Sermons tagged with Promise

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

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

Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kid stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along, and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. Today, pals, Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. That has to be the coolest Mr. Rogers. I mean, a little bit creepy, but mostly, mostly, mostly cool, right? Hey guys, if you are new visiting or we just hadn't had the chance to meet yet, my name is Aaron and I am so excited to be sharing with you today. If you weren't here last week, it was a really cool week, especially for me being the newbie at Grace. It was a ministry partner Sunday and we got to hear from some of our ministry partners and just kind of hear exactly what was going on. And then afterwards, we gave you tacos. And I kind of wish the tacos were this week, because if I do a bad job, but we give you tacos after, you're going to leave and say, that was pretty good, right? So no, no, Nate, man, thank you so much just for the opportunity to come up and share what's been on my heart. Really excited about it. So, to kind of get our minds going in the right direction, I just kind of want to gauge the audience, see if anybody is like me. Is it anybody else who is extremely frustrated and gets angry when something doesn't go according to plan, but because of someone else, right? Like somebody else doesn't do their job, right? Have you ever had a bad haircut? I realize some of you guys are looking at me right now and you're like, 15 years ago, and your wife's looking at you and giggling. I didn't mean to bring that up. I'm sorry. But you understand what I'm saying, right? That happened to me not long ago. And now I'm realizing that I thought of this illustration this morning, getting ready for church, and now there's a bunch of people looking at my hair to see if I'm telling the truth. And stop it. But no, it's the most frustrating thing that can happen, right? Because it's not just that moment that you walk away angry. It's every morning afterward, you're looking, you're trying to fix your hair, and he's like, are you kidding me, right? You go get a hat, go to work, and it's done and over with. But it's frustrating because I went in with a plan, right? I went in and said, hey, this is what I want to do. I talked to him about showing pictures. I didn't walk out looking like Brad, but I looked like one of the little creatures from the Where the Wild Things Are. It was terrible. And every day, I'm like, bro, you had one job. I did everything that I could possibly do. Is anybody else like that? But let me ask you a question. Have you ever had that experience with God? You do everything that you could possibly do, and at some point you kind of sit back and you say, I mean, God, are you going to do anything about this? Like, God, is there, like, I can't, how long am I going to have to keep going through this same thing day after day? God, are you going to step in at any point in time and change things? That's one of the things that I think is so inspirational about, have you ever seen people that just have this unshakable faith? Have you ever encountered that before? It's like it doesn't matter what they deal with. It doesn't matter what they go through, what happens to them in their life. There's this solid confidence in tomorrow. Well, not necessarily tomorrow, but more in the God who kind of controls tomorrow. It's like nothing can be thrown at people like, no, it'll be okay. And they're not void of emotion, right? It's not like they're walking around saying, oh, no, everything's whatever. No, they grieve, they hurt, they have pain, they do all of this other stuff, but there's still this confidence. If you ever have a chance to speak to somebody who is kind of like that, they just have this solid, unshakable faith, I want to encourage you to just ask a lot of questions. And what I believe you will end up hearing is some variation of this, this confidence that God is not simply an observer of our life. He is actively involved in our life. God is not simply up there watching and hoping you get things figured out, hoping things work out according to plan. He's actively involved in the shaping of who we are and the world around us. It doesn't mean everything is going to be perfect all the time, but it means we're never going to be alone in this. And if you ever encounter someone who just kind of walks with that bold confidence that regardless what happens to them, I know that God is not just watching. And that's one of the things that I loved this last week about studying through and reading through Joshua and the battle of Jericho. You're probably familiar with the story. We are going to be in Joshua chapter 6. Joshua is the sixth book of the Old Testament. You can turn there, thumb to it in YouVersion, or we'll put it in this fancy digital Bible in the sky, right? But to catch you up, make sure we're all on the same page, Joshua, where we pick up in the story is he is a newly installed leader for the Israelites. It has been for hundreds of years, not hundreds of years, but for years and years, Moses was the leader. It starts back in when they were in slavery to the Egyptians, right? Moses stepped in, God used Moses, freed them from slavery to the Egyptians, walked them on this extremely long journey, got to see God do some incredible things while they're in journey to this land that God has promised them. And because the Israelites are super creative, they called it the promised land, right? And so now they get to this place where the promised land is in sight. They can see the land of Canaan and it's like, okay, that's it. That's where we're headed. Like everything they had been hoping for, they see it with their eyes. Moses dies. Joshua is raised to be the new leader. And God says to Joshua, hey, listen, there it is. We're going to walk into that land, that land that I promised you, the thing you've been hoping for. You're going to go there. And you're going to go and you're going to conquer all of your enemies there. It will be your land. The very first thing in their sights is Jericho. And so in Joshua 6, 1, it says this about the city of Jericho. It says, Jericho was strongly fortified because of the Israelites, no one entering or leaving. And the Lord said to story, right? Because it's not just any normal boundary. You can see that they really weren't worried about fighting. That's not what Jericho was depending on. They were depending on being able to keep the Israelites out, and that's what was going to keep them safe. I've done a little bit of reading. Without getting too bogged down into the details, the walls are actually made up of two sets of walls. They have an outer wall that starts with a stone retention wall, keeping the resources in. It goes above ground about 12 to 15 feet. Then on top of that, you have a brick mud wall. And it just goes up. It goes up an embankment for a little bit, and you come to the second brick mud wall, and it's built up. A lot of archaeologists, and I've read some commentaries, and what they would end up saying is if you're standing at the base of this wall and you look up, it