Sermons tagged with Perspective

All right, guys. Good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and I'm so grateful that you've joined us on this October Sunday. I'm hopeful that we don't have to hear that noise again, but who knows? Who knows? Some of you may have noticed that I'm wearing Georgia Tech colors for no particular reason. I just thought I'd wear them today. But speaking of suffering, speaking of UNC football, today's message is about suffering, so it kind of works out, those of you who stayed up late to get your dreams crushed last night. This morning, we're talking about Great Is Thy Faithfulness. When we planned the series, I knew that I wanted to take at least one week and talk about a hymn. Because hymns are, if you ask me like what songs are you listening to, what Christian worship are you listening to, I have a playlist called Acoustic Hymns on Spotify, and I listen to that probably more than anything. I just like hymns, and so I knew that one of the sermons was going to be focused on a hymn, but I didn't know which one, and so I did what I often do when I don't know what to preach about or talk about. I ask Jen what she thinks. Jen's my wife. She's not just a lady that I ask questions to, and I asked her what I should do, and she immediately said, Great is Thy Faithfulness. We love Great is Thy Faithfulness. It's one of our favorite songs. Jen even walked down the aisle to that in our wedding. And so I dove into the song Great is Thy Faithfulness a few weeks ago to prepare for this morning. And what I was not expecting to find was that this is really a song about grief. It's a song to be sung in the midst of grief. And so this morning is necessarily about pain and suffering and struggle and grief. And we've all walked through those seasons. Some of y'all know our story well enough to know that 2019, early 2019 to the end of 2020, were some hard years for Jen and I. In early 2019, her dad John was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he fought the good fight for almost two years and died in the last days of 2020. And that was probably the first time that we moved through that kind of profound grief at loss. And it really shapes you when you walk that path. In a lot of ways, there's my life before we walked that and life after. And the perspectives are very different. And one of the things that I learned in that season of suffering and loss and grief was, and I know that this is, I'm just getting right to it. I know it. I know this is heavy. I know this is even grim, but it's just true. And this is the way that my mind works. Maybe that's why one of my favorite books in the Bible is Ecclesiastes. But as we were walking with John on his journey to eternity, it occurred to me somewhere in there that best case scenario in life, you walk with your parents into death. When you are born, the best possible outcome for that relationship with your parents is to accompany them as they transition into eternity. That's the best possible outcome. It's a path we all have to walk. In fact, if we don't walk that path, holding our parents' hands as they fade away, if we don't walk that path, it's because something more sad than that happened, right? They lost you. You were estranged. It was tragic and sudden when they passed. I know that's dark and I know that that's heavy, but I think it's a helpful reality to understand that when you are born, hopefully to loving parents, that the best case scenario for that relationship is for you to one day hold their hand as they pass into eternity. If you have walked that path, you know what an incredible honor it is. I was talking with somebody this week who lost their brother, and he was able to sit with him for the last two weeks while he faded. And I just said to him, it's a unique privilege in life to be invited into that sacred space, isn't it? And he said, yes, very much. So I would say, if you are walking that path, if you have walked it, when one day you find yourself walking it, I know that it is not much solace, but consider yourself blessed. It's a blessing from God to walk with a parent, to walk with a loved one in that way. We don't all have that opportunity. But if that's the best case scenario, what that means is life is going to be filled with strife. Life is going to be filled with grief. I make the comment sometimes that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy for their whole life. No one does. Something sad will happen. Grieving, suffering, loss is a ubiquitous part of the human experience. Just this last week, within the last week, I went to the funeral of a 40-year-old friend of mine who suddenly passed away. I told you guys about this last week. She has two kids, middle school and elementary school. It's tragic. On Wednesday, I drove to Asheboro and I did the funeral for a man that went to my church in Atlanta who moved up here. And I sat with his kids. He has kids are twins they're both 53 and I talked with his daughter very successful woman she was really struggling and I was talking to her and I just mentioned to her that she had walked through this before and I was sorry that but she knew this path because she had lost her mom and she said said, well, this one, she said, yeah, but this one feels different because I had my dad at that one and I don't have parents anymore. It's hard. I told you I was on the phone yesterday with somebody from our church who just lost their brother. As soon as I hung up that phone call, I called somebody else in our church whose dad just started in hospice care. There is a reality in this life of pain and suffering. And in light of the ubiquity of that human suffering, we can be grateful for a Bible that includes the book of Lamentations. In light of the ubiquity of human suffering and grief and tragedy and loss, we can be grateful for a Bible that includes the book of Lamentations. Now, the book of Lamentations is not a popular one, okay? If you have a Bible, if you were faithful and you brought your Bible this morning, I'm so glad that you did. If you don't have a Bible, you can get one in the seat back in front of you. Turn to Lamentations for me, and you'll be able to look at some of these things as we look at them here in a few minutes. It's five chapters, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations. If you get to Ezekiel, you've gone too far. If you can't find it after a few minutes, use your table of contents or hand it to the person next to you who's a better Christian. The book of Lamentations is a collection of five poems that are laments. And a lament is an expression of anguish or grief. It is an expression of deep sorrow. And Lamentations is not the only place where these laments make an appearance. I told you last week as we were talking about Psalms that there's several different categories of Psalms. And one of the categories is Psalms of Lamentations, Psalmsms of lament. We find poems of lament in Job. We find them in Isaiah. And so all through the Bible, we have these poems and these songs and these writings on laments, on deep anguish and deep grief. And I am grateful for a Bible that has those. I'm grateful for a Bible that does not hide from that part of the human experience. We do not serve a God that seeks to whitewash those things and push those off to the fringes and off to the side while we're happy and joyful over here. And in a lot of ways, I'll talk about towards the end, pain and grief and loss can sometimes seek to drive a wedge between us and God and push us further away from God. And so it would seem to his benefit to kind of cast aside, put pain in the shadows so that we don't acknowledge it. But God, in his goodness and in his wisdom and in his word, has chosen to bring pain front and center and show it to us over and over and over again and even show how the saints have responded to it. So we do not have to be afraid of pain or grief and we don't have to pretend like it doesn't exist. We don't have to whitewash it. And because God doesn't flinch about including pain and grief and the reality of suffering in his word, then we don't have to flinch about including it in our church. The church should not be a place where we take people who are grieving and who are hurting and who are suffering loss and put them to the side and ask them to quietly get over it until they can join our happy, joyful circle again. That's not how church works. That's not how the Bible works. That's not how God works. So that's not how we should work. It is okay and right and good to bring our pain and our grief into the middle of the fellowship and say, this is what I'm doing. This is what was happening to me. And this is how I'm suffering. We should do that. But I'm grateful for a God, for his word that does not hide from the reality of suffering and loss. Because everyone in here, everyone in here over the age of 30 has a place they can go. If I were to ask you what was your hardest time, you have a place where you can go. You have something that you encountered that was sad, that was hard, that challenged your faith. And maybe it was so profound that you even mark your life by it. There was me before that and me after that. And if you are one of the lucky few who says, you know, I really haven't known that season, I'm so happy for you. You will know it. You will. It's a reality of life. We will walk through times of profound suffering and grief. And the Bible doesn't flinch about that. And I have committed to you that I will preach about that reality just as often as it comes up in Scripture. Because shame on us if we perpetuate this idea of faith that tells us if we'll just pray hard enough and love hard enough and be faithful enough that we will dodge the raindrops of tragedy, that God will put a protective shield over the ones he loves the most who are the most faithful. That is not in the Bible. That is not in that situation too. And so God includes it in his scripture. And in doing that, I believe that poems of lament imbue human suffering with a sacred dignity. I believe that these poems of lament, that finding deep anguish and grief in scripture, imbues our suffering that we walk through with a sort of sacred dignity. And I don't really know how best to explain it except to say that I'm fond of reminding myself and reminding you guys when I can that we all stand on shoulders. You are who you are, for better or worse, because of the shoulders you stand on. Because of your mom and your dad and your grandparents. Because of the people who were around you when you were being formed, because of the successes or failures that came before you. You stand on those shoulders. I've reminded us as a church, we stand on spiritual shoulders. We do not, as Grace Raleigh, float out in the ether untethered to church history. No, we are a part of church history. We are carrying the torch for our generation, but we are standing on shoulders that go back thousands of years. We stand on shoulders of faith. And in suffering, I think it's important to acknowledge through scripture that we stand on suffering shoulders as well. The generations who have come before us, they know suffering. They know hardship. And the reality of it is, whether we like to admit it or not, we're the lucky ones. Our generations experience far less suffering than their generations. It was not lost on me, and even in other countries. It wasn't lost on me last week as I was at the funeral for Jodi, that we're in a room, there's 750 people in there because this tragic thing happened. This mom died. And 750 people stopped their Saturday and went to a room and celebrated her life and worshiped God together. While on the other side of the globe, there's Palestinian and Jewish moms dying who are not getting services. They don't have time to stop and bring 750 people in and celebrate that life. Life just marches on. And so, comparatively speaking, we are the lucky ones. But just like getting to walk with your parents in their final hours doesn't make those final hours not sad, acknowledging that we are comparatively lucky doesn't make our hurt hurt less, which is why I think the song Great Is Thy Faithfulness can be one of hope. It can be a profound anthem for us during pain. But to understand Great Is Thy Faithfulness, we've really got to understand the book of Lamentations. So you've got it there open in front of you, and I don't expect you to look at this right now, but it's five chapters. Chapters one and two and three and four are acrostic poems. They're all 22 verses. Each verse starts with a different Hebrew letter, obviously in the Hebrew, not in the English that we are looking at or whatever language you read your Bible in. And then chapter three is a little bit different formulaically than the others. But all five chapters are poems and all five chapters are poems of grief and suffering and strife. If you've ever tried to read through Lamentations, I did, sat down, read it cover to cover before I started to write the sermon on it. It's a hard book to read. It is not a hopeful book. It is not, besides what I'm going to show you, besides this one little nook right in the middle, it is not a faith-filled book. It is a book of despair. And so I wanted to acquaint you with kind of the sense of the book of Leviticus so we can understand the deep anguish that the author is talking about. It's attributed to Jeremiah historically, but recent scholarship calls that into question. But we're going to say Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations. Look with me at chapter 2, verses 11 and 12. These are hard verses, but I want you to see the kind of pain that he's talking about here. as they faint like a wounded man in the streets of the city as their life is poured out on their mother's bosom. I cannot think of anything more profoundly sad than that. That a mom clutching her small child as that child's life is poured out on her chest. And I do not think that was a figurative verse, because the book of Lamentations is written in a response and reaction to the downfall of Jerusalem being conquered by the Babylonians and the Jewish people being carried off into slavery. The book of Lamentations is written while the smoke rises from the ashes of Jerusalem in the background and slavery awaits in the foreground. So please understand that to the Jewish mind, to this person, to Jeremiah, and to those who would read it, the anguish they are expressing is because of actual grief that they are seeing. Women and children dying in the streets is what they are seeing as the city is conquered. But it's not just that that they are grieving. This also is a grieving of a loss of a promise from God because God promised to care for his people and God promised to look out for them. He promised to protect them. And more than anything, he promised them that land, the land that they were on. And then God allows a foreign army to come in to destroy his city, the crown jewel of Israel, to lay waste Jerusalem and the temple and take his children that are claimants of his promise and march them into slavery in a land where they don't belong. Back pretty close to where Abraham came from originally. So when they are marching, it is not just the sights that they have seen that have broken their hearts. It's not just the ones that they have loved and lost that have broken their hearts. It's not just the future that they face that's breaking their heart, but it's also the thought, the reality to them that their God had failed them. Their God had broken his promise. Either he was unfaithful or he was weak. But their hopes had been dashed. It's with that that Jeremiah writes these laments. This verse in particular struck me about women and children in the streets as their city was destroyed around them. I wrote this sermon in the days following the original Hamas attacks a couple of weeks ago. And I didn't have to imagine what it would look like to see what Jeremiah was writing about. Because all I had to do was turn on my TV. And you see horrific pain, horrific violence, and horrific evil. I watched a dad celebrate when he found out that his eight-year-old daughter was dead rather than captured because being captured was worse than being killed. That's sad. And my heart breaks for not just the Jewish people who have lost their lives, but for all the Israelis. It's multicultural that have suffered needlessly for this. And my heart breaks for the Palestinians who are caught in the middle of a war that they did not choose to wage. And I don't know the answers there. I don't know the right thing to do. The only thing I know to do is to pray for them. Don't turn our eyes from it and pretend like it's not happening. To be grateful that we don't live in a place where we have to suffer in that way. I've thought over and over and over again what I would do with my young family if I was unlucky enough to be born in Palestine. How do you protect them? And the thought that really struck me as I was reflecting on that and reading these verses is that there truly is nothing new under the sun. Jeremiah wrote these words 2,500 years ago. And here we are right back in the same place. Women and children are dying in the streets of Israel. The suffering until Jesus comes back is unavoidable. And then you flip to the end of Lamentations. The very last verses. This is the time to finish on a high note and encourage God's people. Isn't it, Jeremiah? Not to him. He finishes it this way. I sure do like the sound of pages turning in here. That's good. Verse 21 and 22. Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored. Renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and you remain exceedingly angry with us. The end. That's the book. It ends with a dot, dot, dot. God, please restore us. Please take us back. Please make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Please, God. Unless you're just going to forget us. That's it. There's no resolution there. Which is why I think that these verses in chapter 3 are remarkably powerful verses. These verses are the only hopeful, optimistic verses in the whole book of Lamentations, and we find them in the dead center. And if you know your hymns, these verses are going to sound really familiar. Look with me at chapter 3 and listen to these words. Verse 21. I love the way he starts this verse off with that phrase, but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. This I call to mind, but therefore I have hope. In the midst of all the suffering he's written, he's seen the ashes of Jerusalem are fading behind him as he's led into slavery. He has seen the very worst of human suffering. He has finished the book with uncertainty, but in the middle of it, almost like a nail being driven into a wall with a curtain, just letting it drape there, holding up the last tendrils of faith is this declaration of hope in the middle of it. But this I bring to mind and it gives me hope. Great is your faithfulness. Your mercies are new every morning. You provide for me and I believe in you and I hope in you, God, because I know that you are good. Despite everything that I've seen, despite everything that's happened, despite all the questions that I cannot answer, I know that you are good. And see, I always thought that Great is Thy Faithfulness was a jubilant song. It was to be sung in seasons of plenty. It was to be sung when we realize we're blessed. Great is your faithfulness, O God, my Father. All I've needed, your hand has provided. I have all that I need. Morning by morning, new mercies I see. I thought it was a song to be sung in the midst of plenty. But it's actually a song to be declared in the midst of grief. Which is interesting to me that Jen chose it. We're not too far off. As the song to walk down the aisle, maybe she knew something that I didn't about the years ahead. But make no mistake about it, and I love this. Great is thy faithfulness is an anthem of defiance. You understand? The song, great is thy faithfulness, is an anthem of defiance. And here's what I mean by defiance. Because when you've walked through grief and pain and hurt, you know something to be true. Those things have whispered in your ears. When you are hurting, when you are suffering, when your life is marked by sorrow, that pain whispers in your ear. The same thing it was whispering to the ears of the Hebrew people as they marched away from the ashes of Jerusalem. That pain will whisper in your ear, your God is not big enough. Your God has forgotten you. Your faith has failed you. Your faith is not serving you. Your God is too weak. He's too apathetic. Or your faith is weak. or this is your fault, that pain and grief will begin to drive a wedge between you and God. It will whisper things when you're trying to fall asleep that your faith has failed you and your God has failed you. And if you let it linger long enough, it will work to convince you to walk away from your God. And when you go to the place you went when I talked about your darkest hour, we both know we heard those voices then. We both know we hear them sometimes now. We know people who have let those voices win and have walked away from faith because the pain was too great. So it is those voices that this anthem is defying. Jeremiah was hearing those voices as he wrote Lamentations, and yet in the middle of it, nail in the wall, he hangs his hope. Great is your faithfulness, he declares it, despite everything going on, despite the fact that, God, you could have stopped that and you didn't. God, you made us a promise and it feels broken. Lord, I don't understand how these things can be happening to these people. It doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem fair. How can you possibly watch the news and see what's happening in Israel and not be moved? How can you possibly watch the news and see what happened in Maine this week and not be moved and not wonder and not ask those questions that we all ask in the midst of pain. God, why are you letting this happen? And I don't understand. And I can't explain why. And I don't know what to tell my kids. And my faith feels weak. But in the midst of that dismay, I choose to sing with Jeremiah and all the saints, great is your faithfulness. God, I don't understand this, but I know you're good. Great is your faithfulness. God, I don't have enough to get through today, but I know you're going to give me the strength. I love that line, strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, even in the darkest of times. So from now on, for the rest of your life, when you hear the song, great is thy faithfulness, I want your mind to rush to Lamentations chapter three. I want you to see it holding up the tendril of hope and faith and our creator and uncertain times and things we don't understand. It's an actual choice to choose faith in those moments and declare to God, I don't understand it, but great is your faithfulness. And it's an anthem of defiance because when we choose to sing it in the midst of pain, we are telling those voices of pain and grief and fear. Not today. You will not rob me of my faith today. This pain will not take my faith from me. And it will not take it from me because I know who my Jesus is. And I love him I trust him and I know he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And I don't see how, and I don't see why, and I don't know when, but one day he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And so today this pain will not take my faith from me because great is his faithfulness. And I will declare it even when I don't feel it. So in a minute, we're going to sing. And when we do, let this be an anthem. If you're walking through pain right now, sing it. Defy it. Declare it. When you hear it in the future, sing it as an anthem that my faith will not be shaken by the circumstances that I'm walking through. But I know that for me, for the rest of my life, whenever I hear great is thy faithfulness, I will remember it as an anthem of defiance that in the midst of the greatest suffering and the greatest trials, we stand up and we choose to sing, God, I don't understand, but I know you are good and great is your faithfulness. Let's pray. Father, your faithfulness is steadfast. You have never broken a promise. You have never not done what you said you were going to do. There's so much that we don't understand, God. There's so much in life at times that seeks to rob our faith from us. And so, God, we pray that you would give us strength for today. Continue to give us hope for tomorrow. That we would declare this as an anthem against the evil one who would seek to tear down our faith. Lord, if there are those here who are listening, who don't feel like your faithfulness is really great right now. Would you give them the strength to sing? Would you give them the strength to declare? Would you give them the strength to defy today? God, we thank you for being good. Thank you for loving us. We thank you for being faithful to us. Help us see it more and more. 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.

