Sermons tagged with Spirit

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. How are we, Jay? Everybody good? Good, good. Off to a great start. I'm really excited. Thanks, Jacob, my man. Nate, as Nate mentioned earlier, my name is Aaron. I am one of the pastors out here, and I'm excited to be talking with you today. We've been in a series called 27. We started it last summer and continuing it this summer, and essentially we're just taking a book, pulling a theme or the overall theme of the letter, and talking about it on Sunday morning. This week, we're talking about... Not that one. We're talking about Galatians. So gotcha, right? But we're talking about the book of Galatians. And if I can be honest, like a couple of weeks ago when I started writing this, I got a little bit nervous because last year in the summer, I used the book of Colossians. And as I was preparing this message, I was like, man, there's some very similar tones that Paul is using in both of these letters. Man, I really hope they don't think I just kind of pulled last year's sermon out like he's doing this one again. Like, look at the one trick pony guy, right? But then last Sunday, Doug told us he had no clue that I did Colossians. So I'm like, I'm in the clear. So this was really the easiest sermon I've ever prepared because I did take last year's and I just did a find and replace with Galatians and Colossians. And you guys won't even know it. So that's not true. I am excited to be talking with us about Galatians today. Again, not Ephesians. To kind of get our minds moving in that direction. Some of you know a little bit about my story. But in case you don't, I grew up in the church. I wasn't a Christian at all. My father was a pastor. And if you've ever heard the saying that pastors' kids are the worst, it's true. Just not on Sundays, right? So that's one of the things I learned very early on is that people are looking at my behavior. Like there was an added weight to looking the part, right? Because it seemed like there was people, um, they would assess not just how good I was, but how good of a parent my father was based on how good of a boy I was. And so I learned Monday through Saturday, I can do whatever because I don't hang out in Christian circles on Sunday, Christian circle be good. And so that's what I was. I learned how to say the right things and do the right things. There was all this extra emphasis just on the way that I behaved. But when I did give my life to Jesus, I was maybe 19 or 20 years old. I was a night auditor in a hotel. I was an assistant high school basketball coaching going to school full time. And I can remember as a night auditor, you work about one hour a week. If I ever got fired from the church, I would go be a night auditor because you work one hour a night and the rest of the time just hide from the camera and nap and you were okay. But no, I remember whenever I would open my Bible, my prayer every single time was, God, help me forget everything that I learned about you as a child growing up, and you teach me who you are from your word. I wouldn't be able to articulate to you then why, or I had no clue what the, that was my, that may have been a very bad thing to pray. I have no clue, but what I knew was there was a difference in what I was feeling in that moment and what I felt as a child growing up. There was a very big difference in the unconditional love that I was currently sitting in, the unconditional love that I felt, the total and complete forgiveness that I felt that I had received from God, and the love that I felt growing up. Like the love that I felt growing up very much had to be earned. It had to be good enough. I had to do the right thing. I had to look the right way and say the right things. Otherwise, that love, it was kind of like God was just dangling it and ready to take it away at any point in time. And it didn't take long in my adulthood, or I guess if you can call 20 adult, in my almost formed brain, like it didn't take long before I started to question. I started to question my salvation. And it was always because, man, I messed up again. Does God still love me? It didn't take long before I started chasing good enough. And it's exhausting. And it didn't take long before I just wrestled with this idea of Christianity and who I'm supposed to be and I'm not good enough, I can't measure up, and just this weight, everything that I experienced as a kid suddenly kind of came back and even still today have struggles with it. Maybe you've experienced that. Maybe you've had the thought and this feeling of not being good enough. Like you just have to be better. Like it's this over-emphasis on the rules and this idea of if you don't do this, then you're really not this. God doesn't love you. God doesn't care for you. God is mad at you. It's almost like when you mess up, you feel like Jesus is stepping back in heaven and saying, hey, God, listen, I didn't know he was going to do that, right? Like, I knew all this other stuff, but that's surprise. And every decision, every action, every mistake has eternal consequences on the other side of it. Every bit of that is as a result of being exposed to legalism as a child. We all have been impacted by legalism on some level. Now, we could sit down and probably share story after story of hurt that has came from the church. Church hurt. And even if we didn't realize, and if we started to dig a little bit, what we would probably uncover is some type of legalism being at the root of all of that. Like everyone has this idea and this overemphasis, we've been exposed to this overemphasis on the rules and the regulations of Christianity. Even if someone who hasn't been in the church, hasn't grown up in the church, someone who doesn't go to church now, if you ask them, hey, what is a Christian? The majority of them will tell you some variation of, it's got something to do with Jesus, but then there's rules that you kind of have to follow throughout your life. How many times as a kid, like don't raise your hand, but how many times as a kid, maybe you thought this same thing, right? Like, hey, church is good. Christianity is good. I want to do that. I want to be involved in that, but I'm going to do it when I'm older, right? Because right now, I just want to kind of enjoy my life. I want to have fun. I want to do the things that I want to do. When I'm older, a grandpa, like 35 years old or something, like that's when, I don't know what it was for you. Like me, when I was a kid, 35 was ancient. I was dumb, right? It's not ancient. But that's the thought. Like Christianity, when I settle down, when I get to this place and I wonder, I'll start following the rules and the regulations, this emphasis on behavior. When I get older, I'll do that. When I get older, I'll be a part of that. That's legalism. We've all been impacted by it. And it's not something that's new. It's something that has been around the church ever since the church started. At the very beginning, it's the reason that Paul wrote Galatians. I feel like this is falling off of my ear, but it's the reason that Paul wrote the book of Galatians. In the book of the Galatians, it's six short chapters. Paul attacks and disarms legalism. If you've ever been impacted by it, if you've ever been hurt by it, you will absolutely love this book. But when Paul comes in, he comes in hot. Look at chapter one, verse six. This is what he says. This is verse 6. And Paul's like long-winded. He uses a lot of run-ons. This is his third sentence into the letter. This is what he says. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Evidently, some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one that we preach to you, let them be under God's curse. Paul, throughout the entire book of Galatians, the only thing that he's talking about is legalism that has made its way into the churches at Galatia. And he's confronting really two false gospels that come from that. This idea of I have to be good enough, this overemphasis on the rules that I have to be good enough, or this overemphasis on the rules that, hey, I'm a Christian, I've got grace, now I can just do whatever I want and I'm all good. Paul confronts both of that. What's happening in the church in Galatia right now, these are fairly new, actually very new Christians. Christianity in itself is only about 49 to 50 years old at this point. And so Christianity came from Judaism. It came from the Jewish culture. Christianity came out of the Jews. And so the practices, the culture, the traditions have always been a part of it. Early Christians, even before Galatia, most early Christians were Jews. And then they came to know Christ. And then the Gentiles who came to Christ early, usually they became Jews first and then became Christians. And so as Christianity began to spread through the Greco-Roman world, like the leaders in the church had to answer this very difficult question. Like, what do we do with all of these non-Jews who are becoming Christians now? Do they have to first become Jews? Do they have to follow the traditions set in the Old Testament? Do they have to follow the customs? Do they have to do the things that we have been doing for years and years and years in order to first become Jews? And there were two camps that set up. The Hellenistic Jews were like, no, they don't have to do that. You can actually read about a conversation in Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, where the statement that came out of that was, we should not make it more difficult for the Gentiles to become Christians. But who is Paul is talking about in the book of Galatians is the Judaizers. And the Judaizers came in behind Paul to teach the Galatian Christians, hey, your faith has only just begun. Actually, your faith is not yet complete. Faith in Jesus is good, but now you actually have to become a Jew as well. You have to practice the Jewish customs and traditions, and you also have to become or get circumcised. Could you imagine that as an altar call, right? Like, lights come down, band comes up. Hey, if you want to give your life to Jesus, just go into this room on the right. You're going to be introduced to the 613 laws in the adjoining room in the back. That's our circumcision room. Go through there, and you are a Christian. You thought raising your hand when the pastor asked was hard? Like, no, that's a different kind of level, right? But that's what was happening. The Judaizers were coming in behind Paul and saying, hey, your faith isn't complete yet. You are not quite yet a Christian. You haven't yet attained the salvation that you're hoping for. Jesus is a start, but you also have to do this. It was Jesus plus something. It was Jesus and you have to look a certain way. Jesus and you have to live a certain way. Jesus and you have to believe additional things. Legalism is when we contribute identity as a Christian to anything other than faith in Christ alone. Jesus plus believing these things. Jesus plus living this way. Jesus plus this rule. Jesus plus this law. Jesus plus this command. This is what was happening in the church in Galatia, and it's what Paul is writing about. And if we can be honest, that doesn't sound incredibly different than the church today. Like, it's pretty mind-blowing to me that a faith that is based off of a singular event can have so many variations. It's pretty incredible to me that a faith based off the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, putting your hope and trust in this one man, can have so many different trends, so many different variations. And the thing that we have to realize is Paul wasn't writing and condemning the practices. He probably participated in a lot of the practices. What Paul was condemning was elevating the practices to the status of gospel, elevating the tradition to the status of gospel. Your faith isn't complete. Your salvation isn't complete. You need faith in Jesus and isn't that what we see today? Like you could line 10 different people up and ask them, what does it mean to be a Christian? And you're likely going to get several different answers. But not just about faith in Jesus and like what to believe, but about the way things you should do, the things you shouldn't do. This is what makes someone a Christian, or this is what makes someone a Christian. And this is what Paul was writing and correcting, was this confusion beginning to happen within the church. Like, how do you become a Christian? Well, you have to be this. And that's when you begin to see and you begin to hear statements like a Christian would never do this. A Christian could never say this. A Christian could never believe these things. A Christian could never be a part of these things. I have been in a place before, and I heard, I wasn't serving a church, but it was an area that I was at, and I heard pastors start to teach, hey, listen, if you want to be a good Christian, it has to be the King James Version. If you're reading anything other than the King James Version, you're a bad Christian. How ludicrous is that? Elevating something like that to the status of gospel. It's not that those things and those ideas and those beliefs may be wrong, but that is not what defines someone as a Christian. That's not what makes you a Christian. We have these ideas. You could never be a Christian and be baptized without full immersion. You can never be a Christian and believe or go to these places. You can never be a Christian. And you know what we're going to experience a lot of in 2024? We're going to experience a lot of promotion of Christian politics. You can't be a Christian and vote this way. You can't be a Christian and be for these things. Somehow, at some point, politics has came in and kind of hijacked what it means to be a Christian. And we've fallen for this false dichotomy that's presented. Like Christians are over here. This is the Christian vote. Christians are over here. This is the Christian vote. And you know what's crazy? Oftentimes they're using the same scripture to argue different perspectives. But this is what it means to be a Christian. You have to be this. There's this growing group of people called the nuns. Not like the little hat ladies with the black dress, right? It's a category on the censuses to go around. There's a question on there that says religious affiliation. And there's a box that says nun. That category. There's a book, I think it's called The Nuns. I would check it out. It's a good read, but there was a lot of political scientists who went in and did a lot of research. And what they found is this growing group of people, this growing group of folks who want nothing to do with the church, are standing in that place because of political affiliation. Because Christianity is not Jesus. Christianity is not faith in Jesus. It's faith in Jesus and this political alignment. It's faith in Jesus and this political belief. I don't want anything to do with that. And that's what Paul is writing. And that's what Paul is addressing. There is this Alistair Brigg, as I was kind of preparing this message, Nate actually brought him up to me. I went back and I watched the video and he does this incredible illustration. And he says, when he gets to heaven, what he wants to do is he wants to go and find the thief on the cross. And he wants to say, he just wants to experience, hey, what was it like? Like when you, when you got to the gate, what was it like? Like, what did they they say to you? Like he didn't even know where he was. He just kind of showed up and he ended up at this gate. And then the guy came up to him, Peter or whatever you want to call him. Peter came up and he said, so can you tell me about the doctrine of justification? He's like, the what? Well, tell me what you think about the scripture. Like give me your thoughts on it. He's like, man, I don't have any idea about any of this. Okay, well, I need to go get my supervisor. So let's go get this guy. And he's like, so can you tell me exactly why you're here? And he's like, I have no clue. Except this one guy right over here, the guy on the middle cross, said that I could come. This is what Paul is correcting throughout the entire book of Galatians. It's this convoluted confusion that has crept its way in to the Christian belief. Paul is writing and he's telling them, hey, you