude depicts the approachability of Scripture as well. Because sure, the Bible is complicated. It's challenging. It's difficult to understand. It's unmasterable. And yet, some of the messages that come from it are so simple as to make it immediately approachable. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the whole gospel. That's all of Romans compacted into a sentence or two. Right? Jesus says this new commandment I give you, go and love one another as I have loved you. That's it. That's all the law and the prophets compacted into this one commandment. I don't really understand the rest of the Bible, but I believe in Jesus and I can go love people in his name. Okay. Then you get it. And so in Jude, again, we have this depiction of the depth of scripture, but also the approachability. Because even if you don't get the references from verses 5 to 19, there's a simple message in Jude that we can all understand. Sorry, I had to crunch the ice without you guys hearing. And that's what I want to look at now, is this simple message in Jude, and we're going to spend the rest of our time on it. What is this message that Judah, the half-brother of Jesus, wanted to give us, and why did he write this short little note and it get tacked into the end of the Bible as the penultimate book? Well, I think we see the beginning of this purpose in verse 3. This is the simple message of Jude. This is why he wrote the book. And even if we have no context, we can pretty much understand what this means. In verse 3, Jude says this, Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. So here's why he wrote the book of Jude. He says that he had been eager to write to them concerning their common salvation. And so a lot of scholars believe that Jude was trying to write a letter that looked more like Romans or Hebrews, something long and formal where it kind of outlined this faith that they would share. And that's what he was eager to do, and that's what he was working on. But another matter began to press, and he thought it was so important that he put that large work on hold so he could write this short note to them. And what he wants them to do is, I wanted to talk to you about our common faith. I wanted to lay out all the things that we believe to give you some clarity. I don't have time for that now, so I'm just writing to you to urge you to contend for the faith. Why? Well, because in verses 5 through 19, what we learn is that there's false teachers. The early church, they didn't have an agreed upon Bible, an agreed upon book, agreed upon doctrines. They didn't have denominations in theology. They just had their faith and understanding in Jesus, which means that the populace in the church was very easily deceived, very easily misdirected in the wrong ways. And so the churches had false teachers that were entering into them, gaining clout, proclaiming that they knew the teachings of Jesus. And yet the morality of those teachers did not line up with the words that they were teaching. They were teaching a kind of hedonism that's clearly out of step with scripture and with God's will for his people. And so Jude was writing the churches to say, hey, you can't listen to those guys. They're trying to steer you in the wrong direction. They're wrong. You need to contend for the faith. And what's really interesting is I was thinking about it, at least this is interesting to me, is when in churches, especially in the South, you use phrases like we need to contend for the faith. That usually means go out and fight a culture war against the waves of culture that are trying to bash down and beat down the truth of Scripture. But that's nowhere in here with Jude. It's contend for the faith. Where? Well, it looks like, based on what he says, within yourself. Contend for your own faith. Fight for your true and sincere faith. Because God doesn't need culture warriors going out there fighting for the faith. Contend for it in your own heart and then guess what? You're abiding in Christ and you'll produce much fruit. Contend for it here and you will be who you need to be as we operate in culture. So I believe that Jude is telling us to contend for our faith. And the simple message of Jude then is to contend for the faith with your whole life. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And we're going to read the verses that make me think this is true here in a second. And really this is kind of a launching pad into what I'm going to preach about next week when we do our big reveal Sunday. Next week, we're going to show the plans for the new building. If it's your first Sunday with us, then you have no idea what we're talking about. But we have four acres over off of Litchford Road, and we're looking to build there. And so we're going to share the plans with the church next week. And I'm very, very excited to do that. And the message that I'm going to preach is basically this. We have to contend for the gospel with our whole life. Contending for the gospel, contending for your faith, takes everything you got, and you can't let up. And that is the simple message of Jude. It's interesting to me. Sometimes, I don't know if you guys get to see this from your perspective, but from my perspective, as I just kind of, we map out series and what we're going to teach and what we're going to cover. There's so often that God has woven things together and woven themes in week in and week out to kind of prepare our hearts for things that are coming and help our hearts respond to things that have happened. And I see him weaving things together as we approach next week as well. But I believe that's the simple message of Jude. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And I believe it because of what he says at the end. So he says, contend for the faith. Here's why. Here are the threats. Verses 5 through 19. And then he says, if you're going to contend for that faith in yourself, here's how you do it. But you, beloved, verse 20, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life and have mercy on those who doubt. So Jude says, contend for the faith. Here's what's threatening your faith. Here's what you need to protect yourself against. And then he ends with, and here's how you do it. And he gives us four things that we can do to contend for our faith. Now, here's the thing. If you're here on a holiday weekend, you didn't accidentally come to church. All right. Labor day Sunday is typically not the Sunday when non-church people decide, you know what I'm going to do on a holiday weekend? I'm going to try church. That's not normally how that goes. If you're here, chances are you are probably a church person. If you're here, if you're listening, chances are your faith matters to you or you're visiting people that drug you to church. Either way. But I'd be willing to bet that your faith matters to you. I'd be willing to bet that you are a people who want to contend for your faith. That when Jude says this, if we are believers, we lean forward and we go, yes, how? So I'm going to give you four ways that we contend for our faith directly out of scripture. But here's what I would say to you. I don't think that any of us, and maybe you will, and if you do, that's wonderful. But I don't think that any of us are going to take all four of these things, keep them in our heads and work on all four of these things this week. So here's what I'm going to ask you and challenge you to do. Pick one, one of the four things that I'm about to mention that we can do to contend for our faith. My hope and my prayer is that one of them will resonate with you, that one of them will move you, that you will lock into one of these as you move into your week. And between now and the 10th, you will turn the dial on this in your life in such a way that you are responding to the simple message in Jude and beginning to contend for the faith with your whole life. So like I said, there's four things that Jude tells us to do to contend for the faith. And the first one that we see right there at the very beginning is to strengthen your faith. When I contend for your faith, you need to strengthen your faith. This is an interesting idea to me. How do we strengthen our faith? I don't think our faith is too much different than like a muscle or a muscle group. I've joked before, and I do think it's true, that I've probably had more first days in the gym than just about anybody in history. I've had a lot of first days. Some of those first days were also my last days, and I just didn't know it yet. But I've had a lot of first days in the gym. And one of the things I like to do when I go to the gym is I like to do squats. Big muscle group. I like to do squats. I think it's important. I don't know anything about anything, but I see people in better shape than me. They do squats and like that seems smart. So I do squats, right? And I don't know how much longer my knees are going to hold out and let me like do this. I don't know how many more of those I have in me because I'm aging more like a light beer than a fine wine, but that's how it goes for me. And one of the things I notice when I go back to the gym on the first day, especially if my last day was the last day after like a lot of days and I was actually kind of like in good shape, when I put the weights on the rack and I go to do what I think is going to be a warm-up set. Okay, for those of you who don't work out a lot like me, a warm-up set is when you do a little bit less weight just to get the muscles going and then you put on the actual weight and then you do the exercise. So there's been a couple of times on my first day where I've put the weight on, you know, just like 375, 400 pounds, and I'm just doing a warm-up set. And I go down and I'm like, yeah, this ain't no warm-up