Good morning, and happy pumpkin spice latte season. It is truly the most wonderful time of the year. All the smells, all the fragrance. I'm even wearing my fall colors today. Maybe, I don't know. My wife was asleep when I left, so there's a very good possibility I don't match right now and have no clue. But I'm so glad that you decided to join us today. My name is Aaron, and I get to serve as the worship pastor out here, and I'm so excited to share with you, honestly, something that's been on my heart for the last couple of years. I think around the end of 2020, this really started to just burden me a little bit. And to kind of set up and get our mind going in the right direction, have you ever considered how to navigate the tension of opposing desires within yourself, right? Like, have you ever considered how to navigate a pull in a couple of different directions, specifically around this topic today of compassion? Because I don't think it's possible for anyone to really say, oh, you know what? I'm nailing the compassion game. I have the perfect amount of compassion, unless you don't like dogs. Then, clearly, you today is for you very specifically. Like, no one would say that. If you are, like, you would probably be the person who tries to convince me that, like, the devil didn't get to make cats. That's just not true. I'm joking. My goodness, it got serious. Like he doesn't like cats. It's better than not liking puppies, okay? That's a, no, like all of us would agree. I want to be a more compassionate person. I want to be a person who is kind. I want to be a person that whenever people see me, they see someone who loves well, who they can come to and will understand what it is that will meet the needs of the people who they love. All of us would want to do that. Even if you are a compassionate person, what that's going to do is push you further into compassion and say, you know what, I really could be a little bit more compassionate. And the tension that we feel is today, one of the things that our world really reiterates is this self-focused lifestyle, right? Like self-care, self-love, self-appreciation, self-forgiveness, self... And listen, that's not bad. I love all of those things. I think there's a time and place for all of... I had a membership at one point to a place on Falls. It's called the Float Spa Therapy. Have you ever heard of that? Me either, until I saw it, and I found out that what they do is they put you in a room, stick you in a dark bubble, and you float in salt water. I cannot tell you if it is either a spa or therapy, but I can tell you, you don't have to see the world for an hour, and it is wonderful, right? Like all of this idea, just this stuff, I don't do that anymore because I realized there's other ways to do that. But like there's this pull towards self, and that's a good thing. That's not bad until we become so focused on self-care. We become so focused on self-love that the people around us, the people that God has placed in our life for us to love well, well, they become the problem. They become a challenge. They become a hurdle in my route to taking care of me. And there's the tension. It's good to love yourself well, but we can't forget what Paul said to the church at Philippians. In Philippians 2, he said, do this, do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, consider yourselves more important than others. I'm sorry, consider others more important than yourselves. So I'm going to go back and start over because really what I want to talk about today, nobody else matters. It's all about you, right? So no, consider others more important. Reading's tough. So consider others as more important than yourselves. Next slide. Everyone should not look to his own interest, but rather to the interests of others. And that's the tension that we feel, that we want to live a life that cares for people. But what do you do when people become the problem? When people get in the way? And this is especially true if you're a Christian, right? Not because you're better than anyone else, not because you think you're better than anyone else, or because you're trying to be better than anyone else, but it's because of the example set by Jesus, by the guy who we've devoted our lives to, by the guy who we've said we want to try to become more and more like him. Jesus lived a life that was marked by compassion. I don't remember who's, I think maybe Andy Stanley said this. I can't quite remember. It sounds like something he would say. He said that people who were nothing like Jesus actually liked Jesus. And it's because he lived this life that they knew that he cared for them. It didn't matter their socioeconomic status. It didn't matter their religious beliefs, their political affiliation. It didn't matter if they did the right thing or the wrong thing. It didn't matter what the case was. There was even laws, religious laws set into place that would prevent you from reaching certain people. In Jesus, it didn't matter. Everyone felt cared for. Everyone felt loved. And if you're a Christian, the reason why you feel this tension so strong is because the Holy Spirit is inside prompting you, pushing you, urging you toward this Jesus type of compassion. So what do you do in those moments? Like, what do you do when you're being pulled in a couple of different directions? Like, one of the most remarkable moments that you can see about in Jesus, because he was a real man. He was fully God, but he was also fully man with real emotions, the same emotions that you and I feel, with the same temptations that you and I have. And one of the most remarkable examples that I could have read about with Jesus, we'll read about today in Mark 6. If you've been around the church very long at all, you've heard this story before. It's the story when Jesus fed the 5,000, the text says 5,000 men, but more likely it was 15,000, including women or children. But as I was studying for this, I noticed something in this text that I believe it changes everything. And it shows us in that moment, in that tension, it's what Jesus does to lift the value of others, to care for their needs. To kind of set up the scene, we're at about the third year of Jesus's ministry. He's been going pretty nonstop, him and his disciples, day after day. There's been a few breaks in between, but the mental and physical exhaustion had to be there, had to be present. And his disciples just got back from a ministry trip. And so what he said to them is, hey guys, let's go and let's rest for a while. Not just was he dealing with the mental and physical exhaustion, but he had also just learned about the death of his cousin, John the Baptist. And it wasn't just any death. He was murdered because of a girl's birthday wish. How awkward of a party would that be, right? Like blow out the candles, what you want? That guy. But that's what happened. And so we've dealt with grief before, but that's, can we just admit that's a different level of grief? And so Jesus is dealing with the murder of his cousin. And not only that, but his disciples, a lot of them had followed John the Baptist in the past. They all loved him. They were mentally and physically exhausted, and they were certainly grieving. And Jesus told his disciples, let's get away for a little bit. Let's just go. Let's rest, and we'll get back to work. But while they were en route, people saw where they were headed. And this is what happened. In Mark 6, verse 32, it says this. So they went away, that's Jesus and their disciples. So they went away in the boat by themselves to a remote place, but many saw them leaving and recognized them. They ran on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. When he went to shore, he saw a large crowd. Let me ask real quick, like, how would you respond in that moment? Right? Like, so Jesus, certainly grieving, likely exhausted, he just wants to get away for a little bit. And he has every right to do so. How would you respond? I know what I would say, but he's Jesus. He can't say stuff like that, right? I bet Peter right next to him said it though. Like, what would you do? So something I'm very aware of in my life that I'm trying to work on. On Sunday mornings, man, I can have a tendency to come across more rude than I am, right? It's because I'm focused. Like I'm focused on the Sunday morning, focused on worship. I'm trying to make sure all the volunteers have everything they need, and just really kind of focused on leading worship well. And sometimes I'm just unaware of people. And my sister came down for a visit a few years ago, and I remember she visited church on Sunday and went to my wife. She said, hey, did I make Aaron mad at me? Is he okay? And she's like, no, no, no, no. No, it's just Sunday morning. Just come back in the afternoon, which that wasn't true because I'm even more ferocious about my nap than Sunday afternoon. I'm like a toddler when it comes to nap time, right? Like Sunday morning, I'm just oblivious and unaware of people. Sunday afternoon, I will fight you if you interrupt Sunday. Like fall, best season. Sunday afternoon, best nap time, right? And so it's just one of those things. I'm unaware of people. And I'm talking about a Sunday morning stress, right? Very nominal, right? But Jesus, in this moment, he had every right to say, hey, guys, I just need a second. Like this is one of those head down moments like, okay, let me try to figure this out. Can I have just a couple of minutes, guys? Hey, just a couple of days. Hey, listen, I know you guys heard about what's happening to John. I know you need something from me. If I can have just a few minutes, we'll be back around through time. Like there's, he's certainly right to do that. But in this moment, he sees something different. He sees something that causes a different type of reaction. In a moment when Jesus is sitting in that tension, I need to take a moment for me. I need to take a moment for my guys. These people need something from me. He's face to face with the people he has been placed here to love well. And he sees something that gives him a different reaction. In verse 34, it says this. When he went ashore, he saw a large crowd and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Then he began to teach them many things. They were like, Jesus, in a moment when he had every right to say, guys, just time out. Need a couple of days. He saw their from their perspective, and it moved him with compassion. Jesus looked at them and felt the pain that they were feeling because he saw life through their lens. Sharing in their perspective caused Jesus to share in their pain. That's what the word perspective, or I'm sorry, that's the word compassion means. It means to suffer with, to pain with, to feel the pain of someone. And it is not possible, it is not possible to feel the pain of someone else while viewing their circumstances through your perspective. Jesus stops. He sees life from their lens and it burdens his heart. I love the word that Mark uses here for the word compassion. It's only used of Jesus throughout the New Testament, but it refers to the internal organs, which was believed to be the seat of the emotions. And so what Mark says here is he saw these guys, and there was such a deep hurt. There was such a longing for them. He shared their passion, and he moved into action. If we can learn to see life through the lens of other people, it will soften your heart towards their circumstances. And circumstances doesn't just mean feeding the hungry. It doesn't just mean giving to the poor. Compassion changes the way you approach things. It changes the way you approach your husband. It changes the way you approach your wife. Compassion restrains your anger. Compassion offers forgiveness. Compassion gives gentleness. Compassion seeks mercy and understanding and walks with people. If we can learn to view life through the lens of other people, what we'll start to see happening is we don't see people as someone we have to walk around. We see people as someone we have to walk with because we share in their pain. Is there someone in your life that maybe we need to seek their perspective a little bit? Let's just admit Jesus had a bit of an advantage there, right? Like Jesus understands people the way, like you have never met someone new for the very first time and told them exactly where they were and what they were thinking two hours before, at least not without a restraining order soon following that, right? Jesus Jesus has an advantage. Like, we've got to go the old-fashioned way. We have to ask questions. We have to seek. We have to consider. Like, how much would it change the way you're feeling in a moment if we were to think about something through someone else's lens? I tried to think about a clever illustration here just to kind of illustrate this point. I thought of several, none of which I'm going to use. Because you've lived this illustration. Like every person in here, at some point in time, has said some variation of this sentence. If they only understood, if they only saw, what just happened? If they could only see how I'm feeling, if they only understood how I was thinking, if they only understood what kind of day I had at work, they would not approach me like, if they only saw this, then they wouldn't feel that like we have all at some point in time realized that if someone else could see through our perspective, it would change the way that they're approaching us. It would change the anger in the situation. It would change everything. It would offer compassion that leads to the things that we crave the most. Reconciliation, hope, peace, love. Because Jesus felt such a pain that it moved him into action. I love what St. Augustine said here. He says, what is compassion but a kind of fellow feeling in our hearts for another's misery which compels us to come to his help by every means in our power? Compassion, especially the compassion that we see in Jesus, is never just a feeling by itself. It's such an understanding and such a sharing of the pain that it moves us. Compassion, Christ-like compassion, is both a feeling and the appropriate action. The goal of compassion isn't to find agreeance that someone's right and someone's wrong, that they need this, and I just do whatever anybody wants me to do. That's not the goal of compassion. The goal of compassion is understanding. The goal of compassion is to sympathize with, to feel the pain of, because it changes everything. It burdens your heart to where sitting still just doesn't make sense. Is there someone in your life whose perspective we need to take a moment and seek? If you don't know where that may be, my suggestion and what I would encourage you to do is to lean into the tension. When you feel that tension again, when you feel the tension that says, I just don't have the capacity right now. I just don't have the energy. I just don't have the time. I just don't have the resources. Hey, I just need a minute. What I believe will happen is the Holy Spirit will tug and say, hey, well, is it possible that this is the moment you should ask a question? You should consider perspective because it burdens you. It burdens your heart and it leads you to a place of action. Let me pray for us. God, thank you. Thank you so much for all that you are, for your love, for your grace. Father, I thank you for how you have, I don't know, Lord, just met us with compassion. I thank you for how you have given us this example of how when we pursue you, it will lead us to pursuing life through the lens of other people, Lord. I just ask that your spirit would guide us, would help us, would move us to slow down, to stop and just consider, is there something I'm not seeing here? Is there something that I can do that will begin to ease the anger, ease the frustration, ease the apathy towards a situation. God, is there something that I can do here to more accurately reflect the compassion that you have shown us? We thank you, Lord. We trust 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 making us a part of your Sunday morning. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. Just a real quick tip of the cap to Carly, our female vocalist. She was hacking up a lung in the pre-service meeting. She just got a little nagging cough, and she said, I'm just praying that I make it through my song. She said, great job with Honey in the Rock. You made it. Now, I got things to get to. All right, settle down. But now, if you start to cough during the sermon, get out. Go. All right. Carly's the best. She's also our graphics person, and we love her. This is part two of our series called Transformed. Jordan, in the open, kind of told you guys a little bit of what it is about and what it's for. It's based on that verse in Romans chapter 12 that says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so there's some things that we wanted to talk about over this series that will run into mid-October where maybe we can just shift our thinking a little bit. Maybe we can allow God to transform our mind in the way that we think about some things. And maybe that can actually transform our lives. And so this morning, we're going to talk about this transformation from comparison to contentment. One of the most, probably the most ubiquitous desires on the planet. Every person, every culture, everywhere wants happiness. Now we might put different words around that. We might describe it differently. I want to be safe. I want to be provided for. I want to have enough of this. I want to feel enough security here. I want to be loved. I want whatever it is, whatever the ingredients of happiness are for us. But everybody wants for themselves and for their children and for the people they love to be happy. It's a ubiquitous human desire. It is virtually universal. Now, because we're believers, most of us in this room would claim a faith in Christ. We know that the most important thing to desire is a relationship with him. We know that the thing that we want for our children is a relationship with Jesus. And so I'm not arguing that happiness should replace that. As a matter of fact, as believers, we know that happiness is only really achievable if we trust in Christ to bring that about. And that's one of the things we're going to see this morning. But if we think about happiness, what it means to be happy, it can't mean being a smiling idiot all the time, just grinning all the time. Every day is the best day ever. So it has to be something deeper than that. And the deeper foundation of happiness is contentment. It's being content, being content in the moment. This moment doesn't need any more. I love it the way it is. This situation, this season, this relationship doesn't need any more. I'm happy with the way that it is. It's to be content, to figure out how to be content. When we can do that, we can be happy. The problem is that we exist in a culture tailor-made to rob us of contentment. Would you agree with that? We exist in a culture and in a time where we are constantly and consistently berated with messages and images and comparisons that erode our contentment to a place where we are no longer happy and we spend our days wishing we had what we don't instead of being grateful for having what we do because we live in this culture that just perniciously eats away and erodes away at our own contentment. I was talking with a friend of mine and I asked her, what's the biggest threat to your contentment? And she very quickly said, social media, social media. I scroll Facebook, Instagram. Is it X now? I'm not on Twitter anymore. They went from Twitter to X. I scroll and I see other people who are doing better than me. Their SUV is bigger and wider than mine. And so now I feel like it fits nicely into parking spaces. Mine fits nicely into parking spaces. Theirs takes up two. So they are obviously having a better life than me. You know, their vacations are nicer than mine. They've got life figured out. They're in better shape than me. The scrolling relentlessly of social media and comparing ourselves to what we see chips away at a lot of our contentment. And to that, I would just offer this as an aside. Back at the beginning of the year, I think it's sometime in February, I realized that I was wasting so much time on my phone, just mindlessly scrolling apps for no good reason. And I would scroll at the time Twitter, and I would just be angry. I would be angry at the politics. I would be angry at Christians arguing with Christians. It would just make me mad. So then I would switch over to Facebook. Maybe this will be better. And then on Facebook, all it is, I don't know about your feed and your algorithm. All it is is a bunch of people from my life like 11 years ago that I no longer care about. Like, that's great that you were in the strawberry fields on Saturday. That's not what I want to see. That's not like engaging content for me. So I don't even know what's going on with Facebook. And it was a couple of days of scrolling and realizing, I don't know any of these people anymore. Why are they here? And then Instagram for me just became, the algorithm became falling videos and golf tutorials. That was it. That was all I got and the whole thing. And I'm like, this is a total waste of time. So I took everything off my phone, except for TikTok. I watch TikTok sometimes. That's kind of fun. But I took everything off my phone. And I'll tell you this, my happiness meter has gone up since doing that. So for some of y'all, I know I'm joking around a little bit, but for some of y'all, you may not need anything else in this sermon than just kind of a nudge. Why don't you think about taking that off your phone for a while? Is it making you happy? Is it bringing you joy? Is it making you more or less content? Why don't you take it off your phone and see if you engage more with the people around you? See if you look more at God's goodness in your life that's already there. See if you're more present for people. For at least somebody here, I know that that's all you need. I know that's what you need to hear today. Just try that out. See if it doesn't help a little bit. But if it's not online, it's in person, right? It's still, we can still play the comparison game and make ourselves unhappy with the things that we have. I remember in the summer of 2020, for the previous three years since I moved here, I had been driving a Nissan Leaf. And if you were here during that time, if you knew me during that time, you'd love to make fun of me for that because you hate the environment and fiscal savings. No, because I mean that you, if you listen, I drove one for three years. I'm just going to say this. If you drive a Leaf, you do deserve to get made fun of. That's, that's part of the deal. When I bought the car, I wasn't like, people are going to think this is awesome. Like I knew I was going to get made fun of. So when it came time to sell it and get something new, I thought, I want something nice. I want something that I like. For the first time in my life, I want to buy myself a nice car. And so I looked around, and I looked at a Tesla, the less expensive Tesla, but it was more expensive than the Accord that I was comparing it to. It was more money down, less miles a year, more money per month. And I thought, gosh, it's just not wise. I'm not going to do that. And so I leased an Accord. And it was the nicest car I ever had. When I got in it, I was like, I can't believe this is so nice. Like I was really, I was excited. Here's how excited I was about it. As a grown man, here's what I did. I drove I drove it to my neighborhood I parked it on a street I got out and I took pictures of it so I did I took pictures of my new car and then you know I texted them to my parents how lame is that what am I like 17 that's so embarrassing I remembered that I did that as I was prepping for the sermon I remember that's the thing that I did. And I'm like, what is the matter with you? But I did it. That's how proud I was of this car. I was so excited to drive in the lap of luxury of the Honda Accord XLE or whatever it was. EXL or I don't know. And then like a month later, my jerk friend Tyler got a Tesla. And he's like texting us pictures of it and videos. And it was so awesome. And it was way faster. And the whole roof of a Tesla is glass. And I had, I had a sunroof in my Accord, but it was one of the normal size ones from like 1987. Good job, you dope. That's the car you have now. Everything's controlled from a touch screen. I have to still touch buttons like it's 1998. This was terrible. And within a month, listen, I'm so proud of this car, I'm taking pictures of it. Within a month, I hate it. I want to take it back to the dealership and get a Tesla. I hated what I had. I wanted something new. Life just works that way, doesn't it? In the comparison game. I have a 28-inch black stone on my back porch. I like to cook on it. I go to somebody else's house. They got a 36. I'm like, dang, I got to get a 36. There's more quesadillas on there. The guy with the 36 goes over to his buddy's house. He's got a 36 inch blast stone, but it's in a permanent, it's got stone built up around. It's a permanent cook station outside. This is fancy. This is a big deal now. Then permanent blackstone station guy goes to somebody else's house and he's got a permanent kitchen set up with a smoker and a pool. And he's like, honey, we got to get a pool. And then the guy with the pool in the setup goes to his buddy's house and he's got an infinity pool. And he's like, oh, I got to get an infinity pool. And then that person goes to the bigger infinity pool and on and on and on it goes. And we can never just be satisfied with what we have because our culture that we exist in just chips away at our happiness through that comparison game. And here's another thing as an aside that the comparison game does. It is convinced. This is just for the young moms in the room. So basically, you, okay? It has convinced. I watch it happen. And you, okay? I didn't see you over there. It was Jordan Shaw. It's convinced the moms that they're not momming hard enough. That's what social media does. That's what the comparison thing does. It convinces moms and dads that they're not momming and dadding hard enough. They need to do more. Your cupcakes need to look better when you take them to the school. When your treats, when it's your week for snacks, for the soccer game, your cooler needs to be nice. It needs to be better than the other coolers. You need to engage in imaginative play. You need to do supportive discipline and never be angry at your kids. And only talk to them in soft tones because they're all little princes and princesses and they can't handle adversity in their life. So let's be very gentle. And let's not grade their papers in red. Let's use green and encouraging things and tones. Let's do that. And we're convinced, I see this in moms right now, that you're just not momming right. And you go to bed every night with this gross combination of mom guilt and mom exhaustion. I need to do more. I don't have one single ounce left to give, and I might hate my children. It's just this combo platter that's terrible. And here's what I want to tell you. Here's what I want to tell you, young moms. You are very likely a better mom to your children than your mom was to you. Very likely. It's just a generational thing. Jen and I are so much more present with our kids than our parents were with us. We just are. It's generational. It's just what this generation is doing. So let yourself off the hook a little bit. Now we won't know if we're doing it right until they're adults and they're not in prison, but for now it seems like we're doing a good job. You're doing a good job. Let yourself off the hook a little bit. Quit playing the comparison game. You're doing a good job with your kids. I actually watched a TED Talk a couple years ago, and it stuck with me. It's this guy doing studies on happiness. And he made the point that many of us, because of goal setting and attainment, have fundamentally eliminated the possibility of happiness from our life, which is kind of a crazy thought. But he says that when we set goals for ourselves and we say, when I get to those goals, I'm going to be happy. When I graduate college, I'll be happy. When I get a job, I'll be happy. Get the promotion, I'll be happy. When I meet the person, I'll be happy. When I get married, I'll be happy. When we have children, I'll be happy. When the children leave the house, I'll be happy, I meet the person I'll be happy when I get married I'll be happy when we have children I'll be happy when the children leave the house I'll be happy which is probably true and then when and then when when we get to be grandparents I'll be happy and what we do in life is we set the goalposts we set the marker for