would be similar to looking up at a four-story building. And that's what God says. That's the first target. But did you catch what he said in verse 2? He says, look, I have handed you. That's past tense. That's already happened. And so God sends them to this place that says, the wall, you can do nothing about. Like, it is absolutely impassable. You cannot touch this. I'll take care of that, and you're going to take care of everything else. And in verse 3, he says, here is the plan. I'm going to try to read this, but it's small. My large print Bible is still in transport, and I'm from Kentucky, so there's that too. But it says this in verse 3. It says, That's not that funny. I mean, come days. Have seven priests carry seven rams horn trumpets in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times while the priests blow the trumpets. When there is a prolonged blast of the horn and you hear it sound, have all the people give a mighty shout. Then the city wall will collapse and the people will advance each man straight ahead. So to kind of flesh that out just a little bit, it's essentially this. This was the plan. He said, I want you to have your fighting men in the front. Right behind them, I want you to have seven priests with seven trumpets. And then I want you to have a couple of priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant. And behind those, pulling in the rear guard, have the rest of your fighting men. And then he said, walk. Like literally, God's plan was take a hike. Like that was what God told them to do. Now listen, I am not much in way, I don't know much about like military strategic battles, right? The extent of my knowledge with warfare strategy begins and ends with Call of Duty. And I'm really not good at that either. But I do know this, that's a bad plan, right? Like, if I'm Joshua, I've got some questions. It's like, okay, God, that was a great broad stroke about what's going to happen, but there's some details I really kind of need to know about. Like, just feel me. Like, so we've got these guys. We've got our swords. Anything at all you want us doing with that? You want us making a lot of noise while we're circling just to strike some fear? No, no, just walk. As a matter of fact, just be real quiet while you're walking, too. Okay, God? I saw Bob has a shovel. Like, we can dig around, build something, like, to make the walls a little... No. Just walk. You poke it with a stick. I mean, what? Just literally just walk? Yeah, just walk. And so we have a tendency when we're reading stories like this, especially if you're anything like me, we kind of dehumanize, right? Like we will pull all of the emotion out of the text that we're reading. So just to kind of put you in that, let's say Nate comes up next week and he says, hey guys, listen, I have a vision from God. The city of Raleigh is going to be ours. We are going to remove all things evil from this city, right? There will be no more cats in this place. Like everything, everything evil is going to be, we'll get rid of it. Like there's, there's nothing else. The first thing we have to do, we have to conquer the most evil place in all of Raleigh. So we meet at Walmart and he says, so what we're going to do is I want you to just kind of walk around. He was like, okay, okay. We walk around, we get excited. We're ready to go. Yeah. We walked around. What now? He said, well, go home, and then come back tomorrow. Okay, okay, we can do that. What, you want us to bring? No, no, you're really good. Just walk. As a matter of fact, guys, we're going to do this for seven days, and on the last day, we're going to walk around it seven times. Listen, I trust Nate. I'm not doing that, right? Like, I'm sending my text. Hey, man, shoot me a message after y'all scream, and I'll show up, right? Because it just doesn't make any sense. Like, maybe the first couple of days, the Israelites were excited. Again, they just saw the land that they had been hoping for. They just saw the place that they had been traveling. They just saw the place that their grandparents and their grandparents, that everyone has been telling them that we're about to walk into it. So maybe there was some excitement. Maybe there was some enthusiasm on day one, two, and three. But what about day four, when they walk around it again and nothing changes? Day five, they walk around again, They look up, and there's not a brick that's fallen. Six and seven, much the same. I mean, again, let's be real. They're not superheroes. They're people like you and people like me. I mean, have you experienced that before? Were you're doing exactly what God has asked you to do, and the end result just doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe it's in your marriage, right? Like your marriage hasn't been exactly what you would hope it would be. And so you try to be obedient to who God has asked you to be as a spouse. You love sacrificially. You put them first. You're consistently serving, but they're just not reciprocating. And at some point, do you step back and say, is it worth it, God? Are you going to do something here? Because the unchangeable thing, Jericho, I can't change their heart. God, you said you would do something. You gave me your promise. Like, I know you want this. Maybe it's with work, right? Like you try to be a hard worker. You are the first one there, the last one to leave. You're trustworthy. You're always looking out for your coworkers, but time after time, year after year, you get passed over for the promotion. Somebody else gets in like, God, what are you doing? Maybe it's with finances in general, right? Like you start saving, you stop eating out, you try to create some margin, you put a little bit of money into saving, except the thing you can't control, inflation just seems to keep going up. And it's like, God, man, I'm doing everything I can. Are you going to step in at some point? Like, what do you do when the right thing no longer seems like the right thing to do? What do you do when you're doing exactly what God has asked you to, but nothing is changing? That's where these guys were. Like, again, if you're anything at all like me, well, the wall starts to influence my behavior a little bit. That unchangeable thing starts to have a little bit of control in who I become. Think about how crazy that is. That the thing you dislike the most ends up influencing who you become. And I get it. I'm not up here talking at you. I'm probably doing more counseling to myself than I am anything. Because it's hard when you're doing exactly what God has asked you to do. You're stepping in the exact path that he's asked you to step, but nothing is changing. You take another trip and the brick doesn't fall. You take another trip. There's no rain to make the ground soft. There's no winds. There's nothing. It's like, God, all right, what's going on, God? But that doesn't seem to be what happens to the Israelites. I'm not saying that's not what they felt. Because I believe with all confidence they had to have those wonderings. But what we see Joshua say in verse 16 tells us that they consistently had a hope. That God was not simply an observer, that he was involved, that God's promise wasn't forgotten. And here's what he said in verse 16. After the seventh time, this