Sermons tagged with Salvation

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. I'll be right there at those double doors. Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself and teach me your name and give me about three or four weeks and I'll try to remember it. A big thank you to Kyle, our worship pastor, who stepped in for me last week. About 6 a.m. last Sunday morning, I had been up most of the night and texted Gibby, our worship pastor, hey man, I'm not going to make it. And I went back through some sermons and I found one from last January where I talked about community. I knew it was going to be small group Sunday, so I said this will be appropriate. I said just show this one from last January and we'll be fine. And so then I turned on the TV around 10 o'clock just to see how things were going, and I was as surprised as you to see Kyle up here once the bumper video got done. But he did a great job. I'm so grateful for him. It's kind of a rite of passage as a teacher and communicator to find out the morning of that you're actually preaching that day. And so it's a good experience for everybody. But I'm grateful to him. This week, we're going to continue right on in our series. I was going to preach about marriage last week and prayers for our marriage. And we decided to continue in that series. Next week, we're going to do prayers for our finances, and then we're going to get into a series in Mark that's going to carry us all the way through Easter. So I'm very much looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in the Gospel of Mark with you. But this morning, we look at prayers, a prayer for our marriages. And I don't often do sermons on marriage. And I'll be honest with you, the main reason I don't often specifically target marriage in a church service, probably to our detriment. I should probably do it more. But the main reason I don't is just because I know that even though, as I look out, most of us in this room are married. I hope happily so. Most of us are married, but I'm also aware that we have single people in our congregation as well. And some of you are single right now by choice. You'd like to be married one day, but you're not yet, and that's fine. Or you'd like to be married again someday, and you're not right now, and that's okay. Some of you are widows or widowers, and for different reasons and different walks of life, we have single people in our midst. And so in doing a sermon on marriage, I always worry about ostracizing that part of our population, and so I'm sorry for that. So this morning, I'm going to unapologetically focus on marriage and what God's role for marriage is and what our purpose within our marriages are according to Scripture. And so I would say to you, if you're a single person this morning who's listening to me, if you're watching online and you haven't turned it off yet, I would say if you're not married and you want to be, then hang on to this for the kind of marriage that you want and the kind of spouse that you want to find, the kind of spouse that you want to be. If you're not married and you don't want to be, then the best I can do is to say hang on to this so you can advise your married friends or just open up the Bible and start reading it for the next 30 minutes. That'll be great for you too. With that caveat, let's approach this topic of marriage and ask ourselves, what is God's purpose for marriage? And what is our role supposed to be within our marriages? Now, I don't think that there's any passage that addresses God's purpose for marriage and our role within marriage more clearly than Ephesians chapter 5. Really starting, I believe, in verse 21. Yes, verse 21 through the end of the chapter in verse 32. Now, in Ephesians, sorry, Ephesians chapter 5. In Ephesians and in Colossians and in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes about what theologians refer to as the household codes. In Christ, in church, in this new way of life, in this new way of understanding faith, here are the codes by which we should live within our households. Here's how wives and husbands should interact and children and parents should interact. And there's even a portion about slaves and masters and how they should interact. And so he introduces what we refer to as the household codes. And these, we should understand, are revolutionary for the time. Because at this point in history, it's a heavily patriarchal society. And marriage is really a one-way street. Marriage is really about the man. The woman is ancillary to the marriage. She's almost very close to property, if not just out-and-out property. And so it's within that context that these household codes are introduced. And what we see is that they are revolutionary for the time in which they are introduced. But for us this morning, as we look at them, I want us to be thinking, what's God's purpose for marriage? What does God want to see happen in my marriage? And what is my role within that marriage? How does God want to use me to bring about his desired outcome for us and for my spouse? And again, I don't think that this issue is addressed anywhere more clearly than it is in Ephesians chapter 5. So I want to read to you, beginning in verse one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. But I am talking about Christ and the church. In the verse 33, however, each one of you must also, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. There's a lot packed in there. We could do a series from those verses. But I want us to see the main priority for marriage, What Paul depicts, we believe through the instruction of God, as the main purpose for marriage, which is to prepare the bride for the bridegroom. Which is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it, that he might prepare it, wash it, so that it might be presented without blemish or spot to God on the day of atonement, on the day of glory, that we might present one another as blameless to God at the end of this life. And so here's what I'm going to do with this passage. And I just want to admit this up front so we all know what I'm doing. I've always tried to teach you like you are intelligent adults who have the Holy Spirit. Most of you are adults. Most of you are intelligent. And if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to talk to you that way. I am taking an interpretive and theological license in my application of this passage this morning. This passage on its surface seems to be talking directly to the husbands with the line at the end that says, and wives seek that you respect your husbands. But what I believe about this passage is that there is an implied reciprocity. That if it is my job as a husband to present my wife without blemish or spot, to do what I can to prepare her for heaven, to do what I can to love her towards Christ, then it is likewise the responsibility of my wife to love me towards Jesus. That there is a reciprocital expectation in this passage. I don't even know if reciprocital is a word, but there you go. There's that expectation in this passage, I believe, that both parties would seek to love each other towards Christ. And if you can't go there with me, and you go, listen, man, on the surface, it seems like it's talking to the husbands. That's how I'm going to take it at face value. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm just talking to the husbands today. But by the way, husbands, you don't have to respect your wives because there's no reciprocity in the passage. But that's the license that I'm going to take is that this is for both of us. And if it's for both of us, here's what this passage clearly says is the responsibility of each spouse in a marriage. Okay. This is the purpose of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to sanctify you, to make you more like Christ in character. I'm going to sit more on that in a minute, to make you more like Christ in character, to move you through this spirit, this process of spiritual maturation. And that as such, as the spouse, here's what this passage is teaching us. And we're going to unpack this. You, husbands, you, wives, if you're married, you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's lives. If you're married, this passage teaches us that you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's life. Now, let's stop and talk about this word sanctification, because this is one of those spongy church words that we hear a lot, and you church people probably know that word, you've heard it, but if I were to make you stand up right now and be like, Karen, why don't you stand up and tell us what sanctification means? You'd be like, oh my gosh, I hate you. I've never come back to this church in my whole life, right? Nobody wants to do that right now. But it's a word that shows up again and again in Scripture. It's a word that is referred to again and again in Scripture. And it's a summary word for what happens during our life. So it's important that we understand what sanctification is. It's a very simple definition, and there's no blank for this, but if you want to write it down because it's helpful, you can write this down. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. We see throughout Scripture these encouragements that we should be Christ-like, that we should be like Jesus. We pray and we sing, more of you and less of me. More of you, Christ, less of me. If all I ever get is you, that's good enough. I want more of you, less of me. We pray that we would become Christ-like. We pray for our children to become Christ-like. These are all references to what Scripture calls sanctification, the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is an unavoidable portion of the salvation process. See, a lot of us think of salvation as this inflection point, this point in time, this moment in time in which we become saved. But scripture actually teaches us that salvation is a process that begins at the point of justification or some would argue predestination and then continues through sanctification until glorification. And here's how I know that I'm right about this. I'm not making it up. That's basically a direct quote of Romans chapter 8 verse 29. We know verse 28. We love that verse. For all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Great. But 29 says, for those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he justified. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. Those whom he sanctified, he glorified. So let's look at that process. Jesus, God, through his spirit, calls us to himself. He calls us with his Holy Spirit. He chisels away at our blind and darkened heart. He softens us to the good news and the mystery of the gospel until one day our soul is in a place where we're willing to accept Christ as our Savior. We repent of who we thought Jesus was. We accept who Jesus says he is, and we step forward in faith. This looks a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different traditions. We pray the believer's prayer or that we pray the sinner's prayer. We ask Jesus into our heart. We confess Jesus as our savior. However it is you want to phrase it, this for many of us is the point of salvation. It's what we think of as the time we got saved, but that's really the justification process. So God, God calls us then at that moment of what we would call our salvation, that's really justification. That's when we accept the blood of Christ as a cover over our sins. And God looks at us and he does not judge us based on our actions. He judges us based on the righteousness of Christ and says that he sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. This is Isaiah chapter 1 where he puts his arm around us and he says, Come now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. At the point of justification, Jesus, by hanging on the cross, has made our sins as white as snow. He has covered over us with our righteousness. And God in heaven looks down on us and he sees not us, but he sees his Son and we are justified in the court of divine righteousness and made worthy of heaven through the blood of Christ. When we accept that, we are justified. After we are justified, we are sanctified. After we are sanctified, we are glorified. We are glorified when we meet our Father in heaven and our glorified bodies, when we do not need faith anymore because we're looking our Savior in the eye. We are glorified in heaven. So that means that between the time of justification in your life, the moment you became a Christian, to the point of glorification, the moment you meet God in eternity forever. Everything that happens in between that is your sanctification. That God is using day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade to slowly chisel you into someone who is more like him in character, whose heart beats along with him for the things he wants. We are told that if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, that walk with God through the process of sanctification, our heart begins to beat with his so that the things that we desire are the things that he desires and he brings those about for the good of us and those who are called according to his purpose. This is the process of sanctification. Spending our entire life growing closer and closer and closer to Jesus. Now this process can be thwarted. It can get short-circuited by sin and by other ailments, by the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, according to Hebrews 12, verse 1. This process can get sidelined. But as Christians, we are perpetually going through the process of sanctification until we enter glorification. This means that in our 70s, our faith and our depths of insight and understanding and our knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil and being filled with the knowledge of God and the maturity with which we walk and the love that we express and the selflessness that we live with and the humility in which we walk should be vastly different than it was in our 30s. Because God has had 40 years to sanctify us and make us more like his son in character. So that in our 70s we ought to walk with so much more wisdom and godliness than we did in our 30s. Not because we can't be godly in our 30s, but just because he's had 40 more years to sanctify us. That's the call of the Christian life. And what Paul is saying about marriage is that your spouse ought to be the chief agent of sanctification in your life. Meaning, your husband or your wife has been placed in your life by God