Sermons tagged with Sovereignty

All right, well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Now's not a good time. I'm busy. Happy Mother's Day for those to whom it applies. As we were singing that last song, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. I think that's an excellent song for Mother's Day. I think about my wife, who's an incredible mother. I think about the mom that I got to grow up with. I think about the kids that we have and share together and see God's evidence, the evidence of God's goodness all over my life. And hopefully for Mother's Day, that's something that you get to reminisce and think about too. Hopefully you have a great mom. Hopefully you've gotten to experience being a mom if that's something that you want to experience. But I also know that for others, Mother's Day is hard. We had a lot of hard Mother's Days when we wanted the gift of children and we didn't have it yet. And so I always like to just acknowledge that and pray in gratitude for good moms, for good memories, for the blessing of motherhood, but also pray for strengthening for those for whom Mother's Day is difficult for myriad reasons. So if you'll join me in prayer, I'll pray, and then we'll dive into the sermon. Father, we're grateful for good moms, moms that love us,oms that love us enough to get on to us, to keep after us, to not give in. Moms who wake up in the night with us. Moms who are always there, who leave notes in our lunches and who pray with us every morning. We thank you for moms that we've seen read your word and seek you diligently. We thank you for moms who raised us to help see you. And God, we thank you for the gift of motherhood and parenthood. And those of us who have children, God, are so grateful that you've given us that gift. And so we pray that we would be the mom and the dad to them that we need to be. God, also lift up those for whom holidays like this are difficult. Maybe it's difficult because their mom's not here anymore, and that's hard. Maybe it's difficult because they want to be a mom and they're not. And that's hard. Maybe it's difficult, God, because we thought we were going to be a mom and then we weren't. So, Lord, I pray just for special strength, protection, grace, and peace onto those folks. And that, God, those of us who feel blessed by today would see you as the author of that blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. So this is part five of our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at different stories and instances in the Bible where we see these emotional flare-ups, these blow-ups and these blow-outs, and kind of just ask, what can we learn from that? Because this blowing up is a very part, it's a part of the human existence. It's something that we all experience. And so earlier in the series, we talked about, I talked about Peter cutting off the ear of one of the soldiers in the garden, and I kind of compared that to when we lash out at people. We just get angry, and we lash out, we're cutting off ears, and we should try to cut off less ears. And we talked about what can we do when we feel like lashing out. And so I thought it would be good to look at the other end of that and say, what do we do when we're the one whose ear just got cut off? What do we do when someone lashes out at us? So the question for today is, what should you do when someone blows up on you? When you are on the receiving end of unwarranted anger, of unjust frustration, of unfair lashing out, what should you do when someone blows up on you? And I thought that this would be appropriate for Mother's Day because what is being a mom if not getting blown up at eight times a day because you had the audacity to suggest that now might be a good time to brush your hair or not wear Crocs with a church dress or not get out of bed at 630 to make Mother's Day breakfast. Not that any of those things happen in our home, but with your children who are less good than ours, I'm sure that they blow up at you. And I can only imagine, you know, right now we've got a seven-year-old daughter. John is two. He doesn't really know how to blow up at anybody. He just clenches his fist really tight and you can just hear, he screams and you can just see this visceral anger coming from him, which is great. And, but Lily knows how to blow up. She's seven, but they're seven-year-old blowups, you know, like they're not, they don't really sting a little. I bet the 17-year-old blowups are rough. I bet those, I'm not looking forward to those. And then something tells me that the older your children get, the worse those instances become. And I also know that on the other end of the spectrum, I've talked with enough people, with aging parents, that sometimes as parents get older and older, their filter is just used up. It's just used up. They don't have a new one. There's no replacement. You can't get one from Amazon. It's just gunked up and they've tossed it aside. And they can say things that aren't so nice sometimes. And that's tough. It's tough when someone blows up on you. It's tough to be on the receiving end of unfair anger. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to pick up my dad at the airport. And I was at the airport and just kind of started to, I was near the terminal, so the traffic kind of starts to funnel in and slow down and whatever. And this cab, like a literal taxi cab, I don't even know, like, what are you guys even doing anymore? Like, who's using cabs? And not, why does it even exist in Raleigh? I don't understand this. It's like, it's like, it's like seeing the yellow pages on your front door or something. Like, didn't we, didn't we cover this? Anyways, cab comes blowing past me, swerves into my lane, like, and, and, and like slams on his brakes. Like he's mad at me. And I'm like, what in the world's going on with this guy? I have no idea. I did not see him anywhere in my rear view. I was not aware. I didn't even think that I had changed lanes recently. He just decided he was mad at me. He gets in front of me and I'm like, whatever. So I, I actually, I didn't even need to be in that lane and he was now going slow to mess with me. So I, I I just went around him like I got to go to the second terminal, buddy. And I look over, and he is aggressively hanging the bird at me. And I don't know how you do that non-aggressively, but this was aggressive. Shaking his fist, yelling things. I literally, like honestly, I'm on the stage, okay? I'm preaching to people. So before God, I have no clue, no clue what I did that upset this guy. And so I just kind of looked at him and went, and kept driving. I don't know. I wasn't mad, but he was really mad at me. So what do we do when someone gets really angry with us and we don't deserve it? We didn't do anything. We don't know what to do. How do we act in those moments? How does God want us to act? And what's really cool is not even how does God want us to act just so that we behave well, but how can we act in those moments that will actually draw people, the people who are angry and the people who can see that anger, that will actually draw them closer to our Father. What can we do in those situations when someone blows up on us? When I was thinking about that, there's one story that comes to mind in the Bible. To me, it's the best blow-up story in the whole Bible. It's one of the biggest ones. I can't think of many others that are like it, if any at all. But it's in 1 Samuel. We see the first part of it in chapter 18, and then I'm going to point us to chapter 19. So Saul is the king of Israel. He's the first king of Israel, but there's this kid named David who's been anointed as the next king of Israel. Normally, Saul's son Jonathan would take the throne from him, but God has used the prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king of Israel. And then after getting anointed, David does this really annoying thing where he goes down in the valley and he kills a giant that everybody else in the whole country was afraid of, including Saul, and he does it without Saul's armor. And so Saul's a little ticked at him. And then he puts David in his army, and there's this song. This is the English translation of the song. Maybe it sounds better in the original Hebrew. I don't know. It's a pretty dumb song, if you ask me. But it was, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has slayed his tens of thousands. I don't know what the melody is on that. Maybe I should get Roburg to help me out. That seemed to work for you. But I don't, that was the song, right? So there's some jealousy there between Saul and David. And so Saul was a man that was given to what we would probably identify as anxiety or depression, bouts of despair and anger. And one of the only things that could calm him was David coming to the palace and playing the harp for Saul. That would calm him down. And so David's doing that one day, and Saul is just seized with anger and throws his spear at David to try to kill him two times. David dodges both of them and then gets out of there. Then after that, Jonathan, who was David's closest friend in the world, goes to Saul, his dad, and he's like, dude, this is a paraphrase. He says, dude, what are you doing? What's the problem here, man? This guy, he loves you. He serves you. He's a good servant. He's faithful. He's a good leader of men on the battlefield. He's there to play the harp when you need him to. I'm not mad at him. I'm happy that he's going to be my king. You don't need to be mad at him for me. Just like knock it off with David, with hating David. Can you do that for me? And Saul says, yes, I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Which just as an aside, if you ever in your life have to promise to stop trying to kill someone, you just need to take a look in the mirror. That's all. I'm not going to make a bunch of points about that, but that's a sentence that no one should say. I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Then we pick up the story in 1 Samuel 19. Turns out Saul's a liar. He just really liked trying to kill David. So here we go. Then a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and he sat in his house with his spear in his hand, and David was playing the lyre. And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul so that he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and escaped that night. Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, If you do not escape with spear two times, leaves, gets invited back to the palace, goes back to the palace. He's playing the lyre again to try to soothe Saul. And Saul, for a third time, throws a spear at David. David eludes it and gets out of there. Which, as an aside, I'd just like to point out, this is one of the fundamental differences between David and I. I have a one-spear-throw policy. If you throw your spear at me one time in anyone's house, I'm leaving that house, and I'm not going to trust you around spears again. David has a three-spear policy, much more gracious than I am. So he eludes it for the third time. He leaves. McCall is actually Saul's daughter that was given to David in marriage, and she helps him escape. Later on, we see this poignant scene where David and Jonathan meet in a field, and Jonathan tells David, you're going to have to go until my dad dies. He's never going to stop wanting to kill you, so you got to go. So David, for I think about this 20 year period goes and he just lives in the wilderness with a band of some of his soldiers. And they just elude Saul at various times. Saul chases David through the wilderness, trying to capture him and kill him. And there's actually two really poignant scenes in the wilderness where David has a chance to kill Saul and he doesn't. There's one where they're in the En Gedi, the caves on the edge of the En Gedi plain, which is in the southern part of Israel, close to the Dead Sea. And Saul's army must have been close because David and his men were hiding in a cave. And Saul, now at my house, when someone says they have to go to the bathroom, we say, do you have to go to the bathroom or the bathroom bathroom? Saul had to go to the bathroom bathroom. So he goes into a cave to take care of business. While he's in there, just so happens, that's where David and his guys are. And David's guys are giving David the eyes like, dude, you could totally kill him right now. And David realizes this. But he says, shame on me if I harm the head of the Lord's anointed. So he takes his knife and he cuts off an edge of the robe and Saul leaves. And once he's a little ways off, within shouting distance at least, David feels terrible that he even did what he did. And he goes out and he gets Saul attention, and he shows him the robe. And Saul feels so bad about the grace and forgiveness that David shows him that he decides, I think I'm going to be done killing David for a while. And he goes back to the palace. It wasn't long before he started hunting for David again. This time, David and a guy named Abishai snuck into the tent at night, and Saul's laying on the ground asleep with all of his men around him asleep as well. And Abishai looks at David, and he says, let me strike him with the spear. It will only take once. It will not take twice, which is a really, like, it's one of the cool lines. Like, I only need to do it once, man. I won't need two on this one. I'll get him. And David says, no, shame on me if I touch the Lord's anointed. And then in a battle between some of David's forces and some of Saul's forces, Saul ends up being killed. And the person who takes Saul's life, David actually takes their life for being willing to do that to the Lord's anointed. So what we see from David is that although Saul blew up on him, had completely unjust, unfair, unwarranted anger at David, David always, his whole life took the high road. His whole life honored Saul. Never once did he raise to meet Saul where he was. And so if we're going to ask, what should we do when someone blows up on us, when we are the object of unwarranted anger and frustration, I think we can look to this example of the life of David and see what he did, and we can mimic those things in our own life. And what's really helpful about this is I think that there are three really important New Testament passages, verses or passages, because some of them are two verses. I think there are three really important New Testament passages that honestly, every Christian, if you're here and you call yourself a believer, you should have these memorized. You should be able to say these off the top of your head. These should be things that show up in your life that you think of often enough so regularly that you can quote them. You might not know where they're from. You might not know how to find them. You might have to type them into Google to figure out the reference like I did this week, but you should know them. You should know what to type into Google. And so I want to look at three verses that display three behaviors that David displayed in this story about his interaction with Saul. So let's look at three things that were true of David and try to make those true of us. The first thing we see in this story is that David was slow to anger. He was slow to anger. And I know he was slow to anger because David could have, by all accounts, by all accounts, he was a better warrior than Saul. By every measure, he was superior to Saul. When Saul is in his house and potentially drunk and throwing spears at him, David could have very easily taken that spear out of the wall and gotten his vengeance on Saul right there. Now, you might say, well, he couldn't do that. There's guards. He could have been killed. Yeah, maybe, but what we know is that he didn't raise up in red-hot anger and do what some of us would do if somebody tried to hurt us. He kept his cool. He was slow to anger, which is really not the typical response in the human experience, right? That's why James writes this verse to remind us to do it. In James 1, 19 and 20, he says, does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. This is one that we should know. This is one that we should have memorized. This is one that we should remind ourselves of, particularly when someone is blowing up at us. Because human nature is not to stay calm and stay down here. Human nature is to rise and meet the anger with anger, isn't it? You guys who are married know this. You know this. You've had those fights, those days, where you look at each other and you're just mad at each other. You're just mad. And finally, one of you goes, what are you mad about? What are you even upset for? And the other one says, I don't know. You're mad at me, and I don't know why you're mad, so I'm mad at you. Well, I don't know why you're mad. So I'm mad at you. And then you kind of go back and forth. You're like, what was the first thing that made us mad? And nobody knows. And like, can we just agree to just kind of set the arms down and slowly back away from this one? Are we done here? We're like, yeah, we're done here. But that's typical in human interaction to meet anger with anger. I remember years ago, very early on in our marriage, Jen and I were at each other's throats about something. I don't remember what. But as we were talking about it, she gets really upset. She storms up the stairs, slams our bedroom door. Now, what did I do? Did I, because of my maturity and wisdom, think to myself, she's probably overreacting, but I'm going to let her stay up there and simmer because we don't want to say words in anger. And, you know, I'm sure that she'll kind of calm down. She'll realize maybe that was a little bit too much, and she'll come and apologize and tell me I'm right. That's probably what I need to do. No, I did not do that. I did not do that. Instead, I thought, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to tell her that she does not need to be slamming doors in our house. So I go upstairs, and I open that door, and I start getting on to her for the way that she's expressing her anger. And she, again, I don't want to talk to you right now, and leaves the room and goes into the guest room and slams that door. Now listen. Here's what I know. I don't know what we were fighting about. But if I make that sweet woman act like that, it's my fault. I was wrong. I don't know what we were fighting about. I know I was wrong. That's what I know. Now when she went into the second room and shut that door, did I leave her be? No. Because I wanted to poke it. So I walk up to the guest bedroom and I open that door. And I said, you know, I can open this door too. I can open all the doors. I don't know what happened after that. Things just kind of went red, I guess. It was just a blur. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's mad at us. Oh, I'm going to get mad at you. Some cab driver hangs you the bird, you're like, hey man, forget you. You know, like whatever. Your kid snaps at you, you've had a stressful day, you meet them there and you snap at them. Your spouse, your co-worker, your parent. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's angry with us, we raise to meet that anger. Well, James tells us, don't do that. Don't do that. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. It's important to be quick to listen and slow to speak too, because in those moments when we're frustrated, we have things that we want to say. But if we'll calm down and listen, we'll probably learn new information that may change what we want to say, that may help us be slower to anger. So when someone's angry with us, wisdom says, I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to listen, and I will not meet anger with anger. This is what David does. The second thing that David does is David was quick to forgive. He was slow to listen and quick to forgive. He moves to forgiveness very, very quickly. We see no evidence whatsoever in any of the texts that David was ever angry with Saul or that David could not forgive Saul ever through the rest of his life. We see David offer Saul quick forgiveness, which is right in line with what Jesus teaches Peter in Matthew chapter 18. When it says that Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that should I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to as many times as you need to. Forgive again, forgive again, forgive again, forgive again. And it feels pretty generous for Peter to ask that. How many times, when my brother commits the same offense against me, how many times should I forgive him? Up to seven, which makes sense. Your friend comes over to your house, he gets too rowdy, he breaks your new TV. You forgive him that one time. How many more times should I forgive him? Seven? That's a lot of breaking TVs. And Jesus says, no, as many times as you need to forgive them, forgive them. The way that I think about it is, as many times as we hope God forgives us, forgive other people that many times. When someone offends us, when someone lashes out at us, when we are the object of someone's unfair anger and unfair frustration, we should as quickly as we can move to forgive that person. Because holding that grudge is only going to hurt us. It's not going to hurt them. Now, I will also say this. Last year at Lent, during the Lent season, I did a sermon on forgiveness. And I basically just preached to you from the perspective of my good friend, whose husband was having an affair on her, and she had to really learn what forgiveness looked like because they had five kids, and that was really, really tough. And one of the things that she said that was super helpful, if you're a person who's struggling with forgiveness or wants a more robust explanation of forgiveness and what it looks like, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to that sermon. But one of the things she said that I found very helpful and others have commented to me too that was very helpful is forgiving someone does not mean that you have to trust them again. And so I would say this to you. If the person who is blowing up at you is making a habit of that, if they do it regularly, if it's not just a one-off that you can ascribe to a set of circumstances that are no longer true, but you have someone in your life who's blowing up at you again and again and again, you should be slow to anger in those situations, and you should be quick to find a path to forgiveness in those situations. But let me tell you what David did not do. He did not go back into Saul's palace again. He did not make himself vulnerable to a spear the fourth time. He did not trust Saul again. Did he forgive him? Yes. Did he honor him? Yes. Did he give him grace? Absolutely. But did he put himself back in that home? No. No. If you have someone in your life who is habitually blowing up at you, it is perfectly good and wise to remove yourself from that situation until something changes and you feel like you can trust that that's not going to keep happening. As we talk about what do we do when someone blows up on us, it's... I'm mostly talking about people who aren't our spouses. If it's our spouse and they do it all the time, if it's our brother or sister or friend or mom or dad and they do it all the time, that's a separate sermon. But what I would say to that separate sermon is, it's okay to not put yourself back in a situation where someone's going to blow up at you all the time, where you feel like you're just around a ticking time bomb. We should seek to forgive, but we don't have to trust and keep putting ourself in a place where that is going to happen over and over and over again until we believe that something is going to be different. The last thing David does is David was a conduit of grace. He was a conduit of grace. He was connected to God's grace. He was pouring grace out onto others. Back in the fall, I did a series called The Five Traits of Grace, the five characteristics that make us who we are, The five things that we want every partner to exhibit. And one of those things is to be a conduit of grace. To be attached to the grace of God so that the grace that we receive flows out onto others. This is the verse that I think of when I think of this. This is probably, if you're going to memorize any verse at all, if you don't know any of these, start with this one. Start with this verse. Put it on your mirror where you get dressed. Put it on your dashboard if you get angry in the car. Put it next to where your emails are if those things make you angry. Whatever sets you off, whatever stokes your fire, just put this verse so that you can see it. And it's super easy to memorize and it's super impactful. For from his fullness, John says, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God's grace that pours out on us, we have all received grace upon grace. When we think about a couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, I did a sermon about the earned wrath of God on us for placing his son on the cross and that Jesus on the cross exhausts the wrath of God for his children. When we think of the wrath that we don't have to experience because God poured it out on Jesus instead of us, that's grace. And God knew, as I said, God knew that we were going to cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. He knew that we were going to do that. He knew what you were going to do after you prayed the prayer and after you accepted Jesus as your Savior. He knew that you were going to move through that awful season of your life that you'd like to forget. He knew that and he forgave that. He knows what lies ahead and he's forgiven that. When we think about the grace that we feel every week when we come to church and we sit here and we sing the songs and we have this voice in our head that reminds us of who we are and what we've done and where we've been and that if the people here knew what I was capable of, if the people here knew what I know, then I would have to find a different church to go to. And yet God chooses me and God loves me and God blesses me and he's given me grace upon grace. When we realize that, that that God is so good to us, that that God is so patient with us, that that God will watch us go through years where we don't have quiet times, where we're not praying to him, where we're not seeking him, where everything about our Christian life is compulsory and cursory. He will watch that zombie walk through life and still try to breathe spiritual life into us at all times, calling us back to him. He is excited every time we come home. He is excited every time we utter the words, dear God, and we begin to pray. He is thrilled in his heart every time he hears your voice praise your creator. When we receive from his fullness that much grace, it is very easy to pour grace out onto others. And this is what David did. He had grace for Saul. I think he understood Saul's plight. I think he had patience for him and his depressions and his moods, even in understanding his desire for his own son to be on the throne. And one of the best pictures of grace we see, maybe in the Bible, but definitely in the life of David, is once Saul has passed away, David has ascended to the throne. Anybody who's watched the History Channel or read any books about old kings and kingdoms knows that once a king takes over, one of the first acts of orders of business is to kill everyone associated with the bloodline that preceded him so that there's no threats to his throne. And there was no one left that they knew of, but then one day somebody found a relative of Saul's. It was a nephew or a cousin or something, I can't remember which. Named Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth, it says, had a disability. And that's important because that made it more difficult for Mephibosheth to earn money and provide for himself. So he was a person who needed help. And they brought him to David, expecting David to kill him, to put him to death, to be done with the line of Saul and move on. Instead, David, learning who he was, had mercy and grace on him, made a seat at his table for him, and invited Mephibosheth to live in the palace and dine with him and be with him and considered him a family member for the rest of his life. That was how David showed grace and honor to Saul. That's the kind of grace that we're to show to others. The grace that says, I'm not saying I did this in the moment, I'm not trying to give myself credit, but the grace that says, you know what? It would be super stressful to be a cab driver. I don't know how they do it. I went to Chick-fil-A and Home Depot the other day. I was about to lose my mind, and that's like five minutes away. I don't know how they do it to be a cab driver. And you know what? I bet I did something inconsiderate that I wasn't even thinking of. So I'm going to give them them that. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. They're probably in a hurry. They probably need to get where they're going. Or, if this helps, life would be really hard to be that dumb. So I'm glad that God didn't make me that dumb. Whatever you need. We offer others grace. And I'll tell you who's the world's best at offering other people grace. It's Jen, my wife. She will do this all the time. We will be in traffic. Someone will cut me off, cause me to have to slam on the brakes. Our children are crying. We're terrified. And I'll say, my gosh, can you believe that person? And she'll say, now, Nady, because she calls me Nady. If you want to call me Nady, too, you can. It'd just be weird. She says, now, Nady, you don't know. His wife could be in the passenger seat in labor right now. And we just need, tell me I'm lying. And we just, we don't know what's going on in their life. I could be walking down the road, I promise you. I could be walking down the road and some guy could just come up to me and dog cuss me in front of my family. And then I could get out of the situation and walk down there and be like, can you believe that guy? What a jerk. And she'd be like, now, lady, you don't know what's going on in his life. His wife may have just left him and his parents may have just passed away. You don't know. That kind of grace. And when we remind ourselves of God's goodness and grace to us every day, it is easy to pour that out onto others. And I say start with that one, memorize that one, because if we're full of grace and we're offering other people grace, can't we be more quick to forgive when they mess up? Can't we remember that hurt people hurt people and just assume that they're hurting and maybe actually help them get to the bottom of their hurt rather than piling on and making them feel shame for blowing up in a way that they regret? If we're full of grace, won't we be slow to be angry? Won't we stay here longer? Because we're trying to see the best in them and we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in the situation. I think if we just abound in grace that it takes care of the rest. And then the amazing thing that happens when we do this, when someone blows up at us unfairly or unjustly, if we do what this says, when someone blows up on you, be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and abound in grace. When we do that, what are the people around you going to notice? What are your children going to pick up on? It's the easiest thing in the world to match anger for anger. It's the easiest thing in the world to lash back out. It's the easiest thing in the world to let someone say something nasty to you, say something mean to you, to have a server who's curt with you, one of those servers who acts like they don't even want to be there that day. It's perfectly human to let them walk away and then you venture frustration to the people around you. But what if you meet them with grace? What if you're slow to anger when other people would meet? What if you're quick to forgive when other people would hold on? What if you're abounding in grace when other people would abound in suspicion and doubt? Then not only have you brought that person who blew up at you a little bit closer to Jesus, not only do you bring yourself closer to Jesus, but you bring the people around you who see that and who marvel at that closer to Jesus too. Simply by being someone who, like David, is slow to anger, quick to forgive, and always abounding in grace. Let's pray. Father, would we in this way be more like David? And so be men and women after your own heart. God, when we are the subject of unfair anger, unfair frustration, when people treat us in ways that we don't deserve to be treated, would you help us to be slow to anger? Would you help us to stop and to listen? Not meet frustration with frustration? Would you help us to be quick to forgive where we can, to give us an earnest desire to find a path to that forgiveness? And God, more than those things, would you help us be people who abound in grace, who walk in this acute awareness of the grace and the love and the mercy that we have from you. Let us be people who walk in an acute awareness that from your fullness we have received grace upon grace, and let us freely and excitedly and happily give that grace to those around us, even when those around us treat us unfairly. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Jordan, it is interesting to me that you think profundity is what's required to get up on the stage when they parade me out here every week, falling woefully short of the bar. This is the third part in our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at times in Scripture where we see a blow-up or a blow-out or people with with just big overwhelming emotions because that is so much a part of our life. That is something that we experience just as we go through life. Sometimes our emotions are too big for us and they're overwhelming. And so this morning I wanted to take a look at big emotions in our prayers and what happens and how does God respond when big emotions creep into our prayers, when our prayers really become cries. And to do that, I want us to think about prayer together. It's really, when you consider it, one of the more interesting passages in the Bible, one of the more interesting interchanges that Jesus has with his disciples. They're following him around. They're watching him do ministry. And at one point, they look at Jesus and they say, hey, Jesus, will you teach us to pray? Now, this is a really interesting question coming from the disciples. And many of you have probably considered this before. The disciples knew how to pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed their whole life. They had gone to synagogue every week, maybe daily at different points in their life. I don't know. They had seen a ton of people pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed many prayers before, but there was something different, so different about the prayers of Jesus that they had to stop him and say, can you teach us to pray like you pray? Because that's different than how we pray. And Jesus responds by sharing with them the Lord's prayer. You guys probably all know it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. And so in that, Jesus gives the model of prayer to the disciples and to us in perpetuity. And if you break that down, I've always been taught prayer and I've taught prayer this way in church, in youth group, in camps, in different places, in men's groups, small group, when we talk about prayer, something that's always been really helpful for me is the acronym ACTS. And you guys have probably heard this before. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. So the way that Jesus opens up the prayer. When we pray, the first thing we should do is adore God. God, you're great. God, you're good. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. God, you are wonderful for this. God, you blow me away for that. And when we do this, it really puts us in the right posture for prayer, you know? It really reminds us who we're talking to. I had a Bible teacher in high school who was also my soccer coach, who was also my administrator because I went to a small school. And when he would pray in class, he would say, okay, everyone, let's pray, bow your heads. And we would bow our heads to pray, and he would wait 20 or 30 seconds. And so finally, I asked one day, Mr. Dawson, what are you doing? Like, that's awkward. Why do you make us just sit there in silence? What are you waiting on? Because it's almost like, does he want us to pray? Like, should we? And he told me what he was doing. He said he was taking his mind, whenever he would pause before prayer, to Isaiah chapter 6, where the throne room of God is described. And it says that God is on his throne, and the train of his robe is filling the temple with glory. And there's these six-winged angels flying around him saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And it's just so overwhelming that he cowers in a corner. And Mr. Dawson said that when, he said, when I pray, I like to take myself there to put myself in proper posture before God to remind myself when I pray, where am I going? I'm going to the throne room of God, the King of the universe, and I'm addressing the creator of the universe. That's a serious, somber thing. That's a place for humility. That's a place for penitence. This is why when we teach our children to pray, we teach them to bow their heads and close their eyes. It's a sign of reverence. It's a sign of respect for knowing who we're talking to and where we're going. It's why I encourage you as much as you can to kneel when you pray. Because it's hard to put yourself in the posture of kneeling and not feel humble, at least a little bit. And so Jesus says we should start with adoration. We should adore God. We should praise him. And then we should go to confession. What are the things, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. How have we trespassed against God? What attitudes do we bring into this day and into this prayer? What sins do we carry with us that yet remain unconfessed before the Father? What do we need to confess to God before him? And then we move into this time of thanksgiving, praising Him. God, thank you for your goodness in my life. Thank you for my family. Thank you for a church that I love. Thank you for the rain. Thank you for the day, whatever it is. It's John's second birthday today. Thank you for a great two-year-old son and for friends watching him in the nursery right now. Thank you for all of those things. We praise God for things. And then, suffocation. Then we ask for what we need. And you guys know, and you've heard this, that the tendency when we pray is to skip act and go straight to S. Skip all the other stuff and just go, dear God, I really need blank. I really need you to show up here. I really need this to work out. I'm really worried about this. It's all the I need, I need, I need. And there's a place for that in prayer. But the way that Jesus teaches us prayer, it follows this pattern of first putting ourself in the proper place and then confessing our sins, which remind us of the humility we should carry into the throne room. And then thanksgiving, let's acknowledge all the blessings God's given us in our lives before we ask him for more, and then in that proper mindset, say what we need to say. That's kind of the proper way to pray. But sometimes we pray when our emotions are too big for propriety. Sometimes we pray prayers that become cries. And the emotions that we bring into that moment are too big for acts. I've shared with you guys before that the first time Jen and I got pregnant, we miscarried. And I'm not in the business of doing comparative pain for miscarriages and who has the right to the most sorrow. But for us, the pain was particularly acute because we had been praying for a child for years. For years. We had struggled mightily. Our moms and grandmas were praying for babies. We had the church around us at the time praying that we could have a baby. We knew that's what we wanted to do. On my mama's deathbed, a few years before we got pregnant, the very last thing she did for me was direct someone to the top of her closet to get a stuffed animal that she made to give to my child when we had them. She went ahead and made it, and I think my sister finished it up for her so that we would have that to give to our first child. So when we got pregnant, we were elated. And then we went to the checkup for eight weeks, and the baby wasn't there. I don't know how long it took me to pray after that. But the first time I did pray, it wasn't Acts. The first time I prayed, it didn't look very much like our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. It looked a lot more like God. What in the world? What the heck? I would say different words if I weren't on this stage and there weren't children in the audience. That's how I felt, and that's how I prayed. What are you doing? Because we, and we're not entitled to this. None of what I'm about to say really matters, but to us it did. Jen's a school teacher. She loves kids. She's teaching in a Christian school, leading people towards you. We still have relationships with some of the kids that she taught in those days. I was a school teacher. I taught high school Bible. And then I worked at a church. We had made good choices. We were good Christian people. We had checked all the boxes. We had done all the things. And there was people who were living lives way more rebellious than us who were just tripping accidentally into family. And then we get pregnant and then you take it? No, I'm not praying acts. I'm not following the pattern for this one. There are some prayers that we pray that become cries. When we hear of the terminal diagnosis and we go to the Father and we say, really? This one? Him? Her? Why not me in your jacked up economy? Why them? There's a girl in our community. She's a young woman in our community. Just last week or two. She battled cancer for five years and came to it a week or two ago. Beautiful family, young kids. I don't know when that husband is going to pray again. When he does, those prayers will be cries. We've all prayed prayers like that. Where we're walking through what feels to us like the dark night of the soul and we don't have time or patience for propriety. We just go to our God and we are raw and we are real and we cry out, what in the world? How is this right? How does this make sense? As parents that send their kids to school in that private school in Nashville, what do those prayers sound like when they start to pray again? We've all prayed those prayers that are so big and so raw and so emotional that they become cries. And so I think it's worth it to look and see how God handles these prayers in Scripture. Because we get to see some. God in His goodness left them for us in His inspired Word. And so what I want to encourage you with today is, I know that we've all prayed those prayers. If you've never prayed those prayers, I'm so happy for you. I hope you never do, but I think you will. And what I want us to know as we look into the scripture this morning is that God is not offended by our prayers that become cries. I don't think God in his goodness and in his grace and in his mercy is offended when I look at him after the deepest pain that I've felt up to that point in my life and I go, what in the world? That's not fair. That's not right. That doesn't make sense. I don't think God gets offended by those things. I don't think he's so small that our broken hearts offend our God. And I actually think that there's grace and space for those prayers because we see them in the Bible. We actually see Jesus pray one of these prayers, a prayer that is so raw and so real and so emotional that it becomes a cry. This prayer is recorded in all four Gospels. We're going to look at the account in the Gospel of Luke chapter 22. Beginning in verse 39. And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, speaking of Jesus. And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, this scene, many of you know it, Jesus has just left the Last Supper with the disciples. He's instituted communion. He's told them, my body is going to be broken for you. My blood is going to be spilled for you. He knows what is going to happen. He knows when he gets done praying, he's going to be arrested. And he knows that when he's arrested, he's going to be tried. And after he's tried, he's going to be flogged and beaten, and he's going to be hung on a cross and left there to die and then face death and hell. He knows that. And so he brings the disciples with him, and he says, remain here while I pray. And he goes off a distance, one would assume, so that they couldn't hear him. And it is interesting that they all ended up hearing him, because there's nothing in the text to indicate that Jesus subtly knelt and clasped his hands and said, my Father who is in heaven. No, these prayers from Jesus that we see, in Luke it says he knelt. In another gospel it says that he fell with his face to the ground. And the disciples are a stone's throw away and they can hear him clearly. And then he gets so intense in his praying that sweat begins to mix with his blood, which we know is something that can actually happen in moments of incredibly intense stress in our lives. So the prayer that Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane was not, Dear God, if there's any other way, would you please point me in that? It wasn't that. It was Jesus on his face prostrate, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please, is there any other way? Is there anything else I can do? I do not want to bear this. I do not want to be on the cross and hear you and see you turn your back on me. I do not want to say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I do not want the crown of thorns in my head. I do not want the nails in my wrist. I do not want to do this, Father. Is there any other way? Please, please take this cup from me. That's a prayer becoming a cry. That's Jesus sidestepping propriety and crying out to his heavenly father. And in there, he finds what we should find when we pray like this. No matter how deep, no matter how raw, yet not my will but your will be done. Please give me the strength to accept your will. So I know that God isn't offended by those prayers because his son prays one to him in full view and vision of the disciples. And then he tells us about it in all four gospels. And that made me wonder, where else in the Bible do we have prayers that are raw and real and emotional? Where else in the Bible do we have prayers that have become cries? And of course, I went to Psalms. And I just started reading them and flipping through and finding them, these things where people are just raw. I am weary unto death. I want to die. Take my life. And I put them in your notes, Psalm 142 and Psalm 13 and Psalm 77. I think of Hannah's prayer in the temple when she's praying so earnestly and fervently for a child that Eli the priest thinks she's drunk. I think of the book of Lamentations, which is a whole book of tough, raw prayers. And I was going to kind of bounce around between those prayers, but then I was reminded of another psalm that's really dear to my heart, Psalm 88. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to turn there. I encountered Psalm 88 when I took a trip to Israel several years ago. One of the things most groups do when you go to Israel is when you're in Jerusalem, you go to Caiaphas' house. Caiaphas is the high priest that had Jesus arrested, had him tried, and had him murdered. And in the basement of Caiaphas' house is this makeshift small dungeon. And a portion of the dungeon is a cylindrical room that they would tie ropes under the shoulders of the prisoner and lower them into this pitch black, dark room. Now there's stairs that lead down, but in Caiaphas' day, in Jesus' day, that was not the case. They lower you in and they pull you up when they're ready for you. And most people believe that this is where Jesus spent the night after he got arrested, waiting on his trial before Pilate the next day. And when you go to Jerusalem, you can go down into that cell. And our guide pointed us to Psalm 88. Psalm 88 was written by the sons of Korah, we're told. But it's also believed by scholars to be a prophetic messianic psalm. And many scholars believe that this is meant to be the prayer that Jesus prays after he's arrested. If it's not the prayer that he prays after he's arrested, Jesus knew the scriptures, he knew the psalms, this could very well be a psalm that came to mind that he quoted. But when I picture Jesus arrested and alone and reading, crying these things out, it brings fresh meaning to it for me. And when we listen to it and read it, I think you'll be taken aback by how very real it is. So I'm going to read a good portion of it. Beginning in verse 11. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? And then verse 13, They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. That's a real prayer. That's not a prayer you pray in church in front of other people. That's not how we teach our kids to pray. We see accusations in this prayer. You have caused my friends and my loved ones to shun me. It is your wrath that beats against me and waves and covers me. The person crying out to God in this psalm feels the darkness closing in in such a way that they don't know if they will see the light again. My companions have become darkness, he ends with. And that's it. I am grateful to God for choosing to include in his Bible and his inspired word prayers that are that raw and that are that real. Prayers that show us that when our emotions are too big for propriety, that our God can meet us in those places and hear us. He appreciates those prayers so much so that he recorded them and fought for them and protected them down through the centuries so that we could see them too. So when we pray them, it's okay. When we need to cry out to God, we can. He's not offended by those prayers. He hears those prayers. He welcomes those prayers. And here's what else happens when we cry out to God, when our prayers become cries, when we lose all sense of propriety and we're just trying to figure it out. Here's what else happens when it's literally the dark night of our soul and the darkness is closing in around us and our life is falling apart and our children are making decisions that we don't understand and our husband is making decisions that we don't understand and everything that we thought was going to happen, this future that we had projected is not going to happen. This person that I love is not in my life anymore and I see reminders of them all the time and I don't know how I'm going to put one foot in front of the other. I don't know how I'm going to do it. When we pray those prayers, this is what happens. If we look back at Luke 22, there's a verse that I skipped. Verse 43. In the middle of his praying, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him. In the middle of Jesus crying out, Father, please don't make me do this. Please let there be another way. God says, son, you're going to have to walk that path. But he doesn't make him do it on his own. He sends an angel to strengthen Jesus in the dark night of his soul. And I can't help but believe that God will send angels to strengthen you too. When you pray those prayers, I think God sends his angels to strengthen you as well. And I don't know what those angels look like. Maybe it's a hug. Maybe it's someone's presence. Maybe it's a text or a phone call or an email. I know in our family it's cardinals. Maybe it's a southern thing, I'm not sure. But we believe that when a cardinal shows up in your view, that that's a lost loved one who's just stopping by to say hello. Just to check in on you. And so sometimes God sends cardinals just when we need them. Another big one in our family is Mallard Ducks. You know that we lost my father-in-law a couple years ago. And Mallard Ducks were really special to him. And I can't tell you all the cool places where we've just kind of looked and there's a duck there that doesn't belong there. And it's just God kind of reminding us that he loves us, that he sees our pain, that he walks with us in that pain. Maybe, for some of us, God's using this morning to strengthen you, to buoy you. I hope so. Maybe this is just what you need. My hope for all of you is that you never need this sermon and you never have to pray those prayers. But my suspicion is you have a better chance of dodging raindrops on the way back to your car in a downpour than you do of living a life without tragedy. And so I think all of us, at some point, need this sermon and this reminder that when our emotions are too big for propriety, God can hear those prayers too. And in the hearing, in those moments, he sends his angels one way or another to strengthen us. I just got done reading a book. It's actually Beth Moore's biography. I would highly recommend it. One of the best books I've read in a couple years. And in it, she was talking to someone who faced incredible tragedy. And she asked her, how is it that you have kept going through these years? And she said, God opens my eyes every morning. I have no other explanation than that. There are nights that I went to sleep and I did not want to wake up and God opens my eyes. And so I get up that day and for us today I use the breath that's in my lungs and I praise him and I go. We will all in different times and seasons and for different reasons and in different ways walk through dark nights of the soul. But when we do, we can cry out to God. And when we cry out to God, He will hear us. And when He hears us, He will send His angels to strengthen us. I'll finish with this verse from Isaiah, and then I'll pray, because it's one of my favorites. We're taught in Isaiah that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and that he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. You're big, you're good, and you're gracious, and we are broken. We need you so much, and we have no right, we have no right to pound our desk and shake our fist and demand answers from you. We have no right to do that, and yet in your goodness, from time to time, you allow it, and you hug us, and you weep with us. I lift up the people today who might have recently prayed prayers like these, and I just ask that you would strengthen them, that they would feel your presence, they would feel your goodness, they would feel your love, they would be strengthened by you. Father, buoy us and tether us to you. God, we also thank you that Jesus did drink of that cup, that he did die for us, that he did conquer death and sin and hell for us so that we don't have to. And God, we look forward to a day when we understand things just a little bit better. But in the meantime, may your presence and your love be ever enough. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This last week on Wednesday, it was Lily's spring break. Lily's my seven-year-old daughter. She's going to play prominently in the following story. It's her spring break, and so Jen said, can you take the day and come with us to the zoo? Which I have a love-hate relationship with the zoo. I love the fact that my kids get to see animals. John, my two-year-old son, he'll be two in a couple of weeks, he loves animals. He says all the animal names. He's probably in that room right there saying animal things right now. Like, he just loves animals. So for him to be able to see animals for the first time, super cool. So I love that part. What I don't love about the zoo is literally everything else about the zoo. It is a cacophony of annoyances, particularly for me. I'm a man that probably has a disproportionate amount of pet peeves. I'm not saying I have a right to them. I just have them. I don't really know what to do with them. The chief among those are people who are walking slowly, just anywhere, just slow walkers. What do you, like saunterers in general, what are you doing? And then like if you're injured or something, I get it, okay? I got patience for that. But if you're just slow, I don't, like, move it along. And then another, like, huge one for me is when somebody seems to have no awareness whatsoever that there's anybody else around them that might need to use the same space that they're using. You know, like the people who just walk around like this, and they'll just stop. Like, it's crowded, okay? It's a beautiful day. It's spring break. I've never seen this many people at the zoo. It's so crowded. We're shoulder to shoulder, and some people are just going, oh, I'm sorry. Like, what do you mean you're sorry? Like, there's every, everybody's walking. You didn't, you thought that you were the one who was just alone and there was no one behind you. So anyways, I was just kind of on edge all day, right? And you go, and then the other thing, just so I can get this off my chest, I've got, I've got my two-year-old son. We got to, first of all, he doesn't want to be in the stroller. So when you put him in the stroller, you better be moving, baby, because he's going to start wiggling out of that thing. And I'm not going to buckle and unbuckle him every time. I can't be opening and shutting all those buckles. So then we're going and we get to the thing and you got to pick him up. My back's been hurting me. If you go to the zoo, it's like an eight mile hike. It's forever. It's the world's biggest land zoo. Big deal. Put the animals closer to me so I don't have to walk so far. I don't care about their habitat. Make them depressed and lifeless. Just I want to see them. So I got to pick up John, and I'm walking over to the display to look. And the thing that galled me is there's adults there. They're grownups, okay? And they're the ones standing in the front looking at the animals. Like, buddy, you're 35. Like, you've been to a zoo before. Can you just move out of the way for the kids? Like, I have no problems with kids standing and gawking, but, I mean, grownups, like, let's go. You got like a 10-second window. There's the giraffe. All right, move on. So anyways, I'm just going through this whole day. We get to the middle, we get to the junction, it's time to eat. I don't have a lot to say about what was there, except the wait was extraordinary. And we got two cheeseburger meals and a kid's meal and two bottles of water, and we paid $57 for it. And it was, this is not an understatement, atrocious. It was terrible. It was frozen brick burger that some guy tossed on the flat iron thing until it was warm enough to put between buns. Cheese wasn't melted. I have never, I have never had a greater discrepancy between the amount of money I paid and the quality I received. Never in my whole life. That's lunch at the zoo that day. Then we still got North America to go. There's Africa. You walk through Africa. I'm just halfway through the day. And I'm trying to hold it together. Jen's like, you know, it's kind of obvious when you get a little bit frustrated. And I'm like, what did I do? I was trying to be nice. Like, cause I'm, I'm trying to not ruin family day, you know, cause I can get over the edge and now everyone's having a bad time. So I'm just trying to mind my P's and Q's and white knuckle it to happiness. And she's like, well, it's, I said, well, how can you tell that I'm frustrated? And she, and this is what she said. I thought it was hilarious. She goes, it's just the way you hold your mouth. What do you want me to do about that? I'll ask for pictures. I don't know. So we go through North America. We start to go through North America. And Lily's seven. We've been hiking for four days. So she starts to just start in with the seven-year-old whining, just normal whining stuff. I'm tired. I'm hungry. I need a snack. And in my head, I'm like, John's two. He's entitled to whining. I can't handle you whining too. So just suck it up, kid. Like, let's go. So that's starting to fray a little bit. And we get done. We're all exhausted. We get in the car. We go home. It's nice and peaceful and quiet. And you're resting because that's a whole thing. So everybody's exhausted. We get home. We rest for a little bit, eat a little bit of dinner. Lily's got soccer practice. So we go to soccer practice. She does great. We're walking back to the car, and we play at the Y. I don't know if you've been over to the Y off of Strickland. There's the lower fields that are a good half mile away from the car. The parking situation there is miserable. So you've got to walk up. I'm just a grumpy old man today. I don't know why I said today. You got to walk up to the car. It's a long walk to the car. So we're walking up to the car and Lily starts in with the whining again. My feet hurt. Daddy, can I have a shoulder ride? No, baby, you can't. Because earlier in the day, I gave John a shoulder ride. That's all she wanted all day is a shoulder ride. I'm like, you weigh 70 pounds and my back hurts. Like not today. I'm sorry. You should have had a younger dad. So I'm like, no, I can't do it. She keeps whining. My feet hurt. I'm like, well, there's nothing we can do about it. We got to get to the car. Daddy, I don't want to walk anymore. And finally I was like, sweetheart, you got to stop with the whining. I don't want to hear any more whining. Not another, not another word of whining, or I'm going to have to start taking away screen time tomorrow. Stop it. So then we're walking, and she's not saying a word of whining, but it's, I'm like, oh my gosh, I just want this day to end. She's exhausted. I'm exhausted. We get to the car, and she was supposed to make her water bottle before she left. Jen told her to do that. She forgot. I noticed that she forgot. I made her water bottle. I threw it in there. Then we get to the car, and she starts complaining that I didn't give her enough water. And I'm like, you wouldn't have any water if I didn't notice it and make you some. So literally any water that I gave you was enough water. And then we start this back and forth. She's tired. I know she's tired. She's fatigued from a very long day. I know she is. Her emotions are spilling out on me. I know they are. But eventually she said that one more thing before we pulled out of the parking lot. And I slammed my hand down on the center console. She immediately starts crying. And in my head, because I'm a jerk, I think, good. And I turned around. I turned around and I let her have it. You have been like this and this and this and this all day and I'm done with it. I'm done. Stop it. Do you hear me? And she looked at me and she started to say something back. I said, stop. She's crying. I drive home. It wasn't good. I'm telling you that story not because I'm proud of it. Far from it. I actually think that the rapidity with which I get annoyed is probably my least favorite thing about myself. I do wish I had a lot more patience. I do wish I didn't get annoyed at people just enjoying the zoo, but I do. And I do wish that I wouldn't blow up at my daughter because she doesn't deserve that. And I don't want her to grow up in a home where that's part of the climate and just a regular thing. So, you know, we went back and made that right. But I share that with you because I think that we've all had those moments. I think that we've all lashed out at people in ways that we regret. Most of us in this room are parents. I'm pretty sure that you all have your stories too. If you don't, please buy me lunch and tell me your secrets. Unless it's medication. I don't want to go that route. I think we all have those times when we get overwhelmed and we're feeling so many different emotions that we don't know what to do. And so we blow up or we have a blowout and we lash out and we slam our hand on the center console and we yell at a seven-year-old until they cry to make us feel better about the situation. I think if we're not parents and we haven't blown up in that way, we're all kids. We all have parents. Maybe we've blown up at them. Maybe we've lashed out at friends, co-workers, up the chain or down the chain. I think we all have those moments that we're not proud of when our emotions get too big and we act in ways that we wish we could change. And so that's what this series is about, big emotions. What do we do when we feel overwhelmed, when we are going to have a blow up or a blow out? And we'll talk about what does God want from us in these moments. We'll talk about what did we do to bring this on ourselves. We'll talk about how it affects other people. We'll talk about what do we do when somebody else lashes out and blows up on us. But because we all have those moments, we thought it would be worth it to take six or seven weeks here in the spring and just kind of ask the question, what are we supposed to do with big emotions and those moments that we feel overwhelmed or the people around us are acting out because they're overwhelmed? So I hope that that's helpful for you. And I will also confess the way that I write sermons is I kind of write half of it during the week. And then on Sunday morning, I come in really early and I make myself say it out loud in the hallway over there and kind of piece together really what I want it to be. And after I finished it this morning, I drove home and I said, man, my sermon has really convicted me and I feel terrible. And I'm really going to work on this. So if you guys don't like this, I do. This has been really helpful for me. But I hope that it's useful for you too. We're going to start the series by looking at the story of Peter cutting off the ear of a guard in the garden when Jesus was arrested. Because I think there's some foundational things in this story that are going to resound and help us for the rest of the series as we move through kind of this question of what do we do with big emotions. For those of you who are not familiar with the story, it's in all four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I think the most helpful detailed version is in John chapter 18. And so if you have a Bible, you can turn there. We're going to be in there a little bit looking at the story. But what's going on is Jesus has just gotten done praying in the garden of Gethsemane. It's after the last supper. Then he goes to the garden to pray. Then he gets the disciples. He says, all right, it's time to go. And they're walking back to the house where they were staying. And the guards from the high priest come to arrest Jesus. And in John's account, there's this amazing scene where I don't know how many guards there were. I've always assumed dozens, but I really don't know. They came to Jesus, and in other tellings of it, you see this is when Judas betrays him with a kiss. And then the guards say, are you Jesus? And he says, yes, I'm Jesus. Except he doesn't say, yes, I'm Jesus. They say, are you Jesus? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, this is amazing. When he says that, everybody who came to arrest him stepped back and fell down to the ground. Do you understand that? I don't know how that happened. I don't know if they were in like really tight formation and the first guy stepped back and it was some sort of domino situation where they just all fell, but I don't think so. I think when Jesus utters those words, I am, that they were an echo of Exodus 3 and 4, Moses at the burning bush, when he asked the burning bush, when he asked God, what's your name? And God says, you can't hold me to a name. I'm bigger than names. I'm not going to let you reduce me to that. I am. So God is the great I am. It's the great unutterable word. And Jesus says that, I am he. And they all step backwards and fall down to the ground. At which point, if I'm one of the people who's sent to arrest Jesus, I'm going to get up and dust myself off and say, there's been a misunderstanding. Mr. Jesus, very sorry about this. I'm going to go back to Caiaphas' house. But when that happens and they go to arrest him, this is what Peter does. Peter has a blowout. Peter lashes out. Peter really has had an emotional day. Peter really has had an emotional week. Five days before this happens, they're riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And the disciples up to this point in Jesus's life still believe that Jesus came to establish a kingdom, but it's a physical earthly kingdom. Their brains, their minds can't wrap around what an eternal kingdom would be with a heavenly king. So they think it's going to be an earthly kingdom. And they really think that Jesus is going to go to Jerusalem, that he's going to overthrow King Herod, that he's going to overthrow Roman rule, that he's going to sit on the throne of David, rise Israel to national prominence, and that they're going to rule the world with him. That's what they think. And so when they're entering into Jerusalem, Peter and James and John are arguing who gets to be the secretary of defense and who gets to be the vice president and who has to be the secretary of the interior. Like that's what they're arguing about. They think they're going to be in these positions of political prominence, right hand to the king. And this whole week has started to move really fast. The whole week has been emotionally charged. The whole week has been expectant. And so then they get to Friday and they have the last supper. They celebrate Passover together. And Jesus says that Judas is going to betray him. And Judas leaves, which is weird. And all the disciples are trying to figure this out. And then he does this weird thing where he takes bread and he breaks it. And he says, this is my body that's broken for you. And they don't know what that means. And then he takes the wine and he pours it. And he says, this is the blood that spilled out for you. And they don't know what that means. Jesus has told them, I'm going to die. And on the third day, I'm going to raise again. And they're going, what does that mean? They have not figured it out yet. He's going to be the king. Then after this weird last supper where Jesus does the weird bread thing, he says, come and pray with me. They go to Gethsemane and they're praying. Jesus is praying. He's praying ardently. He's praying so ardently that sweat is kind of coming out of his pores. And we're going to talk about that in another one of the sermons in this series. And he's trying to get the disciples to stay awake, but it's late at night and they had wine with dinner, so they're sleepy. So they keep falling asleep, but Peter can tell something's up. And then