is on the seventh day. Remember the seventh day they were supposed to walk around at seven times. This is after the seventh time. The priest blew the ram's horn, and Joshua said to the troops, shout, for the Lord has given you the city. Did you catch the tense that he used? He said, the Lord has given you the city. Joshua, the wall's still standing, bro. How is the city mine? But he had this confidence. And what he did was echoed God's promise. From the very beginning, God said, hey, listen, the city's yours. Don't worry. I'll take care of the walls. And there's something about Joshua. There's something in Joshua's world that allowed him to consistently do the same thing, consistently be the person God is asking him to be, consistently follow in the steps, consistently let his faith influence his steps versus the opposition. And he said, hey, we did it. We're there. We won. It's good. And it was simply the promise. There was something that he did that kept him gripped to the promise versus the not tumbling wall. It's that confidence that we were talking about. Joshua had a hope God would fulfill his promise by remembering the promises he fulfilled. That's what he did. So maybe that needs to happen kind of in your world, right? Hey, God, I'm having a hard time here. But Joshua encouraged his men. That's why I said, shout. Victory is won. And as I'm reading this, I'm like, okay, Joshua, that's not the problem. The problem isn't believing God can, or the problem isn't believing that God is able, but what is it when you're in that moment that makes it so hard to cling to the promise of God? And as I'm reading through, I come to this portion of the instruction that is right in the middle of everyone, the Ark of the Covenant. Now see, to everyone, to the citizens of Jericho and everyone watching, the Ark of the Covenant really represented who the Israelites were, who they were fighting for, exactly whose people they were. But to the Israelites, it was a little something different. To the Israelites, when they looked at the Ark, it actually contained three different things in it. The first thing was Aaron's staff, which was crucial in a big part of being freed from the Egyptian slavery. The second thing was the stone tablets, which Moses chiseled the Ten Commandments on. And the third thing was manna. Manna was something that as they were walking through the wilderness, they didn't have any food, they were starving, and it's where God provided food for them. All three of those things were sitting in the ark. And everywhere that the ark went, not only did it represent the presence of God, but it represented the promise of God. And I think it's by no accident, no accident at all, that when God said, hey, listen, I want you to have some guys up front. I want you to have some guys in the back. And right in the middle of everything, in the middle of everything you're doing, I need you to put the ark. I need you to be able to see the ark. When the wall's not falling quite as quickly as it needs to, I want you to be able to see the ark and remember how I've provided for you in the past. As the walls and you're walking around and something's not necessarily happening, I need you to be able to see the ark and remember, oh man, I remember whenever we were in captivity, God stepped in and freed us for no reason other than the fact that he loved us. I need you to be able to see the ark, and I want you to remember that when we didn't have a direction, he gave us a direction. I need you to see the ark, and I want you to remember as soon as you start thinking, I'm not going to come through for you, I want you to remember how the bread came from nowhere, and you had plenty of food. I need you to see those things. And it was right in the middle of everything that they were doing, in the middle of their frustration, in the middle of the waiting, in the middle of the, God, are you going to do something? Suddenly they caught a glimpse of something that was a reminder of God's presence and God's promise. And they held onto this hope because they remembered God's promise. Joshua said, shout. And is the thing in your world that cannot be taken away from you? What is your experience with God, your encounter with God, that when things aren't happening the way that you would like them to happen, when you're moving toward what you hope for the most and you aren't quite seeing it yet, what is the thing that catches your eye, that you can go back to, that you can remember? And hope. Hope comes in. Like there's hope in a tall obstacle. So, just to be very transparent, very honest, a couple of years ago, serving at a church in southeast Georgia as one of their pastors, and it was a dark, dark time. I grew up in a church where it was really very behavior and rules oriented. I'm not saying anything except for what I ended up taking away from that is that I had to be good enough in everything that I did. I'm grateful, in part, because it made me so awesome today. But no, there's another part of it that I kind of shifted that same type of approach to God. I felt like I had to be good enough for God. And from time to time, that would creep up in my world. And serving at this church, leading people, and I'm not saying that to elevate myself. I'm saying that to say, hey, listen, I, none of your pastors are any different. I was at a place that I felt like God didn't want me anymore, that I felt like God didn't care for me, that God kind of took his hand off of me, that God wasn't going to use me anymore, and he was just kind of done. Go. I gave you too many chances. I'm done. I'm over with. And I'm telling you, I was at a dark, dark place. And I remember, I'm an artist. I'm going to get emotional. Just deal with it. It'll be fun. I remember I went into the church one day, and I was so desperately, I needed to see a brick fall. And I'm saying, on my knees, I'm praying, God, listen, I need to know you haven't given up on me. I need to know that you're still here. I need to know that you still hear me. I need to know that you still care. I was so desperate for some type of a sign. After I would pray, I would look up at the lights and kind of hope for them to flicker. I needed something. I stayed there for 10, 15 minutes, glancing, looking at my phone. Maybe he would say, I love you or something. Just anything. Silence. Day seven. No brick. No lean. And I remember I stood up. I walked right down the middle of the aisle, headed out. And in my mind, I said, I guess I still got to be that good Christian kid, huh? I was angry. I went home. And I was about to sit down and just work on my call-to-duty skills, right? And before I did that, it hit me. I was like, I guess I got to, again, do my devotional thing. And I sat down. I don't need to read it. I sat down. Opened my devotional. And it was actually, it was Louis Giglio, an incredible speaker. He was probably good. I don't remember what he said, though. But I read the text with it. It was Isaiah 43. And it said, this is the Lord your God, and I love you. I chose you. I'll be with you. And I'm telling you, I got broke. Just like, there's my arc. I don't care what happens tomorrow. I can always look at that. I can always remember. He heard. He remembered me. He didn't give up on me. And I'm telling