set, man. I only got about four of these in me. This is the real deal. This is the real set that I'm doing right here. Because my muscles have atrophied. Because I haven't done that in a couple of, they go into atrophy and they shrink and they get weaker if we don't continue to use them. I think our faith works the same way. If we're not using our faith, living a life that requires faith, then the faith that we have, I believe, can begin to atrophy so that it's not even as strong as it once was. So Jude tells us to strengthen our faith, acknowledging that this requires a regular use of our faith. And I did not come here this morning with the intent of convicting you or making anyone feel bad, but I do just want to ask the question, when is the last time that your life required faith? When is the last time you took a step of obedience, knowing that if God doesn't come through and deliver, this is not going to go well? If we're not taking those steps, if we're not living a life of faith, then our faith is going into atrophy, and it's not being strengthened. It's being weakened. I thought back to 2015, December of 2015, Jen and I were pregnant with Lily and we were, uh, we were not wealthy people. I was an associate pastor at a church. She was a part-time office manager. Uh, we did not have a ton of money, but because Lily was due in January, we had about $5,000 set aside for medical expenses and all that stuff. That's what we figured would work and cover it. And at the beginning of December, her car, her 4Runner, started to make weird noises, and so we took it to our guy who goes to the church, a guy named Kelly. And Kelly called me one day, and after I took the car in, he said, hey, man, how you doing? I said, I'm pretty good. How you doing? I said, hey, Kelly, how are you doing? And his first words were, better than you. And I went, oh, geez, what's going on, man? And he goes, we have to replace the engine. And I said, ugh, this is terrible. How much does that cost? He said, $5,000. Which apparently is super cheap for an engine now, but back then it was not. He says, $5,000. And I'm like, well, you got to do what you have to do, I guess. So make it happen. And there goes our new baby cushion. And we're just looking at each other like, great, what do we do? And that same week, a little bit prior to that revelation, we had committed to giving a certain amount of money to the Christmas offering that year. We had talked about it, prayed about it, and there was an amount that God had laid on our heart to give. And so I went back to Jen and I'm like, I don't think we can afford to give that anymore. We just lost all of our cushions. Certainly God would understand that. But the more we talked about it, and mostly Jen thought this, I was against it. The more we talked about it, the more we thought, no, God put that on both of our hearts. He did it knowing that we would have to pay for an engine. And we should be faithful to that. We should walk in obedience. Okay. So we did. We gave the amount that we had agreed to give. The very Sunday that we gave that amount, some random person walked up to me in the lobby and just said, hey, just want to say thank you. You and your family have been such a blessing to us. And they handed me a Christmas card. And then the Christmas card was a check for the amount of money that we had given to the church that morning. And it was like God was winking at us going, I'm going to take care of you. All right, don't worry about it. Now, do you not think that my faith got stronger after that? When I took this step of faith and obedience, God, I feel like this is a thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do it. And then I watch him come through for us. That strengthened my faith. My faith got stronger. We made a decision that required God to come through in an incredible way. And he did. And so for many of us, I think it's very possible, particularly in our affluence and in our abilities to live lives that do not require faith. And so maybe what you need to take this morning is this little nudge from God to make that decision that requires some faith. To step out in obedience and trust him to come through. That's the first thing Jude tells us to do. Strengthen our faith. The next thing he tells us to do is to pray in the Spirit. I love this. Pray in the Spirit. He doesn't just say to pray. He says to pray in the Spirit. Now, why does he say to pray in the Spirit? And what does it mean to pray in the Spirit? We get an insight into this in Romans chapter 8. It's so funny to me that God laid Romans 8.28 on Aaron's heart for worship. And now just this morning I added in Romans 8.26 for the sermon because there's just so much good truth there. And God often speaks in stereo. But in Romans 8.26 it says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. Meaning the Holy Spirit hears what comes out of our mouths and then communicates to God what we really need because we are spiritual babies and we don't really know how to pray for what we actually need. I don't think it's too dissimilar from when my two and a half year old son, John, says he needs a passy. I need a passy. I want a passy. He wants a passy, but what he really means is, I'm tired. What he really means is, I want to snuggle, which, come on, I got plenty of that. He can do that whenever he wants. What it really means is, I just feel a little bit off kilter and I want to be centered and I need some peace. That's what it means. We're praying to God for passes and the Holy Spirit's like, here's what they really need. And so to me, I think if we learn to pray in the Spirit, it's praying with an awareness that the Spirit is going to translate this to God anyway. So how do I change my prayer? How do I have an awareness within my prayer to pray according to what the Spirit will ask for, to pray according to what the Spirit will translate? How do I pray according to the desires of the Spirit and the very heart of God? To begin to put that filter on our prayers. Before we just blurt out what we need and what we want and what we're hopeful for, to put on the lens of, I'm praying in the Spirit, I'm praying through the Spirit, The Spirit is going to translate this to God. What is it that he's going to translate? I think this is why Jesus teaches us to pray by starting off praying for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We need to put on this mindset when we pray of Holy Spirit, how would you have me pray for this? Which begins, I think, with praying for things that actually concern the Father. This is appropriate at the beginning of football season. I'm not entirely sure God is very interested in the outcome of football games. I could be jaded because I prayed fervently at the beginning of the Falcons Super Bowl a few years back. And he let me down, which means that he does not care about football at all, because certainly he would have come through for my Falcons if he did. It always makes me laugh at the end of a football game when the athletes and the coach want to give glory to Jesus for this victory. Because I just think like, man, you really lucked out playing that whole team of atheists over there so that God could very clearly pick a side. He had to have been against that football team. And if God really did care about football, how does LSU ever win? Like they're Cajun rednecks. It's the worst combination. And yet they're good. So God doesn't care. It's silly, but often we pray about things and God in heaven just has grace and patience for us. I wonder what the translation is when we pray that a certain team would win. I wonder if the translation is, this one's faith is weak, God. I'm working on it. And it's funny there, but there's other ways in which it applies and it matters. One of the things I've learned over the years and the way that I pray for people who are sick and maybe dying is when I have opportunities to go and pray for families over seemingly terminally ill loved ones. If the family asks me to pray for healing, I will because I think that's an honoring thing to do. So sure, I'll pray for healing. But when I pray privately for that family, I almost never pray for healing. I always pray, Father, help this family see and accept your will. Help them to be comforted by it. And help what they're about to walk through to conspire to make their faith in you stronger, not weaker. God, please don't let this path that they're walking shake their faith to a point where they question it. Would you make everything that's about to happen, whether you heal or whether you take, would you let everything conspire to make this faith stronger in this family? I could be wrong, but I think that's a more reflective prayer of what concerns the Holy Spirit. And I think if we can teach ourselves to pray in accordance with the will of the Spirit, we better acquaint ourselves with the heart of the Father. And we see a lot more answered prayer when we do it that way. So pray in the spirit to contend for your faith. The next thing we do is we walk in God's love. We walk in God's love. Now this is what we talked about last week. How do we walk in God's love? And it's actually in the verse, it actually says, keep yourselves in the love of God. So I probably, I should have said, keep yourself in God's love. How do we do that? That was last week's sermon. That's how God's weaving things together. That was first and second and third John. How do we walk in God's love? How do we walk in love for God? We obey him. Because when we obey God, we admit his expertise and that we trust in it. When we obey God, it proves that we trust him. Right? Obedience proves trust. So how do we walk in God's love? We walk in obedience to God. And some of us may have carried in the same sin and the same