Jesus gets them. They walk back to the house and on the way back to the house, here come the high priest guards to arrest his Jesus. And he freaks out. This is not, what's happening is not what's supposed to happen. This is not the way this is supposed to go. So what does he do? He lashes out, he grabs his sword, and he cuts off Malchus's ear. Now, here's what's important about that. Peter wasn't aiming for the ear. He's not like, I'm going to teach this dude a lesson. Clearly, he was going for the kill shot. Clearly, he was going for the head,chus moved or Peter was bad and it just got his ear. And in the other accounts, we see Jesus stoop down, pick up the ear, reattach it to the head and tell Peter to chill out. Peter lashed out. Peter slapped his hand on the center console and started yelling at people because he wanted to control things. And what I've always wondered about this story is that from when I was a real little kid and I encountered this story for the first time, I have always wondered this. How did Peter think his outburst was going to go? How did he think that was going to go down? What's your plan after that, Peter? Kill the first guy and then heroically sword fight your way out of danger with Jesus in tow? You and James and John, you're going to take down the whole guard of Caiaphas? Those guys are soldiers. They have armor. You're wearing a sheet and you have a sword on your hip and you're a fisherman. This is, what's the plan, buddy? Where do we go from here? It's honestly, and I'll meet him one day, and I don't think I'll apologize for this because I think he would agree. It was stupid. It's just dumb. What's your plan, buddy? And as I reflected on that more, what occurred to me is that in those moments when we feel overwhelmed and we lose our composure, we're admitting something. Losing your composure often admits your intimacy or your impotence. Losing your composure often admits our impotence. Not always. We're going to see an instance with Jesus losing his composure, and it certainly was not impotent. But most of the time in life, if you think about it, when you lose your composure, when you let it go, when you have a blowout or a blowup, really you're just confessing your own impotence and powerlessness to do anything that matters in the situation. What was Peter doing? Something impulsive. It was the only thing he could think of to do. It was completely useless, completely unhelpful, and he did it. And honestly, he made it worse. And Jesus had to cool things down. And when you think about when you blow out or blow up, when you yell at somebody, when you lash out, when you lash out at a colleague, or when you talk poorly behind someone's back, and you lash out at them unreasonably, or you lash out at your kids, or whatever it is, when you do that, when you blow up, when you lose your composure, aren't we often just confessing our impotence? Isn't that what I was doing in the car with Lily? What was going on in her is a combination of fatigue and being a seven-year-old and a heart that needs to develop gratitude and somebody that needs to understand, yeah, I made that water bottle for you so the correct attitude is to just be grateful for anything that's in there. But yelling at her until she cries is not going to teach her the heart lessons that she needs to learn to not do that again. It's completely impotent. It's helpless. It's frankly stupid and unuseful. And now in the same way that Jesus had to clean up Peter's mess by grabbing the ear and putting it back on Malchus's head, so does Jesus have to reach into the heart of my daughter and heal the wound that I put there because I lashed out in impotence. Our prayer as parents, I think, is that there's just not scar tissue because we ask Jesus to do that too many times. But as I think through the times in my life when I've lashed out, it tends to be because I just didn't know what else to do. And I felt things so much that they had to escape. Sometimes this lashing out and this impotence is more easily seen because sometimes it looks like tears. Sometimes we're overwhelmed and we retreat into the bathroom or we retreat to our room or we retreat to the house we retreat to the car, and then we just let it go. And isn't that, those tears, that sort of breaking down, isn't that an admission of our powerlessness as well? So in the story of the arrest in the garden, Peter gives us a great example of what not to do when we are overwhelmed. But it also begs the question, and this is really the guiding question for the series, what should we do when we feel overwhelmed? What's the right thing to do? How should Peter have handled that situation? How should I have handled my frustration on Wednesday? Well, if Peter, this is pretty simple stuff, if Peter is the bad example in the story, then Jesus must be the good example. So we look to Jesus, and we see how he handled the situation. A couple verses that throw, that shed some light on Jesus's handling of it. I'm going to look at verse 8 in chapter 18. Jesus answered very casually. I just love how matter-of-fact he is. I told you that I am he. I told you that I'm the guy that you want. So if you seek me, let these men go. Like, I'm the one you want. It's not them. I'll go with you. And then down in verse 11, just a reminder of what we read earlier, Jesus said to Peter, put your sword into its sheath. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me? And then we see, I think, an even more useful response in Matthew chapter 26. Then Jesus said to him, put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my father and he will at once send more than 12 legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled that it must be so? So Jesus is calm, he is collected, he is wise, he is gracious, he is peaceful, he is patient. And I would point out, from a very human perspective, Jesus is dealing with all of Peter's emotions tenfold, probably a hundredfold. When they're going into Jerusalem and he's being welcomed as a conquering king and his disciples, those chuckleheads are behind him arguing about stuff that they don't know what it means. He's just walked through three years of ministry. He knows what's coming. He knows what's five days away. He knows where the nails are going to go. He knows where that crown of thorns is going to rest. He knows where the cross is going to hang. Jesus knows that. He knows the grave is waiting for him. He knows that the Romans have scientifically studied the most painful way to kill somebody and that that's going to happen to him. He knows what lays ahead, the cup that he has to drink. And we see his knowledge of that in his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. He knows Judas is going to betray him. He knows the disciples do not understand. He's frustrated with the disciples because they can't stay awake. Can you imagine being Jesus? I need one thing from you. Can you please pray for me? After three years, I'm about to die for you and go to the grave for you, and you can't stay awake to pray for me? Can you imagine how frustrated he would be? And if anybody had the right to lash out at anyone for being ungrateful, it would be Jesus. And yet, when they came to arrest him, and when Peter does dumb stuff, he's quiet, and he's gracious, and he's peaceful, and he's kind. What Peter should have done in that situation, feeling overwhelmed, is look to the face of Jesus. If Jesus is peaceful, I can be peaceful. If Jesus isn't freaking out, I don't need to freak out. When we feel overwhelmed, we should look to Jesus. That's what I take away from this story. If Peter would have simply, as the guards approached, if he would have simply, like we sang earlier, turned his eyes to Jesus and looked at his face and see that he was nonplussed, that he was not worried, then he could have responded accordingly. But he didn't. He didn't look at Jesus. He looked at everything else and he acted impulsively and he lashed out. If he would have looked to Jesus, he could have responded well in the moment. If I, in my car, had had the wherewithal in my frustration to look to Jesus instead of at my daughter or at myself or inwardly at my own frustration and decided it's time to vent them. If I would have had the wherewithal to go to Jesus in prayer, I said, Jesus, I'm really frustrated. What should I do here? Please help me. Please show me what to do. Jesus, I'm frustrated. Please navigate my response for me. I'm fairly certain that if I had done that, that the nudge I would have felt from the Holy Spirit would not have been, you should really turn around and let her have it. She's got it coming. The nudge from Jesus would have been, calm down. She's wrong. She's also seven. You're an adult. Get her to bed. Talk to her tomorrow when you're both clear and you're not angry. That's what Jesus would have reminded me to do. But I didn't give him a chance. I just cut off that ear anyways. And then he had to clean up my mess. When we feel overwhelmed, overwhelmed with sadness, overwhelmed with grief, overwhelmed with anger, overwhelmed with frustration, overwhelmed with whatever it is that's piling on us and it's just too much, before we blow out and before we blow up, if we can teach ourselves to simply turn our eyes to Jesus and look to him, then in those moments when we feel overwhelmed, we will handle them in ways that we do not regret later. We will cut off far less ears. Here's the other thing about Jesus' response in that moment. I think that the reason, the main reason that Jesus was so calm and placid in this moment is because he knew the plan. Look at his responses. What does he talk about? Peter, what are you trying to do? I have to do this. Stop it. I've got to go. This is part of the plan. Would you have me not obey my father? He says, do you not think I could do something different? Do you not think I could bring down 12 legions of angels right now and handle these guys? Like it wouldn't be a problem. I just knocked them down with my words, Peter. I'm not going anywhere I don't want to go. But Jesus knew there was a plan. He knew the prophecies. He knew that he needed to fulfill them. He's known this plan his whole life. And so he knew that even though everything around me seems chaotic, you guys are just actors. This is all part of the plan. I have to go. And it's what allows him, I think, to fulfill the prophecy that he was going to be like a sheep led to the slaughter. Peter should have looked at Jesus and trusted that even though he didn't know what was going on, seems like he's got a plan. Seems like he knows what's happening. And it seems like I should just trust that. So I would say that when we feel overwhelmed, we should know that Jesus has a plan. And even if I can't see the details of his plan, I can trust it because I can trust him. Jesus has a plan for my Lily. He sees the young woman that she's going to become one day. He's asked me to steward her into that. It's his plan, not my plan. And those of us who are parents would do well to remind ourselves that Jesus loves our children way more than we do, even though we can't really fathom that. And that he has a plan for them. And even when we can't see the details of the plan, we can trust the plan because we can trust him. So we turn our eyes to him and we place our faith in that. I actually love that there's a baby making noise right now. Because it's... I just met her this morning. I'm sorry. Everyone's going to look at you now. I'm very sorry. She's never going to come back. Shannon, I apologize. She's never going to bring any more friends. I get it. I know. I know. This is bad. You don't have a clue who that kid's going to be or where he's going to go. But Jesus sees that whole life. And we can take solace in that. We can take comfort in that. We can't see past our own noses. Jesus sees all of time. So when we feel overwhelmed and it feels like there's not a plan and we don't know what to do and we want to just blow up or we want to just give up or we want to just bow out, we look to Jesus. We trust him. We trust his plan. And we take faith in that. And if we'll do that, if we'll remember when we feel overwhelmed that we can look to Jesus because we can trust him, I think that we can be people that cut off a lot less ears. We can be people that require less healing for those around us. We can be people who are more like Jesus, who as we look to him, we are kind and we are gracious and we are patient and we are peaceful. And that's the kind of person I want to be. That's the kind of dad and husband and pastor and friend I want to be. And I have a feeling that that's the kind of person you want to be too. So let's pray that we would more habitually turn our eyes to Christ and be filled with his wisdom and grace and not give ourselves over to being overwhelmed. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for who you are. We thank you for sending your son. We thank you that your son died a death that he did not want to die so that we might be with you. Father, we confess we are impatient. We are at times ill-tempered. At times we cut off ears around us because we don't know what else to do. And Lord, we pray that you would bring healing when we lash out. And we pray that you would bring peace to our hearts when we feel like doing that. For my brothers and sisters who can be like me and at times just grow in frustration, would you remind us in those moments to turn to you? That we might be peaceful and that we might be reflections of your wisdom and grace and sovereignty. God, for my brothers and sisters who feel overwhelmed and who do blow up or blow out, but maybe it doesn't look like anger, maybe it looks like frustration, or maybe it looks like giving up, or maybe it looks like just being overwhelmed and sad and grieving. Would you be with them too and remind them to turn their eyes towards you? That they might be comforted. That even though they can't see the plan, they can see the author of it. And God, would you help us to be people of peace? For those of us that need it, would you just help us cut off a few fewer ears this week? In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody, particularly the UNC fans this morning. If you don't know this about me, I'm wearing neutral colors, but that's really what we're wearing today. This is just to keep you guys from getting mad at me. I would like to personally thank Alan Hill, Kyle's future father-in-law, for inviting me to their UNC tailgate yesterday, where I was able to bring what is apparently my son, who is a good luck charm, and we won, which was great. And you'll have to forgive my exuberance. Georgia Tech doesn't get a lot to cheer for. This is essentially my national championship, okay? This is the one time in a calendar year I've been able to be proud to be a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket. As a matter of fact, I think the last time was when we beat UNC last year in Atlanta. So I'm high on the hog right now. All right, thank you for indulging me that. I'm sorry, I'll settle down. But we are in the fifth part of our series called Powerful Prayers, where we're looking at prayers that we find in Scripture and just examining them, seeing what we can learn from them, from the heart that's revealed in them. And I thought that we would be remiss if we didn't ask the question for ourselves as we look at powerful prayers, how can we become more powerful prayers? How can we become more powerful and more consistent in our prayers, right? How can we be people of prayer? I know that for many of us, you share my experience. To be a Christian for a while is to hear things like, man, you should probably pray more. And instantly you go, yeah, I should. It's a thing that we know. So how do we go from knowing that we should pray more, that it should define us more, that we should be what's called people of prayer, people who are defined by a rich and vibrant prayer life? How do we go from knowing that to actually doing it, to actually experiencing it? How do we become more powerful prayers? And to answer this question, I think we can look at an example tucked away in an Old Testament story. We're going to be in the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah is tough to find. If you don't know where it is, just use your table of contents. But turn there with me if you want to. We're going to be in chapters 1 and 2. Now, Nehemiah is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I know that doesn't carry any weight with you guys because all the stories that I talk about are my favorite stories in the Bible. I get that. But I love the story of Nehemiah because it's such a great picture of how we are supposed to build God's church here as Grace Raleigh, but how God intends to build his church in Raleigh, how God intends to build his church in America, how God intends to build his church internationally. I think what we find in Nehemiah is examples and lessons for how God intends to build his church that have applications all over how we think of church. But I don't get to talk about that this morning. I just get to say it and hope that it sparks enough interest in you to go read it and figure it out for yourself. What I do get to focus on is the prayer life of Nehemiah. So I want to look at this instance, this little snapshot of his life at the beginning of his story. We encounter him when he is the cupbearer for King Artaxerxes. Now, Nehemiah is a Jewish man who was carried over after the Babylonians conquered Israel or Judea, and they carried the best and the brightest over to Babylon to be slaves. And clearly, Nehemiah was a sharp man. He was a trustworthy man because he made it up the ladder to where he is the cupbearer for the most powerful king in the world. This is the man, Artaxerxes, that called himself the king of kings. He was the king of Persia and Babylon and Egypt all at the same time. So we're going to call it the Babylonian empire, but it's really, it's even larger than that. And here Nehemiah finds himself as the cup bearer to King Artaxerxes. And one day Nehemiah gets word that his hometown Jerusalem has been just laid waste, that the walls are torn down, they're broken down, and the city has been destroyed. And this is a big deal in the ancient world for a city not to have walls, because when a city doesn't have walls, it has no defense. Anybody around it that wants to come in and take from the city whatever they want, just with enough swords can come in and take what they want. They have no defense. They lay vulnerable to the entire countryside, to the entire surrounding countries. This city is vulnerable to whatever they want to come and do to it. And so Nehemiah goes into this phase of fasting and mourning and sadness and prayer because he's distraught over his hometown, Jerusalem. And you've got to remember, too, it's not just finding out that your hometown has been ransacked. That hometown, I'm not going to get into it too much this morning, but that hometown represents promises from God that the Jewish people clung to all the way back to Abraham, all the way back to Genesis chapter 12. And so it's not just that the hometown lays in rubble, it's that he's feeling that his promises from God need to be restored. And so in his spirit, he's wrestling with all this and trying to figure out what to do. And so when he heard this news, this is Nehemiah's response. In chapter 1, O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keeps his commandment. And then in verse six, I just go on. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants. And so he goes on and on praying, but he essentially prays that Israel would be restored. God, hear my prayer. Hear the prayer of your servants in Israel. Restore Jerusalem to its former glory. Let the walls be rebuilt. And in the interim, you know that Nehemiah, it's implied all throughout the passage, is wondering, what can I do? How can I help? God, what would you have me do to fix this problem? I'm a thousand miles away, the cupbearer for a king. How could I possibly help repair the walls of Jerusalem? But I guess at some point or another, he gets an idea. And we see him admit to this idea in Nehemiah chapter 2, when he's in the throne room of Artaxerxes. And Artaxerxes notices that he's sad. And this is not a good thing because when you serve the ancient kings, you needed to be glad to be in their presence. You needed to be happy, okay? You had to fake it until you made it. You did not want to be bummed out and depressed and bring in your bad mood into their presence. But Artaxerxes cares about Nehemiah, and he notices that he's downtrodden. He notices that he's been bummed out the last little while, and so he asks him about it. And this is the interchange between the two of them in Nehemiah 2, verses 2 through 5. Yeah, why should not my face be sad when the city, the place of my father's graves lies in ruins and its gates have been destroyed by fire? Then the king said to me, what are you requesting? So I prayed to the God of heaven and I said to the king, if it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in your sight, then you send me to Judah, to the city of my father's graves, that I might rebuild it. So he's in the presence of the king. And he's clearly depressed. And the king says, Nehemiah, what's been going on, man? You're sad. You're sulking. You're not sick. So your heart is sick. What's going on? And he was afraid, but he admitted to it. The city of my fathers and my grandfathers has been torn to rubble. And then Artaxerxes says, what are you asking? What are you requesting? And then I love that phrase that he stopped, he paused. Nehemiah paused in the middle of what was going on and he offered a prayer to the God in heaven. And he asked for a blessing from God before he asked for the blessing from Artaxerxes. God, I'm about to ask this really bold thing. God, this request could potentially cost me some jail time or my life if he decides he's in a bad mood. So I need you to bless this for me real quick and just confirm for me that this is actually the idea that you placed in my mind before I submitted to the king. So he stops and he prays. He says, God, bless this. And then he turns to Artaxerxes and he tells him what he wants to do. And Artaxerxes is moved by Nehemiah, cares for his servant, and releases him to do that. Not only does he release him to do that, but he hands him a letter. It's a letter of free passage through each province between Babylon and Jerusalem. And it's a letter that once he gets to Jerusalem, that he can get all of the lumber and all of the stone that he needs to complete the wall and he can bill it to Artaxerxes himself. So it went pretty well for Nehemiah. But the reason I'm focusing on the story when we ask the question, how do we become more powerful prayers, is because Nehemiah models the importance of scheduled and spontaneous prayers. In Nehemiah, we find the model of a life of a person who is a person of prayer. He models both scheduled and spontaneous prayers. He models scheduled prayers. When he heard about the destruction of Jerusalem, he went into a time of mourning and fasting. He picked the time when he was gonna sit down and more likely kneel before the Father. And just as an aside, in your prayers, if you're able, I don't know if some of us are not, if you're able to kneel when you pray, it really changes your mindset as you pray. I would encourage you as a regular practice to be someone who kneels when you can. But Nehemiah was likely kneeling to pray. He set this time aside and he poured his heart out to God. He prayed everything that was on his heart. And so he models for us scheduled prayers. The greatest model for us of scheduled prayers in the Bible that I see is Daniel. Daniel set aside three times a day to pray. And we've preached about him before. But that's the first place where I would push you a little bit. In your own prayer life, whatever your regularity is, however much you pray, however often it is, if it's not very often at all or if it's very, very regularly, I would encourage you to follow the model and the example of Nehemiah and of Daniel and schedule your times to pray. And we all know this is true. You've heard this before. People have told you this. You've heard this in seminars. You hear this in corporate world. We hear it in church world. Someone, one of your friends has told it to you over lunch as if they've unearthed some sort of wisdom that's never occurred to you before when they tell you, if you don't schedule it, it won't happen, right? We know that. We know that to be true. This is America. We schedule things. We're very busy. We're the busiest. We have not, Europe has figured it out. We have not figured it out. We're a bunch of dum-dums. We just, I mean, every block of time that we have is scheduled out. And so what we know is if we don't schedule it, it's not going to happen. How many of you, don't raise your hand, but how many of you have left church or left a small group or read a book, something that emphasized prayer and thought to yourself, I'm gonna pray more. But you didn't pick a time to do it. You didn't commit to a set schedule of it. And then you didn't pray more. I think it's probably happened to all of us. It might sound unspiritual to schedule your prayer, but I'm telling you it's one of the most spiritual things you can do. I would recommend starting with prayer in the morning. I've said it since I started here. I'll say it until you guys get rid of me. But the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. You've got to schedule your time in prayer and you've got to figure out what works for you. There was a season of my life where I set my alarm a little bit early and I thought the first thing I'm going to do during the day to begin my day is pray. And my alarm would go off and I would swing my legs out of the bed and I would kneel on the bed and I would pray and then I would wake up and there would be drool in my beard. And I would think, this seems to be an unsuccessful practice. I need to schedule this a little bit better. So I learned for myself that I need to get up. I need to have coffee. I need to read God's word. And then let God's word push me into prayer. So that's been my pattern and habit. And then after I pray, just if this helps anybody, I have a book that I'm reading that's spiritually encouraging. So my practice and my devotionals is to wake up, get a cup of coffee, perk up, be somewhere with a little bit of light, but not too much light. I mean, come on, you don't want to ruin it. And then read God's word, let God's word carry me into prayer. And then I read whatever spiritually encouraging book I'm reading until a child makes a noise and ruins my peace, right? That's what I do. But we've got to have these times that we schedule. That used to be what I do. I do that on the weekends now as much as I can. But now what I do is I just get up and I get after it and I get Lily to school and I get into the office and I'm usually here first because Lily has to be at school earlier than everybody else has to get up. And that's when I have my time of prayer. But you need to pick a time for prayer that works for you. You need to schedule it. There was a season of my life where I set an alarm that went off every day at three o'clock and I would pause at three o'clock and I would pray. I'm not that spiritual anymore. I don't do that. I missed pray, but I do know that if you don't schedule it, it won't happen. So maybe the first baby step for you in being a person of prayer is to schedule a time of prayer. And I'll just tell you this too, practically as your pastor, if you're sitting there right now and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna do that. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna do a couple things, I'm gonna pray. Tomorrow when I have the space, when I park, I'm gonna get to the office five minutes early and I'm gonna pray. Whatever it is, however it is, you figure out how you can begin to be a person of prayer and you intend to pray tomorrow or later today. I'll just tell you, the first time you pray, you're gonna really mean it. You're gonna last about two and a half minutes and you're gonna be done and you'll be like, God, I'm sorry, I ran out of things to pray. And you're going to feel like a terrible Christian. That's because you are. I'm just messing around. You're going to feel like a terrible Christian, but you're not a terrible Christian. You just haven't developed the pattern and the habit of prayer. So just let two and a half minutes be two and a half minutes. And the next day, pray for three minutes. And the next day, pray for three minutes. Just pray. Just talk to God. Pour out what's on your heart to him. Schedule a time to prayer and then pray about whatever it is you're supposed to pray about. And I tell you, if you do that day after day, you'll start praying longer. If you do that day after day, you'll learn the art of listening prayer, of just sitting in stillness in the presence of God and trying to hear him and be encouraged by him and receive love from him. But you don't just start on day one praying these 45-minute prayers that are 15 minutes of silence and other stuff. So just take the baby step, start the prayers, and start to make your way to being a person of prayer. Now the other thing Nehemiah does is he models for us spontaneous prayers. Just these single shot prayers as he goes throughout his life. He's just going throughout his life. He's just going throughout his day. He doesn't stop in mid-conversation with King Artaxerxes and say, hang on King, and kneel down and pour out this elaborate prayer. No, he just says, God, bless me. Like, let's see what he says. So I prayed to the God of heaven. That's it. So God, bless this conversation as I'm about to have this conversation. Bless the thing I'm about to do. He just stops, he pauses, gives a momentary mental, God, I need you, and then he steps into what he needs to step into. And this is the pattern of prayer that we need to follow. These spontaneous prayers as we go into and out of different situations to just stop and say, God, I'm inviting you into this situation. God, I'm not enough for this situation. God, I need you in this situation. God, I need you in this conversation. I need you to calm me down right now because I'm about to lose my mind. Whatever it is, he models for us this time of scheduled prayer and this time of spontaneous prayer. And as I read the story, I began to wonder about us. And really, I began to wonder about me. Because I'll confess to you, I don't pray enough spontaneous prayers. I don't stop enough times throughout my day and go, God, just be with me as I go into this lunch meeting. I mean, I was thinking about it, and I don't pray before staff meetings. We have a staff meeting every Tuesday. And this last staff meeting, we got in there and we went to plan the semester. To plan next semester, the series from January all the way to Mother's Day. And we prayed as a group in there. And I prayed earlier in the day. But going into that meeting, I didn't stop and pray, God, just bless this time, just be with me as I lead us through this. What's the matter with me? Why doesn't that trigger my prayers? Why aren't we triggered to prayer more? And it just made me wonder what actually triggers our prayers. What is it in your life that makes you stop and go, yeah, I'm gonna pray real quick? Whether we, like, one of the things that triggers my prayer sometimes is when I go inside my kid's bedroom and I look at my sleeping children. If you're a parent and that doesn't trigger the occasional prayer, you're broken on the inside. It's even worse than not liking dogs. You're totally dead on the inside. And I'll go in and I'll see Lily lying there and I'll kind of just be overwhelmed and I'll kneel and I'll pray. And sometimes things will happen, I'll get nervous, I'll get worried and I'll stop and I'll pray. But the things that trigger me in my life, there's very few of them. There's not enough. And it made me realize that I go through my life feeling pretty adequate to the things that God would ask me to do. And I think that when we don't pray a lot of spontaneous prayers, God be with me here, that's a pretty good sign that we're too prideful. We think too highly of ourselves. Or we think too little of God, one or the other. But I wonder what kinds of things trigger you to prayer. Because the reality is, the model that we see in Nehemiah, and the model that we see throughout the powerful prayers in Scripture, is that powerful prayers pray about everything all the time. Powerful prayers pray about everything all the time. People who are powerful in their prayer life, people who are people of prayer, are in constant prayer. It's not just the scheduled prayer where they wake up and they get on their knees and they pray, or the midday prayer, or the end of the day prayer. It's this constant communication with God. They pray about everything all the time. And that has to be true because it's the only explanation for Paul's little pithy throwaway instruction in 1 Thessalonians, I believe chapter 5, where he's wrapping up the book. He's writing a letter to the church in Thessalonica in the New Testament, and he's wrapping up the book. He's giving them five chapters worth of encouragement, and then he tells them, he gives them kind of a list of things like, hey, just to review, do these things. And one of the things that he just throws in there is if we're just supposed to receive it and do it all the time is he says, pray without ceasing. And whenever you read it, it's like, what are you, how man? Like I'm not a monk. I have things to do. I have a life. I have stuff I have to get accomplished. And even monks, they like make beer and honey and stuff. Like they got things. I don't know what happens in monasteries. Everybody has stuff to do. How do we pray without ceasing? It's got to be that we maintain this daily communication with God. I heard a story years ago that illustrates this point very well. And it's a totally made-up story. Somebody made it up. When they told us the story. They told us they made it up. This is not real. This is more of a parable. Okay. So there's a guy who is renowned in his church for the way that he prays. He is a person of prayer. He prays about everything all the time. He has this incredibly vibrant prayer life. And some other dudes in the church wanted to learn from this guy. They wanted to hear him pray. And so they got together and they figured that the best time to hear him pray is going to be his nighttime prayer. When he kneels beside his bed and he's praying before the end of the day and he's talking to God and he kind of downloads this whole day, this is going to be the best time to hear this guy's prayer. And so while that guy's out doing whatever he's doing, probably feeding the homeless or something, they go to his house, and they hide in his closet. Now this guy, this hypothetical non-existent person, is a single man without a wife, so it's not weird that they're in there, okay? They're not going to see anything they shouldn't see. So they're hiding in his closet, and