to be the primary tool he uses to chisel away at your rough edges and reveal within you the person that he's always wanted you to become. They are the primary tool that God uses to chisel away the elements of the world that are still a part of you so that your character might emerge as more Christ-like. That is the purpose of marriage. If you are married, God's primary purpose for you in that marriage is to use you as the primary tool that he chooses to make your spouse more like him in character. That is the role of a husband or a wife. And nothing short of it. And here's what I think is interesting about that point. Here's what I think is interesting. I think that if I were to sit down with any of you over coffee who are married. And say, do you consider yourself a good wife? Do you consider yourself a good husband? You would say yes or no. You would say, you know, for the most part, I think I'm pretty good, or gosh, I haven't been doing great lately, or some of you, I hope, would say, yeah, I think I'm nailing it. That's great. Some of you would be like, I'm failing miserably. Okay. Whatever your answer was in how you're doing, good or bad, neutral or not, the next question is the important one. How good are you doing at being a husband? I think I'm doing okay here. I think I've got some things to work on there. I think I can get better. But overall, I think I've been pretty good. Okay. Why? That's the important question. Why do you think you're a good husband? Why do you think you're a bad husband? Why do you think you've been a good wife? What's your criteria? Why do you think you've been a bad wife? I think a lot of us, if we had to make lists, even if we take your marriage out of it, and I were to ask you, what makes a husband a good husband? If I were to ask you, think of somebody that you think has a great marriage, and they're a great husband, and they're a great wife. What makes them great? What are the qualities? I think we would say things like, well, he loves her really well. He's unselfish with her. He's patient with her. They've been married for 40 years. He's faithful to her. She's faithful to him. She's patient with him. She supports him. Or if they're bad, we would say, well, he's selfish. He doesn't see her. He pretends that the yard needs work for eight hours on a Saturday while she deals with three-year-olds. She doesn't support him. She gets on to him all the time. He ignores her. How far down the list, here's the important part. If I were to ask you what makes you or what makes that person a good husband or a good wife? How many items would you list off before you said that man's a good husband because the way that he loves his wife loves her closer to Jesus? That man's a good husband because his wife is an incredible believer because of the way that he's loved her towards him. How many of you, how far down the list would we have to get before you said that woman is a wonderful wife to that man? Because she has been used by God over and over again and she steps into her role of sanctification in his life. And because of her influence in his life, that man is walking more closely with Jesus than he would have without her. How far down our list of good or bad husband or wife criteria do we need to go before we get to the very first criteria laid out by God in Scripture? Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Present her holy and blameless before the throne. That's tops. That's the number one thing. That's the standard. And yet, so many of us, and listen, well, I'll say this in a second. So many of us have that so far down our list of what a responsible spouse should do that it wouldn't even go mentioned, that we haven't even thought of it. And here's what I want to be really honest with you about, okay? As I prepared this sermon, and I was confronted with this standard from Scripture of what my role as a husband is. I was deeply, deeply convicted. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm not saying that for show. I'm not saying that like, well, you know, we could all improve a little bit. I could too, so I'm going to act convicted here so you feel safe in your conviction. No. I was deeply convicted and went home and apologized to Jen for not being the husband I was going to preach that I needed to be. I apologized to her because I'm about to come out. I might not be much, but I like to think I have some integrity. And I'm not going to come in here and look you men in the eye and tell you what Scripture calls you to be, knowing good and well I've fallen short of that in my own house. So the first thing I did is I went home. I didn't know she was going to be in the fourth and fifth grade room this morning. That makes this part a lot easier. I thought she was going to be sitting right there. And that if I didn't apologize to her, she was going to be sitting there going, what are you talking about, man? There have been seasons where I have done this by God's grace. There have also been seasons when I have not. And so if you are convicted this morning as I lay out the standard that is set forth in scripture for what marriage is and what a spouse ought to be in that marriage. If that's hard to hear and you feel that you've fallen short, I am the captain of your team, pal. I'm with you. I am not preaching this as if I were on some marital mountaintop and I figured it out and I would like for you to get on my level. I am preaching this here. Saying, hey, this is what scripture calls us to. We've all got to step up together. This is what we're called to. So let's be that. To that end, as I was talking through this with Jen this week, she brought up, yeah, that's good, that makes sense. I like that. If both parties are spiritually engaged, it's a really good and helpful thing to tell the couples of grace. I like it. But what do you tell the spouse who is spiritually engaged, whose spouse is spiritually disengaged? To put a finer point on it, more often than not, what do you tell the women who care about Jesus and would really, really love for their husband to be this for them and are trying desperately to be that for their husband, but they can't get his attention? Now, sometimes it's flipped. Sometimes it's the man who's spiritually engaged and the woman who's spiritually disengaged, but that's the exception in my experience in churches. So what do we tell those people? Well, I would tell you two things. First, sometimes when we're unequally yoked in that way, it's our job, and 1 Corinthians speaks to this, it's our job to quietly, patiently love them towards Christ until the Holy Spirit convicts them and they're able to come home and apologize and then step into who they need to be. Sometimes it's our job to patiently wait and pray and love them towards Jesus when they're not able to love us towards Jesus. And we wait on them to step into what they're supposed to be. The other thing I would say is this. I'm going to quote, I wish Keith Cathcart were here, one of my buddies. Keck, you'll have to tell him to listen to this sermon. Because I'm going to quote Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, and Keith is going to lose his ever-loving mind. I quoted Tomlin in the sermon. But Coach Tomlin is a coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He's an incredible leader of men. He's an incredible leader. He's one of the all-time greatest coaches. I have a large amount of respect for him, and he's got a lot of these quick little one-liners that are really good. But one of the things I like about what he says about Pittsburgh Steelers football is the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. The standard in Pittsburgh is Super Bowls. We do not settle for divisional championships, which means, those of you who are not sports inclined, marginal success. We do not settle for marginal success. We are number one or bust. If you don't know what the Super Bowl is, this is America, man. Get with it. Also, go Bills. Yeah, there we go, baby. Mike Thomas says the standard is the standard. Meaning, we have the highest possible standard in our organization. We have the highest standard for what we want to achieve as a team, and we have the highest possible standard for what we expect from each position group and each portion of this team. The standard is the standard, and the standard does not change based on your feelings about your inability to reach it. The standard does not change based on previous performance. The standard does not change based upon how you feel. The standard is the standard. We confront it with honesty and we meet it or don't, but the standard doesn't change. That's how we will approach marriage. The standard is the standard. And the standard is that it is my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus. That's the standard. If you are married, whether you knew it or not when you stood at the altar, what you accepted is this mantle. It is now and forevermore my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus Christ. And here's why it's so important to accept this mantle because people come and go in our lives, man. Jen and I have been together since I was 20 and she was 19. I'm 43. She's 32. I'm just kidding. I'm just not going to tell you her age. I'm 43. We've been together a long time. There have been people, men, in that season, in those years, in those decades, who have come into my life and have been more of a catalyst for change and sanctification in my life than she was at the time. But that flares out. People come and go. And sometimes God in his grace uses them to compel you and to convict you in wonderful ways towards a deeper relationship with him. But day in and day out, year in and year out, she is the presence in my life. She is the one who sees me wake up and go to sleep. She is the one that God has placed there to be used as an agent to change me. And when she does, and when she engages in that, it is so powerful, I can't describe it to you. And that is our sacred duty, to love our spouses towards Jesus. And listen, if you feel like that's too tall an order, if you feel like you haven't done that in a long time and you're not sure if you can do that and you don't know how to do that, what I would say to you is I love you so much and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but what I would say to you is listen, the standard is the standard. That's your sacred duty. Accept it or don't. But if you do not accept your sacred duty to love your spouse towards Christ and be the chief agent of sanctification in their life, then you are absconding on your commitment as a husband or a wife. And if this brings upon you a deep conviction, good. Sit in it. Your wife and your husband or your husband will benefit from that. React to it. Respond to it. Accept it. Step into it. Your kids will be better off for your conviction and your acceptance of this mantle. You will have a marriage that they look at as worthy of emulation if you will receive this mantle, this standard from Paul. It is our sacred duty to love our spouses towards Jesus. Full stop. That's what we must do. Now, as I wrap up, I want to give you guys just a few practical things to do to keep this standard the standard in your marriage. I want to give you a couple. So we go, okay, I accept this. It is my job to love my spouse towards Christ. I accept that mantle. I want to do that. I'm going to be the chief agent of sanctification in their life that I believe you. I want to do it. Let's go. What do I do? What does that practically look like? This is, I'm going to give you four things. So obviously there's more to do than this. This is not an exhaustive list, but four quick things that you can do in your marriages starting right now, starting today to love your spouse towards Christ. Four quick things. Number one, hold them accountable for accountability. Hold them accountable for accountability. I have never thought it's the best idea for your husband or your wife to be your accountability partner. If you decide that you want to develop a new discipline of waking up every day and praying and reading the Bible, spending time in God's word and spending time in God's presence through prayer, if that's what you want to do, probably don't tell your wife that this is what I'm going to do. And when I don't do it, I would like you to call me out on it because of all the other things that exist in your life that she nagged you about and that you get mad about. Let's not add one more. All right. Similarly, wives don't need husbands hounding them about one more thing that they were supposed to do. All right. So let's, let's let other people hold us accountable for things like that. And let's let our spouses hold us accountable for accountability. I've told you before, and this was actually the sermon that I thought you were going to watch last week. It's okay that you didn't. But in that sermon from last year, I talked about the idea of sacred spaces, having spaces in our life, two or three people at the most who know everything about us, who love you and love Jesus and are given permission to tell you the truth about yourself. I shared with you then that there's two men that I meet with, two men from the church that I meet with pretty much once a month. And the very first thing we ask is, what are you struggling with? What's stopping you from following God as well as you can right now? What's going on in your life? Is there anything that you need to share? And it's an opportunity to be held accountable for anything and everything that may be going on in our life that is keeping us from pursuing Jesus the way we need to do it. Jen needs to hold me accountable to go and meet with them and tell them the truth, but she doesn't need to be my primary accountability agent in that, if that makes sense. But spouses, responsible ones, hold each other accountable for accountability. So a wonderful conversation to have in your car at lunch, tonight when the kids go down, whenever, might be where is your accountability in your life and how can we encourage each other to find that more. The second thing we can do to love our spouse towards Christ and accept this mantle is to take their spiritual temperature. Just take their spiritual temperature. Just know how they're doing. If I were to ask any of you who are married, how's the spiritual health of your wife? How's the spiritual health of your husband? How are they doing? How good of an answer could you give me? How good of an answer would you like to be able to give? If you're going to see yourself as sincerely the chief agent of sanctification in their life as bestowed upon you by God, how good of an answer to that question do you think you need to be able to give? And is it good enough right now? All right, moving quickly. Next thing. Love them sacrificially, not selfishly. Love them selflessly, not selfishly. Often we fall into these habits as married people where we love transactionally. I'm going to love you like this, so you love me like this. A husband might think to himself, I'm going to be on the Saturday. I'm going to be present with the kids on Saturday. I'm going to love by cleaning things I haven't been asked to clean. I'm going to do everything I need to do. I'm going to do all the things that she likes for me to do. I'm going to love her in that way so that maybe later when the kids go down, she can express love in a different way. That's what I'm going to do. And listen, that's a sound strategy. Okay, tried and true. Stick with it. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there needs to be more to love than that. Loving selfishly is loving with the expectation of reciprocity. I'm going to love in this way, and they're going to love me in this way. But loving selflessly says, no, I'm going to love them because I love them and I want them to see someone that loves them no matter what. We have a quote in our hallway at the top of our stairs from a guy named W.H. Autzen. I have no idea who that is. I've never, ever Googled him a single time. I just really like this quote that I saw at someone else's house, so I had it done for us. And it says, if greater affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. That's sacrificial selfless love in a marriage. If equal affection cannot be, let the greater love be me. So if it's got to be disproportionate, let it be disproportionate in their favor. And I'll tell you how I've seen this lived out. I have a very good friend whose wife is going through, this is understated, an extremely traumatic time in her life that doesn't have anything to do with him. It's just a really, really difficult time. And because of that, rightly so, she has nothing in her cup left to be the mother that she needs to be to their three children. She has nothing in her cup left to be the wife that she needs to be to him. She has nothing to give. And he is choosing day in and day out to love her, to stay faithful to her, to serve her, to step up and to care for the kids and to love her in that way without expectation of reciprocity, without expecting that she's going to turn around and thank him for that. He's just loving her to get her through this season because he loves her. That's loving sacrificially, not selfishly. Love for love's sake. Last one. This one's so simple. It's so simple. Pray for them and with them. Pray for them and with them. Very simply, I'm not going to belabor this because I don't need to. How can we claim to have accepted the mantle of chief agent of sanctification in the life of our spouse if we can't remember the last time we prayed for them? If we're not praying for them every day? How can the Holy Spirit speak into our hearts and in our minds what they need and where they're at and how to best pray for them if we don't give him space to do that. How can we claim that Jesus is the center of our home, the center of our marriage, and that our marriage is being used to sanctify one another towards Christ if we're not praying with each other with a great degree of regularity? I don't need to belabor this point. You guys know it's right. I know it's right. If we want to love our spouse towards Christ, then we ought to pray for them and with them with a high degree of regularity. Yes? So that's my hope and prayer for you and for your marriages. That you'll accept the standard as the standard. And the standard is you are to be the chief agent of sanctification, of the process of spiritual maturity, becoming more like Christ in character in your spouse's life, and that it is your sacred duty to step into that role. So I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray that you would accept that mantle and that you would walk with humility and meekness as you seek to love your spouse towards Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and how you love us. God, we thank you for our husbands and our wives. God, I thank you publicly for my wife and the ways that she has faithfully loved me towards you. Help me love her towards you. God, for those of us who walk away convicted, I pray that we would sit in that conviction, that we would accept it, that we would be spurned on by it. And that from today, you would produce in all of us an ardent desire to see our spouse come to know you more. Help the husbands in this room to love their wives sacrificially. To love them well, to pray for them. To lay down their lives for them. Help the wives in this room to love their husbands faithfully and earnestly, believing in them as they pray them and love them towards you. God, be with the marriages in this room. We praise you for the good ones that reflect you. We lift up the hard ones and ask that they would reflect you. And we ask that you would be with us as we go from here. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, man, that's got to, that may be the grooviest song I've ever walked up to stage to, so pretty excited about that. Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace, and if you receive like our email communication, our Grace Vine, then you came, then you woke up this morning anticipating to see Nate preaching from stage and talking about marriage. And guess what? So did I. I woke up to a phone call this morning that Nate was sick and that he wasn't going to be able to come in and preach this morning. And so here I am. And I know that Ashlyn and I are probably like 98% towards solving marriage because we've officially hit two years as of a few days ago. Yeah, I didn't do that, but you know what? I'll take the applause. I'm feeling nervous up here and your applause is soothing me, so thank you. But while we're close to solving it, let's give it about six more months and then I'll do my marriage sermon for you guys. But no, so Nate at some point is going to serve you well by hopefully getting to preach a sermon on a prayer for marriage. But this morning, instead, I'm going to let you guys get a peek behind the curtain as to some stuff we've been doing in youth group on Sunday nights. So for those of you who don't know, on Sunday nights is when our sixth through 12th graders meet. We all come, we meet in here, we get rid of a lot of these chairs because they're in the way of fun. And we set up games, we set up all this different stuff. And then ultimately, we always have some sort of message and some sort of small groups and whatnot. And the last few times we have been meeting, we have been discussing and reading and going through this one simple verse in Deuteronomy 6, 5. So there's not going to be any slides. So like, that's kind of your like wink, wink. If you want to grab your Bible and read along, this is probably your time to do it. Because I'm going to pause here and I'm going to be any slides. So like, that's kind of your like wink wink. If you want to grab your Bible and read along, this is probably your time to do it. Um, because I'm going to pause here and I'm going to pick up on asking, and you don't have to tell me verbally because that would just be too wild, but with a, with a nice head nod or a nice head shake as anyone in here set up or, or, or did anyone have new year's resolutions this year? I've actually apparently heard that three people for sure in this room had New Year's resolutions, as Haley just told me. So I'm very glad to hear that. But I've got, all right, I got to see some heads moving. Yay? Nay? We've got some people who did. I am the king of setting New Year's resolutions. And I would not say I'm the king of New Year's resolutions, because that probably means actually doing the things that you set. And I'm not good at that. But boy, do I love thinking that I'm going to do things in the new year. This year, I went classic. I went very cliche. I didn't want to, you know, get too interesting or get too whatever. And I was like, you know what? It's probably time I got in shape. I wear big enough clothes to where people still go, nice, you look nice. No, you don't need to. It's like, trust me, you'll never see me with a shirt off, but if you did, you'd be like, ah, that's a bummer. And even getting in shape, you're still not going to see with my shirt off, but at least it wouldn't be false. But I was locked in in December. You know, we're going to see our families. We traveled in a week's time, about 29 hours on the road. And through that time, I'm like thinking through what I'm going to do when we get back. You know, I'm going to eat all of this bad food and do like nothing that's helpful or useful or important to my life and my being while I'm at my family's house because it's Christmas and Christmas doesn't count as we all know. But once I get back, like I'm doing stuff, hey, what can I cut out? What is something easy that I could get better? I could eat a little bit healthier here. Or what are some workouts that I would do that would really benefit what I'm looking for? I did research. I've got the Nike Training Club app and you can can highlight, and you can find different workout programs, or I bookmarked workouts. Oh, this one's perfect for me. It's like, I don't know any of this stuff, but I'm acting like I'm an expert when I'm scrolling through that app. But I'm figuring out, I'm planning it out, I'm locked in. And honestly, as I'm driving, and I'm like, man, my back hurts, that's probably a core thing. All I'm thinking of is like, this is going to be wonderful when I'm finally here. I'm locked in, I'm ready. I know the stuff. I've done the research. I'm excited about it. I have all of this will. My heart is ready to be healthy. And yet, as I told my students last Sunday when we were talking about some of this stuff, the most I've done is one night, I think Saturday night, because I had been thinking about this message, I decided to lay on the floor and do some sit-ups while we watched TV. So I'm like 10 sit-ups in to a new year, which is less than what I had planned, which is less than what I had been ready to do. And ultimately, as I thought about that, and as I began to think more about New Year's resolutions and why I'm simply the king of starting them as opposed to continuing them, what I recognized and what I realized is I am so good at having the heart that is ready to do the thing. I am so good at having a will of doing a thing and setting my heart on what I want to do and what I want to value in the person that I want to be, but I have a much more difficult time at marrying that heart and that will with action. I have two, a left and a right hand, so handshakes like this don't look right, but that's a handshake. What's in my head, what's in my heart, often stays there. Especially when it comes to resolutions, when it comes to setting and walking out goals, when it comes to doing those things. And I wonder if any of y'all have felt the same way. Speaking of what Haley mentioned, there's people in this room that have the New Year's resolution of joining a small group. What I know for sure is that those people know the importance of joining a small group. They know why it's valuable. They know why it builds and grows their faith. They know why building relationships with friends inside of a small group is deeply beneficial to them and to their hearts and to their lives. But as long as that's all that happens, as long as it's only what's in your heart, then it's incomplete, right? Because then you're still just sitting there on a Tuesday night when all of your peers are meeting together and growing together. And it's the same with anything that we do and with all of those things. And so now I'd like to come back to what I think we learn and what I think we begin to understand in our faith if we want to marry and we want to couple our heart and our action. And that is in Deuteronomy 6, 5. So some of you guys open with me and we can read it together. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with everything inside of you. I understand that. I understand what it takes to do that. I get to know Christ. I come to church every week and I get to learn about this God that loves me so deeply and so uniquely. And I get to learn about Jesus, God's son, this savior who God sent down to live a perfect life and yet die so that I can experience an eternal life with God in heaven through salvation, simply through faith. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart. That is easy and understanding and tangible. I can tangibly understand, okay, how do I go about that? What does it look like to love God with my inside? Well, it looks like going after and pursuing God. Sitting in church and learning more about him. Waking up and reading scripture and spending time in prayer. Sitting in small groups and listening to how the Lord works and how the Lord moves and allowing our hearts to be shaped and molded and changed and transformed in the goodness and in the love of God. But as we move forwards, the point of these verses is not simply to internally love God, but it's to love God with all that we are. I learned some Hebrew as I was reading through some of this, and so guess what? We're all learning some Hebrew this morning. The word soul here is actually translated to this word called nefesh in Hebrew. And nefesh, while it's translated in our Bibles as soul, the nefesh more has to do with the soul of who we are as a physical presence in this world. Who we are and the people that we are as we are living in our lives. And when we understand that, and then when we translate might to being with everything and with all that we have, the goal and the purpose of this is not simply to love God internally, inside of our hearts, worshiping him and loving him, being like, God is the best, I've got this down. The goal and the point of this is to recognize and to realize when we put these three words together, love God with all of our hearts, our souls, and our might, is to say that every part of your life should be dedicated to loving God. So yes, do all of the things to where you can continue to fall in love and be transformed internally in your heart by this God that loves you, created you, and wants a relationship with you every single day, but at the same time, just like me trying to do a New Year's resolution, if you're simply starting internally, then this call is incomplete in your life. And so then the question becomes, okay, well, what does it look like to love God with our physical selves? Does it look like, oh, well, I guess like if my body needs to love God better, maybe I should like raise my hands during worship, which, hey, you know, try it maybe. But I love that Jesus actually gives us this perfect and beautiful definition and explanation in Matthew 25. And so if you want to read with me, because we're going to like, it's going to be a few verses. So here's what I'm going to do. Normally what I do with students is I say, first one to find it, yell out the page number. Well, guess what? I'm the first one to find it. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to yell out this page number and it is page number 984. If you have one of the Bibles in the back of the seat in front of you, we are going to be reading verses. We're going to start in 31 and I'm going to just read this story. So if you guys are committed, I am going to read for a chunk. Sometimes that can get boring. And so let's all just like lock eyes and go, you know what? I'm not going to be bored because this is God's word and it's probably good. So we're going to lock in and we're just going to do it. So if you will read or listen along with me, please. He will put the those on his right, I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me. Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in or needing clothes and clothed you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you? The king will reply, I will tell you the truth. Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me. How do we love God in our lives? We do so by loving his people. How do we serve God with our physical presence? We serve the people that are in and amongst us within our lives. One of my favorite stories in all of the Bible is the story of King Josiah. So much so that if Ashlyn and I ever have a kid, I've asked that we could name our son King Josiah. I haven't decided if I want to do like King Josiah and then still give a middle name or if I just wanted to be King Josiah Talbert, which would be sick, which Ashlyn said no. So maybe if you guys are moved enough, if you could just have a couple words with her this morning, that would be great. Thank you. But I love the story of King Josiah because Josiah became the king in a weird and difficult and troubling time for a few different reasons. Let me go ahead and give you the background. This is how King Josiah's story starts out in 2 Kings as I turn and make sure I found it. In 2 Kings 22, I'm just going to read 1 and 3. Don't worry about finding it. I'll just listen along. Josiah was eight years old when he became king. Awesome. Genuinely, I would have thought you'd at least have to be 10 to be a good king, but he ended up doing it at eight. And he reigned in Jerusalem 31 years. Here's his description. Here is how he is described before his story is even told. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left. Josiah's descriptor as a king is that he did what was right in the eyes of God, and he followed after the footsteps of the one chosen king, David, that God had placed in front of him. Josiah took over a kingdom in Jerusalem, a group of people who had been set into this place to be God's chosen people, to be a people that would experience the love of God, who would get to have their hearts truly transformed by God. And through that, that as a part of the covenant that God made with his people in Israel, in Jerusalem, that his people would not only love him, serve him, and whatever, but that they would go and that they would bless the entire world. Their call was to know God, was to love God, and was to bring God and to bring goodness about the world through God. This was not a covenant or a call that Josiah had ever heard about. Because Josiah took over rule of a nation that was completely walking in opposition to God. What we learn actually in this story is it was a nation that was actually moving forward into exile. That soon enough after Josiah's reign, that Judah was going to be taken over by another nation and the people within that, but within Jerusalem were going to be taken into exile. Why? Because they had fallen short of their covenant. For generation after generation, they had walked farther and farther from God. And that is where Josiah took over. And about 18 years into his reign, he came into contact with a high priest. He encountered a high priest, and this high priest basically brought him, Josiah, for the first time in Josiah's life, the law or the word of God. And through Josiah being able to interact with this word of God, he was able to learn who God was. And as he was able to learn who God was, he was completely transformed. Truly burdened by the fact that he had lived such a life that would be walking anywhere except towards God because he realized for the fullness of the love and the goodness that was offered by God and his heart was completely changed. This child, I mean, even still at 18 plus eight, you do the math, he was 26 at this time. This young guy with all of the power in his, with all of the power you could ever ask for was forever changed and his heart was forever marked by the fact that he had encountered this God who loved him. And upon that encounter, and upon learning about this, and upon having God change and mold and shape his heart to becoming a new person, changed everything he did and everything he valued. And so, as he turned back around, the rest of his reign as king was a reign that was marked by, I'm going to continue to lead and I'm going to continue to serve my people the best that I can. But what I recognize now is while I'm doing that, the only way I can do that well and the only way I can truly love and serve my people rightly is if I do so for God, in God, and through God. He rebuilt the temple so that his people would have a place that they could go and encounter God. He got rid of all of these false idols so these people wouldn't have these temptations in front of them to walk and to go and serve other gods. He made the word of God readily available and made the word of God a foundational piece of these people who lived there. What Josiah did is when God got a hold of his heart and transformed his heart, he realized that that would be incomplete unless he turned that love around and he showed it and he gave it to his people. Josiah offered the love and the goodness of God to his kingdom because he knew that a heart for God is not enough. But a heart for God only takes full effect when I turn that around and I share that with my kingdom. And guess what? I know that none of you are kings. You're kings in like the cool sense. Like I think you're all kings and queens. You're awesome. You know, great. But all of us have kingdoms. All of us have a kingdom that we are living and, as Nate often says, that we are building. You have a family at home. You have people that you interact with on the way to work, inside of work. You have sports or you have kids that are at sports and you're standing around with parents. There are kingdoms that all of us have in our lives. And if we want to truly live out this Deuteronomy 6, if we want to truly love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and might, then that means that as we are taking steps forwards and growing in our love of God, then at every step, we should be taking steps forwards just along with it of loving the people that are in our lives. Because guess what? God placed them in front of you for a reason. There's this old hymn that I think is beautiful that I love. It's called Christ Has No Body But Yours. We're called to love people out of the love of God, certainly to make our faith whole and to make our faith what God describes and how it's described in Deuteronomy and throughout scripture. But we're called to do the same because guess what? Christ isn't here. Christ hasn't been here for 2,000 years. God takes up residence inside of his believers, inside of the people whose hearts he has gotten a hold of. And through us and through our hearts, Christ has a body now. And through our hands, our feet, our actions, our lives, our words, we share the love of God that we have experienced so that these people can experience the same. There are people in your lives and in your worlds that will not know God the same way if we don't bring it to them, if we don't tell them about him, if we don't show him his love, who he is and what he's done. And so as we normally wrap up in students, I always send to small groups. And when I send to small groups, I normally want to have a couple things, a couple tangible things that I can grab onto. And it's normally, hey, you know what, this week, let's do this. So if you're willing, since I've decided that this morning, I'm letting you guys into what a youth group would look like, I'd like to do something similar. And I'm going to give you guys the same call. So if you find somebody who looks like a student, ask them how they did it. They might can give you some help. But what I asked them to do and to think about was this. If we're trying to marry the heart with the action, then to really love people this way requires us not simply to do it because we're supposed to, but to do it because our hearts are truly for these people. So maybe you have someone in your world right now that you can think of this week. Someone who you know in some way you could serve well or you could love well. You could love or serve uniquely to your relationship with that person. Maybe it's a group of people. Maybe it's a small office and this is the people. So, write that person down. Write that group down. And here's what I want us to commit to. Not simply going, you know what, when I get to work, I'm going to be really nice to those people. But when I wake up in the morning, before I ever interact with these people, I am committed to praying for them. Praying that God would mold and shape our hearts to having a deep burden and a deep love for these people, that I can love them in a way that is going to glorify the God that is sending me to love them. And in and through that, as you interact with them, being prayerfully aware of what the Lord would have you be in their life. When I translate these Matthew verses, feeding the hungry, taking care of the sick, what I translate it as is this. Everyone has different needs, and everyone needs love in a certain way. So my call for everyone in here is this week, whether it be one person, two people, a few people, can you be the people that loves these people well? Can you be the people that serves them? And can you couple this heart that you have for our God that loves us so deeply with the actions of letting these other people know just how deep that love is through how we love them. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. I pray that we never grow tired and weary in growing closer to you and diving deeper into your love. But God, I just pray that it never stops there, but that you give us a heart for your people. You give us eyes to be able to see where we can serve and where we can love in any possible way that would glorify you. Lord, allow us to be prayerfully aware of the people in our lives and how we could show you to them. We love you so much. We are so thankful that you let us come and be here to rest and to worship in your love. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here this Sunday. I am acutely aware that for many of you, you were not here for this, you were here for that. And so we're so glad that you are here. And if you're a grandparent, thank you for trusting us with your babies and your grandbabies. It's an honor and a privilege to do that. I've been talking a lot about how our children's ministry is growing and burgeoning, and I thought it would be, we thought it would be really good to highlight that on a Sunday and for you guys to be able to see physically all that God is doing and bringing, and that was great. If you're wondering who the pastor's kid was in the first, in the preschool one, it was the boy in the white sweater and red pants that looked like he hated everything in the world. So he's got somebody leaned over to me here and said he's got a real future. Yeah, I think so. I think so. This morning we are in the third part of our series called Foretold, where we are looking at prophecies from the Old Testament, messianic prophecies. And a messianic prophecy is simply a prophecy that tells about the coming Christ, the coming Messiah, who we know of as Jesus. And so in the first week, we looked at Jeremiah 31, where it said this coming Messiah will bring a new covenant. And so we talked about what that new covenant was. Last week we looked at Isaiah chapter 9, the most famous Christmas prophecy that his name will be called, that he will be called Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. And we talked about what those names mean. And it's right and good to focus on these prophecies about the coming Messiah at Christmastime because Christmas is when we celebrate the arrival of the Messiah and the fulfillment of these prophecies. So this morning, we arrive at a prophecy in the book of Zechariah. Zechariah chapter 9, verse 9. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and start trying to zero in on Zechariah. It's a tough one. It's a minor prophet towards the end of the Old Testament. If you need to use your table of contents for this, please do. I'd also like to just point out, because I can do this and they are friends, Tom and Linda Sartorius and their daughter Kristen thought that this week was Family Jammy Sunday. So make sure you say hey to them in the lobby. They are a delight this morning. I've been told to blame this on Kristen, but at this point it really doesn't matter. It's just fun all the way around. Steven and Maddie, they avoided it. They're another part of the family, son and daughter-in-law. but the rest of them look like suckers, and it's great. It's great. In Zechariah chapter 9, what we have is not a prophecy about the first arrival of Christ. It's a prophecy about the arrival of Christ as king, and it's a profoundly important one, and I think it's worth reflecting on this morning. So I'm going to read you the prophecy from Zechariah. We're going to talk about the context of that. And then we're going to look at its fulfillment in Matthew chapter 21. So read with me, if you will, Zechariah chapter 9, verse 9. Rejoice greatly, daughter Zion. Shout, daughter Jerusalem. See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. This is the prophecy from Zechariah. And we're going to turn to Matthew 21, but if you're following along in your Bible, keep something noted in Zechariah because we're going to come back to verse 10, and I don't want you to have to find it again. But to understand what happens in Matthew 21 and the fulfillment of this prophecy, we need to understand the context of what this one implies. In ancient times, and even in the times of Christ, really up until World War I, we figured out we should kind of knock this off. Kings went out and conquered. That's what they did. The only major nation that hasn't figured out that we should knock it off on trying to conquer other nations is Russia. They keep dabbling in it since World War I. But everyone else has figured out not to do that. But in this time, it was very regular for kings to go out and conquer. It's what they did. If you were a king, this is what you did. And we know this because when David sins with Bathsheba, that story begins in Samuel. It was spring at the time when kings went off to war. So this is what they did. And when a king would enter a city to assume control of that city, there was two ways that he entered. One was on a war horse, symbolizing that he had conquered the city. He was coming in as the conquering hero to his people and the conquering king to these people. That he had conquered this city. He would ride in on his war horse once everything, all the dust had settled from the battle. The other way for a king to enter a city that was less, less, uh, it didn't happen as often, but it did happen. And it did mean something was for a king to come in on a donkey. When a king would come into a city on a donkey, he was symbolizing peace. He was symbolizing. I did not have to conquer this city. This city willfully gave itself over to me. And because of that, I'm not coming in to kill. I'm not coming in to conquer. I'm not coming in to hurt or to subdue. I am coming into this city in peace and I intend to peacefully take over this city. And then the prophecy of Zechariah takes it a step further because not only is he entering as a peaceful King on a donkey, but on the cult, the foal of a donkey on a bay, on a little baby donkey to be humble, to communicate in every way. And it says humble and lowly to communicate in every way that Jesus doesn't come as a conquering King for the city. He comes as a king who's already conquered and is now entering into the city peacefully. So there's great, it's not just random that he's entering into a donkey and that this is how Zechariah prophesies that he's going to become the king of Jerusalem. Because to become a king of the city, you basically got to go take it over. And Zechariah says, no, he's not going to do it like that. Jerusalem is going to welcome him with open arms. He will enter on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey, gentle, humble, and lowly. That's the context that we need to understand what's happening in Matthew chapter 21 when he fulfills it. So, if you don't mind, turn over to Matthew chapter 21. In the preceding verses, Matthew has said, I'm not going to read, there's a whole passage here, I'm just going to read a portion of it. I'm going to begin in verse 7 and go through 11. But in the preceding verses, Jesus has told the disciples on their way to Jerusalem, beginning the last week of his life, Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday. This is the story where we get Palm Sunday. He tells the disciples, I want you to go into town and I want you to get a donkey. I want you to get a colt, the foal of a donkey, and I'm going to ride that into Jerusalem. And then Matthew says, this is to fulfill what was said by the prophet Zechariah. And he quotes Zechariah. A wonderful aside about the gospel of Matthew is that the gospel of Matthew was written in the first century A.D. to convince skeptical Jewish people that Jesus was the actual Messiah that you learned about for all those generations. And so very often throughout the Gospel of Matthew, you'll see the narrative stop. There'll be a bracket in it, and it will say this is to fulfill the prophecy of, and then there's a bracket, and then it's the prophecy to show how Jesus really was the Messiah that the Old Testament talked about. So, for us New Testament believers, reading the book of Matthew is a great way to begin to tether the Old and New Testaments together to bring us to a greater depth of understanding. So, Jesus says, go get this. This is to go get this donkey. This is to fulfill this prophecy. And then this happens. Verse 7, they brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted, Hosanna to the son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest heaven. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, who is this? Who is this? So Jesus shows up at Jerusalem. At this point in his ministry, he's been doing ministry for three years. He knows that when he goes into Jerusalem, he's going to stir up a hornet's nest of conflict that's going to ultimately lead to his crucifixion. But he also knows that he's entering Jerusalem as a conquering king, as a king who has conquered. And so he enters in as king on a donkey. And I think about the crowds in this story because I think those are who we relate to the most. And I think in this story, there are really kind of three crowds that we see. The first crowd is the most obvious crowd is the crowd that welcomed him. The crowd that showed up, that heard about it. I don't know exactly how word spreads in Jerusalem in zero AD or whenever 33 AD, whenever this was. But it was word of mouth. It was people seeing, there was stirring up, there was a commotion and everybody just kind of goes to see what's going on. And these people were so excited at who Jesus is. They believe that he was the king that Zechariah had prophesied about. Now they believe, full disclosure, they believe that Jesus was showing up in Jerusalem to overthrow Herod, to overthrow Roman rule, to take over the kingdom of Israel, to make it independent and to make it an international superpower and rise it to prominence. That's what they're expecting Jesus to do. They don't yet know that that's far too small a goal for our Jesus and that he came to establish an eternal and universal kingdom that makes an international power like the Roman Empire at the time look like peanuts. He's not interested in that. But they came because they believed that Jesus was coming in to be the king. And so when the king arrives, they take off their cloaks, they throw it on the ground as a sign of respect and celebration and adoration and worship. And then they go and they cut off the palm leaves or the palm branches and they place those on the ground, a sign of respect and adoration and worship. And they sing to him, Hosanna, the son of David, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest heaven. They're praising him as he enters into the city. This crowd welcomes Jesus into their kingdom, welcomes Jesus into their life. And here's the implication here. And I'm going to talk more about this in a minute. Jesus came, he did not come to conquer, but he did come to rule. He did not come to take anything over, but his expectation is absolutely that he's going to be in charge. His expectation is absolutely that I'm going to reign and you are going to submit. And the people celebrating in this crowd, they know that. They're gleefully, gladly, and gratefully accepting the incoming king. Yes, we will serve you. Yes, we will submit to you. Yes, not only will we submit to your reign, but we desire your reign. That's why we're laying our cloaks down on the ground because we want to follow you and serve you and submit to you. That's the first crowd. We'll call them the Sunday crowd because that's Palm Sunday. Five days later, there's another crowd. We'll call them the Friday crowd. This is the crowd of people that gathered around the fortress that Pilate, the Roman governor, was in, who yelled at Pilate, give us Barabbas and crucify Christ. And Pilate says, I find no fault in the man. He's done nothing wrong. There's no reason to crucify him. He might be a little delusional, but he has done absolutely nothing worthy of capital punishment. And they said, the crowd said back, kill him, his blood be on our hands and on the hands of our children. And they were so adamantly against Jesus that they crucified him. That's the Friday crowd. No, we do not accept that king. No, we do not accept his rule. We will fight back with our lives to not have to accept that rule. As a matter of fact, let's kill him. Completely anti-Jesus. But I think that there's a third crowd that's not mentioned anywhere in the Bible explicitly. But if you'll allow me this license, I think we can all admit that they've existed in every generation. I'm going to call this the Wednesday crowd. This is the crowd that's apathetic towards the whole thing. This is the crowd of people that went, hey, on Sunday, they went, what's that commotion? And they went, this is Jesus. He's the coming king. And they're like, maybe for you. I've got things to do today. I have cabinets to make and bread to deliver. I got stuff to do. So not super interested. He can be your king, not going to be my king. I got to get along with my day. And didn't go over to the commotion and just kept going about their lives as if Jesus didn't exist. And then on Friday, the Wednesday crowd sees the Friday crowd getting all worked up and says, what are you doing? They're like, this Jesus is full of crud. We don't like him. We're going to kill him. He's like, all right, seems like a waste of time to me, but go ahead. I have things to do. I don't care that much. And I think we would tend, I think we would tend to say in the way we do our moral judgments that the Friday crowd, the anti-Jesus crowd, was worse than the Wednesday crowd. Obviously, Sunday crowd's the best crowd. We know that. But Friday crowd, worse than Wednesday crowd, because Friday crowd killed Jesus. Wednesday just decided they didn't care. But I heard someone really smart one time say that the opposite of love is not hate. It's apathy. Because in hatred and in love, there are a lot of the same emotions just poured out differently. But in apathy, there's none. And I would argue that the apathetic crowd is just as guilty of what happened on Friday as the Friday crowd. And that that may be the most dangerous one. So I think as we walk through those crowds, that there's one question that becomes really obvious for everyone, and hopefully you started asking yourself this question already. What crowd are you in? Which one is it? Are you in the Sunday crowd when Jesus shows up in your life? Are you in the Sunday crowd that lays down your cloak and gladly and gleefully and willingly accepts his rule in your life? Yes. Not only will I allow you to rule, I desire it. Come in. Are you the Friday crowd? And I doubt on a Sunday morning we have very many, if any, people at all who will admit to being in the Friday crowd and radically anti-Jesus. You're in church on Sunday. But because we've got a bunch of visitors here, maybe that is you. And if it is, thank you for coming and putting up with us. I will try to go faster. You're being very nice. But I bet there's some people in the Wednesday crowd. I bet there's some people who treat the arrival of Christ in their life with apathy. Like it doesn't have anything to do with us. And so as I ask, which crowd are you in? I think most Christian minds go to the idea of salvation. How did I respond to Jesus when he showed up in my life? I'm a Christian. I've accepted Christ as my savior. I've prayed to ask him into my heart. I am a believer. Whatever your nomenclature is, you would call yourself a follower of Jesus and believe that you are saved. I'm not here to negate that belief. But I think our Christian mind, when we ask, how do we receive Jesus when he shows up in our life? We go, well, I'm a Christian. So clearly Sunday crowd laid down my cloak. Come in. I'll gleefully follow you. I think that's where we go. But I would argue with you that Jesus doesn't just show up once in our life. That there's more to this question than simply, have you accepted Christ as your Savior or not? And I think to actually answer this question, what crowd are you in? That we first have to decide what it looks like when Jesus shows up in your life. So let's talk about that for a second. What does it look like when I say when Jesus shows up in your life, what do I mean? What does that look like? And I was trying to think through a succinct description of this to help us grab onto it. But the reality of it is that Jesus shows up in myriad ways. Yes, of course he shows up as our savior and he invites us to repent and to follow him. And the fundamental repentance of all Christianity is to repent of whoever you thought Jesus was before you believed in him as your savior. We, all of us in here have different ideas about Christ. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you, you also have an idea about Christ. He's somebody that somebody made up. He was a good teacher, but he's not a savior. He was a good man, but we're going overboard with the God thing. He existed, but he doesn't matter. You have an opinion about Jesus. And to become a Christian, the fundamental repentance is to say, I was wrong about what I thought about Christ, and I now agree with him about who he says he is, what he said he did, and what he said he's going to do. I now have aligned my thoughts and actions by agreeing with Jesus about who he says he is. That's what it is to become a Christian. So when we think about what crowd we're in, we've got to think about how he shows up. And I don't think he just shows up at that moment of salvation. I think that Jesus shows up every day, every hour, and sometimes moment to moment, depending on the circumstances. Jesus can show up. I thought about how does he show up? When does he arrive? When does he make himself known? He shows up in sermons. You've come to church this morning. I'm saying his name a lot. He's come up. He's shown up. He's here. How will you respond to what you hear today? Jesus is showing up. How will you respond to what you sing when you sing a worship song riding down the road? And it's about Christ. How will you respond to that? Jesus is showing up. You could be riding down the road innocuously listening to Christmas music, not expecting to have a Jesus moment. And all of a sudden, no holy night comes on. And if you're paying attention, the words are about Christ. And so Jesus has shown up. You can be in a conversation with a friend that you're just talking to about life. And then they'll start to reference scripture or point towards prayer or point towards something that God has been teaching them. Jesus is now showing up in this conversation. You can be doing something that you know you have no business doing. That you could be somewhere where you should never be. And there will be this prick of conviction, this realization in the moment, I don't need to be here. This isn't good. This isn't what's best for me. That's Jesus showing up through the Holy Spirit of conviction. He can show up in the midst of sin. He can show up on a billboard that you see that flashes a memory and makes you think of something. He can show up in a terrible circumstance where you've just received terrible news. Someone is very sick, someone is very hurt, something that's very sad has happened and the right friend or the right person puts their arm around you and shows up for you and is the presence of God in that moment for you, Jesus is showing up. And so when I tried to answer the question, what does it look like when Jesus shows up? I think the only real practical answer is Jesus shows up whenever you let him. Jesus shows up whenever you let him. Whenever you're willing to pay attention and acknowledge that he's trying to get your attention, that's when he shows up. Whenever you're willing to stop all the other things going on in your day and in your head and acknowledge that he's just arrived. And what does he want me to do with this? We don't have to ask if Jesus is going to show up in our life. We just have to pay attention and realize that he is. And because that's how Jesus shows up every hour of every day, inviting you into his presence and under his lordship, inviting you to allow him to be the Lord of that moment or that role or that conversation or that habit or that discipline or that decision. Because that's how Jesus shows up, I will ask you again. When Jesus shows up in your life, which crowd are you in? Because I think this is a daily decision, Christians. It's a daily decision to decide today, this morning, at work, with my children, with my spouse, with my friends, with my habits, with my disciplines, with what I consume. I am going to be a part of the Sunday crowd. I'm going to lay down my cloak and I'm going to gladly, gleefully, and gratefully usher Jesus into my life and receive him today. I'm going to willingly submit to his lordship and his rule today. When Jesus shows up in a conversation, do we allow the conversation to go there and engage or do we steer away because it makes us uncomfortable? When he comes up in a worship song, are we going to stop and welcome him in and praise him in our car or are we going to turn it down and focus on something else? When the conviction stirs and our hearts are pricked, are we going to respond to that by allowing Jesus to come into our life and become Lord over that and move away from that sin and repent of it in that moment? How do we respond to Jesus when he shows up in our life? Maybe, hopefully, we can all claim from time to time to be part of the Sunday crowd. I said earlier, I don't think in a church service on a Sunday morning there's going to be very many of us that are part of the Friday crowd. No, Jesus, get out of here. I'd rather kill you. No thanks. But I do think that there are plenty of us in this room who are regularly a part of that Wednesday crowd. I do think there are plenty of us in this room and on this stage, and I don't have any company up here, who regularly are part of the Wednesday crowd. When Jesus shows up in our life and says, are you going to give me lordship over that? We go, listen, you're my savior. Okay, I'd like to go to heaven, but I'd also like to do this thing. So not today. I've got bread to deliver. Not today. I've got things to do. Am I your savior? Yes, absolutely. Am I your king? No, I got the crown. And we respond to Jesus, not with acceptance, not with rejection, but with apathy, as if he doesn't show up. And when we do this, when we respond, when we join the Wednesday crowd at the arrival of Christ and we decide not to care, do you know what that stops us from doing? Noticing the other times that he's shown up. If I asked, hey, how does Jesus show up in your life? And you're like, I don't know. Is that because you've been a part of the Wednesday crowd for a while? Because when you get in the habit of going, yeah, Jesus, I'm not giving you that thing today. I'm not giving you that relationship today. I'm not accepting your lordship in that action or in that sin today. I'm going to do my own thing. It gets a lot easier to be a part of the Wednesday crowd the next day. It gets a lot easier to choose apathy the next day. And then eventually, I know this from experience, you choose to be apathetic enough days in a row, and you're going to say things like, you know what, you're not going to say it out loud. You're never going to admit this. But you're going to take on a mindset of, yeah, not this week. We don't have to do the daily check-ins. Not this week. Not this month. Not this season. And we become deeply apathetic Christians who are part of the Wednesday crowd, neither accepting nor rejecting Christ, just going about our lives as if he doesn't exist. And if it's true that hate is not the opposite of love, but apathy is, then there is no greater sin that we could commit and no greater offense that we could offer to our Savior Jesus, to our King who offers us His Lordship. There is no greater offense to Him than an apathetic response towards His arrival. And I think, if I'm being honest, I know that I could just stop the sermon right there and send us home, and we would have enough to think about. Because I think apathy might be the most pernicious and sinister sin in the American church now. Yeah, I'm good. I've accepted you as Savior. But I don't really want you to be king every day. And I don't want to feel bad like I've rejected you. So I'm just going to pretend like I don't notice. I'm going to go about my life. But here's the thing. Here's the thing that tells us that not only is it wrong to choose apathy, but we literally can't. We cannot continue to choose to be apathetic Christians because those phrases are oxymoronic. They do not go together. They are impossible together. The Bible does not make space for apathetic Christians because make no mistake about it. When Jesus shows up, when he arrives, when he tells us, I stand at the door and knock. When we open the door and we let Jesus into our life, he fully, listen to me, he fully expects to take charge. Jesus' expectations when he shows up somewhere is, yeah, I'm going to show up on a donkey, but when you let me in, I'm the boss. I'm going to show up humble. But when you let me in, I'm the ruler. I'm in charge. You submit to me and you do what I say. And Jesus will settle for nothing less. This is why I said we're going to turn back to Zechariah chapter 9. After he says I'm going to show up humble and lowly, this is what he says after that in verse 10. I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the war horses from Jerusalem and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. When Jesus shows up, he's not doing it to be your vice president. He's not doing it to only be your savior. He's doing it to be your king. Those words do not sound like the words of someone who intends to do nothing. I'm going to break the battle bows. I'm going to get rid of the chariots. I'm going to get rid of the war horses. And my empire will extend from end to end and from sea to sea. I'm going to be in charge. So here's the thing that I think is profoundly important for us to understand about the arrival of Christ in our life. Jesus insists on ruling, but refuses to conquer. He insists on ruling you. He will not conquer you. Do you understand why that's so important? He will not force you into being a Christian. He will not force you into being a believer. He will not force you into submission. I think of the story of Joshua wrestling with Jesus, Jacob wrestling with Jesus. And it teaches us that if you want to wrestle with Jesus, you're going to win. If you want to defy his will, he's not going to force it on you. He will not conquer you. And I know this to be true because in the young zeal of my faith in my twenties, I prayed on multiple occasions. This is true. On multiple occasions, I got on my knees and I said, God, I want to be an automaton. I do not want my free will. It does not serve me. I have no use for it. I know that without it, I cannot offer you a greater love, but I no longer want my free will. It doesn't serve me. I just want to do whatever you want me to do every day. Please take it from me. And I can tell you at 43, he did not answer that prayer. I still very much have it. Much to my chagrin. Oh, wretched man that I am who will deliver me from this body of death. Jesus insists on ruling you. He will not conquer you. He will not make you do it. He only comes into your life through invitation. He only comes into those moments when you let him. He does not force his way in. And what's even better about this, listen, when he comes to Israel and he takes over as king, it's not that he's never conquered anything. It's just he's already conquered what he wants to conquer. And now, listen, he wants to come into your life and share with you the spoils of his wars that he's already won. Do you understand? He doesn't want what you have. He wants to come into your life and give you the victories that he's already won. He wanted to come into Israel, not to conquer Jerusalem, but to offer them the kingdom that he won outside of Jerusalem. How profound is that? That when Jesus says, hey, would you invite me in? He's not trying to conquer you. Listen, he'll pursue you. We're told that Jesus leaves the 99 who have let him in and is pursuing the hundredth that won't. So even if you're here this morning and you would not call yourself a believer, I want you to know that Jesus is still with you and following you every minute of every day. And I hope and pray, if I'm speaking to you right now, that you feel him hot on your heels. You can turn around and let him in anytime you want. And when you do, he's not going to conquer you. He's going to offer you the spoils of the wars and the battles that he's already fought. I love this song, this old hymn called See the Conqueror. Nobody's heard of it. It's nerdy, but I really like it. And in that song, there's lyrics. It talks about see the conqueror mounted in triumph and how Jesus ushers into heaven. But it was like here, it says, he has vanquished sin and Satan. He by death has spoiled his foes. He's conquered sin and death for us. Oh, sin, where are your shackles? Oh, death, where is your sting? He's conquered death and disease for us already. He's conquered that sin for you already. He's conquered that anxiety already. He's conquered that relationship already. He's conquered that life issue already. He's conquered the temporary nature of life already. He's conquered the loss of people already. Do you understand? He's already conquered it and he's not looking to conquer you. He's looking to be invited into your life to rule as king and to offer you the spoils of the wars that he's already fought. That's what it means when he arrives in your life on a donkey. He just wants to offer you the victories that he's already won. So at Grace, we talk a lot about the fact that we are step-takers. To be a step-taker is to simply acknowledge that God has a step of obedience for everyone to take, and it's your job to figure out what's my step of obedience and how do I take it. And so this morning, I think we have in front of us an opportunity to be a step-taker. And I think it comes in this form. Let me ask it this way. What would it look like to hand over lordship in a place where Jesus is showing up? The idea of, for those of us who have grown apathetic, and we're not even really paying attention to when Jesus shows up, the idea of handing over every moment of every day to him is something that seems so far off that it's almost so impossible that maybe we won't even start the journey. But I think if we can just look at the journey as one step of obedience, just one thing, not all the things, just one thing. Where is Jesus showing up in your life where you can be a part of the Sunday crowd and usher him in and submit to his lordship and experience the spoils of the victory that he's already won over that thing? Is it in a relationship? A marriage that you haven't focused on in a while and you know you need to? Is it in the way you parent? Not that I know this from experience, but maybe as a parent you've fallen into parenting the children towards just not being annoying to you instead of towards Jesus himself and loving him? Is it in the way that you go about work forgetting that it's your ministry, not your profession? Is Jesus convicting you in the way that you talk to others, treat other people? Is he convicting you to worship more? Is he convicting you to acknowledge him? Is he inviting you into his presence in times when you're refusing it? In response to this sermon, if you'll intellectually acknowledge with me that Jesus is showing up in our lives daily, hourly, maybe even momentarily, then where is he pressing on you the most? At what door is he standing and knocking, saying, are you going to let me in now? I'm going to pray. And as I pray, the band's going to come up and they're going to sing. And as they sing, they're going to offer you the opportunity to just continue to sit as they sing over us. I would invite you to use the next few minutes to spend time in prayer and go before God and say, Jesus, where are you pressing? Where are you showing up? Help me to see you and give me the strength to lay my cloak on the ground and invite you in as Lord and allow you to rule me there. Can we do that together? Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this morning. We thank you for the kiddos, the joy that they bring, the laughter that they cause, and the blessings that they represent. God, we pray that we would be good parents and grandparents to them. We pray that we would be good spiritual parents and grandparents to them. I pray that they would be good friends to one another. Jesus, we thank you for showing up on a donkey. We thank you that you don't conquer us. That for some reason, unique in world history and in the span of all religions, you simply wait for us to let you in. And you do not insist, and you do not force. So God, I pray this morning that we would let you in. And that when we did, we would know that you do that to rule us, not to partner with us. Not to simply usher us into heaven, but to share with us the spoils of the victories that you've already won. Jesus, we love you. We thank you for winning those victories and we thank you for being a good king that we can celebrate this Christmas. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Good to see you during this Christmas season. December is my favorite month of the year at Grace. Before I just dive in, a couple things. First of all, it's Gibson's birthday today, so don't do it right now because we have more important things. But if you get a chance in the lobby, just wish him a happy 48th. And then also, it looks great in here. Aaron Winston did Yauman's work this week to get this done. Carly was a big help there, too. So say thank you to them. They took good care of us, and everything looks great. So we are festive and in full swing for Christmas. And as we do that, as Michelle mentioned at the onset, we're going to be looking at prophecies about Christ. We're going to be looking at Messianic prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Jesus that we are celebrating here in December. This morning, we're going to be looking at what I think is probably the most famous Messianic prophecy. It's at least the most famous Christmas prophecy. Isaiah chapter 9, verse 6, when I read it, you will absolutely recognize it. It was made popular by a guy named Friedrich Handel, who wrote Handel's Messiah, that great song that we hear every Christmas. It's really, really good. I tried to get Gibby to robe a choir and hire an orchestra so we could do it big this morning, but he has no passion or willingness to dream. His mind is very small. And so he keeps us from great and grand things here. So maybe next year, let's work on them together. But this is the prophecy that we all know. I think it's the most famous one that we'll talk about. And it was almost the entirety of the whole series out of this verse. I'll tell you why in just a minute. But Isaiah chapter 9 verse 6 says this. These are familiar words. For to us a child is born. To us a son is given. And the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. So I think it was back in the spring, Jen told me that she was doing a devotional. Jen's my wife. She's back there teaching the fourth and fifth grade right now. She told me that she was doing this devotional, and the devotional focused on this verse. And she said, I think it can make a great Christmas series, and here's why. And it almost was the Christmas series, and it's actually the reason why we landed on focusing on prophecy for the Christmas series. I just wanted to cover more than just this verse. But one of the things that the author of this devotional noted that I thought was an interesting point that I had not pieced together before, which is a low bar, but I saw that there was, or she points out that in these names of Jesus, there are four distinct roles and four distinct descriptors of each of those roles. So we have four distinct roles. We have counselor, God, father, and prince. And then we have four unique descriptors for those roles. Wonderful, mighty, everlasting, and peace or peaceful. He's the prince of peace. And I think it's worth it to take a look at each of these roles and descriptors, each of these names for Jesus, and think about what they mean, why they were chosen, why it's so significant that he's a wonderful counselor, a mighty God, an everlasting Father, and our Prince of Peace. Why those names? Why does Isaiah say this is what he will be called? Why did God direct him to write those particular things down? Why are they so powerful? And how can they encourage us in our faith today? And I thought it would be a great morning to just kind of sit in this reality of who Jesus is. That's what we're going to be talking about this morning. The Savior that we claim, that we sang to, that we said, yes, I will cry out to you no matter what my whole life, for all my days, I will claim you. Who is this Jesus that we claim and that we are celebrating this month in particular? And I think these four descriptors, these four roles are a great place to camp, to acquaint us with our Christ and hopefully leave here more desirous of him than you were when you came in and feeling like you know your Jesus a little bit better. So I want to look at these four titles and roles of Christ, these four names for Christ described by Isaiah through an angel. And the first one is that he is a wonderful counselor. Isaiah leads with wonderful counselor. Now this word counsel or counselor there, and I don't do a lot of like particular word work a lot, but it's relevant this morning because it's the type of counsel that advises, that purposes someone with a plan, that guides and directs. It's the kind of counsel that you go to to get advice. What should I do in this situation? That's kind of the implication here. That's the kind of counsel that Jesus is offering, and he is a wonderful counselor. And so it's worth asking, well, why is he wonderful? What makes him and his counsel so wonderful? And I think it's this. It's an obvious point, but when you think about it, it's such an important point. His counsel is wonderful because it is always right and always loving. His counsel is wonderful because it is always right and it is always loving. I don't know how often you guys find yourselves in situations where you're serving someone as a counselor. Where they're coming to you for advice. They're talking about their marriage. They're talking about their family. They're talking about their kids. They're talking about their career, they're talking about inner family dynamics, whatever it is. I don't know how often you counsel someone, but the more regularly you do it, the more difficult you understand it is to be both right and loving in the counsel that you offer. It's hard to be either one of those things. I remember as a pastor, people asked me for advice way more than they should based on my limited experience in life. When I was a student pastor at my last church, a dad came in. Him and his wife had divorced. He had a daughter. His wife had disparate standards for his daughter than he did, so it was causing some tension between him and his daughter when she would stay with him, and she was starting to rebel, and he didn't know what to do, so he came to the youth pastor. How do I maintain this relationship with my teenage daughter who's pushing against me because her mom gives me, gives her more freedom than I do. And I said, well, you're in luck because I am 29 years old and I have no children and I know the exact right answer to this. And I honestly, I said, his name was, his name was Carson. Great dude. I said, Carson, I don't know why you're here. He goes, you're the pastor. I said, I don't even have any kids, man. I don't know how to get a dog to keep liking me. Like, I don't, I can't help you. And to his ever-loving credit, Carson goes, you know what? You're right. I don't know why I'm here. Thanks for your time. And he left. He just walked out of my office. That was loving counsel. It was not right counsel. It gets more serious when we think about the counselors that we have in the world. I've got a really good friend. One of my best friends in the world and his marriage is really struggling right now. And he and his wife, like all of us, are broken people who brought in broken pieces and created a broken marriage. She is seeing a counselor on her own. He's seeing a different counselor on their own. Then they're seeing another counselor together that's supposed to be like the foremost marriage and family counselor in their area. And they've signed agreements for all of the counselors to talk to each other about the best plan of action for this particular couple. And yet, after his last session on Thursday, he called me to let me know how it went. And he said, I've never been more confused about anything in my entire life. I don't know what to do. He used to claim a faith, now he does not, nor does his wife. So you can't just say, hey, this is what scripture, I think, would have you do. I think this is what God's desire would be for you. I can't just give him that counsel, he's not going to receive it. I do think that in a marriage where there has not been infidelity, where there is not abuse, and where there is not abandonment, where both parties are in and they want to see this thing work, that the absolute best and right thing to do for everyone involved is to keep working at that for as long and as hard as you can. And I think that if they would just give themselves over to it and shut that back door of stepping out of the marriage and going separate ways and say, we're in, we're here, how do we do this? How do we find a path to happy together? I believe that they could, and I believe that the counsel of God, which is in scripture, correlates with that and agrees with that, and that is both right and loving counsel from our wonderful counselor. But instead of following that counsel, they're following the counsel of the world, and it has left him in a place where they are counseled out of their mind, to the hill. They are up to here in counseling appointments. And he left the last one saying, I've never been more confused about anything in my whole life. Jesus is our wonderful counselor. If we want to know what to do, we go to him in prayer. If we want to know what the plan is, how to handle a situation, we go to his word and we see if there's anything here that can guide us. We go to people who know us and know his word and we ask them what they think and we ask our friends to pray for us and we ask people to gather around us and maybe even lay hands on us and pray for us. What do we do? And we ask and we plead for the direction of God. I can't tell you how many times in my life I have not known what to do in a certain situation, making a big decision, facing some uncertainty or whatever it might be, and I've just prayed to God, would you please just make your will clear? That's all I need. I'm not asking for a particular outcome, but would you help me walk in confidence and faith that I am taking the steps that you want me to take? Will you please do that? And whenever I'm telling you the truth, whenever I have prayed that prayer, God has been faithful to make my path forward as crystal clear as possible. And when you do that, when it's a no, and you feel like God has said, don't do that yet. There were times in my last church where I prayed, God, can I please look for another job? I'm not happy here. And I felt like the answer was no. That's not my counsel for you. That's not what I would have you do. And I wasn't ready, and I didn't do it. I didn't go, and I stayed. But I had peace in staying. And then eventually, it became yes, go. And then eventually, it became yes, grace. And he made it so clear along the way that these were the steps that he wanted me to take, that he had orchestrated for me. And there's confirmation after confirmation that I was following God's counsel in being here. And what that also helps with is when things are tough, when you get discouraged, when, say, a global pandemic happens and your attendance is reduced by 95% and you have to hit the reset button on the whole church, you start to doubt whether or not I heard that counsel right. But you know that you did. And so following God's counsel, knowing that he knows the perfect plan, having confirmation that this is what he wants you to do, keeps you faithful in the path because we have a wonderful counselor. I was reminded as I was thinking of this, as one of my favorite verses, I remind you of it often because it's so simple and yet so powerful. John 10.10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says, I have come here so that you would have life and have it to the full, so that you would have the best, most rich, extravagant, adventurous, deep life possible. The best, the most full life possible for you. Now, his definition of that is going to look different than ours might, but when we experience his, we'll change our mind to his definition. Jesus says, if you'll just follow my counsel, I will lead you down the right paths. In Christ, we have a wonderful counselor whose advice is always right and always loving. The next thing that we see is that we have this mighty God. We have a mighty God. And I thought about how do we make a mighty God relevant in 2024? Certainly that resonates a little bit differently than it did in 800 BC, right? We live in a different timeframe, a different context. So how does that resonate for us? And I was reminded of a sermon that I like to do on David and Goliath. I did this sermon my first summer here, and I haven't done it again. Maybe it's time to polish it off because I really like doing it. I love telling the story. I think it's an amazing story. But in the story of David and Goliath, for those who have existed like in a space station for 30 years, David's a little guy, he kills a giant with a rock. I'd like to ask, as we look at that story, what made David so different than the rest of the fighting men of Israel? David's this ruddy teenager, 15, 16 years old. He goes to the front lines. He's there with all these fighting men, all these courageous men who have gone to battle, and it's a horrendous kind of battle where you hack off more limbs than your opponent does. It's a terrible, terrible way to do war, and they have faced it, and they are ready to face it, and yet there's this one giant Goliath of Gath who stands in the valley and blasphemes them and their God every day, making fun of them. And they won't even make eye contact with him. They're terrified of him. And when David sees Goliath, he goes, who's this guy? Who's this jerk? Who does he think he is? And then he says, I'm going to fight him. Then he says, I don't need Saul's armor. Then he goes out