you, I suck really bad at remembering that. So much so I had to get it tattooed on my arm, right? And every day at two o'clock there's a notification that pops up on my phone that says, hey, remember how God is for you. Believe that he'll do it again. Every day, 2 o'clock. What's your arc? What is that encounter? What is that moment? What is that experience with God? Is it a car accident that should have killed you? Is it your spouse still loving you? Is it a home, being able to close on a home in 2022? Good Lord. What is your arc? How different, how different would those moments of walking around the wall be if you started and stopped your day with a journal? Like at the end of every day, sit down and write down, man, this was my God moment. This is what I saw God do in my world today. And then next week, recount back to the week prior. Read that, oh man, that was incredible. And you're sandwiching your day with your God moments, with your ark. How different would your world look if every night at dinner you sat down and you just asked your kids, asked your spouse, hey, what happened in your world today? What did you see God do? What was that cool thing? Not for any type of you have to to be good enough, but I'm telling you, you've experienced it. I've experienced it. The Israelites experienced it. This hurt and this heartache and this wall that kept me from having the hope that Jesus said he came to offer. What's your arc? In just a minute, I'm going to pray for us, And there's a new song. Maybe you're familiar with it, but I believe it's a newer song for here. And it comes right out of this text. And so what I want you to do, I don't want you to necessarily sing along at first. You're more than welcome to. You can read the words if you don't know it, whatever. But what I want you to do is take just a moment and find your ark. Like think back to those God moments, those God encounters that cannot be taken away from you because I promise you this, we need those in our journey because one of the things we were never promised is easy. Find your ark. And then we get to this bridge. The bridge of this song says, I've seen you move. You move the mountains. And I believe you'll do it again. You made a way when there was no way. And I believe you'll do it again. What I'm going to ask you to do at that moment, you've got your ark. I want you to stand up and do exactly what the Israelites did. Shout it. We declare praise to a God who is worthy of our praise. And I believe with all of my heart, right, he is involved in the world that you're living in. I can't tell you tomorrow is going to be easy, but I can tell you if it's not, you've got an ark that can still bring hope into your journey. Let's pray. God, thank you. Thank you for being a God who is good, a God who is kind, a God who is faithful, a God who has blessed us with encounters with you that we can take along with us for the rest of our life. And it's in those moments, I believe that's what helped your disciples ask and pray for boldness, to pray for moments of new experiences with you. Because it just strengthened their faith and it built them to a place of unshakable faith in you. So God, I know sometimes it's hard to remember, and again, you have this promise that your Holy Spirit will speak to us and guide us and lead us. What I ask you to do, Lord, is we sit in just a couple of moments and we reflect on our encounters with you. We invite your spirit to just come and flood our minds, God. Just pour these encounters with you, maybe even moments that we didn't give you credit for. Just flood our hearts, flood our minds with an ark that we can carry with us for the rest of our life. In Jesus' name.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

The All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you are going to miss that Revelation intro, that's the last time you get to hear that music, let me know and I'll send you the clip. You can use it as your alarm clock on Mondays just to really face the week. This is the last part in our series moving through the book of Revelation and it's been a good series. I think it's been good for the church. I think it's been good for our small groups. I've heard that we've had some really good, robust discussions in those, and it's been fun for me to get to tackle this book on your behalf. And sincerely, I appreciate your trust and belief in me as we've walked through this together, and I've kind of served a little bit as a guide through the book of Revelation. By way of review, as we finish up the series, I thought it would be worth it to kind of recap all that we've learned and talked about as we arrive here at the final week. So in the first week, we're setting the scene. It's Revelation chapter one. John arrives. He's given a vision while he's on the island of Patmos. An angel comes and gets him and says, write down the things that I'm going to show you. And in that first chapter, we see this remarkable reunion between John and his savior, Jesus, his best friend, Jesus, who he served and spoken about and longed for for years. And we see that the greatest promise, no matter what else we encounter in the book of Revelation, the greatest promise in the book is that one day we will meet our Savior face to face. That one day we will meet Jesus too. And after we meet Jesus, after we see his face, whatever happens after that is going to be okay. That's the greatest promise in Revelation. In week two, my dad preached and we looked at Revelation 4 and 5. Remember, we skipped the letters to the churches in 2 and 3. We're going to tackle those in a series to be named later. Revelation 4 and 5, God sits on the throne. That's the important part. God's in control. And then Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, worthy to open the seals and begin the tribulation process. Remember, we define the the wrath of God and how even though we kind of shy away from it in the 21st century church, it's important. It's important to lean into. It's important to acknowledge. And we actually want a God that's capable of that. And then for the next two weeks, it was kind of academic. I pulled the whiteboard up here one week. We went through the events of the tribulation, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls and God's wrath being poured out and what order that comes and the different views around that. And then we kind of looked at the figures of the tribulation, the antichrist and the false prophet and the dragon and the witnesses and the 144,000 and kind of decoded some of those things within the book. And then last week was probably my favorite week where we look at the return of Christ and what that wins us. How he conquers evil once and for all. He conquers Satan once and for all. He makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And we also kind of reflected on the idea that when Jesus comes, we can finally lay down our faith and our hope. Those things are no longer needed because we're looking at our Savior face to face. And so this week, we arrive at the end of the book, at the end of the series, and I almost titled this morning's message, It Begins, or The Beginning, because this is where eternity begins. This is where the temporal world stops in Revelation 22, and eternity