are, you became, and you remain a Christian because of your faith in Jesus. In Galatians 1, he says this. He says, Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by believing in what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain, if it really was in vain? So I ask you again, does God give you His Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law or by believing in what you heard. Paul reminded them. Hey, you know that justification, salvation through the law is not possible. Its sole purpose is to point you towards a savior that you are in need of. And I love his reminder. He said, do you remember your faith? Like, do you remember when you came to faith? Do you remember whenever you were saved? Before you knew all the right things? Before you did all the right things? Before you lived in the right way? Do you remember who you were? Do you now have to maintain and earn that love that was freely given? He reminded them of their faith in Jesus. He reminded them that a Christian is someone who trusts in Jesus. The way we say it at Grace is that you become a Christian by believing Jesus was who he said he was. He did the things he said he would do, and he will do the things that he promised. Like, that's the faith that Paul is defending. That's the faith that Paul is arguing for. And when I first read this, like, I read the, you foolish Galatians with the exclamation point, like, still kind of get that vibe, like Paul's really going in hard. Like he's still, you fools, how could you dare? But the more that I read it, I started to hear a different tone. It's an exclamation, just like you would shout to a child running towards the middle of a busy intersection. When a fear and pleading, like you have to correct course. You can't go down this path. And in verse five, he points out, like, are you still equating God's love for you by the rightness of your life? Are you still equating God's love for you and faithfulness by the blessings around you? Are you not having the things happen to you and suddenly God doesn't love you anymore? Because that's the result, isn't it? Like, haven't you been there? Or have you been there before? It's exhausting. This pursuit and this treadmill of trying to run towards awesome enough for God to save you. This over-emphasis on the rules and the regulations of Christianity and perfect adherence towards all of those is what's necessary for God to give you the love that he gave you when you first began. And it creates, it can create this judgmentalism that comes inside us. We can become the older brother in the story of the parable or the prodigal son. Like we can see the blessings in other people's lives and be like, I'm doing better than they are. Like what's going on, God? Like why is this not happening for me? Why am I suffering in these different ways? Why am I not having these good things happen to me? Look how awesome I behaved. And the moment things start going down here, suddenly, okay, it's where prosperity gospel kind of gets its momentum from, right? Like, I have to be good enough, and then all these awesome things will begin to happen to me. I have to be good enough, and then God's love will shower down on me. I have to be all of these things. And Paul says that is foolishness and we have to correct course. Like every bit of legalism really does get its leverage by its offering of direction. Like it tells you where to go. It tells you how to live your life. It tells you the things you should and should not be a part of, which there are things that should not be a part of the Christian's life. And I don't believe, I don't believe the Judaizers were malicious. I don't believe that when they came and they were teaching the Christians in Galatia, I don't think they were trying to lead them astray. I think they were trying to lead them. There have been thousands of years of tradition, and it is all that they knew. And what Paul says as a result of legalism is exhaustion, this feeling like a rejected child instead of an adopted heir with Christ. This feeling in the sense of judgmentalism, this feeling in the sense of not good enough and we begin chasing it. That is what naturally comes from legalism. And he says, anytime that we move Christ to the periphery, anytime we make him not the main thing, that's the fruit. This is what begins to pop up in our life. But there are things that should not be a part of your life. There are things that you should pursue and there are things that you should try to do. But what you need to do is keep Christ at the center of your faith. The beginning and end of what it means to be a Christian and that moves you towards something different. In Galatians 5, I'm going to read 16 and then jump down to verse 22. Galatians 5, 16 says this. So I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. I call it mountain biking Christianity. I don't know if you've ever been mountain biking before. I did whenever I was in Georgia. Well, I was in Georgia, so it would be more hill riding than anything. But if you ever go, what they will tell you is the very first rule, other than like knowing how to ride a bike, the very first rule is you're going to have a tendency to want to look at the things you want to avoid. As you're going down the hill, you're going to want to stare at the stone. You're going to want to stare at the tree. You're going to want to stare at these things because that's how you're going to avoid them. And I learned, actually, I learned that the guy was not lying to me when he told me after I was going down the hill and I saw a rock. And so I'm like, I've got to know where I'm supposed to avoid. I've got to know what I'm supposed to kind of veer towards and all of this. So your eyes and your body move towards the very thing that you're focused on. That's the entire role. That's where it all comes from, which is the same principle in life. Like Paul says it in Romans 12, he says that you're transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's this idea that you will always move towards the direction of your most powerful thought. The thing that you're thinking, whatever you are focused on, that will be the direction that your life moves. Mountain Viking Christianity says this, that yes, there are things that you want to avoid. There are things that you need to avoid. There are things in your life that shouldn't be there. What you need to focus on is the path. Is the journey that you're going on that the Holy Spirit is leading you towards. Keeping Christ at the center. Not moving him towards the periphery. What starts to happen is love develops. It's a fruit of the gospel. Patience starts to form. It's a fruit of the gospel. Kindness, gentleness, self-control. Like these things start to develop in your world, not in order to attain salvation, not in order to attain God's love, God's forgiveness, God's freedom, but as a result from it. It says that the spirit and the flesh are at work against one another. And any time we move what should be avoided, we move what should be in the periphery to the center, our body, our life will move towards those things. And what develops is exhaustion, fatigue, judgmentalism. But if we can stay focused in Christ, do you want a check mark? Do you want to know the marker along the way? Are you moving down the path? Are you growing in those things? Are you growing in love? Are you growing in peace? Are you growing in patience? Are you growing in kindness? Are you growing in self-control? Like if you want a marker that you're moving in the right direction, it's not by an overemphasis on the rules and regulations. Those kind of take care of themselves when you're focusing on becoming who Christ has created you to be, walking and riding in the path that he has called you to walk on. Paul's entire letter to the Galatians is simply a reminder that a Christian is from a life of faith defined itself by a life of love. Are you moving down that path? Are you moving towards greater patience? What's popping up in your life? The band is going to come here in one second and we're going to sing the song Living Hope. It's simply a reminder and a focus that we were separated and it's only through the saving work of Jesus. It's keeping Christ the path. We pray for us. God, thank you so much. Thank you for your love, your grace, and your kindness. We thank you for all that you've done in us and through us because of the grace that we've received in Jesus. And Father, we just ask you as it's going to be a natural tendency. Legalism isn't a new thing that's happening and the effects of it have been felt for thousands of years, God. And we just ask you to point us toward the path you're asking us to follow with the grace of your spirit, and even if it means reminding ourselves of the gospel we came to know daily, Lord, help us to do that. Help us to live the life you have asked us to live by trusting in Jesus. We need you. We thank you. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Good morning. Thank you all for being here, for listening online. My name is Doug Bergeson. Thank you, thank you. It was my hope that I would get that. But to kick things off, I'm going to need a little help from you. The audience, congregation, flock, whatever you want to call yourselves. I need a little help. Who in today's culture, books, movies, TV, podcasts, or even real life would be considered a great detective, a master of deductive logic, one able to take the most cryptic clues, hints, and innuendo and figure out what's going on. I'm asking you all so as not to date myself and come across as a hopelessly out of touch boomer. So a little help, please. Just shout out some names of great detectives, masters of deductive logic from any realm of your experience. Sherlock Holmes. Okay, that's kind of a boomer response, but that's okay. Who else? I would have gotten that one. Who else? Columbo. That I had down too, and I wasn't going to share because it's so out of date. Anyone else? Axel Foley. Okay. Okay. In the first one or the one in the new release? Axel Foley. Okay. Who else? Ace Ventura. Okay. Okay. That's good. That's all I need. I really needed those names, and I appreciate your contributing to make this one point. When you see me being trotted up here to speak on a Sunday morning, you do not have to be a Sherlock Holmes, a Detective Columbo, an Axel Foley, or an Ace Ventura to know that we must be deep, deep, deep into the lazy, languid days of summer. When I plot up here on stage, you have the legitimate right to ask yourself dang why am I not on vacation but be that as it may I am here and I'm excited to share when Nate first reached out to me way back in March he wrote that he we'd be in the middle of our summer series which we started last year called 27 that covers the books of the New Testament and specifically the letters of the Apostle Paul and he said I could pick whichever one I wanted and build a sermon around its overall message. Now typically when asked to preach I deliberate, I agonize, hem and haw wringing my hands over whether I really want to do it or not. But not this time. I was excited and quickly responded to Nate, saying that I would leap at the chance to do the book of Colossians, as it is magisterial and soaring and easily one of my favorite books in all of Scripture. I was pumped. However, just moments later, Nate wrote back, and I quote, Doug, thanks for taking me up on the offer, though I have bad news that I hope will not dissuade you from your acceptance. Aaron preached on Colossians last year, and I failed to mention that to you in my request email. Kyle has also preached on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, so those are off the market as well. So remembering that old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, I went back to Nate, explicitly asking him to confirm in writing what books were actually able and available for me to pick. And thankfully for me, and hopefully for you, Paul's letter to the Ephesians was one of them. And that's the book we're going to look at this morning. This letter was written by the Apostle Paul, once among the fiercest and most formidable opponents of the early Christian church. But God, in his wisdom and grace, had chosen Paul, this fervent enemy of the church and most unlikely of all candidates, to be his chosen messenger in spreading the life-changing news of Jesus Christ throughout the known world. And for two to three years, they don't know exactly how long, the city of Ephesus had been base camp for Paul's ministry, for his missionary work, establishing churches throughout the region. Now, by AD 60, some 25 years after his miraculous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Paul is thought to have written this letter from a prison in Rome. Now, for those familiar with this letter, it is chock full of beautiful and iconic passages. Nate frequently has brought to our attention the last half of chapter 3, which is his favorite prayer in all of Scripture and one he prays over grace often. Ephesians also contains the verses that would shape and fuel the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 asserting that salvation is only found through God's gracious gift of Jesus Christ and is by faith in him alone. In other words, there's nothing we can do to earn or curry God's favor. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not fromesians, there are the frequently misunderstood, misappropriated, and sometimes even abused house codes, describing how the relationships between wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters, are to work in light of the Lordship of Christ. Finally, in a very famous passage near the end of the letter, Paul exhorts all believers to put on the full armor of God. And there are more, but this morning, our focus will be on the one overarching theme of this entire letter, our identity as believers, who we truly are now that we are in Christ. According to Paul, everything in both the individual and collective Christian experience, hangs in the balance, directly dependent upon the extent to which we can wrap our minds around this one transcendent and surpassing reality. At this stage of my life, if you were to ask me why I believe what I believe, my most honest and transparent answer would go something like this. I believe because everything I've seen, everything I've learned, and everything I've experienced in my life so far has validated the truth of Scripture. Not just some things, but literally everything has reinforced what the Bible has been saying all along. And despite being such an ancient book, I've for the most part stopped being surprised when I again discover another way in which the Bible is fresh and profoundly modern, relevant, life-changing, and most importantly, true. Here's one quick example from my long-ago past. In 1966, Professors Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn at the University of Michigan published a groundbreaking work in the field of psychology and organizational behavior. By the time I started graduate business school up in Chicago in 1980, Katz and Kahn's cutting-edge theory, only about a dozen years old, had swept through academia and was now all the rage at the elite business schools. What this theory offered was a sweeping transformational alternative to classical business management that up to that point had viewed organizations as machines. Now what this new systems theory proposed was that organizations should best be viewed not as machines but as living organisms. When I first heard this I was floored, blown away. What insight, what brilliance, so outside the box. I'd never in my life heard anything like that before. Oh, wait. Yes, I had. The Apostle Paul had made that very same point when he compared the church and how its members were to operate to a human body in his first letter to the Corinthians, written around A.D. 55. Turns out the Bible had beaten Dr. Katsakan and Kotz to the punch by just over 19 centuries. Much more recently, I was again struck by Scripture's remarkable freshness and relevance, revealing truth and wisdom long before the rest of us even begin to catch up. The occasion was this past fall when I listened to the book, The Coddling of the American Mind. And it has direct relevance and application to what Paul is trying to do in his