dude comes in the bedroom, and he does his nighttime routine, and they're kind of sitting there waiting, and this is when he's going to kneel by his bed, right? So they're kind of waiting there, leaning in, and he doesn't kneel by his bed. He just gets into his bed, and they're like, oh, oh, he's going to go prostrate. He's going to go face down on the bed. This guy means it, but he doesn't do that. He just kind of gets in, and he rolls over on his side, and he reaches over, and he turns out the lamp, and he says, good night, Father. And he closes his eyes, and that's it. Because that man had been in prayer all day. That man woke up. He said, good morning, God. This is the day that you have made. Let me rejoice and be glad in it. It's yours. Let me be who you need me to be today. And then at one point or another, I'm sure that man had a time of scheduled prayer where he sat down and he prayed about all the things. And then as he went through his day, he kept God as an active participant in his day so that at the end of the day, when it was time to say goodnight, the only thing left to do was to say goodnight because he had been talking to God all day. This is the model of prayer that we are supposed to pursue. And I know that that might feel far off for some of us. I heard that story before and I've heard pray without ceasing and this attitude of prayer and I've sat you are, and I've thought, gosh, forget it. I barely can remember to pray every day. I don't pray for some of my meals. Like, I don't know if I can ever do that. And it might feel pretty impossible to be someone who wakes up talking to God, who goes throughout your day talking to God, and ends your day talking to God. But I don't love you if I don't put that in front of you as the standard. If I tell you that something short of that is actually what God wants for you, that praying without ceasing, that being people of prayer, that being people who have conversations with God throughout the day, every day, if I tell you that that's only for some Christians, that that's only for some churchgoers, that's only for some of God's children, then I'm lying to you and I don't love you. And so even though that goal may feel very far off, how dare me sell you short of what you should be and of what God wants you to be and of what he implores you to be through model after model and verse after verse in his word. We are to be people of prayer who exist in communication with God. And if you're not there yet and it feels very far off, that's okay. There's grace for that. But we cannot accept less than that. We must be people who pursue God in prayer. And there's so many reasons why, but I think one of the big ones is that when we pray, we confess. Do you know that every time you go to God in prayer, you are making an implicit confession with the simple act of praying. When I see Lily sleeping in her bedroom and I'm overwhelmed and I stop and I pray, I'm confessing in that prayer. God, I'm not big enough for this. God, I'm not adequate to raise this girl without scars that are going to send her into counseling later. I don't have the character to do it, God. I don't have the wisdom to do it, God. God, I can't see around corners, but you can, so I'm just asking you to be with her. God, I know that you created her as your workmanship to walk in those good works, but I don't know what those good works are, God, but you do. So would you please help me raise her in such a way that moves her towards what you intended her to be because I know that I'm inadequate for this. When we pray for our children, we confess that we are inadequate to make them who God wants them to be. And so we need God's help. When we go into a meeting, and before that meeting, maybe it's a difficult conversation. Maybe you're having lunch with a friend and they're going to ask you about a thing, or you have to ask them about a thing, and it's not going to be easy. As we go into that and we say, God, just please be with me as I go to meet with so-and-so. We confess. We confess that we don't have the wisdom for that conversation and that God does. We confess that God loves that person more than we do. We confess that God is going to be present there and that his spirit is needed to give me the words I need to say and to soften the ears and the heart of the person who has to hear them. We confess that God is needed there. Listen, when we're going into a business meeting in sterile, corporate, sometimes vulgar corporate America, when we go into those meetings, and before we go into those meetings, we pray. And we say, God, help me remember that I'm your agent here. Help me remember that they're your children too, that I'm about to meet with your sons and daughters, and that there's something bigger going on than just the decisions that we make or the deal that we close or the pitch that we agree upon. Help me remember, God, that there is something divine happening in that room when I get in there and that I need to be sensitive to it. Help me be sensitive to what everybody else in the room is experiencing. When we pray before we walk into a business meeting, we confess that there's something bigger than business happening in that room. So we stop and we pray. When I pray before a staff meeting, I confess that there's something more important than the day-to-day decisions that are going on in that room. I stop and I pray and I confess. When we schedule time and we pray about everything, it's a confession that we are inadequate for all of those things. And these confessions are important to make those confessions through prayer. It humbles us. It attunes us. It focuses us when we make these confessions. Every Sunday I pray before I come up. And one of the things that I pray is, God, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to do this. And it confesses, right? It's a helpful thing for me to thank God for the opportunity to do it, to ask that my words would be a reflection of his words and would be helpful for his people. It's helpful for me to do that because it reminds me. God made me for this good work. He made me to teach and run my mouth. I didn't get good at it. I don't know if you think I'm good at it now. I don't really, I don't care if you do. But God gave me a gift to teach. But every time I thank him for the opportunity to express that gift, I acknowledge that it is a gift. I acknowledge and confess. He can take it from me whenever he wants. He can give someone else this stage whenever he wants. It is only by his grace and by his protection that I'm up here this week. And I hope Lord will and I'll be here next week. That's all up to God. And so when I confess that and I acknowledge it and then I get done and someone says, oh, that was good. Oh, that was helpful. I get to celebrate with them that God has worked in their life and that has been helpful, not that I did good because I've already confessed to God that this is his. When we pray, we confess. And by making those regular confessions in our lives, we put ourselves in a posture of humility before God and before others. We see other people as God's children or people who need to be turned on to God's love. Not projects or things that are in the way or simple coworkers or simple friends, but we see God's children. When we pray, we confess our own inadequacies, our need and reliance for God's wisdom rather than our own. I said earlier, I think I'm not triggered to pray enough because I think too highly of myself. I think that I'm too capable for things. I'd be willing to bet we all think that. I want us to be a church of powerful prayers. I want us to follow the model of Nehemiah, to have times that we schedule to pray, And maybe that can be your step of obedience this morning, is to schedule times of prayer. If you're a person who already does that, then maybe your step of obedience can be, God, help me open my eyes to the times that I need to pray. Help me see the times when I'm not doing it. Maybe we can create more triggers. Every time I'm going to make a phone call, every time I'm going to be in a meeting, every time I have a presentation, every time this happens, I will pray. Every time I drive home, I need to pray, God, give me grace for my children from 5.30 p.m. until 7 p.m. Let me be the dad that I need to be to them and not the one I feel like being. We need to set up things in our life where we need that remind us to pray. And I think that we need to acknowledge as we pray that we confess and think through what are the things that we are confessing with this prayer and let that confession humble us before God and for others. With that being said, let's pray together. Father, we love you. We trust you. We're grateful for you. We are thankful that even when we don't know what to pray, that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, and that even as an added help, your son sits at your right hand interceding for us on behalf of our prayers. God, make us a church filled with people of prayer. And in those prayers, may we confess our insufficiency in light of your all-sufficiency, your greater love for the objects of our prayers that we love so much. May we confess, Father, you as a source of all our wisdom, of all our peace, of all our strength. And may our bowed heads and bent knees acknowledge your sovereignty over this world and your lordship over us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Man, that was good. I tell you what, I tell you what, I love you guys. I love this place. I love this church. It is so special. God's doing something here, y'all. He's doing something in me. He's doing something in y'all. And I fully, fully believe that the brightest days of grace are ahead, that he has a lot for us to do in us and through us. And I'm excited about those. This morning, we are starting a new series. And I got to say this too. I expected for this morning to be terrible. Can I just tell you that? I expected it to be dead in here, for there to be sporadic attendance, and for it to just be a lame Sunday. I'm coming back from South Africa. I don't know what day it is. I feel like eating lunch right now. I have no clue what's going on around me or where I am. We have a team coming back from Mexico that represents a lot of our core folks. Did you guys just clap for yourself? Is that what just happened? Good job, everyone. Yes, we are the best. We got students coming back from Metta. They're all ready to fall asleep. Yeah, this is great. And then it's the middle of October, and if you don't know anything about Grace in October, it's like July 2.0. Everybody goes to the mountains to see leaves, I guess. I don't know. They don't come here to see me, and so it's just kind of sparse here. And I thought this Sunday is going to be dead. And then I'm sitting here worshiping and I'm like, holy cow, God, this is amazing. That was some of the best, most energetic, enthusiastic, sincere worship I've heard come from us. And I'm just fired up, especially about what I get to share with you this morning as we start our new series called Great Prayers. So what we're going to do for six weeks is just open the Bible and look at some of the more impactful prayers that we see in Scripture. And hopefully by looking at these great prayers, we can become greater prayers, but we're not going to talk about how to pray. We're not going to talk about having devotions and that prayer time needs to be a part of our life. And here's why. We're simply going to look at some of the most impactful prayers and meaningful prayers in scripture and kind of ask the question, what can we learn about them for our prayers? And so the one that we're kicking off with is very near and dear to my heart. It's very special to me. This is my prayer over grace. It's what Rachel Gentile just read. As she got up here to read, I leaned over to Jen, and I said, she's just the best. And Jen has tears in her eyes because she loves Rachel. And she's like, I know. Maybe I'm just jet lagged. I don't know. And I don't love Rachel that much. Maybe I'm just fatigued. You're not a big deal, Rachel. It's whatever. We're glad you're here. But this prayer, it's the one that I pray over grace. My office at home, I've got it sitting in the corner now. I need to get it framed and then hang it up. But I've got this prayer written out on a big piece of paper in calligraphy that we had a friend of ours do for us. When I come and pray over children who are born at grace, this is what I pray over them. When I pray for grace, it's what I pray for grace. When I pray for my children, it's what I pray for them. When I pray for you, it's what I pray for you. And so for me, it's perfect that this prayer sermon is coming right on the heels of traits of grace, where we're saying this is what makes grace, grace, and this is who we are. And so now right on the heels of that, we say this is to me the prayer of grace. And I think it's safe to call it the prayer of grace because the greatest church planner of all time, one of the most influential Christians who ever lived, Paul, the apostle, is the author of this prayer. And what I think is cool about it is that it's really mirrored throughout the rest of the Pauline epistles, the other letters that Paul wrote to the churches. So for those of you who may not know exactly what Paul did, you just know he's kind of a name of one of the saints that we talk about in church sometimes. Paul wrote a third of the New, or two-thirds of the New Testament, as far as the books that are attributed to him. Paul planted seven to ten churches right after Jesus died. He's responsible really for the early church movement throughout Asia Minor. And once he was converted on the road to Tarsus, Paul spent the rest of his life traveling around these cities on the Mediterranean coast, planning churches and encouraging the church leaders and the people within those churches, and then writing letters back to those churches as he was going on his four different missionary journeys. If you count the journey on the slave ship that shipwrecks at Malta and then eventually makes it to Rome, then there's four journeys. And so all through those journeys, he's visiting the churches and then he's writing letters back to the churches that he's already visited or that he longs to visit. And in most of those letters, he has a prayer. There'll be a preface and it'll say something like, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And that's what we see in Philippians. And sometimes it says, whenever I think of you, I pray for you and here's what I pray. But if you'll read Paul's letters carefully, what you'll see in these prayers when he prays for those churches is that they're remarkably similar and that he essentially prays for the same thing for all the churches. And so it's interesting to me to look, what does Paul pray for the churches? What's the singular thing that he wants? What does he always pray for no matter what else is going on? But before we look at and examine what he prays for, I thought I would ask you what you think you would pray for. Put yourself in the shoes of Paul. You spent your life planting these churches, investing in these people. You want to see them grow. You want to see them flourish. You want to see the communities evangelized and reached. You're hopeful for these churches. Not only that, a lot of these churches exist in cities and in empires that are under persecution and oppression, where it might even be illegal to be a Christian and to be in these churches and definitely to be leading these churches. So if you were to write a letter to these churches and you were to include in that letter a prayer, here's what I hope for you. Think with me sincerely, what would you pray? What would you hope for them? What would you want for them? Would you pray for safety? I would. Would you pray for relief from persecution? Would you pray in a day and age when a life expectancy isn't long? Would you pray for health? Certainly you would know some people there who were ailing. Would you pray for the success of the church? May you reach the community. May your love abound so that others come to know Jesus. Would you pray for the health of the church, for the wisdom of the leaders? If you were Paul, what would you pray for? And then think about it in terms of the people that you do pray for. Hopefully, hopefully you pray for the people in your life. If you have kids, hopefully you pray for them regularly, if not daily. If you don't, that's okay. Maybe you have an eight-year-old and you're thinking, gosh, I have not really prayed for that kid very often the first eight years of their life. Okay. Well, they don't have to go any more years without you praying for them daily. So start doing that now. Hopefully you pray for your spouse. Hopefully you pray for them daily. If you don't, that's okay. They've gone however long they've gone without you praying for them daily. But start now and don't make them live that life anymore. Pray for them daily. Hopefully you pray for the people that you love. Hopefully you lift them up to God and you ask for what's best for them. And when you do, what kinds of things do you pray for them? If we pray daily, maybe there's daily prayers, but I think a lot of us probably relegate prayers for others to when there's something urgent going on in their life, right? When there's a tricky relationship, when they've reached a difficult season, when they're awaiting news for a diagnosis or they've received it and now they're undergoing treatment, when there's a difficult situation at work, when there's a difficult situation with their