weight and the same thing that's entangling us. Last week when we preached a sermon on, hey, if you love God, obey him. Where are we being disobedient? Where do we need to walk in obedience? And maybe we brought that exact same disobedience into this sermon this week, into this place this week, and God is still after us. Hey, when are you going to hand that over to me and walk in obedience there? And so maybe this week is just a reminder for you that God really does care. He really does want you to let that go. And he really does want you to walk in obedience. And that's how we need to respond this morning. The last one I love, and I love that it seems to just be tacked on there, but it's such an important concept as we contend for the faith. Have mercy on doubters. There's not too many other places in Scripture where we're given instruction on how to handle doubt and doubters, but it's really interesting to me that Jude, as he's listing these other things that we would all agree with and expect to be there, walk in God's love, strengthen your faith, pray in the Spirit. Sure, we know that. We hear that kind of stuff every week and all the time. But then after that, just as importantly, have mercy on the doubters. And I love that this is in here because can I just tell you a secret about faith? If you are a thinking person, if you are an observant and thinking Christian, then doubts in your faith are unavoidable and absolutely necessary. They are essential and unavoidable parts of faith to run into places where you are experiencing doubt. And if you have never experienced doubt, you either have the strongest faith of anyone I've met, or you, I would gently say, have not really deeply considered your faith and what it means. Doubts, wondering if all this is true anyways, are an unavoidable and completely essential part of our faith. Why do I say that? Because I know personally from experience that the faith you find on the other side of doubt is more rich and more full and more vibrant than the previous version of your faith could have ever imagined being. I walked through a profound season of doubt in my early 20s as I was finishing up Bible college and doing ministries. And then I walked through another profound season of doubt during COVID in the summer of 2020 while I was pastoring. It felt like reassembling a plane in midair. So I know that doubts in our faith are unavoidable and absolutely essential. And I know that when we do the hard work to learn and to actually answer the questions, not let the questions drive us away. I don't understand this, so I'm done with faith, but I don't understand this, so I'm gonna dig in harder. I'm gonna look from new sources. I'm gonna look new places. I'm going to ask more people. And when we find the answers that actually satisfy the doubt, what happens is we emerge with this firm foundation and this vibrant faith that's more rich and more generous than what we could have ever imagined. And what we find on the other side of doubt is that we actually love God more because he gets bigger and more mysterious and we find out we can trust him. Doubts are good, but we shouldn't stop at doubt. We should work through them and talk through them. The problem in churches with doubt is that often doubts are met with condemnation and not mercy. I shared with you guys weeks ago, and we all know that this is happening, that over the last 12 years or 20 years, 40 million people have left the church or something like that. We know the church in America is shrinking. We are now very familiar with this term deconstructing, which refers to someone who grew up evangelical Christian, who grew up with faith and as an adult walked away from it. We're familiar with that. Why is this's going on in our culture it's something that i think about a lot but one of the big reasons it's happening is because doubts in our churches tend to be met with condemnation and not mercy because our pastors and our leaders are not obedient to jude's instruction to have mercy on doubters And when people raise their hand and they go, hey, what about, or how come, or I don't understand, but how could this be true if this is also true? When people express doubts, sometimes they're met with dismissals. Sometimes they're met with condemnation. When I grew up, you felt like this person with a weak faith if you had any doubts. If you didn't understand. That the people who were in charge, the spiritual leaders, the pastors and the deacons and the elders and all those people, they were the people with the fewest doubts. They were the people with no chinks in their armor. They were the people who had all the answers and understood it the best. And so having doubts made you weak. And I think we need to have a church where having and expressing doubts actually shows some strength because you're trying to fight through those rather than bury your head in the sand. And you have a desire to enrich your faith by working through those and finding answers. So if we're going to be obedient to Jude, we need to have mercy on the doubters, understanding it's a necessary process in faith to move through those and find answers. This means, parents, we create that environment in our homes where our children are allowed to doubt, and they are allowed to ask questions, and they are allowed to wonder, and they are allowed to learn other information that causes them to question things about their faith. And they are allowed to move through that in mature ways that are helpful for them, believing that on the other side of that doubt lies a rock-solid faith. So we give them mercy when they have questions. We create environments in our homes where we can have spiritual conversations, and they don't have to agree with mom and dad about everything. And then maybe most of all, for some of us, we have mercy on ourselves. And we allow ourselves to express those doubts. We allow ourselves to express that uncertainty. We give ourselves some grace and start to seek out answers. Not being afraid of the doubt, but knowing that pushing through it and seeking answers in the doubt is going to lead to a faith that we don't have right now, but we desperately want. So we have mercy on the doubters. That's the simple message of Jude. That's how we contend for the faith. The simple message of Jude is to contend for the faith with yourself, with your whole life, with everything you got. How do we do that? We pray in the Spirit. We walk in God's love. We strengthen our faith. And we have grace and mercy on those who doubt. And we walk through this together. I don't know which one of those resonates with you. But if any of them do, I pray that you'll take it from here and you'll leave and you'll work on that this week. And contend for your faith with your whole life in accordance with the message of Jude. Let's pray. Father, you love us. We know that you do. We feel it and we see it. It's all around us all the time. God, if anybody doubts today that you love them, I pray that they would see evidence of that sometime before their head hits the pillow tonight. Lord, we thank you for the simple message of Jude and ask that we would be people who would contend for our faith, that we would contend with our whole lives and our whole heart. Lord, if we have lived lives that don't require faith, would you help us take steps of faith and watch you come through? Lord, if we need to learn to pray more in the spirit and according to your will, would you make us aware that your spirit is with us as we pray? Make us sensitive to praying according to your will. God, if there are areas of our life we know are not in accordance with your word, that we know we are walking in disobedience, would you help us to walk in obedience and therefore walk in your love? Father, if we are experiencing doubts, would you help us be brave in those? To have mercy on ourselves. And to seek out the conversations that we need to seek out. To help us arrive at a stronger, richer, more vibrant faith. Help us contend for the faith that you've given us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Erin. I get the honor and the privilege of being one of your pastors, and I can't tell you how excited I am to actually be in Big Church today. As our kids call it down the hall, this is Big Church, and I'm thrilled to be here and to be hanging out with y'all. But I do need to start our morning in a place of confession. You see, I have struggled a whole lot in the process of putting this together to bring to you guys this morning. It first started with the idea of this sermon series forever ago, and Nate and everybody was talking about it, and they're like, let's do this, 27. We'll do the 27 books of the New Testament. It's going to be great. And I was like, oh, okay. Did you say the New Testament? Well, okay. Yeah, well, for those of you guys that know me, anytime that I've actually stood up here before you guys, I've spoken from the Old Testament. So the New Testament, while I have read it and I have studied it and all those things, and that is not my safe place, maybe is a good way to put it. I love the Old Testament stories. I love the details. I love the battles. I love all those things. I'm a book girl. That's where I am, right? Now the New Testament has a little bit of that. The New Testament tells a fabulous story, but it's just not quite the same. And then we said, okay, so now you're going to pick one of these books and you're going to take it and you're going to study it and you're going to find one thing to talk about and you're going to present it. I'm like, okay, so I have to take a whole book and I have to go through it. And then I have to come up with one thing to tell you all. For those of you guys that know me, you know, brevity is not exactly