letter to the Ephesians. Written in 2018 by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff, the book makes the case that our society and culture have gradually but steadily moved towards broad acceptance of three great untruths with terrible consequences, particularly for our young people. The three great untruths the authors cite are, one, always trust your feelings. Two, avoid pain and discomfort if you can. And three, life is a battle between good people on the one side and bad people on the other. Even if well intended, as they often are, the book asserts that these beliefs represent terrible and demonstrably false ideas whose adoption and embrace by large swaths of our society have contributed to an epidemic of anxiety and depression and overall decline in our mental health, to the intolerance and turmoil roiling our public discourse, and to the tearing apart of any semblance of social cohesion in this country, to name just a few of the disastrous consequences of these ideas, these patterns of thinking. The book went on to show how these flawed beliefs not only contradicted thousands of years of wisdom literature from a variety of traditions, but also fly in the face of the latest findings of science and modern psychology. That the Bible is prominent among wisdom literature debunking those three great untruths came as no surprise. What did come as a new revelation to me was when the authors introduced something I've never heard of, something called cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT, as an especially effective remedy and tool in combating these three great untruths. Why this is pertinent to Ephesians is that the Bible in its entirety, and the Apostle Paul in particular, espoused and practiced cognitive behavior therapy almost two millennia before it was even a thing. Some of you older folks, as well as any country music freaks out there, might remember the 1981 chart-topping duet by Barbara Mandrell and George Jones, I Was Country Before When Country Wasn't Cool. Does anybody remember that? Yeah, there we go. Well, tweaking that a little bit for my purposes this morning, it turns out that the Apostle Paul was doing cognitive behavior therapy before cognitive behavior therapy was cool. First pioneered in the 1960s, CBT is premised on the idea that how we think and what we think is what determines to a large degree both our emotions and our behavior. Rather than focusing on the origins of a problem as happens in traditional psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy works to change our current thinking. It is our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves and our world, what cognitive behavior therapy refers to as cognitive distortions that must be addressed and changed. In clinical practice over the last several decades, this has been shown to be true as CBT has been proven to be remarkably effective. But zoning in on just the first of those three great untruths, always trust your feelings. It's an important, even vital question to ask, to what extent should our feelings and emotions influence and shape what we think, what we believe to be true? If one has been paying any attention at all, we now live in a society and a culture which have elevated and anointed emotions and feelings to such prominence that they control the moral high ground. And in many instances instances assume ultimate authority, even to the extent of determining what is true and what is not. One simply doesn't question or challenge another's feelings in polite society. After all, that's what you feel. That's your truth, right? Well, no. Wrong. Wrong. Not according to cognitive behavior therapy, and certainly not according to what God has revealed in his word. It turns out that in many instances, God cares far less about our feelings and emotions than we do. It can be off-putting at first, even shocking. After all, if God's supposed to be so loving, how does that compute? But lest anyone here this morning or listening online misses this critical point, it's not that God doesn't care about our feelings and emotions, but that he cares more for those things that have the greatest chance to help us. And from God's vantage point, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, the mind is the key. The mind is the key because how we think determines how we act. Our behavior follows our thoughts and beliefs. And we intuitively know this to be true. If I care to know what you really think, what you really believe, there's no need for me to ask you or for you to tell me. I'll simply watch closely what you do. How do you spend your time and treasure? What you prioritize? What are you willing to stand up for, come what may? When are you quick to compromise and make exceptions? What sacrifices and trade-offs have you made? How do you treat people? How different are you in public than in private? Your actions are the tell. Even the old adage, follow your heart, which I love, is not so much an appeal to one's emotion as it is to what one truly believes is right and true. In actual practice, the heart doesn't do most of the leading. It is typically more of a follower. It is the convictions of your mind that set the wheels of action in motion. It's what one thinks and believes that does the leading, and our hearts then follow. That is why, whether we like it or not, it's a far greater concern to God how we think and what we think and why we think the way we do than how we might be feeling at any point in time. The priority on the mind rather than the emotion is found throughout scripture. Time and time again, the Bible asserts that our minds are the key. But you may ask, don't feelings and emotions greatly influence how we think? Absolutely they do. And therein lies the problem. God is obviously not against emotions, revealing in scripture his own deep emotions and feelings. Furthermore, he's imbued us, his treasured and loved creations, with gobs of both. Emotions can be wonderful and transcendent, an indispensable and indelible part of being human. But the downside to our feelings and emotions is that they are often fleeting and fickle. They can also easily deceive, mislead, and distort. Here's a simple case and point from real life. If we have any poker players in the house this morning, do we? Any poker players? Okay. It's probably not, I was hoping to get a little bit more, better response. Have to move to Vegas. But if you do play, well, if we have any poker players in the house, you're probably familiar with the term tilt. If you do play and are not familiar with the term, then my guess is you probably lose a lot. Always leaving the table a bit mystified as to why you have such bad luck. Tilt is when emotion knocks a player off balance, disrupting and distorting his objectivity and ability to discern what's really happening. Tilt most commonly occurs when a player suffers, is unlucky due to a bad beat, a hand he should by rights have won but didn't, as it can spiral into frustration and subsequent decision-making infected by emotion. But tilt can also happen to a player on a winning streak, where strong positive emotions lead to equally poor and distorted decision-making. In both instances, emotional reasoning, patterns of thinking unduly influenced by how we are feeling at the moment, leads to bad outcomes. But unless you're trying to make a living playing poker, that example might not strike much fear in you. But I think it should. Feelings are always compelling, but they are wholly subjective and not always reliable. For example, I might be thinking I'm absolutely killing it up here this morning, really giving Nate a run for his money. But just because I feel that way doesn't make it so, does it? We live in an age of emotional reasoning. Way, way too much importance is placed on how we feel, elevating our feelings to such a degree that they can overwhelm the facts and distort reality. It's not been good for our mental health. It's not been good for our public discourse. It's not been good for our social cohesion. And it just so happens it's not good for our faith either. The powerful and often pernicious ability of our emotions to distort reality and overwhelm our thinking, to convince us something is true that is not, or to convince us something is not true that really is, presents a clear and present danger to the vitality of our faith. Imagine being in a story in which you think you know what's going on. All your senses are in touch with that story. Yet, in fact, there is a much bigger story and a different reality at work. Guess what? We're all in that bigger story. And the challenge is that our feelings and emotions aren't going to be of much help as they often point us the wrong way. As the writer and pastor Eugene Peterson most famously known for his popular paraphrase of the Bible called the message states, my feelings are important for many things but they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. In other words, it's not so much the feelings we have about God, but the facts we know about God, what we are convinced of, that need to be right. Whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a raging battle going on for our minds, and the stakes couldn't be higher. The key to victory, in a nutshell, is to think right about the things that matter. Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. This task of renewing our minds is made even more difficult because influenced by both our own sin as well as the fallen world in which we live, we all begin our journeys of faith with a constricted and impoverished view of what's possible, of what God wants and has in store for us. And this is Paul's overriding message in Ephesians, to convince us of the things that are actually and eternally true. Paul knows that we all need a radically new orientation in our thinking. Because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And in Ephesians, Paul starts right up front. In the opening verse, offering a view of a reality that immediately confronts and calls into question my own. Addressing his readers as saints or holy ones. Those set apart by God. Paul is directly contradicting my feelings about myself. For I don't very often feel saint-like or holy or set apart. That's certainly not how I would describe myself. Yet Paul is asserting that it's true. I have been set apart by God for his purposes. That is who I am in Christ Jesus. In essence, Paul is conducting a master class in cognitive behavior therapy. Just like in modern CBT, Paul goes about combating our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves, our world, and our faith by laying out the facts and the truth. And as in cognitive behavior therapy, the goal is that the process becomes a virtuous cycle of sorts, slowly but surely changing the way we understand and interpret things, which causes a change in how we respond emotionally, which in turn causes our thinking to change a little further. And so begins Paul's full frontal assault on our small and constrained views of ourselves and our world that constitute reality as we know it. Like rapid, sharp staccato bursts of machine gun fire, Paul rattles off a whole slew of facts that we are in fact part of a massively bigger and grander story, one that began long ago and will continue for all eternity, that we were chosen by God before the creation of the world, an act rooted in the eternal purposes of God, to have a people, holy and blameless, set apart for himself, something only made possible through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and that now unites all believers as one, that although once dead, we are now alive, despite rightfully deserving the judgment of a just God, someone else has borne our guilt and suffered in our stead, And by and through that extravagant act of love, we have been declared not guilty. Once consumed, controlled, enslaved by our own sinful natures, the ways of this world, we've been set free and made new through faith in Jesus Christ. And that even now, all of God's spiritual blessings in Christ are available, active, and evident in believers' lives. These are the things Paul thinks we should know. This is who we truly are. We can't intuit them. We can't feel our way towards them. Our feelings and emotions offer little help in arriving at these transcendent and transformational truths. Only by repeatedly reflecting on these things, allowing them to seep into us, to question and challenge our existing patterns of thinking and emotional reasoning, will we ever be able to renew our minds. Paul is asking, he's cajoling, commanding, encouraging us to put on a completely new lens, a lens designed to color everything that we think about and all of our thinking. We are indeed part of a bigger and grander story. And as Paul writes in chapter 1, verse 10, this story will culminate when the times will have reached their fulfillment to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. So, though the world may often seem chaotic, mystifying, and out of control, a time is coming and is advancing already when all will make sense under the lordship of Christ. In the meantime, believers in Jesus Christ have been given the gift of God's Holy Spirit as the first installment and guarantee of our salvation, a magnificent promise and blessing. However, this has led to a tendency for Christians to sometimes describe their conversion process as inviting Christ into their hearts, as if salvation entailed a mini-Jesus or a little bit of Jesus being in us. While that, in a sense, is true, it can lead to a misconception that downplays the extent to which all believers are united together in Christ and whose identities are found together in Christ. Far more common in Paul's writings and conceptually more powerful and accurate is the idea that believers are part of a larger reality of God. We are now in Christ, not the other way around. In fact, Ephesians describes two separate and completely distinct realms, that of Christ and that of the world, which are polar opposites diametrically opposed to utterly incompatible spheres of influence. To be in Christ means we are moving from one sphere of influence to another, from the realm of the world to the realm of is in them due to the former way of life to put off the old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Putting off the old self and putting on the new is the process which happens as we move from the world's sphere of influence to that of Christ, a migration to a new identity that will define us for all eternity. However, again, we're not going to move very far unless this increasingly becomes how we view and understand ourselves and our reality. Paul insists that we must engage our minds rather than our emotions. Again, it is only when we change the way we think that we change the way we live. That's when transformation happens. Now, personally, I've often observed in my own life that if I really believe what I said I believed, my life would look a lot different. The great majority of the time, I don't feel like I'm a new creation or that I put off my old self. Far from it. On the contrary, I still struggle with the things that I've struggled with all my life. This has been convicting and has made me feel like a giant hypocrite at times. However, if my mind, what I think and what I believe, is decisive in determining how I act, then all this disconnect really means is that I obviously have a long ways to go in changing my thinking and renewing my mind. I'm still very much a work in progress. Fortunately for me, and for all of us, one of the most consequential and vastly underappreciated blessings of having been given God's Holy Spirit is that the Spirit helps us to make this transition by helping us to better grasp these truths, by purging our minds of those influences which distort, deceive, and mislead. In other words, by helping us to renew our minds. God's spirit in us seeks to shape us by reminding and teaching us who we are now in Christ. Only when we more fully know and believe can we authentically move and change. But we need to do our part. We have a role to play. Again, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, we need to deliberately, intentionally expose our minds to the truths of God and ourselves. If we were to have any chance of changing our thinking. It's simply not going to