begins, an eternity that I want us to see this morning, for which we were created. So we arrive not necessarily at the end today, but at the beginning. As we do, there's a couple more things in Revelation to look at, namely the millennial reign of Christ. The millennial reign of Christ is discussed in Revelation chapter 20. So Jesus has just come down. He stormed down on the white horse. He has the troops of heaven, the angels of heaven arrayed in white linen behind him. They conquer the armies of the antichrist, of Satan, of the false prophet. They conquer the dark kingdom. They take the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth, the antichrist and the false prophet, and Jesus binds them and throws them in the lake of fire forever. And now all that remains is to deal with Satan. How is Jesus at the end of time going to deal with Satan? We find this in Revelation chapter 20. Now just a caveat about this sermon. It was a holiday week, all right? So I wrote this basically in my head during the 24 hours I was in the car this week with a six-month-old, which means I didn't produce notes for Kyle to put in there, which means that Scott back there, who's in charge of the slides, has the easiest job ever. And Carly, who's in charge of printing your notes, had an easy job because there's nothing there. So it's entirely up to you to write down what you want to write down and to follow along as you want to follow along. I would encourage you to grab a Bible. Grab the one in the seat back in front of you and be looking at Revelation 20, 21, and 22. I'm going to read the first four or five verses from each of those chapters as we move through, and they will not appear on the screens. If you're at home and you're watching, grab a Bible so we can go through it together and interact with the text together. But we see the millennial reign in Revelation chapter 20 in the first three verses. John writes, So if you keep reading, what you find is that after Satan is bound and thrown in a pit for a thousand years, that at the end of that thousand years, he is released and allowed to tempt the people on the earth who are alive at that time. For just a little while longer, he pulls away some people from Christ. And then Christ once and for all binds him and throws him in the lake of fire with the Antichrist and the false prophet. So around this, there are a lot of questions. Namely, the biggest one to me is, why in the world would God bind Satan, put him in a pit, make him stay there for a thousand years, and then let him out to tempt people one more time, just one last hurrah from Satan, like God's doing a favor to an old buddy or something, and then throwing him in the lake of fire. Why does God do that? Listen, I don't know. To me, this is one of those mysteries of revelation. I have literally nothing for you. You can research it and read about it, and people make guesses, but in all honesty, as is often the case to me, a lot of the guesses, and in fact, for this one, all of the guesses out there really don't hold intellectual water for me. I see them. I can see how they might be thought of as reasonable, but I can also very easily, to me, poke holes in them. And so I thought it not worth sharing with you the different guesses because they're all bad ones. So I would say, I don't know. It's a mystery on this side of heaven why God chooses to order things in that way. I continue to believe that if in my elevated body, if in my new heavenly body I get at the marriage supper of the lamb, I have the mental capacity to understand this and God deigns to explain it to me and I even still care once I'm in heaven, which I definitely won't. But let's pretend that in heaven while we're amidst this perfect joy, we say, hang on a second. Why'd you do that thing with Satan where you released him one last time? If God were to explain it to us and we had the mental capacity to grasp it, I think we'd all go, oh, thanks. And then we'd go on with our joyful day. By the way, I haven't said this yet. It's important to point out. Part of the reason that heaven is so joyful is because there's no dogs or animals there. It's fantastic. No more hassles, no more cleanups, no more messes. It's really, it's a wonderful place. I know it says lion lays down with lamb. That's figurative. There's no animals in heaven. I'm certain of it. I'm sure your dogs are all there. All right. I'm sure they are. Except for my first dog, Maggie. If they have an afterlife, Maggie's in hell, that dog is. What was I preaching about? So we don't know why God chooses at the end of the millennial reign to allow Satan loose for a period of time and then throws him into the lake of fire. And I'm not going to pretend to offer you explanations because they don't make sense to me. There are also views about the millennial reign. And we're going to get in the weeds just a little bit. And if this doesn't interest you, I am sorry. But there are some people who showed up with questions this morning about the millennial reign. And so this needs to be discussed. So we will move quickly, but there's kind of three traditional views about the millennial reign. They are called amillennial, postmillennial, and premillennial, and they're questions about when does God return? When does Jesus return? Does Jesus return after the millennial reign? Does he return during the millennial reign? Does he return before the millennial reign? And so we're going to basically group them like this. There's premillennial, which says Christ's return is before the millennial reign, that Christ comes back like he does in 19. He conquers Satan. He throws them in there. It's literally a thousand years where he reigns on earth and Christian ideals flourish and Christians flourish and God's kingdom flourishes. And then at the end of those literal thousand years, Satan is released. He tempts some people and then Jesus conquers them once and for all. Amillennial and postmillennial believe, and this is where it gets tricky, that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay 20 over chapter 19. See, premillennials believe that first chapter 19 happens, which is the return of Christ, the big war. He comes out of heaven and he conquers the beast. And then chapter 20 happens, which is the millennial reign. So premillennialists read this literally and say that these things literally happen. Christ, after he binds the beast and throws him in the lake of fire, then he reigns for a thousand, he binds Satan, then he reigns for a thousand years, then he loses him. It's a literal thousand years. The amillennial and postmillennial view think that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay them over top of each other and that they are different ways of describing the same events. Do you remember in week one when I said when you're interpreting Revelation that sometimes it's linear and sometimes it isn't? And how do you know when it is and it isn't? You just study really hard and you make a good guess. So some people have studied really hard and they've made this guess, that 20 lays over 19. In which case, the millennial reign of Christ, the thousand years, is figurative language for a long time. And we are in the middle of that. The millennial reign comes between the two comings of Christ. The