family, with their kids, or with their marriage, then we lift them up. And so when we do, it's often a petition, right? God, save their marriage. God, help them here. God, help me here. Help them do that. God, I just pray for protection for my children. We've got one girl in the youth group who recently turned 16. I'm very certain that her parents are praying prayers of safety on the road and for the other drivers who are around this particular young lady. Those are the kinds of things we pray for, like circumstantial help in this situation. And listen, those are good prayers. They're good prayers. And we see those throughout the Bible. We see David say that God is his fortress and his strength and he prays for protection. We see Paul at different places pray for healing. We see Paul pray urgently and petition God that communities would be reached and that the gospel would be expounded. So we see all of those prayers in scripture. But when we look at Paul's prayer, to me, as we read it, and I'll read it again here in a second, to me it speaks just as loudly what he doesn't pray for as what he does. And I think that we have a lot to learn from that. So let's look again at the prayer that Paul prays, and let's ask together, what is it that he's asking on behalf of the church. Verse 14 in Ephesians chapter 3. So here's what Paul prays. the triune God, that you would be strengthened by the Spirit, that you would be indwelled by the Christ, and that you would be filled with the fullness of the Father, resulting in knowing God along with the saints. So when we say knowing God this morning, we mean the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So Paul's prayer is that we would know God. That's the prayer, that you would know God. Not for safety, not that everything would be okay, not that the people would be healed, not even for success and growth of the church, not for anything circumstantial, but a singular prayer for them is that they would know God, that they would know him deeply and so commune with the other saints that know him. And it is my prayer for you that everything in life would push us to this place where we know God more deeply. It was the apex value for Paul. Again, do we see in other places him praying for those things? For safety and for protection and for growth and for the expounding of the gospel? Yes, absolutely, he prays for those things. But it's not the first thing he prays. It's not the apex value. It's not what's most important to him. To help us think about this idea of like this apex value, this thing that's so valuable to me, I'm going to pursue it above and beyond anything else. I'm going to tell you a snippet of the story of me getting home from South Africa, which is a heck of a story. But our flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg kept getting delayed. And we had to catch a flight in Johannesburg from Johannesburg to Atlanta. And that margin of time between when we were going to land and when we needed to be at our gate kept shrinking. And I'm looking at my buddy that I'm traveling with, and it kind of dawns on both of us, because he's a more experienced international traveler than I am, and he didn't do me the favor of advising that I not check a bag. So this is really his fault, and he owes me money. But I didn't know not to check a bag, so I had a small bag, and I checked it, figuring it's an international flight. We're going to be there for six days. It seems like the time you check something. Anyways, I checked it. So we're looking at each other going, and he's like, dude, you ain't going to get that bag. You do not have time to go to baggage claim, go to check-in, go through security, and get to the gate. You've got to choose. Do you want what's in that bag, or do you want to get on that flight? Do you want that stuff, which, in that bag, or my Crocs, guys? I know. I know. Oh, man. That's great. If you're watching online and you don't know what just happened, I'm not going to explain it to you. You just got to be here. You just got to be here. So sad. But I know I want to get home. I want to see my family. I want to see my church. I don't want to spend more money on another ticket that's going to cost more than the content of my bag. So even though I really want that stuff and I like some of that stuff, it's just my apex value in this situation, my biggest value, my biggest priority is to go home. So even though it hurts a little bit, I'm going to make a choice to pursue the thing that I need the most. It was the apex value. My value is to go home, see my family, to be in my house. Paul's value for us is that our souls would go home, is that our souls would find rest. And if on occasion we have to leave a bag behind to get closer to the Father, so be it. If on occasion the sickness is what's acting in our life to actually conspire to bring us closer to God and drive us to a deeper knowledge of Him that we would be filled with his fullness, then so be it. Paul prays that our souls would go home, that our souls would find rest in God, that they would go there first and foremost, and that that's what we would want to sacrifice anything else for the sake of knowing God. Maybe this is why Paul writes in Philippians 3.8 that he considers everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. So if we want our prayers to mirror the ethic of Paul, then when we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, we pray that our souls would go home. We pray that our souls would find their rest in God, no matter what else we have to go through. So if we have a child who's wondering and they don't know about their faith and we see them making decisions that we might not make, the prayer to pray for that child is, God, would everything in their life that they're experiencing somehow conspire to push them closer to you so that they might go home? When someone is sick, sure, we pray for them to heal, but we layer that prayer at the end with kind of a tip of the cap to Jesus' prayer, to the Lord's prayer where it says, not my will, but your will be done. Yes, Father, I pray that they'd be healed. Yes, Father, I pray that they would be okay. Yes, Father, I pray that you would bring relief in this situation. But more than anything, I trust you and I trust your sovereignty. And I'm praying that you would use everything in that situation, use all the circumstances in their life. I pray that they would conspire so that they might simply know you more so that their souls could go home and find rest in you. That's what we pray. And when you ask me to pray for you, when someone's sick or someone's's marriage is struggling, or someone's child is wandering, or things are hard, I always pray the thing that you ask me to pray. But I always follow it with, but God, whatever you choose to do here, would the circumstances conspire to push them closer to you, that they might be filled with your fullness, that they would be indwelled by your Spirit, that they would be strengthened by your Spirit, indwelled by your Son, that they may be filled with the fullness of the wisdom of the Father, that they might know you. So I want to encourage you too, parents, as you pray for your children, pray this prayer over them. We can't possibly see all of the winding roads that may eventually lead them to a greater depth of faith. I can tell you in my own life, there's been two times in my life when I thought, I'm going to have to walk away from this. I can't believe this anymore. This is untenable to me. And one is way more recently than you think it was. But that when I walked through it, and when I got honest about the God that I was pursuing, and when I started pursuing answers to the questions that I had, God opened my eyes to a greater faith and a greater depth of desire for Him. And I feel like as I walk through those points of inflection in my life that God used them to bring me closer to Him so that I might desire Him more. We never know how God is weaving lives to bring us closer to Himself. So sometimes we don't pray away the circumstances that He has brought about to work in. Sometimes we simply trust Him. All the time we simply trust Him. And we say, God, not my will, but Your will be done. We say, Father, I just want to echo Ephesians 3 and pray that everything that happens in the life of this person would conspire to push them closer to you, that they might know you more, that they might know what it is to walk in your peace. That's our prayer for others. That's our prayer for Grace, that God, whatever you do here, if we languish in the small room with the pole in it for the next six years, who cares? God, with all the events that Grace conspire, that we might know you more and do greater things in your name so that other people might come to know you more through us. Who cares where we meet? If we move into a big fancy new building and we do it in a year and a half because God just decided that's what we need to do and hundreds more people come, who cares? God, with the events of these people coming, conspire so that they might know you more and be pushed closer to you. It's our only prayer. And if you were to ask me, Nate, why is this Paul's apex value? Why is this the thing that he feels is most important? Well, the first answer and the most important answer is this is exactly what we were created for. This is why God made us, so that he could share Himself with us so that we would know Him. That's what heaven is. I think we mess up. I think we make a mistake when we make heaven about our personal salvation. Am I in or am I out? Am I going to burn or am I going to be in there for forever? That's kind of silly. The purpose of heaven is that we would be reunited with our creator God and experience eternity in harmony with him forever. The purpose of heaven is that we fulfill our ultimate purpose of just knowing him. And so every inch we move closer to knowing God, every bit of depth that we gain in our knowledge of him, every bit of closeness that we experience in our relationship with him is a way to bring heaven down here on earth. And so not only we experience heaven, but those around us get a little glimpse of what heaven's going to be like with every inch that we move closer to the Father, with every embrace that he uses to pull us in as this small reflection of what heaven will be one day. That's why Paul prays that we would know him. But as I was thinking about it this week, writing this sermon on various flights at who knows what time of day it was, depending on the time zone, this thought occurred to me that, you know, we are at our most gracious and most peaceful when we are experiencing the most closeness to God. Another way to say it is, the closer we get to God, the more grace and peace that we walk in. The closer I get to God, the more I pursue Him, the more I know Him, the more I love Him, the more I experience Him, and I feel his goodness in my life, the more gracious I am with myself and others, the less annoyed I get in traffic, the less annoyed I get with my kids, the less obnoxious I think someone is, and the more I realize they're just a hurt person who's hurting other people, and they need God's goodness just like I do. Isn't it true? In the times in your life, when you look back and you would say, or maybe it's right now, and you would say, I'm as close to God as I've ever been, or in that season I was as close to God as I've ever been, weren't you also your most gracious with yourselves and with others? And isn't it a good indicator that we're not walking with God when we begin to lack grace for ourselves and we begin to get really hard on others and we become harsher versions of ourselves? And isn't it true that the closer we get to God, the more peace we experience? And the more we know him, the more certain we are that he'll take care of us. I did not know. I did not know if I was going to be home today. Catching that flight was, I don't think you can cut it closer. I really didn't know if I was going to be here. But I also really didn't pray about it that much. My only prayer while I was sitting there wondering if I was going to make it was, God, if you want me home, I'll be home. If you want me to preach, I'll preach. If you don't, I won't. And I'll get to keep my crocs. So Lord, your will be done. There was an upside to both, you know? But my only prayer was, Father, do what you want. I trust you. Whatever, if you want me to get home, we'll get home. It's kind of like, it's one of the things that raising the money for the building taught me. We did the campaign really, really dumb and it was just kind of like, well, you know, God, if you want us to have the money to buy the land, then we'll have it. If you don't, then we won't. Now we need to raise more money to get into the building. And you know what? If God wants us to have the money, you're gonna give it. And if he doesn't, you won't. Okay. The closer you get to God, the more peace you experience in life. And so I think it's, and honestly, the times in our life when we're drifting from God are sometimes the times when we get most honest and we try to seize the most things and we worry about the most things that we can't control. And then the closer we drift to God, the more of his peace that we feel. And so I think it's very true that the more we know God, the more gracious and peaceful we are. And as I was thinking about that, I was also reminded of the fact that Paul signs off almost all of his letters, grace and peace. He almost always says grace and peace to you, to the saints and wherever. And I've always paid attention to that. And I've always wondered why that is, especially if you juxtapose it or you compare it with the passage in Corinthians, where it says these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. Like why doesn't he ask for faith, hope, and love to you and all the saints? He doesn't do that. He asks for grace. He wishes them grace and peace. I've always wondered why. And maybe, just maybe, it's because Paul knows that grace and peace are byproducts of knowing God. Paul knows that if God answers his prayer in Ephesians 3, 14 through 19, and then Colossians 1 and in other places, that the people in the churches will know him. And if they know him, they will be people who are filled and who will walk in grace and peace. And so by blessing them and wishing upon them grace and peace, what Paul is really doing in his Pauline way is saying, I hope you know God. I hope you grow closer to him. And so I'm praying grace and peace unto you this morning as well. If you are a praying person, I hope that this great prayer can influence the way that you pray for others. Sure. Pray for the circumstances. Pray for protection and pray for health and pray for success and pray for reconciliation and pray for forgiveness and pray for all the things. But layer over them this apex value from Paul, that the person you're praying for, that the body that you're praying for, the family or the church or the people that you are praying for, would simply know God. That even in the circumstances that you're praying for, that all of them would conspire in some miraculous and unknown way to draw people closer to the Father, that He would use those circumstances to pull people near to Him, that they might experience the grace and peace of their soul going home with God. If you're not someone who prays for the people in your life regularly. Okay. You don't have to be that. If your children have not had the benefit of a praying parent, they can now just start. If your spouse hasn't had the benefit of a praying spouse, if your friend hasn't had the benefit of praying friends, if your co-workers haven't had the benefit of a praying co-worker, okay, they can. Anytime you want. So I hope you'll be people who pray for people. And when you do, I hope that you'll pray according to the ethics of Paul as he prays. That whatever happens, whatever they experience, whatever highs and lows they walk through, that if there's success in their life, celebrate that success, but pray fervently and ardently that it would bring them to a deeper knowledge of God. If there's struggle in their life, pray for a relief of that struggle, but pray first and foremost that that struggle would bring them to a deeper knowledge of their God that they might walk in grace and peace. As I encourage you to pray that for others, let me pray that over you as we wrap up. Father, we love you. We thank you for what you're doing in this place. I thank you for what you're doing in me. There's so many things to pray for. In this room, God, there are struggles that no one knows about. There are hurts and hangups that have not been articulated or that have. Our mind goes to places of stress and of urgency. And so, God, I pray that your hand would be in all those. In this room, God, there's also seasons of celebration, of goodness, of sweetness, of joy and blessing. Whether it's in the highs or in the lows, God, may we not forget that you are the author of those things. And may everything happening within them conspire to push us closer to you. God, I pray for grace. I pray that you would work in the lives of the people who are here and who are at home. And that all the circumstances that are working in their life right now would conspire to bring them closer to you. That they would be strengthened by your spirit. That they would be indwelled by your son. That they would be filled with the fullness of the father. Help our souls to find their rest in you, to go home to you, and so walk in the grace and peace that you offer us. In Jesus' name, amen.