happen otherwise. And this is why worship, prayer, study, community are so vital. Christians, including myself, often act like these activities are certainly good things to do, but essentially voluntary ones, more or less. That we have times and seasons in our lives when they can have less prominence, be less of a priority, perhaps because we're so busy. And other seasons when we can allocate more time to them and really get our spiritual mojo back. The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians does not share that view. Being a believer, being saved, to use a nice evangelical expression, being a follower of Christ, having our identity found in Christ, are all descriptions of the process of moving from one sphere of influence, the world, to a completely new sphere of influence in corresponding reality, Christ. that requires a radically new orientation in our thinking because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And we can't depend on our feelings, emotions, and intuition to convince us of these things, for they often tell us something very different, which is why we're going to close by listening to Aaron sing a song from about a dozen years ago called Remind Me Who I Am. I personally find it so, so compelling because it captures my desperate need to be constantly reminded of the truth of who I am and who God is. I'd like to read a few of the lyrics. When I lose my way and I forget my name, remind me who I am. In the mirror all I see is who I don't want to be. Remind me who I am. In the loneliest places when I can't remember what grace is, tell me once again who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget, who I am to you, that I belong to you. When my heart is like a stone and I'm running far from home, remind me who I am. When I can't receive your love, afraid I'll never be enough, remind me who I am. Tell me, once again, who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget who I am to you, that I belong to you. Worship is how we are reminded. Spending time in scripture is how we are reminded. Getting down on our knees in prayer is how we are reminded. Being in community is how we are reminded. These ancient and timeless disciplines remain profoundly modern for when we worship together on Sunday mornings, when we open our Bibles, when we bow our heads, when we sit quietly alone in God's presence, when we spend time with others who share the same Savior and the same hope, we are working on and renewing our minds, implicitly acknowledging that we are part of a much grander story.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see everybody. And it sounds like to me that only the singers come during the summertime. You guys were singing great. And that was really always love it when the church sings together like that. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby. After the service, you have dropped in. If this is your first time, you've dropped into the middle of a series called Idols that's loosely based on a book by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods. If you haven't picked up a copy of that, we are out, but they are competitively priced on Amazon and will be brought right to your door for ease of purchase. So I would encourage you to grab one of those and kind of read through that as we finish up the series. This is week four. Next week is the last week. Week five, we're going to talk about comfort next week, which I'm very excited to talk about that because I think it's something that every American alive needs to hear. And I think it's going to be an important one next week. This week, we're looking at the source idol of control. And when I say source idol, one of the more interesting ideas that Tim Keller puts forward in his book is the idea that we have surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are the ones that are visible to us and people outside of us, a desire for money, a desire for friends, a desire for a perfect family, for appearances, things like that that are a little bit more visible. Source idols are things that exist in our heart beneath the surface that fuel our desire for those surface idols. And he identifies four. Power, which I preached about two weeks ago. That's the one that I primarily deal with. And then approval, preached about last week that's what he deals with a lot that is not one that that's probably the one I worry about the least and then control this week and comfort next week so as we approach this idea of control in our life I want us to understand what it is and what it means if we struggle with this source idol. And again, an idol is anything that becomes more important to us in our life than Jesus. It's something that we begin to prioritize over Jesus and we pour out our faith and our worship to that thing instead of to our Creator. About four or five years ago, I was in my therapist's office. I was seeing a counselor at the time just doing general maintenance, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's probably time for me to get back in there and let them tinker around a little bit. But one day I got there and whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, what a cliche, but whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, he would always ask me what's been going on, what's happened since I last saw you. That was always the first question, so I knew that was the question. So in the car, in my head, I'm thinking, how am I going to answer him? I can tell him about this thing and this thing and this thing. I think that'll be enough. Well, I'll start the bidding there, and we'll see where it goes. So I go in, I sit down and he asked me the question, how's it been going for you? What's been happening? And so I told him my three things, five or eight minutes. I don't know. And I get done with it. And he just looks at me and he kind of cocks his head and he goes, why'd you tell me those things? And the smart aleck in me is like, because you're a counselor, because this is the deal? Because that's what I'm supposed to do? What do you want me to do? But I said, well, I knew that you were going to ask me what happened, and that's what happened. So I told you those things. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but he pushed back on me and he goes do you do you ever enter a conversation without knowing what you're going to talk about and what the other person is probably going to talk about and I said not if I can help it I always plan ahead whenever I have a conversation or meeting coming up I always think through all the different ways it could go and how I want to respond because I don't want to be caught off guard in the moment. And he said, how many times are you in a situation that's taken you by surprise and you didn't expect to be there? I said, very rarely. And he goes, yeah, I think maybe you've got an issue with control. Because you have a hard time not being the one driving the bus, don't you? And I was like, you have a hard time not being the one. And I kind of thought about it, and I said, my gosh, is it possible that this need for control is so ingrained into me that the reason I told you those stories is so that I could control where the conversation went and we would talk about things I was willing to open up about and I could steer away from the areas that I wasn't willing to talk about. He said some effect of, and circle gets the square. Good job, buddy. And so this need for control that some of us all have to varying degrees can be so sneaky. Sometimes we don't even recognize it in ourselves until someone points it out in us. So let me point it out in you. Some people deal with this so much that it shows up in every aspect of their life. For me, it's relational, it's conversational. I don't want to look dumb. If someone has something negative to say, I want to be gracious and not be caught off guard, whatever it is. But for some of us, we're so regimented and ordered that we have our life together in every aspect of it. We have our routine. We wake up at a certain time. We go to bed at a certain time. Our kids do certain things on certain days. If you have a laundry day, you're gaining on