Christ as crucified Savior that we read about in Scripture. And then the Christ as returning conqueror that we talked about last week. That in between those two comings of Christ are the millennial reign. And it is I fall in? Probably the latter, the ah or the post, the figurative meaning of the millennial reign. But as my father is listening to this sermon, he will vehemently disagree with that. So there are, I would say there are smart people on either side, but there's not necessarily based on me and my dad being on the two different sides. You'll have to pick which one of us is dumb. But there are good arguments to be made for either side, and it's really not that important which side you choose. The important part is, in the end, Jesus wins, and he binds Satan, and then we move into an eternity that's briefly described in Revelation 21 and 22. In Revelation 21, and you can look at verses 1 through four, we have a passage that I've shared a lot from this stage, that I refer to a lot in my preaching. It's a passage that I think is maybe the single most encouraging and hope-filled passage in the Bible. It's one that I use to comfort others with. It's one that I use to comfort myself. It infuses itself into my preaching and into my thinking over and over again, so much so that I can vividly remember that in the interview process and talking with the elders, when they were asking me about my worldview and my theology and all the different things and my approach to the Bible, I referenced this passage tearfully in my interview with them because it, over the years, has come to mean so much to me. And I thought it worthwhile before we read it this morning to tell you how I encountered this passage and the hope that it can bring in the most dire of situations as we prepare ourselves to look towards eternity. About, I think it was about eight years ago, I was at Greystone Church outside of Georgia, or Atlanta, and I was the small groups pastor and a couple other things, and one of the other hats that I wore at that church was I was the care pastor. Thank you. There it is. Right. Yeah, we were short-staffed. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. That'll probably never be my title again anywhere I go, but it was my title there. And I got a call one day, and it was a couple who had just recently started coming to the church, and they had an eight-year-old son named Landon, whose name I'll never forget, who had passed away. And it was an incredibly sad circumstance. Landon had an infection. He was sick. Went to the doctor, got some antibiotics, took him, went upstairs, I think take a bath or something, and they found him dead. He had had an allergic reaction to the medicine that he took, and they didn't know it. Incredibly sad situation. So sad, in fact, that a few days after the funeral, I was driving somewhere, and I called Jen, and she said, what's wrong? And I said, I don't know. I just, I feel heavy. And Jen goes, Nate, those are emotions. And I was like, well, then you can keep these. These are terrible. I hate this. It was a hard time. And so leading up to meeting with the family and doing the funeral, I called my pastor growing up, a man named Buddy Hoffman, who's no longer with us. I wish he were so I could talk to him about being a pastor. But I called Buddy. I said, Buddy, this has happened. I'm going to have to do this funeral and meet with this family. This is way out of my depth. I don't know what to do or what to say. What do I do? And he says in his typical, very blunt, forthright, buddy nature, he said, Nathan, just don't say anything stupid. And I laughed and I said, yeah, man, that's the goal. That's what I'm trying to avoid. That's why I'm on the phone with you. And he said, well, in times like this, so often people try to say things when they shouldn't. Sometimes your presence matters way more than your words, so really lean into just being quiet and being there. And then when you share scripture, be careful what you share, because it can often ring hollow in times of deep grief. And I agreed with him because I think of when something terrible like this happens, when we lost our first child due to miscarriage and somebody would quote us Jeremiah 29 11, I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, prayers to prosper you, not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. Listen, listen, listen, that's true and that's good, but that doesn't help my pain, right? And if part of God's plan was to take a kid from me, then I don't really want to be a part of that plan. You know what I'm saying? So those verses can ring hollow. And I didn't want to say those to this family, Romans 8, 28. You know, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. That's good and that's true. And that means that in eternity, it's gonna work out and we see it working out. That's what Revelation is about, is affirming Romans 8, 28. But in the moment, boy, that doesn't really bring a lot of comfort to a grieving family. And I said, I agree with you. There's verses that ring hollow. so what do I share? And he said, I always use Revelation 20, Revelation 21, verses one through four. This is the hope that we cling to. And this is why these verses have infused themselves into my preaching and into my thinking and into my prayers and why I still use this passage at every funeral that I do because I believe it's maybe the most hope-filled passage in all of Scripture. And it says this. John writes, I love this part. That, remember last week, I said that hope and faith were burdens and we cling to our hope and our faith. That is the hope that we cling to. This is the event that we place our faith in. That Jesus' death on the cross won us this. That one day, God will be with his people and we will be with our God and he will wipe every tear off of our face and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And if you've heard me do a funeral, you've heard me say what the former things are. In this moment, the former things are death, pain, cancer, birth defects, difficulties, abuse, estrangement, broken homes. The former things are the brokenness of other people that spills out and breaks the people around them. The brokenness is gone is this idea that hurt people hurt people because nobody's hurt, so nobody's getting hurt. The former things are all of the things that cause you stress and anxiety and pain and discomfort now. There's coming a day where those things are no longer present. Those are the former things. And it hearkens back to this promise that we see in Revelation chapter 1 that we highlighted in the first week, that one day we will be with our Savior face to face. One day we will sit in the very presence of God. He will be with us and we will be with him. And in that day when that comes, the former things, the things that cause us pain now. The things that are difficult now. The things that made this week tough. The things that have made these last two years tough. The things that you came in here worrying about now, the scars that you bear from the people who have come before you, all those things have passed away and we walk in perfect joy. This is why I love this verse because this verse acknowledges the former things and it doesn't seek to cheapen those things. It