happy off in the distance and then we think I'm not happy now but when I get there I will be and then we get there what do we do the very second we arrive we move to the next thing. So I never spend any time in the joy that God brought me to. I only spend time anticipating the next thing I'm going to need to be happy. Whenever sit and revel in God's goodness now. So I think it's fair to say that we have a contentment issue. We always want the next thing. We always want a little bit more. Something a little bit bigger. Something a little bit shinier. Something a little bit more peaceful. We're always bugging God or ourselves for whatever could be next. Which is why I think this verse in Philippians is such a helpful verse for us this morning. It's actually, and then don't put that one up on the screen yet. I'm just gonna say 13 and then I'll read them all. It's actually one of the most misused verses in all of scripture. It's neck and neck Philippians 4.13 and Jeremiah 29.11. Philippians 4.13 says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, or I can do all things through him who strengthens me. And we see people misuse this all the time. I can do anything I set my mind to with Christ powering me. In the name of Christ, I can do whatever I want to do. I've seen athletes with this tattooed on themselves somewhere. I'm going to complete the pass through Christ who gives me strength or score the goal or hit the home run or pitch the strikeout. Like I'm going to do this through Christ who gives me strength. There's even a Christian apparel line, like Under Armour, but for believers. So it means it's almost as good as the not believing material, but it's a little bit cheaper and a little bit poorly done. And it's got 413 all over it. These, these athletes are on high school fields all over the nation being powered by Christ and their teams are winning all of the state championships, of course, because they're powered by Jesus and he wants them to win. We misappropriate the verse all the time. It does not mean that through Christ who gives me strength, I can close the sale. I can accomplish this thing. I can do this deed. I can accomplish this act. It does not mean that. We have to be very careful when we pluck verses out of context and make them mean what only the sentence sounds like without anything else informing what that sentence actually means. And we use it to mean the opposite of what it really means. Here's what it really means. Here's the context of it. If we read verses 11 and 12, Paul writes this in Philippians. Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In's about learning in all seasons to trust God to provide what we need. And I love that the word learn shows up in here two times. I've learned to be in abundance and in need. I have learned to be in plenty and in want. I've learned these things through Christ who gives me strength. And it may seem like, well, man, it would be pretty easy. I don't know how tough that is, Paul. It'd be pretty, pretty easy to be content in abundance when you have plenty, when you don't want for anything, when you're, when you're living a life of luxury and you've got more than what you could ask for. It's got to be pretty easy to be content in that scenario. And to that thought, which isn't all the way incorrect, I would remind you of this proverb. I think about this proverb a lot. Proverbs 23, 1 through 5. When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Do not toil to acquire wealth. Be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven. That is a fancy, poetic way of saying this. Acc breeds more desire not less exposure to nice things a taste of the good life usually breeds a desire for more of that not less we have it pretty good then we go to someone else's house and they have it a little bit better and all of a a sudden we go home and we want what they want. Did you see that serving dish? I want that serving dish. My serving dish is from Kohl's. It is stupid. I would like a nice serving dish from like Nordstrom or something. I don't know. Crate and barrel. That's where you waste money on serving dishes. William Sonoma. That's right. That's a gold standard. That's all Jeffy has at his house. William Sonoma, everything. And Viking appliances, I'm sure. Yeah, because you can tell that the Viking stove heats up the ground beef better than just a regular GE stove, right? Yes, of course. But we all want those things. We all want those things. There's actually the effect of this that accumulation tends to make you want more. I heard this a while back. Steve Harvey, the host of Family Feud, was giving some people some financial advice. And he said, if you're just starting out in your career and you don't have a lot of money, he said, save up enough for a first class ticket somewhere and fly first class. Because once you fly first class, you will never want to fly coach again. And you will reorganize your life and be driven to make the money you need so that you can fly first class. And here's the thing. He's right. Have you ever flown first class? When you fly first class, you don't want to sit back there with the gen pop anymore. That's depressing. Now, here's what I've not done. And if I do this, I'm in big trouble. I've never flown in one of those pods internationally. If I fly in one of those pods where you get to stretch out and you get your own screen, like, I'm done for. But what you do when you get exposed, when you're at the king's table and you're around things that you don't have, is you begin to organize your life in such a way so that you can have those. When you see your friends taking nice vacations, you start to organize your life in such a way so you can too. When you see what you don't have, you start to organize your life in such a way that you can have what you want. And in organizing your life around the things that you want, around materials or experiences, we lose the contentment that's sitting right in front of us. So let's not think it's just a simple thing to learn to be content when you're surrounded with abundance, because it's not. It's really tricky, and it's really sneaky. Now the one that we would all agree is difficult is to be content when we have little. I kind of wondered as I read that, how can anyone be content in the midst of tragedy, loss, or loneliness? When you're sitting in the wake of a divorce, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When you are a freshly minted widow or widower, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When your children are walking through a tragically difficult time, how can you possibly claim to be content, to be happy? I need for nothing, when you clearly need for much. This is where that word learned comes into play, because somehow or another, Paul figured that one out. But that feels impossible. And it feels like really bad pastoral counsel. Someone's walking through a really difficult time in their life. They come to my office to see me, and they're crying about this hardship that they're enduring or that they're watching a loved one endure. And I point them to this verse and go, hey, you can be content through Christ who strengthens you. You should just be happy right now. How do we do that? How is that attainable? In the grace vine that I wrote for this week, I stated that this was a deeply personal sermon for me. Because this topic of contentment and happiness is actually something I think a great deal about. Because back in 2020, in the fall, I started to go to therapy. And I've mentioned before that I've done therapy, and I've mentioned before that I think everyone should do it. Everybody, you should go to preventative maintenance therapy. Most of us, all of us need more maintenance than we're willing to acknowledge anyways. Everyone should go. If you can afford therapy, you should go to therapy. I actually have a really good buddy here at the church. He's a big, tough guy, you know. He feels the only acceptable emotion to him is anger, and all other emotions are for sissies, all of them. And he decided he was going to start going to therapy, and I sent him to a guy, and he literally texts me every time he talks to this guy. Man, I love that guy so much. This is the best. I've never experienced anything like this in my life. Like, every time. Big tough guy loves therapy. You'd like it too. But I remember sitting in this guy's office, and I had kind of come to realize that in life, like, we all chase things. We all chase happiness. Some chase respect. Some chase security, stability, love, approval, just a sense of being enough and worthwhile. We're all chasing something. All adults are little more than just a pile, a comprising of insecurities and desires and ways that we try to cover those things up to make ourselves acceptable to the broader milieu. That's all we are. We're all chasing something. And I sat in his office, and he looked at me and he said, dude, when are you going to realize it? I said, realize what? He said, that thing that you're chasing, you have it. You have it. You have a wife who loves you. You guys laugh together every day. At the time we just had Lily, she said, you have a daughter who loves you, wants to spend time with you. You have rich friendships. People who support you, believe in you. You have a job that you love, a church that you love, and who seems to love you and support you too. When are you going to quit chasing it? You have it. It's right there if you'll just stop to look at it. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. And I realized, my goodness, I don't know why I'm striving so hard to get the thing that's going to make me happy. I have all the ingredients for happiness in my life right now if I'll just notice them. And I think that that's true of most of us. I think most of us already have all the ingredients for happiness available to us. We already have all the ingredients of happiness available to us right now. Even if it seems like there's this hole in our life, this thing that we want, and I won't be happy until I get it, I would push back and say, no, you have everything you need right now to be content in this moment. It doesn't mean that we should stop striving. It doesn't mean that we should stop trying. It doesn't mean that we should stop seeking, but we can be content in this moment because God has given us everything we need to be content. He's given us all the ingredients to make happy if we will just stop and slow down and see them. And since then, since realizing that, I've just done a lot of reflection on the transformative power of being content. On the transformative power of looking at your life and saying, thanks God, I have everything I need to be happy in you and content in you. And I would be willing to bet that whatever it is you're chasing, you've probably caught it. Whatever it is you think you need, you probably don't. And that all the things that you need in your life to make you content in the Lord, He has provided for you. And as this has washed over me, it's impacted me in profound ways. And so I sat down and I thought, how has just this arrival at contentment shaped me? How has it changed me? How has it impacted me? And I came up with this list. Contentment has transformed my gratitude, perspective, faith, sentimentality, and my prayer life. Most importantly, contentment has transformed my gratitude. It has transformed the way that I walk through life grateful for God's goodness in my life. Every time Jen, my wife, laughs at one of my jokes, I say a little prayer of gratitude to God. Because as long as she'll laugh at my jokes, I know we're good. When she stops laughing at my jokes, we're in in trouble because I don't really have any other tools in the tool belt besides trying to make her laugh. Like I'm not romantic. That's it. It's changed the way I think about my children and the moments that I'm grateful for with them because here's the reality. Parents with young kids. When that kid is crying and you have to walk in there at 3.30 in the morning when all you want in the whole world is to sleep and you pick them up and you calm them down and that little head is resting on your shoulder and that little arm is on the other shoulder and you calm them down and you get them back to sleep and you lay them back down in that bed. Let me tell you something that's super depressing. You won't know when it is the last time that you just did that. One of those times is going to be the last time and you won't know that it was. And there's a bunch of parents whose kids are grown up who would give anything in the world to have that moment with their kid one more time. So be grateful for those moments. Be grateful for the sleepless nights because you only get so many of them. I was sitting in my house the other day and John and Lily, Lily's seven, John's two, they're running around the downstairs. We asked Lily to vacuum the kitchen and we got this little thing that she can do it with. And she did for a second. And then she just started running laps around the kitchen and the dining room. And she's screaming and John's screaming and no work is getting done. And I'm sitting there. And Jen was a little bit exasperated with him. And I'm just grinning like an idiot. Because I think one day we're going to miss these days. One day I'm going to miss a noisy house. And when you're content, when you're determined to see the good and what God has provided for you right now, annoying things become moments of gratitude. Frustrating things become moments of peace and reflection. It transforms the way you walk through life. It was in this season that I stumbled upon this verse in John 1 16 that I say all the time. You guys have heard me say it. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I love that verse. From God's fullness, from his goodness, from his generosity and his mercy and his grace, he has given you so many blessings. And it's up to us in the moments to acknowledge those. Next time you're with friends and you have a great conversation and it's life-giving and dinner is good, be grateful for it. Tell them so. Thank God for them. Next time you get one of those good laughs where your eyes tear up and you can't stop and you go for so long that you can't remember why you started, even if it was about something inappropriate, anyways, still praise God for laughter in your life. It was good and those moments are sweet and we don't know how many of them we get. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I know. Some of us are in hard seasons. Some of us are in seasons of abundance. But I know that we all have God's goodness in our life. We just sang that song. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. And Aaron and the band laid out and I heard you guys saying that. If it's true, then be content in that goodness. And I love that line, why should I fear? The evidence is here. That's how it changed my faith. I said it affects my gratitude. It changes my faith. My faith in God. My faith in his goodness. I know that things are going to work out the way that he wants them to work out because he wants them to work out that way. He's inviting me into it. But I have nothing to fear from the future because God is orchestrating it and I am in his hands. And I've said last week we launched the part two of the campaign to build a building. And I said last week, and you'll hear me say a bunch, if God wants us to build it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. But that doesn't change one little bit what I get to do and what he's called me to do. That doesn't change one little bit what he's called you guys to do, what he's called us to do as a church, which is make disciples and grow closer to him, connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. That's what he's called us to do. That mission doesn't change if we get into a building. It doesn't change if we stay. Now, if we go, I'll be excited. If we don't, I'll be sad. But not for very long on either way because if God wants us to do it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. I'm content. I'm happy getting to do what God has asked us to do in whatever capacity, in whatever location he's asked us to do it. This God opening my eyes to contentment has changed my perspective on life. In the middle of this realization, we were walking through a season of need. It was a hard one. We were walking through pancreatic cancer with Jen's dad. We ended up losing him at the end of that year. It was not an easy time for everyone around us to be content. It wasn't an easy thing to watch my wife just be sad and try to be content with that. But one of the things I learned is that life has seasons. And sometimes they're abundant, and sometimes they're lacking. And in the abundant seasons, we should revel in them and praise God for them and find joy in them. And in the seasons of need and hurt and want, we can take solace that it's a season that every day won't feel like today. Every month won't feel like this month. And a lot of times I'm not even sure. Sometimes we operate as Christians that God takes us into hard seasons because he has a lesson that he wants us to learn. So we allow these things to happen to us. And I just kind of think that's a pretty myopic view of God's will. He's orchestrating all these other things and all these, all this ripple effect and all these other people's lives so that you can learn this lesson about being grateful. Maybe, maybe you're that important in God's kingdom. Or maybe life ebbs and flows and good seasons and bad seasons come and go. And when we're in a bad season, we just say, I'm in a bad season. This is tough. But I know that God is with me and I know that everything won't feel like this. It's changed my perspective. It's changed my sentimentality a lot, like a lot. Because of those sweet moments, from his fullness, we've all received grace upon grace. And you reflect upon those sweet things with friends or children or family or whatever it is, I cry all the time. Like, if I'm watching TV with John and he's on my lap and Lily sees it and gets jealous and she comes over and she puts her head right here and she says she wants snugs and now I'm cuddling with both of my children at the same time, I have the 100% chance I'm going to cry. I just will. I'll just sit there and I'll think, this is the good stuff. Like I'm such a sap. I don't know if I told you guys this already, but we got a piano in the house and Jen's playing just a little bit. And she was playing a hymn. I said, go play a hymn for me. She said, what hymn? I said, I don't care. I just want to hear you play a hymn. And she goes and she plays it. And I went and I stood next to the piano and she's playing the hymn. And I started crying and she was like, what are you, like, what's the matter with you? And I'm like trying to explain to her, like, I just imagined like 20 years down the road, John and Lily coming back with their kids and we're standing in this very dining room and we're singing Christmas carols and hymns. And she was like, you got to get it together, man. And she, I mean, she's right. But I've seen it revolutionize that in me too, savoring every moment as sweet and as God's blessing. And then lastly, I think that contentment radically changes our prayer life. I've talked about this a couple of times, but Jesus starts the Lord's Prayer with your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Over the years, my personal prayer life has gotten a lot shorter. The most words I use when I pray is when I pray in front of other people. It's not that I'm praying for shorter amounts of time. I just use a lot less words. Because I just pray, God, here's the thing. Would you do with this thing what you want? And would you help me to accept what that is? God, here's a concern. Would you be in this concern? And would you help me to be content in your answer? God, this person is sick. I'm just lifting them up to you. I don't know what to pray for them. But will your will be done in their life and in the life of their family? God, Lily's struggling. Will you help her? According to whatever your will is, because I know that this struggle might be important for who she's gonna become. But in all things, God, your will be done. And when you pray like that, then you can just kind of rest in the assurance that he will do his will. So I by no means have figured out contentment. And it certainly wasn't by my own desire that I arrived there. I didn't decide one day, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to be content. I'm just going to decide to be happy with my life. I didn't do that. It washed over me like a ton of bricks because someone was ministering to me and they said, hey, you have all the ingredients for happy in your life right now. Maybe you should stop reaching for other things. And so I would like to say that same thing to you. You very likely have all the ingredients you need right now to make happy. If we just stop reaching and grabbing. And then here's what happens. I said earlier, it's impossible. It feels impossible to be content in a season of want during loss or loneliness or tragedy. But what happens is when we learn to be people who are content, that word learn, Paul says it's a process. When we learn to be people who are content with what God has provided for us in this moment and in this season, then when we are in a season of need, when we are in a season of hurt, if you're sitting there and I'm like, hey, you've got all the ingredients you need to make happy, you're like, I don't. I don't. I've got a big hole in my life. If that's you, here's how being a content person even transforms that mindset. Trusting God and being content allows you to say, you know what? I might not have all the ingredients in my life. I think I need to be happy, but I have Jesus and he's enough. He has provided himself for me and he is enough. And I trust him that not all seasons will feel like this season. And then we come full circle back to the verse and make this point. True contentment is only possible through the sanctifying work of Jesus. Sanctify, I always say, is to become more like Christ in character. It's a process after we claim a faith in Christ and then we're taken up to heaven in glory. Everything that happens in between, the Holy Spirit is working in us to make us more like Christ in our character. That's a sanctification process. And that's only, true contentment is only accessible through the sanctifying work of Christ. That's why Paul says, I've learned to be content. How? Through Christ who gives me strength because he allows me to do all things. And when we find our contentment in Christ and in his strength, we come full circle and we get to say, along with Paul, I have learned in seasons of plenty and I have learned in seasons of little to be content and happy because I can do all things through Christ who gives you strength. Let's pray. Father, we do, we do. We see the evidence of your goodness all over our lives. Lord, I pray that we would look at your considerable gifts, at the fullness that has leaked out onto us, and we would see the good things that you've given us, the good friends who love us, the good family that supports us, the good job or the good role or the good thing in our identity that we get to do to express ourselves and exercise our gifts, God, would we look at the many, many rich blessings that we have in our lives and be grateful to you. Father, for those with us who don't feel content, who do feel sad, who do feel like they are lacking some essential ingredients. God, would they feel this morning that you really are enough? Would they feel this morning that Jesus really is enough? Would they trust that these seasons of need and want, they come and go, and that you're in these seasons with us just like you're in the seasons of abundance with us? Help us be a grateful people. Help us pray with faith and with trust. And God, help us learn like Paul did to be content in all seasons and to find that joy and that contentment in you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this incredibly gross, hot Sunday. I heard somebody say it's like walking around in warm soup outside. I think that's pretty appropriate. I think we're going to take out the lounge areas next week and make more space for y'all. So we're getting the message. You're coming back to church, so this is great. These lounge areas are penalties for not coming in the summertime, so now we'll get back to normal. We've been moving through a series called 27 that we're going to do this summer and next summer where we're doing an overview of the 27 books in the New Testament to kind of give you an idea of where we're going for the rest of this summer and where we're going to pick up next summer. For the rest of the summer, I'm just going to go through the general epistles, the general letters that are largely in the back half or entirely in the back half of the New Testament. We're going to do Hebrews this morning. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, did a phenomenal job covering James for us in July. So if you want to catch that one, you can go back and take a look at it. And then we're going to do 1 and 2 Peter together, 1, 2, 3 John together. Because I don't want to do three sermons out of 1, 2, 3 John that all say like, hey, if you love God, obey him. That's the message of 1, 2, 3 John. And then we're going to do Jude Labor Day Sunday. We decided that we would save the most overlooked book of the Bible for the most overlooked Sunday of the calendar. So that's going to be very appropriate when we do Jude and you guys watch online while Aaron and I work. But this morning we're going to focus on Hebrews. And deciding how to approach Hebrews and how to give you guys an overview of Hebrews was a little tricky because Hebrews is such an incredible book with so many good things and so many good themes. The overriding theme of Hebrews is to exalt Christ. The overriding point of Hebrews is to hold Christ up as superior to everything, the only thing worthy of our devotion and our affection, the only thing worthy of our lives. That's what the book of Hebrews does, and it focuses us on Christ, which is appropriate because we preached Acts last week. Well, I preached. You guys listened and did a great job at listening. I preached Acts last week, and we talked about how it's the Holy Spirit's job to focus us on Jesus, past, present, and future. And so once again, we're just going to enter into this theme in the text where the whole goal of it is to focus us on Christ. And so my prayer for us is that that's what this will do for us this morning. In an effort to exalt Christ, the author of Hebrews, who we're not sure who it is, the author of Hebrews starts out his book this way. Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he had spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right some of the most sweeping prose about our Savior that we'll find in the Bible. The only other place that compares is probably found in Colossians, which Aaron covered. Aaron, our worship pastor, covered last month as well. So from the very beginning, he exalts Jesus. He is the image of God. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He upholds the universe with his majesty, the sweeping picture of Christ. And then the author goes on to kind of build this case for the superiority of Christ. And the book is called Hebrews because it's written to the Jewish diaspora all throughout Asia Minor. As here, I know that you have a Jewish background. Let me help you understand your new faith by helping you understand your new savior. And he goes to great lengths to explain to them why Jesus is superior. And he does this through four major comparisons. He compares Jesus to Moses. He compares Jesus to the angels. He says Jesus is superior to the high priests. And he says that Jesus is a superior sacrifice. And he goes through and he tells them why Jesus is superior to those things. Now, to the Jewish mind in the first century A.D., all of those comparisons would carry a great deal of heft. They would matter. The Jewish mind would immediately know what that meant, would immediately be taken aback by the boldness of the author of Hebrews, and feel the weight of the comparison that they were being asked to make. But for us in the 21st century in America, those things don't resonate with us like they did with the first century Hebrew mind. We know, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in two decades, you probably already know that we're of the opinion that Jesus is a bigger deal than Moses. Like, we got that one down. You know that already. You know that we think that Jesus is superior to angels. No one's getting confused and worshiping angels. Aaron's never gotten a request for a praise song for angels. Like, we've never gotten a Gabriel praise song request. So we know that. Nobody has any misgivings about me being superior to Jesus. We know Jesus is the superior priest. We know he's the superior priest to everyone that's ever lived. And that's a really hard concept for us to hold on to, I think, when we see it in Hebrews that he's the great high priest. That's a difficult one for us because most of us in this room have never really even had a priest. Most of us in this room have had pastors. And pastors are different than priests, take on a different role than priests, have historically been viewed differently than priests. So that's a tough one for us. And then the sacrifice, none of us in this room have ever performed a sacrifice. If you have, I'd love to talk with you about what led you to do that in your life. I'd like to hear that story. I don't know if I want to commit to a full lunch because you're crazy, but maybe just out there, you just tell me about that time with the goat, okay? But these things are difficult for us to relate to. They don't hit us the same way. So a lot of my thoughts and energy this week went into helping us understand why these are such weighty comparisons, why they are so persuasive, and most importantly, why they're still important to us today in 21st century America so that the book and the message of Hebrews can be just as impactful for us as it was for first century Jews. So I think, as we think about the overview of Hebrews, the most interesting question is, why did those comparisons matter to me today? Why are they important to me today? So we're going to look at them and we're going to ask, why does it matter that Jesus is superior to these things? So the first one that we see, I'm doing kind of a combo platter and you'll see why, but Jesus is superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message is greater than theirs. In your notes, I can't remember if I put it there or not, but there should, it'd be helpful to write above these three points and be bracketed by the text. Jesus is superior because, superior to blank because. So that's, that's the question that we're answering. He's superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message are greater than theirs. Okay. Here's why I kind of combined those two. We probably all know, the Jewish mind certainly knew, that God's law came from Moses. God brought the law down off of Mount Sinai and presented it to the people. Now we often think that just the Ten Commandments were written on those tablets, but those tablets were covered front and back. So we don't know what all was on there, but most certainly more laws. And if you read through the books of Moses, the first five in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, you'll get somewhere around 620 some odd laws depending on which rabbi or scholar you're talking to. And so those were the laws of Moses. And those were the laws around which their religion was framed. Those are the laws around which their culture was built, around which their entire life was formed by following those laws well. And Hebrews is earth shattering to them because it says, hey, Jesus's law is superior to Moses's law. You can cast Moses's law aside. It doesn't mean there's not some good ideas in there. The one about like not committing adultery, we should probably carry that principle forward. But those laws are done. It's now Jesus's new law that he gives us in John. Jesus tells us that in these two things are summed up all of the law and the prophets. Everything that Moses or the prophets ever wrote or writings that's ascribed to them can be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells us that early in his ministry. But then at the end of his ministry, he's sitting around with the disciples and he says, this new command I give you, there's this new thing I want you to do. I'm going to add to the, I'm going to sweep away those commands. I'm going to give you this new command. Follow this. I want you to love your neighbor. I want you to love others as I have loved you. It's this new command that Jesus gives. And so that command is superior to all of the commands that came from Moses in the Old Testament. It's also superior to all the commands that come after that. His message is superior. This is what it means with the angels really quickly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the angels that took the tablets from God and delivered them to Moses as God's holy and anointed messengers. So what we're seeing in these two comparisons is Jesus' message is greater than any message that's come before or will come since, and his law is the greatest law, superior to all other laws, and it's the only one worth following. This is incredibly important for us because we live in a culture and we are people who are incredibly vulnerable to the insidious slide towards legalism. We are incredibly vulnerable to reducing our faith to a list of do's and don'ts. Okay, I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Like, I get that. But is it a sin if I do blank? I hate that question. Is it a sin if I do this? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it a sin if I go there? Is it a sin if I have this? That's an immature question. It's almost irrelevant. Is it a sin? And we even do it in the early stages of our faith. Am I in or am I out? When I die, am I going to burn forever or dance in the streets? Which one is it? I just want to make sure I'm praying the right prayer so I don't burn forever. That seems like a bummer. So I'm going to believe in this. Am I in or am I out? Is there an unforgivable sin? Is there something that if I do it, I'm going to lose my salvation and then I'm out? And we try to make it about the rules. We enter into Christianity kind of asking the leader, like whoever's in charge here, can I just have my personnel handbook? I just need to know when my vacation days are. I need to know how many Sundays I can miss in a year and still be like, good. You know? I don't want to have to feel that out. We want our policy handbook. And when we make that our faith, we pervert it and distort it into things that it ought not be and was never intended to be. When we try to make the Bible basic instructions before leaving earth, have you heard that? If you haven't heard it, sorry, because it's stupid. And I just told you it, now you know. We try to make it God's handbook for life. There's a rule for everything, we just got to find it. And when you do that, the people who know the rules the best and appear to follow them the best are the spiritually mature ones. Meanwhile, the people over there who don't follow what we think are the rules super well are actually getting busy loving other people as Christ loved them. But we don't value them because we value the rules. So it's important to let Hebrews remind us that Jesus' law is superior to the laws that we add to his law. Because we love to say yes and. We love to turn Christianity into an improv class. Yes, that's true, and this. Yes, to be a believer, what does God ask of you? That you would love other people as Jesus loved you. Yes. And also you shouldn't watch shows that are rated MA on Netflix. You should not do that. Yes. And you should love other people as Jesus loved you. And you shouldn't say cuss words. Because we got together in a room at some point, and we decided that these words that are spelled this way are bad. And you can't say them. And they're very offensive. And they offend the very heart of God. Jesus didn't make that law. We do yes and, and we start to build other rules that are requisite for our faith. And at the end of that is legalism. And some of y'all grew up in legalism. I know my parents grew up in legalism. My mom went to a church outside of Atlanta where you couldn't, if you're a girl, you were not allowed to wear skirts above the knees. They all had to be to the knees or below. And if they weren't, you're a sinner. You couldn't go, you weren't even allowed to go to the movie theater. If you're going to see a Disney movie, you cannot, you cannot go to the theater. You were not, your family was not allowed to own a deck of cards because with those cards, you might gamble and offend the sensibilities of God. And what happens when we do that is people like my mom who grow up in that, when they grew up in that, in their adolescence, they're riddled with all this guilt of things that they're supposed to do and shame for not being able to do them. And that shame isn't coming from Jesus because you've offended his law. That shame is coming from rickety old deacons because you offended their sensibilities. And it's not right. We should always choose love over law because that's what Jesus asked us to do. And here's what can happen when we do that. At the last church I worked at, there was a policy, and some of you are familiar with policies like these. They're particularly prominent in the South. There was a policy that you could not consume alcohol in public. You had to privately foster your own alcoholism. You couldn't consume it in public. You can have it in your house. You can have it with trusted friends. But you can't consume it in public and you can't be seen purchasing it by someone from the church. It's absurd policy. Be all in or all out. Just say don't drink it. That's way less hypocritical than drive to DeKalb County to get it and then drive back. So one day, I'm cutting my grass. I'm relatively new to the neighborhood. And when I finish up, my neighbor, Luis, comes out. He says, hey man, hot day. I said, yeah, it's hot. He goes, you want to have a beer with me? Now that's against the rules. I'm not allowed to have a beer with Luis because I don't want to, I'm not going to get into it. According to the rules, this is bad. But he's my neighbor and we know what do you want to have a beer with me means. He's showing me hospitality. He wants to talk to me. He wants to get to know me and I need to love him. And it's not very loving of me to be like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get my water. That's just not what you do. So I said, sure. I had a beer, an illicit, an illicit beer. God, I'm still sorry. And we talked and we became buddies. And Luis had a stepson and two sons that lived with him as well, him and his wife as well. Gabriel, Yoel, and Yariel. And over the course of the next six years, I got to be their pastor. And I got to baptize all four of those guys in the church. Now, if I had said no that day, could that still have happened? Sure. But, I chose love over law, and God used it. We should be people who choose love over law, understanding that Jesus' law is the superior law. And just in case you think I'm letting people off the hook to do whatever you want under Jesus' law, as long as you're loving others, it is absolutely impossible to love others as Jesus loved us without being fueled and imbued by the love of the Holy Spirit. We cannot love others as Jesus loved us if we do not know Jesus and love him well. That the two things that sum up the law and the prophets, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen, love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as Jesus did if you do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. It takes care of everything. And suddenly there's times when you shouldn't watch that, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't have that, or you shouldn't shouldn't go there or you should do this or you should do that, but not because it offends some law or sensibility