one of my strong suits. I like words. I have lots of them and they tend to come forth. So, so, so now we have New Testament, we have brevity, and then now I have to pick a book. And there's 27. Thankfully, Nate took four. Aaron has taken one. Kyle has taken one. So I'm just down to 21. So I struggled with that as well. I went back and forth. Aaron and Kyle can attest to it because they kept saying, have you landed on one yet? No, I'm not there yet. So I went back and forth. And so one day I just was kind of picking up my Bible. I moved to the back and then moved forward because Revelation is not where I'm going to be. And then I moved forward and I dropped into the book of James. And I had read James. It had been a long time. And I sat down and I read James again. And then I kind of read it again. And it just settled in my heart and said, you know, this is the place, Aaron, that you need to be for the next little while. I think you need to study this. And then we'll find one thing that you can talk about together. And so this is where I am. And I think the other part that struck me as funny is that James's book is a very to the point and practical advice to people. So he got the brevity thing. So we're hoping that somehow over the course of the last little while, I have learned the brevity as well. But you guys can be the judge and you all can tell me at the end of the day today as to whether I hit home or not. But before we jump into the actual book itself, I would love to take the opportunity to introduce you to the person of James. Because I think if you sit back and you learn who he is and you get to know James' heart, then as we talk about the book, you'll see how very much of his heart comes through in the words that he presents to his followers. So, brevity, and here we go. We're going to make this work, I think. There are three prominent Jameses that you will learn about in the New Testament. There is James, the son of Zebedee and the brother of John. Then there was James, the son of Alphaeus. And these both were part of the 12 disciples. And then you had James, the brother of Jesus. Well, it is highly believed or widely believed that this book of James was written by Jesus's brother. And so we find out that James is the oldest of what would be the half siblings of Jesus. There were three other brothers and a group of sisters. We don't know the sisters because of course it doesn't tell us names. It just says he had sisters as well. So we have this group of brothers, this group of sisters, and we have James as the oldest. How many of you in here are younger siblings? Yeah? That's me too. I have an older brother who is six years older than me. So thankfully that gap helped a little bit. I've looked at my kids with their two-year age gap, and I see it more with the older sibling, the younger sibling. There's a little bit of maybe jealousy of the older sibling, or even the younger sometimes, but there's also a comparison that starts to happen because people know the older brother or the older sister, and they think that the little is supposed to be like the big. There's a lot of that. As the younger, you also tend to live in the shadow of your older sibling. And so here we have James. It says James is the oldest of the half siblings, but guess what? That also makes James the what? The little brother of Jesus. Okay, sit on that one for just a second. He was the little brother of Jesus. So that takes the whole living in somebody else's shadow to another level. I just can't even imagine what it must have been like for him. And in scripture, it continues to go on and tell us though that, oh, by the way, his siblings didn't believe him. They didn't believe in him. They didn't believe he was who he says he was. As a matter of fact, they spent a lot of their time following him around. And when he's in these crowds of people, they're going into the crowds, and they're trying to pull him out. And in the process, they're saying, we're really sorry. He's out of his mind. And I promise you, it says that in Mark 3 21, it quotes that as saying he's out of his mind. So you have James, you have all of these brothers and sisters, and they're trying really hard to kind of like convince everybody that Jesus is not who he says he is and that he's kind of crazy. Y'all, this is Jesus' family that's doing this. So let's fast forward now. We have Jesus' death, his burial, his resurrection. We're told that when Jesus is resurrected, he appears to his disciples. Then he appears to a really large group of believers. And then he appears to James. We have no idea from scripture what that meeting was like. But when I read that and thought about it, my heart melted, y'all. Like, this is Jesus coming to his baby brother. And of course, my human brain goes to the fact that wouldn't it have been funny to have been a fly on the wall? And could you have seen Jesus go, hey, so do you think I'm out of my mind now? But we don't have any idea, again, what was said. But all I could hear and all I could think about was just how sweet this moment was between two brothers, one who didn't believe, but one who is now experiencing this moment with the risen Lord. his life is now forever going to be changed. Because what we see now is James begins to hang out with all of the believers. James begins to hang out with the disciples in Jerusalem. And then Peter, who is in Jerusalem with him at this point in time, Peter decides to take off and go spread the gospel, leaving James behind. So there stands James in Jerusalem with this brand new group of Jewish Christians. And he becomes basically the first pastor of the first Christian church ever that's now set up in Jerusalem, which is the hub of Judaism, but it's also now the birthplace of Christianity. And there he sits. I can only imagine kind of the pressure that sits on James's shoulders during this. Y'all, he's the first kind of like pastor. He doesn't have any other pastors to talk to. Like, hey, did you know this is going on inside of my congregation? You got any advice? Or I want to talk about this. Do you not? He doesn't have anybody to talk to. It's him. He's by himself with this group of new believers. But the one thing that I think that is so cool that he does have, no Bible, but he has the time that he spent with his brother. He has all of the time that he spent with Jesus to be the place that he holds on to and the words that he then can speak to the people that are following him. And so now during the middle of James's leadership of this church in Jerusalem, Saul decides to start his great persecution campaign. What we know about Saul is Saul was someone who felt that the Christians were wrong in their belief structure and felt that he was going to throw them all in jail because they didn't belong out there. We know eventually Saul has an encounter with the risen Lord as well, and he is forever changed. And he becomes Paul, who we have been talking about before today. And we'll continue in the New Testament. But for now, he's Saul. And he is out to get these Christians. So this sweet little flock that James is in charge of is sitting in their homes or walking through the market in complete fear at all times of the fact that somebody's going to snatch them up, drag them off, and throw them in prison. They don't know if that knock on the door is a friend or somebody coming to get them. They don't know if they leave their house and head to the market, if they're going to come back to see their family again. It's a place of fear that I'm not sure any of us could ever really and truly understand. But that's where they are. And then let's add a little insult to that. And there's a great famine happening at this point in time as well. And so because of this famine and the persecution, James's people start to leave the city. They start to flee into the countryside to escape all that's happening in the city of Jerusalem. And as they escape, they're running into places called Judea and called Samaria, which what we know about Jewish faith is that was places that as a Jew, they never would have gone. But as a Jewish Christian, that's where they went for refuge. So they're now depositing themselves in these areas that are filled with pagans. And they're trying their best to reestablish their life. To bring their families back together. To find new jobs, and to find new community. And so this is where we find James sitting in Jerusalem still, he and a few apostles are all that's left, and wondering how his people are. Where have they gone? Have they found a place to settle? Are they together? Is there a chance that there's some community around them? And as I was reading this and I was thinking about it, it brought me back to some of the COVID lockdowns for us. I know as a staff, we struggled really, really hard with trying to do ministry and loving on our people when I couldn't see our people, when we couldn't really, we had the luxury of being able to talk to our people. We had phones, we had all that other stuff, but you get where I'm headed with this. We just were very separated and it was hard. Well, that's where James is. He doesn't know where they are. He doesn't know what's happening to him, but he does know that they have headed into lands that are not gonna be the most friendly to someone in a new faith. And so this is where James sits down with pen and paper or quill and parchment or papyrus. I don't know what he used, but he sat down at this point in time to write this letter to his people. And the thing that I found as I read through this, and like I said before, it's very practical advice. However, the overarching place from James's heart was to tell his people to live it. This idea that if you are a Christian, if you're going to say that you're a Christian, your life must reflect your words. That the people in Judea and the people in Samaria, when they look at you, they should know that you're different. They should know by your actions and the way that you choose to live your life that you're different and that you're a follower of Christ. And so in James chapter 2 verses 14 through 19, you can check out a Bible if you'd like. I did not have them put on the screens. You can just listen to me read it, whatever y'all would like to do. But that's where I am. So James 2, 14 through 19, if not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, I have faith, I have deeds. Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there's one God, well, good, because even the demons believe that, and they shudder. So right now, I know I have gained the attention of all of those that were trying to decide where they were headed for lunch after church was over because I made the statement about faith and deeds and everybody has it in their head that, oh, wait a second, wait a second. We all know that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works. And I'm going to tell you that's still 100% true. And I don't believe that that's what James is saying here. But what I believe he's doing is he is questioning our commitment to our faith. When we talk about our faith, we talk about this idea of trusting God fully and committing to this idea of lordship, that Jesus has lordship over our life, over all pieces and parts of our life. That's what it is to have faith. But I think, and that's 100% true, and that's what we get through our belief in Christ. But what James is saying is, I want you to take that a step further. And what I want you to do is, I want you not to just say that you believe in me, but I want that complete lordship of your life to show in what it is that you do. I want you to realize that people will see you and know you and know who you are in Christ because of what you say and what you do. So if we peace and keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? That's it right there. Somebody sits, somebody's cold, somebody's hungry, and I look at them and say, go in peace. I hope you get warm and I hope you get food. And I go this way. That's not living out our faith. Because I could say I'm a Christian, but I did nothing. There was nothing that shows. We talked about James having an encounter with the living God and then from there, everything changed. He changed. If we have this encounter with the living God, we can't live as if we have not been changed, because we have been. We have to learn to live in a place of obedience to what it is that he tells us to do. We can't just be hearers of the word. We also have to be doers. We can't come into church every Sunday and sit here and listen to what Aaron and Kyle and Nate have to say, but then not apply it to what we do. We can't sit down with our Bibles in the morning and read through them and be convicted by something and then, eh, maybe I will, maybe I won't. We have to be willing to allow that change to happen. Another simplified example, and this one's really simplified, but if I were to say to you that I have made a decision that it's time for me to shed a couple pounds, to get myself into great shape, well, I can talk about that all I want. I'm going to put together a great plan and I'm going to shop better and I'm going to eat better and I'm going to exercise. I'm going to the gym three times a week. It's going to be great. And then you come see me two months later and I still look like this. Hey, Aaron, what happened? Well, I talked about it, but I didn't do anything about it. Now, if I could talk it off, y'all, I would just be the most fit person that walked to the face of this earth. But I can't talk it off. I have to be willing to commit to, to be obedient to a plan, a course of action, whatever it is that's going to help, right? And that's what he's talking about here. We cannot serve a full-time God with a part-time faith. It doesn't work. So now if we go back and we remember James's original audience, we have this group of tired, fearful, relatively new, maybe even new to Christianity, Jewish Christians that are living amongst this group of pagans. How easy do you think it would have been for them to have kind of fallen into this idea of a part-time faith? I don't know about you, but I think it would have been pretty easy because they have no Christian community around them. They didn't have Bibles. They don't have somebody speaking into their life. It's just them trying to hold on, right? It would have been so easy to have fallen into a part-time faith. And that's where James' heart is, is he's writing these words to them and he's saying, y'all, I just want you to go back and remember what it was like when we were together. I want you to remember what it was like when you came to that moment and said, I've been changed and I now want to live this out. And so the rest of the book of James, he goes through and he reminds them of what this looks like in their words and their actions. And there's so much of this book of James that sounds like Jesus. It sounds like Jesus as he stands on the Sermon on the Mount and is teaching. And it's because we find out that James actually teaches the most from Jesus' words than any other author in the New Testament. And you gotta love that little brother who now thinks that his big brother is really cool. And he wants to make sure that everybody hears and knows what it is that he taught. And so he continues in this book to talk of a faith, of an active faith that endures in the midst of trials, that calls on God for wisdom, that bridles the tongue. That's a lesson for all of us. Bridles the tongue that sets aside wickedness, that visits orphans and widows, an active faith that guards against greed, that's patient in suffering, that's rich in prayer, that doesn't play favorites. And he stresses that this life of faith should be all-encompassing and pressing us to engage in the life of others. And so as I continued to read through this and I was thinking about like, hey, does James' teaching actually apply to us in 2023? And of course I came up with a resounding yes, it does. Because y'all, in the culture and the world that we live in today, if we as Grace Raleigh, as the people of Grace Raleigh, are this living example of people who are walking out their faith. They're not just talking about it, but they're actually walking out their faith, like the impact that we can have both as an individual and as a group. And so one of the things that really also hit me is, is that as I went through this is I was reminded of our traits of grace. For those of you guys that don't know what I'm talking about when I say the traits of grace, this was five traits that the elders and the staff came up with that describe our people, that as partners of grace, this is who we are and what we reflect. And there's a whole section that talks about our core beliefs, but then it goes on with the sentence that says, in the light of the gospel and because we love Jesus. So going back to like what James said, he had an encounter with the living God. He was forever changed. So in light of the gospel and because we love Jesus, this is what we choose to do. And it goes on to say that we are kingdom builders, that we leverage everything that we have, our time, our treasures, and our talents to build God's kingdom. We are partners. We partner with each other. We partner with our ministries. We partner with our missionaries. We partner with nonprofits because we truly believe that no one should ever do life alone. And of course, to further God's kingdom. That we're people of devotion where we spend time daily in prayer and in God's word to grow closer to him. That we're step-takers where we're committed to this next step of obedience. And then finally, that we're conduits of grace, that we acknowledge that God has lavished grace upon us and that because of that, we're actually able to lavish it on others. And so this is who the people of grace are. And I have to say that my family and I had the opportunity to be huge benefactors of watching the people of grace live out their faith. For many of you, many of you may or may not know who, I don't know. But over the course of the last year or so my mom was exceptionally sick and in poor health or declining health and starting about a year ago her health took a little bit steeper trajectory downward and we started with some hospital visits and I was running back and forth between Raleigh and Pinehurst on a weekly basis on the weekends. And then as time went on, the time increased a little bit more. I'd spend more weekend time down there, etc. And then in October of this year, mom was hospitalized. It was a sudden hospitalization. She was severely ill at that point in time. I dropped everything. I went to Pinehurst with my laptop and a bag, not knowing what I was going to find. When I got there, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Well, come to find out that over the month of October, so 31 days, my mom spent 21 of them in the hospital. And during that time, I watched as Julie slowly made sure that everything in Grace Kids was running as smoothly as it possibly could, so I didn't have to worry about that. I had parts of our small group, Tammy Vinson and Karen Latta and some of the others that jumped in and said, we've got this. And they took over all of the responsibilities that I had there, and the small group kept moving right along. I had Nate and the elders saying to me, you do what you need to do, Aaron. Your family is the most important thing. And so I was given the freedom to be there with my mom and with my dad to do what it was that I needed to do at that