doesn't tell Sean Weldon who lost his son Landon that this thing doesn't matter, that this thing doesn't hurt. Don't worry about it. God has a plan for this thing. It says, no, no, no. This is one of the former things, man. And if you can cling to your faith and your hope through this, it will become a former thing and you'll see him again. So I find this passage to be uniquely and tremendously hope-filled. And it inaugurates the eternity that we are going to share in together. The holy city comes down. We are a part of the new Jerusalem. We are a part of the new heaven and the new earth. Some people believe God creates an entirely new heaven and new earth. Some people believe he replaces this one. I believe it doesn't make a bit of difference. But Revelation 21 inaugurates the eternity following the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest celebration feast of all time. And it ushers us into this beginning of life. Not the end of time, but the beginning of eternity. And this eternity is described, I think, the best in chapter 22, verses 1 through 5. In 21, there's a description of what the new heaven and the new earth is going to look like. And if you remember in week one, I read you a portion of that description where it talks about the jewels that adorn the walls and sit at the base. It says that the city is like gold and the streets are like glass. And we're gonna see a description of a crystal river flowing from the throne of God. And it describes it as this remarkably beautiful place. And that's well and good. And I don't want to cheapen or dismiss the remarkable beauty of heaven. But what is more compelling to me is the peace that we find there, is the tranquility of life there, is the provision of God there, and the perfect peace that we rest in for all of eternity. And I think that's better captured in these verses, in chapters 22, verses 1 through 5, where John writes this. Through the middle of the light that we need. His kingdom knows no night. His kingdom knows no darkness. The tree of life is on either side of the river. It provides for us in season all that we need. There is nothing left to do but to enjoy God and His perfect love and the people that we are there with forever. And what I want you to focus on this morning and what I want you to remember from this series is that this is what we are created for. You understand? What we see in Revelation 21, what's described in Revelation 22, that's what you were created for. Hear me, you were not created for this place. You were not created for this world. You were not created for your current body. You were not created for that. You were created for what is described in Revelation 21 and 22. You were created for eternity. It's why you have a soul that will outlive your body. It's why you have a soul that will pass into this next life without the broken shell that it inhabits right now. It's why your soul longs for eternity. It's why there's something inside of you that says there's gotta be more than this. It's why the people who have accomplished the most on the planet get to the end of their rope of accomplishment and say there has to be more than this. It's why nothing in your life ever fully satisfies you. It's why I believe this to be true. Perfect happiness is not possible this side of heaven. To choose one road towards happiness is to fundamentally disallow another road to happiness. And we are therefore incapable of perfect happiness on this side of heaven. And that's why we are incapable of it, to remind us that on that side of heaven, we will walk in perfect happiness for all of eternity. Because we were created for that eternity. We were designed and purposed for that. We long for it. Paul writes about this over and over again in the things that he says and in the things that he writes to the early church. Particularly in Romans 8 where he says the whole earth groans for this eternity, pressing against the shell that we are in, waiting for our perfect bodies. And I think that this is why Paul writes this in 2 Corinthians 4, verses 17 and 18. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to me because these are famous verses. We refer to these often. These are funeral verses. These are grieving verses. But I think that Paul writes them because Paul was aware of this idea that we were not created for this place. We were created for eternity. So he writes this in chapter 4, verse 17 of 2 Corinthians. I'm going to pick it up in 16. Paul calls all of the pain that we endure in this life light momentary affliction. And just so you know, he's addressing a persecuted church. And the verses that precede this, he's talking about the harm that faces them, the death that faces them. He's talking, he's in, if you want to look historically, he's in a time period where the life expectancy had to be somewhere in the 40s or maybe as late as the 50s. He's looking at a high infant mortality rate. He's looking at people who have lots of kids and are very used to some of the kids not making it to adulthood. These people know what loss is. They know what pain is on a level that most of us in this room are not even close to being acquainted with. So before we think that Paul is being flippant with our pain that we walk through, let's be clear. No, no, no. He's being flippant with way worse pain than what we walk through. And he still calls it light and momentary affliction. And he says it is not worth comparing with the glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. The pain that we experience in this life is not worth comparing. It's just preparing us for the weight of glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. I've mentioned this before, but you've likely forgotten it, and it stands out to me. When Lily, my daughter, was I think about three years old, we were putting her to bed one night. And as we were trying to put her to bed, she insisted on jumping on her bed. And we told her, no, you can't do that. Stop jumping on your bed. And she tried to do it. And I had to be stern. No, stop jumping on your bed. You're not allowed to jump on your bed. She lost her mind. She was so bummed that she couldn't jump on her bed. I mean, she screamed and she cried and she kicked and she wailed and she flailed. And it was the biggest deal in the world to her. And, you know, in that moment, would it have been easier to just say, all right, listen, kid, just jump on the bed for five minutes and then go to bed, right? Of course it would have. But the Rubicon had been crossed, man. I had planted the flag and I had to defend it. You will not jump on this bed. I will cry with you all night before you jump on this bed one more time. Like it is not happening. So she's losing her mind over and I won't let her, I won't let her jump on the bed and whatever. And while it's happening, after she settles down, she goes to sleep. I think to myself, that's so dumb. She treated it like it was the biggest deal ever. She's not even going to remember it in the morning. Two days later, that thing never happened. When she's an adult, it's not even a blip on the radar screen. It's completely and totally inconsequential to who she is as a human in every way that she didn't get to jump on her bed that night. It does not matter. And then I