that we've added to over the years, but because to do that or to not do that is the most loving action to take. That's why it's important for us to still acknowledge that Jesus's law is the superior law and that Jesus is a superior messenger and the angels. Now your notes are out of order. The next one we're going to do is priest and then sacrifice. So I'm sorry about that. But it's important to us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priests because Nate is broken. It's important for us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priest because I am broken. When we were running through the slides before the service started, we got to this one, and the band and the tech team laughed at me. They're like, Nate, you think we don't know that? We haven't pieced that one together. And I said, well, my mom's coming. So this one's for her. Sorry, mom, this is news to you. I know that you don't need me to tell you that I'm broken and that I'm a human. And that I'm going to teach you the wrong stuff sometimes. The way I think about faith and the Bible and God and Scripture and all the things evolves. It changes. There's things I taught when I was 30 that I'm so embarrassed about now. And there's things I'm saying to you right now that when I'm 52, I'm going to be like, oh, what a moron. I just know that's true. I'm broken. And even though you guys know that, and you guys know not to put pastors on pedestals, and you would probably all say that you have a pretty healthy idea about that, and I consider it part of my personal ministry to you to act in such a way where it's very easy for you to not put me on a pedestal. That's my ministerial gift to you guys. You would probably all say that you know better than that. But we still get the jokes. Those still happen. I had a friend, a good buddy, still a friend of mine named Heath Hollinsworth. Heath had three brothers. He still has three brothers. Jim was the oldest and Jim was an associate pastor at the church that Heath and I both worked at. So we all worked together. And then Ryan and Hunter worked construction. So they're a little bit less important in the kingdom of God than me and Heath and Jim. Which is the, that's the point I'm making. And whenever they would be around their dad for a meal and it came time to pray for the meal, Heath was in charge of the service. He was program director. It was a big church. So he had positions like program director. Here, Aaron does that. But whenever it came time to pray for a meal, their dad really didn't like praying in public, so he would always get one of the boys to do it, and he'd kind of look them over, and he'd be like, Jim, why don't you lead us today? You're the closest to the Lord. You have the most direct line. And Heath would be like, I work at a church too, and I'm sure it flew all over Ryan and Hunter. But he would joke about it. It didn't really make him mad. He just thought it was the stupidest thing because Jim was ordained and Heath wasn't. His dad thought he had a more direct line to the Lord. And as stupid as that sounds, you guys say that to me. I know we don't really believe it, but we keep saying it. When I golf with y'all and I hit one in the woods, which is rare, but when I hit one in the woods and it comes bouncing out just miraculously, just a squirrel throws it and it just lands in the middle of the fairway, somebody is going to say, got that pastor bounce, somebody's going to say it. We make the jokes and we think the things, and I can tell you from personal experience, we exonerate pastors too much. We honor pastors too much. We think too much of them. We have too great an expectation for them. I am not to be exonerated. My job in God's kingdom is not more important than your job. My gifting is not more valuable than your gifting. And listen, your character is not less important than my character. A lot of us have more expectations for me and what my character should be than for ourselves. And that makes no sense because you're a royal priesthood too. If it's okay for you and not okay for me, then you either need to raise your standards for yourself or lower them for me. Probably raise. And I don't mean to hit that too hard, but the church has a long history of making the people who stand here way more important than they actually are. And we've got to knock that off. While I'm here, and just kind of kicking you guys in the gut, let me kick you in the teeth. The other thing I was thinking about with priests and why this is important is the historic role of the priest. Do you realize that for a vast majority of Christian history, from the first century A.D. to now, for the vast majority of that, Christendom did exist under a priesthood. And that those priests were the sole arbiters of the truth of God in the lives of their people. Do you understand that? The people, for much of history, were largely illiterate. The vast majority of people were illiterate for much of church history. And before the printing press, a Bible was so expensive that it took the whole town to raise money to get one, and then they'd put it up on the lectern in the church or in the pulpit, and they would literally chain it so that nobody could steal the Bible because it was that valuable, and it's the only one that existed in the town, and because everyone's largely illiterate, the only person who can read it is the pastor. Do you understand how easy it is to manipulate when that is true? Do you understand how vulnerable that populace was to the malice that might be in their pastor? Do you understand how limiting it is for your faith if there's only one person who can explain to you who's reading scripture on your behalf and then telling you what it says and then telling you what you should do about that? That's how we got indulgences and we paid for St. Peter's Basilica because they manipulated the masses in that way. Because I'm the only one in the room who can read this and I get to tell you what it means. That's incredibly harmful. And now, we live in a time when Bibles are ubiquitous everywhere. You all probably have multiple Bibles in your home. You probably have more Bibles than you do people. If you'd like to add to your collection, take one of ours. You can download it on your phone. You can look it up on the World Wide Web. You have universal access to the scriptures of God. And yet, I see so many of you, so many Christians, walking through life, functioning as scriptural illiterates, trusting your pastor to spoon feed you truth twice a month for 30 minutes. And that's all you know of this. People have fought and people have died and people have lived to make this available to you. And yet as Christians, many of us live our lives as functional illiterates who still rely on our pastor or spiritual leader to spoon feed us the truth twice a month? How can we be Christians and be so disinterested in what God tells us? How can we call ourselves passionate followers of Christ and yet not read about him? How can we have access to this special revelation of God and the inspired and authoritative words within it that tell us not basic instructions for life but about our wild and wonderful and mysterious father? They tell us all about that and we have access to it all the time. We can read it whenever we want. We can do all the research we want. We can even, you can download professors walking you through this as you explore it on your own. And yet we function as illiterates still acting like the only source of truth is our pastor for whatever sermon they want to give that day. Jesus is your pastor. He's your source of truth. And he made sure that this got left for you so that you could learn about him. I'm here to augment the work that you're doing. I can't do the work for your whole life. Neither can your small group leader. It's important to know that Jesus is our high priest because we have the freedom to go to him and to pray to him whenever we want. We don't need a go-between. We don't need someone else to spoon-feed us truth. He makes it available to us here. Now, let's end on a higher note than that. It's important for us to know that Jesus was the superior sacrifice because he was enough. It's important for us to know that Jesus was a superior sacrifice because he was. This is important to mention. Because the old sacrificial system, you had to perform a sacrifice, and then you were good until you messed up again, and then you had to go back and you had to sacrifice. Like I wonder about the people who like went to the temple for a certain festival and they performed all their sacrifices and they're good. They're good before God. If they die, they're fine. And then they like take a wrong turn or there's traffic getting out of Jerusalem and they say things they shouldn't say. Like, I guess we got to go back to the temple and do this again. But Jesus is a superior sacrifice because we need one for all time. That's it. We're done. We don't have to go back and keep making sacrifices. And yet, we do the yes and thing again where we go, yeah, Jesus died for me and he made me right before God, but now that I'm a Christian, I keep messing up, so I need to do more and I need to better, and I need to perform my own personal sacrifices to get myself back in good graces with God. And we make Jesus' sacrifice not enough. Yeah, that was good then, but I know better now, and I need to keep working harder and keep being hard on myself and keep making my own sacrifices to then get back into the good graces of God so that he will love me more and approve of me more. And we live our lives, I do this too, as if Jesus' sacrifice wasn't enough. And now God in his goodness and glory and perfection requires me, Nate, to make greater sacrifices to supplement the insufficient sacrifice that Jesus made for me. I think that we would do well to wake up every morning and remind ourselves, even if we have to say it out loud, what Jesus has done for me is enough. God loves me as much as he possibly can and ever will. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me less. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me more. And there's nothing I can do today to make myself more right before God. Jesus was enough. He did that for me. And then walk in the goodness and freedom of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Walk in that fullness. Walk in that grace. Walk in that gratitude by allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to be enough. That's why Hebrews can still, that's how Hebrews can still resonate with us today. By acknowledging that Jesus is superior to the law and the message of old, that he's the superior priest that gives us unfettered access to him, and we ought to passionately pursue that, and that he is the greatest sacrifice because he's enough for us once and for all. We don't have to keep supplementing that with our insufficiency. And to do all of this, as we're reminded of all of this, and we start with the sweeping prose about Christ, and then we see the comparisons, he starts to close his book by drawing this conclusion, and I think it's a great place for us to stop and put our focus on today as we prepare our hearts for communion after the sermon. But he starts to summarize his book and to wrap up by telling us to do this. I preach about this lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, my Bible says, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. In light of all that we learned, in light of who Jesus is, the image of God, the very imprint of His nature, and in light of the ways that Jesus is superior and serves us and sacrifices for us and is our high priest, in light of the law that is to love Jesus with all our heart, in light of the law that is to love other people as Jesus loved us and then so in turn love Christ and be fueled by that love, in light of all these things, what are we to do? What are the rules that we're supposed to follow? How are we supposed to live this Christian life? Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. Run your race. Go out there and run hard. Pursue Jesus with everything you've got. Go love other people with your whole heart. And to do it well, you've got to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we don't do that by white-knuckling it. We don't do that by trying to be our own sacrifice. We don't do that by supplementing the work of Christ in our life. No, we do it by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If we'll do that, we will follow God's laws. We will pursue Jesus hard. We will love others well, and we will have run a good race. That's the point of Hebrews. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are, for how you've loved us. Thank you for your son. Father, I pray that it would be critically important to us to acknowledge the superiority of Christ. That it would be critically important to us to pursue Him, to love Him, to know Him. Father, if we are not in Your Word, if we're not pursuing You on our own, would you light a fire in us to do that? If we've spent too many years not knowing your Bible well, would you let this be the year that fixes it? If we've spent too many years adding to your law, would this be the year that we let that go? If we've spent too many years supplementing your sacrifice, would this be the year that we finally accept yours? And God, as we go from here, would you help us run our race? It's in Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.