time. And Jesus took my mom home at the beginning of December. And as I look back on it now, though, I was given such a gift by the people of grace who loved on us so well, who loved on my family in my absence. It's something I can never, ever repay. But y'all, that's the best example that I have of what it looks like when a people live it. They didn't just say they believed in Jesus. Everything that was extended to my family during this time just shone the light of Jesus. And again, it's something I can never, ever repay. So a life where our words and our actions come together, where in light of the gospel and because we love Jesus, we are showing the world how an encounter with the living God has changed us and changed us for the better. So this little book of, it's five chapters and a hundred verses, y'all. That's it. It's not a lot. I promise y'all can sit down and read it. And I hope that you can hear the pastor's heart behind this book. And I also hope that you will allow it to challenge you like it's challenged me. On a little bit of a side note, I found this one funny. As we talk about being challenged by this book, Martin Luther actually was severely challenged by the book of James, and he called it a right strawy epistle, and then went on to say, away with James, I feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove, which I just had to giggle a little bit at that one, because I tell you what, if Martin Luther can be that challenged by this book, so much so that he wants to pick it up and throw it in the fire, oh, can you imagine what it's going to do to the rest of us? It might step on your toes a little. I expect it to. But I hope and I pray that you accept that challenge because in that challenge, it's going to produce change. And it's that change that helps us to grow and to continue to mature in our faith. So people of grace and followers of the risen Lord, will you look in the mirror each day? Will you take the opportunity to ask God what you need to change, what you need to do in order to get a little bit closer to him? And what is it that we can do in order to learn how to live it so that we're known by what we do, not what we say. Will y'all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you for these beautiful words of James. Thank you for the challenge that you give us. This challenge to take that step of obedience and learn to not just talk the talk, but to walk the walk. We want our words and we want our actions to do nothing but bring the glory to you. So will we become that people, Lord, that when the people of Raleigh look at us, they see something different. They see lives that have had encounters with the living God that have been forever changed and who want to bring that change and that love to others. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. How you guys doing? Everybody good? If you are new or if you are visiting, my name is Aaron. I am so honored to get to serve as one of your pastors. And can we just take a second? Like, that was incredible, right? Can we just take a second and thank our worship team? Like, a lot of times, we see what happens on Sunday morning, but we don't see all of the prep that goes into, like, making sure that we set a good environment for worship on Sunday morning. And they knock it out of the park every time. And matter of fact, I'm really nervous about my job at this point because I'm not needed anymore, right? So I'm excited to be sharing with you today. I do want to clear the air about something. This is the first time I've really gotten to talk to you since the new setup. And if you remember a couple of weeks ago, our loving pastor blamed, if you do not like this, it was my idea, right? You remember that? And truth, it was my idea. But if you do not like it, it's because I was gone and his execution of my idea was terrible. So no, truthfully, the reason this became an idea is because I got tired of every single week leaving my coffee cup underneath my chair. And so I was like, hey, if we have something to set it on, we'll be good to go there, right? Hey guys, again, I'm really excited about today. We're continuing our series 27. It's a journey through the New Testament. It's just a broad overview of a lot of the books. And the heartbeat behind it is to honestly just create some hunger to go and check it out, go and read it. And today, we're talking about Colossians, which has easily become one of my favorite books. And to get our minds going in the right direction, I'll tell you a story of several years ago. I was serving at a church, and I had never taught. I had never preached on Sunday morning. At this point in time, I was just the pretty face on staff, and I was there to make the staff pictures better. It's similar to today, right? But no, so I was never somebody who taught, right? Except there was this one time they figured, hey, maybe he's more than a pretty face, and they let me teach. And so what happened after that, there's a part of the responsibilities, whoever teaches that Sunday, to call and follow up with anyone who responds to the gospel. At the end of the message, we would give a gospel presentation, and so my responsibility was to call people the next week. And I can remember a phone call that I had the very next day. I knew that I was unprepared for the phone call, but I had no clue how much of a bumbling idiot I really was until I got on that phone call. Because the goal was to just kind of tell her, okay, here's some next steps. Here's what your life should look like. Here's what the Christian life looks like. And I'm going to be honest, like I have no flipping clue what I said to that girl, right? Like I remember, like at some point I talked about Genesis and I may have talked about dinosaurs. I have no, I'm pretty certain that I am the only pastor to ever talk someone out of following Jesus. Like that's what happened. But really the whole goal was to just say, hey, here's what your life should look like. Here's the decision you made, and here's how it impacts and affects your life. But as you think about that, isn't that a great question? Have you ever wondered that? Like if you were sitting down having a cup of coffee with somebody, and you were trying to tell them, hey, here's what your life should look like as a Christian. How do you answer that question? Because we're told throughout all the New Testament, right? Like from this point forward, go and impact the world. Make a difference in the world around you. And yes, we do know and we've heard these things that say, read your Bible, pray about what it says, and then live it out. But can we just be honest? There's been a lot of times that I read this and I have no clue what to do with what it says. And then what KT talked about last week, right? It was just reflecting the love of Jesus. And that's great, man. That's an incredible, incredible thing that we need to remember. We need to let resonate. But there's a lot of times that I wonder, what does that look like? Like in today's world, what does it look like to love myself and simultaneously love someone else? Have you ever thought about that? Because if we can be honest, church today, Christian world today, it kind of has the same vibe as, like it's a-life version of telephone. You remember that game that you played as kids? Like, your teacher would get all the students up, and you'd stand them in a long, single-file line, and then she would whisper a phrase or a sentence to the very first kid, and then he would whisper it to the next, and they would whisper it to the next, and they would go all the way down the line until the very last person, they repeated what it is that they heard. And everybody's like, no, that's not what I said, except the teacher. It's like, wait, how in the world did you get there? It feels like that's kind of where we're at today with Christianity. Like generation after generation, person to person, these things have been kind of added to. And a lot of it is based on what the world needs at a particular moment. A lot of it is based on maybe an understanding or misunderstanding of scripture. But we put into the gospel, we put into Christianity, this is what Christianity looks like. This is what your life is supposed to look like to the point where we stand here like, well, who's right? Because that's the one thing everyone has in common. They're all right, but somehow all different. Like we're all convinced that this is the thing. And Paul's heartbeat behind his letter to the church in Colossae was, here's the life I want you to live. His heartbeat early on in chapter one, he says, hey guys, here's my prayer for you. My prayer is that you would live a life worthy of the Lord, that you would be knowledgeable of God's will, and that you would live a life that produces fruit. You would live a life that creates change in the world around you. That's his heartbeat. That's the purpose of Colossians. But what's amazing to me is that he doesn't start his letter with the do's and don'ts, which is what you may expect, right? He doesn't start his letter with, hey, all right, so now that you're a Christian, you gotta stop doing this because that's not very Christ-like. Now that you're a Christian, you definitely gotta quit doing that. Can you imagine if someone sees? He doesn't start with modifications to our behavior. Where Paul starts is with your belief. In this letter that he wrote from prison, he's writing to them to instruct them, to give them the Christian blueprint for life. And he doesn't start with what they do, but he starts with what they believe. I would recommend go and read through 1st Colossians, right? Like I'm from Kentucky, so it took me about 15 minutes., you'll do it in one, right? But read it nice and slow because it