there and Goliath talks smack to David and David gives it right back to him. And then he slings the rock and he drops Goliath. And so the question is, how is David able to confront Goliath and respond to Goliath in such a vastly different way than everyone else in his country? And a lot of times people say faith. David was a man of faith. He had great faith. He knew that God was going to do it. And I just simply am not satisfied with that answer. Because I think that there was many men of faith in that army. Certainly of a more mature and seasoned and deep faith than that of a 15 or 16 year old. I'm not sure that David was the most faithful person in Israel. Maybe he was, but that doesn't resonate with me. Even Saul, the king, was a man of faith at that time in his life. My answer to what causes David to see, to respond to Goliath differently is that when everyone else looked at Goliath, they compared the strength and the might of Goliath to themselves, and they said, I am inadequate for this task. I cannot handle it, so I will not fight him. When David looked at Goliath and heard him blaspheming God, he compared the strength and the might of Goliath to the strength and the might of his mighty God, Everlasting Father, and he went, dude, you're in trouble. And so when David goes down to fight Goliath, it's not with his own might. It's not with his own strength. God didn't need that. God just needed a warm body to go do what he told him to do. And now it's just God's might and God's strength at play. And what we see, and this is so important, is that when we talk about mighty God and why that matters, it's because his might makes ours obsolete. The might of God makes our personal fortitude and might and strength and stick-to-itiveness and determination and all the things that we like to say about ourselves. It makes those obsolete. When we do things in the might of God, we don't need ours. All we need to do is be a warm body that's willing to do what God tells us to do. And if you think about this, even the strongest of you, even the smartest of you, even the mightiest of you, there are myriad things in your life for which you are inadequate. It does not take you long to have children and realize I am inadequate for the task of parenting them well. I am inadequate for the task of parenting them perfectly. I am not going to thread this needle without sending them to counseling for something. It's just I'd like to send them for as little as possible. That's my goal with John and Lily. I want to release into the wild capable adults who love Jesus and are self-actualized and have as few reasons to do counseling as possible. That's the goal. When you get married, you realize very quickly, if you're paying attention and you're not a moron, that you are inadequate for this task of being the spouse that your husband or that your wife needs. It's just not in there. You're going to make mistakes. We are inadequate to be perfect friends for each other, to be perfect confidants and counselors for each other. There are myriad ways in life. In most situations, if we would really just think about it, what we should admit is that every single one of us has imposter syndrome about something, and we are inadequate for the task that we face. That's good, because God isn't. So quit comparing yourself to the task and finding yourself lacking and start comparing the task to God and finding him sufficient. He is our mighty warrior. He fights our battles for us. It is not my job to lead grace according to the standards of Nate. It is not my job to make us successful or not successful. It is my job to be a warm body that gets up here on Sundays and does what God asks him to do. It is not your job to make your things successful. It is your job to be obedient because we have a mighty God that goes before us and fights our battles for us. This next one is interesting. We are told that he is our everlasting father, which is interesting for multiple reasons, not the least of which is Jesus is not referred to as God the Father in Scripture. This is the only place I can think of where Jesus is referred to as Father, and so it's interesting wondering why. And really, that word is just a general descriptor for a parental figure. He looks out for us. He nurtures us. He protects us. He guides us. He's a safe place for us. Jesus is fatherly in his behavior towards us. It's kind of a placeholder for that. And as I was thinking about what it means, not only that this is one of Jesus's roles, that he's a father figure for us, but that the descriptor that was chosen was everlasting. And I thought, there's got to be something to everlasting. There's got to be something to why that word was chosen. And as I thought about this, I was reminded of how I think about parents. I think that when you're born, if you're born into a half-decent family, it doesn't even have to be a great family, just a half-decent one, they're going to provide you with food and shelter. They're going to shelter you. They're going to give you a safe environment in which you can grow up. For most of us, that's our experience. So I've always thought of my parents as my shelter. And then at some point or another, they're going to send you out into the big, bad world, and you're going to face it alone. And you're going to see if you can go it alone. And you're going to see if you can make it. But here's what I know, and this makes me emotional every time I think about it. What I know is, I'm out here, Jen and I are out here on our own facing the big bad world. But I know that if it gets too stormy, I always have a shelter I can run to. I know that if things go sideways and we shut the doors and I'm jobless and useless because I have no marketable skills, I know that I can take the family back to their house and we can find our path again. I don't want to, mom and dad, if you're watching, I don't want to do that at all. Sounds terrible. But I know that we could. I have a shelter. And sometimes in life when the storm comes, when I'm getting, and this happens from time to time, it's bound to in this role, really harsh criticism, when I'm trying to determine if it's fair and just, when I'm really discouraged, when I don't know what to do, I can always pick up the phone and call mom and call dad and get advice from people who love me and love Jesus and aren't trying to get me to perform as their pastor. They just want to see what's best for me. I know that when the storms come, I can call and I can hide under that shelter for a little bit. And it always makes me sad when I do the funeral of a parent, whether they're 85, 95, or older. And what a blessing it is to have our parents for that long if we do. Or whether that parent is 55 or 45. Because it makes me sad for the kids, usually adults, that are left behind because their shelter is not here anymore. You're your own shelter. And I think about how lonely that must feel. There's a singer-songwriter named James Blunt that wrote a song about this, sitting next to his dad as his dad was dying of a disease. And he wrote a song about saying goodbye to your parents. And this is the chorus of the song. I think it's so powerful. He says, I'm not your son. You're not my father. We're just two grown men saying goodbye. No need to forgive. No need to forget. I know your mistakes and you know mine. And while you're sleeping, I'll try to make you proud. So, Daddy, won't you just close your eyes? Don't be afraid. It's my turn to chase the monsters away. Jeepers. The reality is, and I know this is heavy for December 8th, at least it's not Family Jammy Sunday. That would be weird. This occurred to me as we were walking through the process of losing my father-in-law, John. That when you are born, best case scenario in your life, you bury your parents. That's the best case scenario. Because if you don't, something more sad than that happens. Because here's the reality about our moms and our dads. They are not everlasting. And one day, we'll say goodbye to them. And when we do, it'll be our turn to chase the monsters away. But in Christ, we have an everlasting Father. And because of that, because of His eternal nature, means we never have to face the world alone. His eternal nature means we never have to face the world alone. We always have shelter. We always have someone to run to. We always have someone to cling to. We always have someone to call. Because he is our everlasting father and we never have to say goodbye to him. And I know that for some of you, you're big and tough and you're stoic and this emotional stuff doesn't do it for you. First of all, you need therapy. Second, you may have been fighting the monsters for a long time on your own. It may be a long time since you lost your mama or your daddy. Or maybe you're one of the unfortunate ones whose mom or dad ran out on you quick, and you've never really had that shelter to run to. And you've been fighting by yourself for a long time and you're tough. I'd be willing to bet you all my money that there have been times in the years and decades since you lost them where you thought to yourself, God, I wish I could talk to Dad. I wish I could call my mom. I wish I could just talk to him. Or maybe, I wish I had a dad that ever gave me good advice, ever. I just wish they were here. That's what makes this promise and this title of Christ so powerful. He is our everlasting Father. We never have to say goodbye. We never have to face the world alone. He is always there, constantly looking, constantly protecting, constantly guarding. And we can always, always run to him. And we'll never have to be on our own with what we face. Because of all these things, I believe, Isaiah calls him and finishes with the Prince of Peace. Jesus, he says, is the Prince of Peace. Why is he the Prince of Peace? His peace is the only possible consequence of his attributes. His peace, the peace of Christ that transcends all understanding and guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus, this peace of Christ is the only possible response and consequence of his other attributes. If you really believe that Jesus is a wonderful counselor and that his advice and his counsel is always right and always loving and that all you have to do is walk in his counsel. All you have to do is follow his advice. All you have to do is walk the path that he's laid out for you. I don't have to worry about everything else. I just need to walk this way and I know that Jesus will take care of me. If you believe that's true and if you believe that Jesus is your mighty warrior who goes ahead of you and fights your battles for you, who makes your personal might obsolete, who only asks of you for a warm body that's willing to do as he instructs, if you believe that's true and it takes the mantle of the battles off of you that we fight and it places it on his more sturdy shoulders and all you have to do is walk behind him, if you believe that he's a mighty warrior that goes before you, and then you believe that he's an everlasting father that you can always run to for shelter, that you can always run to for comfort, that you'll never have to say goodbye to, that is the reason that you'll never have to face the world alone or chase the monsters on your own, if you believe those things, how could we not arrive at the conclusion that he is the Prince of Peace and experience that peace? Jesus says in the Upper Room Discourse that we focused on last spring, John chapter 14 through 16, before he prays the High Priestly Prayer in 17, he finishes the Upper Room Discourse in chapter 16, I believe verse 39, and he says, I say these things to you that you might have peace, that you might rest, that you don't have to worry anymore. Just walk in me and walk towards me, and I will take care of everything else. It's why I think these four titles of Christ are so powerful together, because they flow one right after the other, and they lead us into this place of perfect and uncontested peace, so that if we really believe those things about Christ, we will not be like the proverbial duck on top of calm water looking calm and placid on the surface but legs flailing like crazy underneath. We will be like the disciples on the boat after Jesus groggily comes up and calms the storms and calms the winds and the rains and says peace be still. And then he goes back down to continue taking his nap, and the disciples look at each other and they go, Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? Look at him. Perfect peace. How did he do it? That's how we should feel when we reflect on who Jesus is and what he is for us. So this Christmas, when you hear Handel's Messiah, when you hear the great chorus swell, when you encounter this verse and you're met with the reality that he is our Prince of Peace and you understand more fully how we arrive at that peace, I hope and pray that the person of Christ will be brought freshly to your mind. And maybe not all four of these titles will resonate with you, but maybe the one that did the most is the one that you'll be reminded of and that this Christmas you'll experience the peace of Christ and you'll celebrate the peace of Christ. And we'll remember to do this as we celebrate together with our families, that we will never hear this messianic prophecy, this Christmas verse the same, but that will always remind us of the peace that we find in Christ and make us more desirous of the Savior that graciously offers us that peace. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. We love you. We praise you. We thank you for the gift of Jesus, for sending us your son, so that not only would he come to reconcile us to you. To reconcile your creation back to you. To give us a hope for the future. But God in so doing. Also becomes our wonderful counselor. Our mighty God. Our everlasting father and our prince of peace. Father I pray for for us that we would know Jesus better as we leave here. That we would seek Him more, be more desirous of Him as we leave here. And that God, those of us who are not experiencing Your peace, those of us who need a Father to run to, those of us who need a wonderful counselor, who need a mighty God to fight a battle for them. Lord, I pray that they would be heartened by these words, that they would be encouraged as they go. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, know the Lord, because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. And then in verse 33, this is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.