started thinking about all the things when you become an adult that mattered so much when you were younger that when you're older, it's like, who cares? Remember how much you cared about homecoming? And then 20 years later, it's just a waste of money. It was silly. Remember all the things that mattered so much in elementary school? Then in the light of adulthood, they just, who cares? It makes me wonder how often in this life we're wailing and flailing and ticked off and upset and hurt. And God's in heaven going, you're just trying to jump on the bed, man. When you get here, it's not gonna matter. Quit getting so dang worked up. It makes me wonder how often we just wanna jump on our bed. It makes me wonder all the things that we get so worked up about that cause us so much anxiety that just spike our blood pressure. We just got done with a week-long trip driving to two different cities with a six-month-old. So I had some chest tightness this week and it got pretty stressful. And it makes me just, if I see that through the eyes of God and in light of eternity, how utterly ridiculous it was for me to waste one ounce of energy on getting frustrated at a six-month-old for crying. And when I read through the Bible, the more I walk with God, the more of Scripture that I see, the more times I expose myself to Jesus and the Gospels, the more times I read Paul, the more times I see the nature of God and begin to ask, why did he do this? And why did he direct in this way? And why doesn't he give us more of this? The more I conclude that God himself is far more concerned with eternity than we are. And that the problem is not trying to figure out all the things that are happening in this life and how to make sense of them all. The problem is not focusing enough on the next life and looking forward to that and seeing this life through the perspective of eternity the way that God does. Because when we read through scripture over and over and over again, it's very clear to me that God cares way more about what happens after Revelation 22 than he does about what's happening right now. He's just trying to get us there. So as we go through this life, I think it could be helpful to have reminders of eternity. And maybe that's what joy and pain are. I would argue this morning, if we had notes, this would be a thing that showed up on the screen that I would encourage you to write down. But I would note this morning that all joy and all pain are simply reminders that we're not yet where we belong. All joy that we experience and all pain that we experience are really simply reminders that we are not yet where we belong. Thanksgiving was this last week. If at your Thanksgiving table there was pain, because maybe someone wasn't at that table this year who was there last year. Maybe we hoped that there would be a baby or spouse or at least just a boyfriend or a girlfriend or something at the table this year and there wasn't and that caused us pain. Maybe there's strife in our family. Maybe one of our family members just isn't who they used to be. And because of myriad circumstances, when we sat around our table this week, there was pain for us. That pain is simply a reminder that we're not yet where we're supposed to be. That pain that we experience, that's a former thing. It will pass away. So we let pain remind us that I'm not intended for this place. I'm holding on for the next place. Likewise, joy is a reflection of the perfect joy that we will experience in heaven. If we sat around the Thanksgiving table this week and there was particular joy there, there was richness of friends and richness of family and richness of relationships. If there was a new seat at the table, if there was a new baby at the party, if there is a pending birth to celebrate, if there was a new relationship represented there, if there was reconciliation, if maybe this was the first time we've been together as a family since we had to start wearing the dumb masks, maybe that's what got us together and that's what brought us joy. That joy that you experienced this week is just a reflection and a smudgy window of the pure joy that's waiting on you in eternity. It's just a hint of the joy that's waiting on us in the future. And so I think we would be wise to allow all pain and all joy simply remind us that we are not yet where we are supposed to be because God did not intend us for this life. God did not design us for this life. God designed us for the next one. And in Revelation chapter 22, chapter 21 and 22, we see those things begin. That's why I actually like the following verses in 2 Corinthians. The ones that follow the light and momentary affliction and they are preparing us for this eternal grace. Because they acknowledge that we were not made for this place. I'm going to read to you just kind of a selection of them from 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Paul writes, He's talking about what we talked about, the former things, that we weren't made for this world, we were made for the next one. So if in this tent, sometimes it's uncomfortable, if in this life, sometimes we feel pain, those are groanings that are reminding us that we were made for the next life. And then he goes on down in verse six body, we are away from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage. And we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him. Scripture acknowledges, that. It is right and good to hope for that. It is right and good to remind ourselves that there is perfect joy where the former things have passed away waiting on us and we cling to that hope. And I said in week one that this mysterious book of Revelation really is the greatest book of hope that we have in Scripture and I hope that you've reached that conclusion on your own as well. So I would finish the series with this encouragement. Cling to your faith. Cling to the hope that this is true and that one day these things will be realized. Cling to your faith and cling to your hope and take courage, Christians, because we know how this story ends. Let's pray. Father, thank you for telling us how the story ends. Thank you for not making us wonder that. Thank you for the book of Revelation, for the vision that you gave John. Lord, I pray that you would give us a heart to understand the important things there. That you would give us a heart to respect the mysteries, to wonder in awe at all the things described. More than anything, God, I pray that we would see that you acknowledge that some things in this life are tough. Some things in this life are the former things that we're walking through right now. But that God, you offer us a hope and a future. So Lord, I pray that we would cling to that. I pray that we would be of good courage. That no matter where we are, no matter what we're doing, we would live to please you. And that nothing that could happen to us in this life could wrestle away from us the hope and the faith that we have in you. God, we look forward to the day that we can spend eternity with you when Revelation 21 and 22 come to pass. We thank you for this book. We thank you for the series. God, I ask that it would push us closer to you and that it would more deeply entrench us in the hope that we find in you. It's in your son's name I ask these things. Amen.