is probably the fullest expression of Jesus and his deity and supremacy. He goes through and he just talks about it. He articulates beautifully how Jesus is the son of God. He was there at the beginning. He was through him, all things are created. And for him, all things are created. I was really hoping. I was really hoping that that's where the rest of this book was gonna go. Because like that's, man, that comes from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount where he says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness because then you'll be filled. What he's saying is, hey, you're hungry. Like you're chasing all of these, and you're hoping for fulfillment. You're hoping for joy. You're hoping for a full life, but you weren't created for those things, and that's why you keep coming up. That's a great message, but that's not where Paul goes. He talks not just about Jesus and him being God, his deity, not just about Jesus being ruler over all rulers, ruler over all authorities. He's the Lord of lords and the King of kings, but he also talks about Jesus and his sufficiency. This is what he says in Colossians 1, verse 21. He says, once you were alienated and hostile in your minds, expressed in your evil actions, that's what we would call non-Christian, right? This is what he's defining right now. You were alienated and hostile in your minds, expressed in your evil actions, but now he has reconciled you by his physical body through his death to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him. If indeed you remain grounded and steadfast in the faith and are not shifted away from the hope of the gospel that you heard. Paul, in a book where he is trying to tell them what life to live, he says, first, you have to understand the gospel. He defines a clarity and the simplicity of the gospel. What Paul just told them, he says, it's his body, it's his death, it's his resurrection, and it's his presentation of you. All you do, it is your faith. In a book that is designed to tell them how to live, he says the key to all of this, the key to the life that you're hoping for is not in the life that you live, but first in the hope and faith that you have. What Paul just said was you became a Christian. You became a Christian when you put your faith in Jesus and his actions. See, what was happening at Colossae at this point in time before Christianity came to the scene, like all of the religions and all of the ideologies and everything that existed before, Christianity came in and it started to merge and blend with. People were saying, it's not just Jesus, but it's Jesus and this. For them, it was this thing called asceticism, right? Like it would be severe depravity, right? Like you would deprive yourself of something or you would even cause physical harm to your body to make up for the evil actions. It was Jesus and that. It was Jesus and this idea of philosophies built on elements not built on Christ. It was the elements of the world. It was Jesus and Jewish tradition. Jesus and, and it was this and thing, and it began to muddy the waters. And what Paul is saying to these guys, hey, listen, if you want to live this life that you're asking about, if you want to live this life that you have been called to do, you first have to understand the clarity and simplicity of the gospel, because a convoluted gospel confuses direction. Anytime that we add to the gospel, it just confuses where to go from there. It confuses what to do from there. We cannot live the life that we've been asked and called to live. The way this plays itself out today is you have this word repentance, right? Like if you've been in and around the church very long, you've heard this term before. What tends to happen? I believe wholeheartedly that reading throughout the scriptures, you see two different types of repentance. Paul just talked about one. He said, you were alienated from Christ because of what? Your thinking. And your thinking influenced your actions. Your actions expressed what you think. You have Peter, just after Christ, burial, resurrection, and then ascension. Peter stands in front of the masses and he says, you killed Jesus. It was what you did this, so repent. He wasn't saying, you can't go back and undo that. What he was saying and what Paul is saying, a repentance that defines Christianity is what you believe to be true about Jesus. What Paul says to these guys, the life that you live, first has to be a repentance of what you believe to be true about Christ. Do you believe him to be who he said he is? Do what he said he did, and we'll do what he said he would do. The other repentance happens from that. The other repentance is a lifelong journey. It's what we call sanctification. It's the tugging and pulling and molding of the Holy Spirit working on creating you, morphing your desires, pulling you from the life that you left and towards the life that Christ is calling you to. What we tend to do, both of those are necessary. One is necessary for Christianity, belief, faith. And what we have a tendency to do is take the two repentance and we just blend them together. And so it's not just Christianity is not just a faith in Jesus. It's a faith in Jesus and this. It's a faith in Jesus and this belief. And honestly, most of the time, those beliefs are, they're proximity related. Like where you grew up, they scatter all over the states. Where you grew up, it's plausibility structuring. Like what you believe is possible is largely based off what you've been exposed to. And what happens is we elevate the non-essentials to the status of gospel. And Paul says you will never live the life you've been designed to live if we do that. Because it has you working from the wrong position. If we don't understand the gospel for what the gospel is, it has you working for a position with Christ instead of from a position with Christ. It has you working with the effort to earn Jesus instead of walking in life in Christ. Paul actually uses a word that he says, it holds you captive. Let me read for you in chapter two. I'm going to start in verse four, and then we'll pick it up on screen in verse six. I'm saying this so that no one will deceive you with arguments that sound reasonable. For I may be absent in body, but I'm with you in spirit, rejoicing to see how well ordered you are and the strength of your faith in Christ. So then, just as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live in him, being rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught and overflowing with gratitude. Here's the warning. Be careful that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit based on human tradition, based on elements of the world rather than Christ. This word captive is a strong word. It's saying there's a restriction from where you want to be. Like we have the desire to move and live and go and do this, except absorbing these beliefs, lifting things up, trying to earn what has been freely given. It holds you captive. You know this, like nothing, nothing good is gonna come from captivity. Nothing good is going to come from presenting non-essentials as gospel. Like we could all sit down, right? We could have a cup of coffee and we've all probably got our story. Maybe you yourself or you know someone who has been involved and hurt by legalism. Because what happens with these beliefs is if you don't adhere to them, if we don't fall into them, it's, you're wayward. You've lost, he's kind of lost sight of what's good. He's not quite where he needs to be. And suddenly, because of not something that Jesus defined, it's just these ideas that have blended. And you're not good enough anymore. Some of you know this. I grew up in the church. My father was a pastor. And I can remember one week in particular. I don't quite remember how old I was. Maybe 10, 11 years old, something like that. But it was after worship, we were all sitting down, and after my dad had got up to preach, maybe two minutes within his message, he looked right back at me. I remember I was sitting, it was to his left. It would have been like you, right there. That's where I was sitting. I remember it, because he said, hey, Aaron, I need you to stand up and go home. Now, I got in trouble when I was a kid. I never knew I got in that much trouble. He stopped church to say, hey, listen, you got a whooping coming. That's what was going through my mind. I got whoopings as a kid. That's how I'm such a productive member of society. But I remember I was sitting in church and he stopped the service and said, Aaron, I need you to stand up and I need you to go home. And the entire trip, I'm like, oh, no. And you start cycling through all the things. Like, what'd I do? Well, I did that. Did he know that I did that? Like all of these things start happening, right? But what I came to find out later, he sheltered and guarded me well from that. What I come to find out, what I can remember now is as I stood up, there was another guy who was standing up before me. And what he was doing is he was parroting and mocking my father. Every sentence, he would echo it like a toddler who's spoiled and not getting what they want. He was standing in church. My dad knew something was about to happen. And what he came to tell me later, it was shortly after that, there was a family, probably about four to five families, that circled around my father, almost like a schoolyard fight. And they were trying to push him out of the church, trying to remove him from any type of leadership. They're claiming just heretic, claiming non-Christian, claiming all of these different things, simply because he was going to allow someone who had been divorced and remarried to become members of the church. We've all experienced where you know somebody, maybe you yourself. Like we don't, people don't walk away from the church because of what they see in Jesus. People walk away from the church because of what they see in people who claim Jesus. And it creates confusion. It creates hostility. It creates an uphill battle of worthiness that we will never, ever reach. And Paul says, don't let somebody take you captive. Don't let someone convince you that Jesus isn't enough. You will and you should. I'm gonna say this again. Please hear me. You will and you should live a different life. After receiving Christ, you will and you should live differently than you did before, but it's in response to Jesus, not to earn Jesus. And if we do not understand that, if we live with an effort, you can't focus on what Jesus has asked us to focus on because I'm trying to be good enough. I'm trying to earn. I'm trying all of this other stuff. And listen, Grace, I got to tell you, that is not something I've seen with you. Just to be very honest and very transparent, our last year here for my wife and myself has been such a breath of fresh air, of people who love because they love. They love because of what Jesus has done in their world. There's no expectation of anything. I mean, don't be a jerk, but like still, but even like grace, I do not think, I do not think that Paul would look at you and say, hey, stop. I don't think he would do that. But I do think he would look at you and say, hey, you don't have to earn anything. You are God's child. You are holy and dearly loved. You are worthy, not because of your actions, but because of your faith in Jesus' actions. So live in the freedom and joy that Jesus offers. Live in light of the gospel you have put your faith in. Live a life that Jesus has asked you to live without the weight of earning. That's the place where you can walk into who God has asked us to be. It's fascinating to me. It's fascinating that over half of his letter, like he didn't put numbers like chapters and stuff like that, but it's sectioned out into four different chapters, two chapters. In a letter where he's trying to tell you how to live your life, he says, first, understand your belief. And then he says, now go and do this. Chapter three. Therefore, as God's chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion. I don't know if you are reading through your Bible or like you're thumbing through or whatever, but if you are, underline that word put on, right? If you're not just writing on the person's neck in front of you, like you need to remember that. Like put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. If anyone has a grievance against another, just as the Lord has forgiven you. And I'll read verse 14. I don't think it's up there. Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity, and let the peace of Christ to which you were called in one body rule your hearts. I love that word put on. Paul talks about this often in multiple letters. He says it in Romans. He says it in Corinthians a couple of times. He says it to the church at Ephesus. He uses this phrase, put on, which put on simply means to clothe yourselves. I love that. When that happened, it changed everything. When I realized he was saying clothe yourselves, because that's something we all understand, right? The intentionality that goes into deciding what it it is you're gonna wear. Some of us clearly think about it more than others, but like the intentionality, every day we wake up and we what? We clothe ourselves. There's laws that make you do this, right? Like we clothe ourselves. You go and you decide this. This is what I want to be wearing when people see me in the world. And he says, clothe yourselves with compassion, gentleness, humility, patience, and kindness. This is what Paul says. He says, live a life that reflects the life you placed your faith in. This is what he just described. This sounds remarkably close to what Jesus said, right? He says, it's this way that people are gonna know that you're my disciples. Hey, when you live this life, people are gonna identify you with me by the way you love one another. In a world where commandments mean everything, in a world and in a season of life where they needed the step-by-step direction, Jesus said, hey, I give you one, one command, one thing to do. This is what I want you to do. This is how I want you to follow me. Love others. What Paul tells us is that in order to love others the way that Jesus has called us to love people, you first have to understand fully how loved you are and that you have nothing to earn. And living a life of that love, it changes things. It creates and produces fruit. I have seen the church. Legalism hurt people. I have seen the effects of terrible theology. My entire family split from the church. My parents got divorced when I was maybe 15, 16 years old. And of course, how can you go back to the very place that tried to get you removed from the very thing you just did? Everyone. Gone. I have also seen, you have also seen, a lot of you are here today and consistently coming back to grace because you have seen what a life in a church that reflects the love of a Savior does to a person's heart. It pulls you in. It was the love of our Savior that drew you in. And Jesus said, hey guys, here's what I need you to do. Do you want to change the world? Draw them in with love. And this, you guys are all smart people, but I know for me, this made such a difference. Just the context of which Paul is talking about right now. He says, clothe yourselves with compassion. Compassion is not just seeing someone and having a sadness about their lot in life, but it's seeing someone and you feel such a hurt, like your insides turn and you're not okay with it. So you feel this and it moves you into action. Compassion. Clothe yourselves with kindness. Kindness is simply lending someone else your strength. You see someone dealing with something, I lend them a part of me to aid them. Humility. Humility doesn't necessarily mean thinking less of yourself. I think in this context, it means thinking more of others, not in terms of value, not in terms of how awesome they are at stuff. Maybe we can say it like this, thinking of yourself less. Like we don't see helping someone and being there for someone as beneath us. We think more of them and we move to help. We move to serve. We move to love. And then gentleness. Gentleness is the difference of catching a softball and a bubble. It's like you have the grip and you have the strength and you have the capacity to catch a softball. You can grip it and it won't fall, but you understand that in some situations, the gentleness of catching a bubble is what's needed for people. Patience is the tricky one. Because patience kind of, the way we think about it, the way I think about patience is I'm sitting there, okay, come on, let's go. Just don't cuss. Just don't cuss. That's not patience. Patience means moving at someone else's pace. And not sitting and waiting. Hey, come on, let's go. Walking with. Jesus. Paul. Jesus said, do you want to change the world around you? Clothe yourselves. How different would your world look? How different would your day-to-day look if every day you got up, you went in your closet, you got dressed, and maybe you have to do what me and Jeff do, right? Like you go and check with your wife if you match, and you just go back and put on whatever they tell you to, right? Like so maybe you go through all of that. You intentionally decide what you wear. You get ready to walk out your door, and you stop at your mirror right before you walk out the front. You look at it, and you say, okay, today, when people see me, they're going to see compassion. They're going to see someone who's not okay with seeing someone hurt. When they see me, they're going to see someone who's not above stepping in and helping out. When they see me, they're going to see someone who is not angry at consistently waiting, but walking along with. Listen, please, how different would your world look if every day you picked one and you clothed yourself? When people see you, they identify you as compassionate. Jot it down, right? Like, whatever it may, put your Bible, jot it down somewhere. Put it on something you have to look at every single day. Gentleness, kindness, compassion, patience. What is it that would change? How different, let's just not, let's take it beyond us right now. How different would the world perceive Christianity if people who claim Jesus reflected him? How different would your world look? How different could our world look if we live the life that Jesus has asked us to live? And intentionally, wear compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience, and humility. Let's pray. God, thank you. Thank you so much, Lord, for your, well, compassion, gentleness, kindness, humility, and patience with us. God, I thank you for the writing of Paul that just, it frees us and allows us to step into the joy and freedom that we have in you, Jesus. And I ask, Lord, that you would just guard and protect our hearts and that you would help us to daily choose to wear something about who you are. That we would be intentional, Lord, about living a life that is a reflection of you. God, I think this is what it means when it says to trust you with our souls, but also trust you with our life. We're choosing to live a life that we are rested secure in because of who you are and asking you to do the same thing in the world around us, God. Help us to be a reflection of the life you have created us to live. Help us to be a reflection of the life that you lived because we do not just trust what you can give us. We trust who you are, Lord, to the point of we will put all of our faith in you and we will adopt your lifestyle as our own. Thank you, in Jesus' name. Amen.