it. If you make your bed, you're gaining on it. Like there are things that we do. We have a workout routine that we do. We have the way that we eat. We have the places that we go. We have our budget. We have our work schedule. We are very regimented. And a lot of that can come from this innate need to be in control of everything. I think about the all-star mom in the PTA, the one who runs a better house than you, who drives a cleaner car than you, and who makes cupcakes better than you, that mom. And her kids are always dressed better than your kids. This is this need for control. And if you're not yet sure if this is you, if this might be something that you do in your life where everything needs to be ordered, and if it's not ordered, your whole life is in shambles. I heard in the last year of this phrase that I had not heard before. I'm in the last year of the Gen Xers. I think the millennials coined this phrase. You boomers, unless you have millennial children, you probably have not heard this, but maybe you can identify it. It's a term called the Sunday Scaries. Anybody ever heard that term? You don't have to raise your hand and out yourself, but the Sunday Scaries. Okay. Now for me, I have the Saturday Scaries because about three times every Saturday, I kind of jolt myself into consciousness and ask if I know what I'm preaching about in the morning. So that's, that's what I have for me. Sunday scaries are when you take Sunday night to get ready for your week. And on Sunday afternoons and evenings, you begin to feel tremendous anxiety because the meals aren't prepped and the clothes aren't washed and the schedule isn't done and the things aren't laid out and the laundry isn't all the way ready and you start to worry, if I don't, I've got this limited amount of time, if I don't start my week right, everything's going to be off, it's going to be the worst and so you get the Sunday scaries and you experience stress on Sunday night. If that's you, friends, this might be for you. And when we do this, when we make control our idol, when we order our lives so that we manage every detail of it. And listen, I want to say this before I talk about the downside of it. Those of us who do live regimented lives and who are in control of many of the aspects of them, that ability comes from a place of diligence and discipline. That's a good thing. That's a muscle God has blessed you with that he has not blessed others with, but we can take it too far. And we can allow that to become what we serve. And we can allow control over the things in our life to become more important than the other things in our life and to become more important than Jesus himself. And here's what happens when we allow this sneaky idol to take hold in our lives. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful of the control we try to exert over them. I'll never forget, it's legendary in my group of buddies. I've got a good group of friends, eight guys, and we go on a trip about every other year. And one year we were in another city and one of my buddies named Dan just decided that he was the group mom on this trip. And I don't really know why he decided that, but he was bothering us the whole time. Don't do that. Don't go here. Where are you guys going? What are you guys talking about? Come over here. Be part of the group. Put your phone down. Let's go. Like just bossing us around the whole time. And we got mad at him. He spent the whole trip anxious. He didn't have as good a time as he could. And we, we spent the trip frustrated with Dan to the point where whenever he starts it now, we just call him mom and tell him to shut up. When we try to control everything in our life, we make ourselves anxious and we make the people around us resentful. We make ourselves anxious because we're trying to control everything. Everything's got to go according to plan. And now that we've structured this life, we have to protect this life with all the decisions that we're making and see all the threats, real and imagined, to this perfect order that we might have. And then the people around us grow to resent us because we're trying to exert unnecessary control over them as well. And it's really not a good path to be on. And the best example I can find in the Bible of someone who may have struggled with this idol of control and made herself anxious and everyone around her resentful is Sarah in the event with Hagar. Now, I'm going to read a portion of this, Genesis 16, 1 through 6, to kind of tell the story of Sarah and Hagar and Abraham. A couple bits of context. First of all, I know that at this point in the story, technically, her name is Sarai and his name is Abram, okay? For me, it feels like saying the nation Columbia with a Spanish accent all of a sudden after I've been talking in southern English for 30 minutes. So I'm not just going to break out into Hebrew. Okay, so they're going to be Sarah and Abraham, and you're going to bear that cross with me. And then what's happening in the story is in Genesis chapter 12, God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was in the Sumerian dynasty. He says, I want you to grab your family. I want you to move to this place I'm going to show you that became Canaan, the promised land in modern day Israel. And when he got there in Genesis 12, God made him three promises. He spoke to Abraham and he said, hey, this land is going to be your land and your descendants' land forever. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. He made those three promises to Abraham. Can I tell you, the rest of the Bible hinges on those promises. If we don't understand those promises, we can't understand the rest of Scripture. But all of those promises require a descendant to come true. Sarah and Abraham were getting on up there in age, maybe in their 80s. And Sarah had still not born Abraham a child. She was barren or he was impotent. And she begins to get concerned enough about this that she takes matters into her own hands. She arrests control away from God's sovereign plan. And this is what happens in Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 through 6. We're going to read it together. I don't see any problems so far. Okay, a little recap here. I, for one, am shocked that the story went that way. After she said, hey, here's what you should do. I have an Egyptian slave. You should sleep with her. She'll carry a baby, and then we'll raise that as our own child. I don't know what Abraham's moral compass was at this point in his story, what laws of God he had been equated with and not. I don't know how aware he was of the myriad egregious sins happening in this one instance. But this goes exactly how you'd think it would go. After a wife, likely much older than her slave, says, why don't you sleep with my slave and you all have a child together? And then what happens? She gets anxious. She gets resentful. She sees that Hagar is haughty towards her. And then she begins to resent Abraham, blames it on him. This is your fault. Excuse me. I'm sure it was your idea. And then runs Hagar off. By taking control in this situation, she made herself anxious about everyone around her, and she made everyone around her resentful of who she was. You can see it in Abram's response in verse 6. He says, listen, she's yours. You deal with it. Don't come to me with those problems. He's tired of dealing with it. And as I was thinking about the sin of Sarah, and as I was thinking about what it's like when we take control of our own life, when we kind of take the wheel from God and we say, I've got it from here, you can ride passenger, I'm going to be in control and orchestrate everything. That what we're really doing when we take control is this. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. We just get in the way. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. What did Sarah do? She got in his way. He had a story that he was writing with Isaac. He knew exactly when he would, God knew exactly when he was going to allow Abraham to make Sarah pregnant. He knew exactly how the rest of the story was going to go. Ishmael doesn't need to exist. That root of Ishmael doesn't need to exist. If Sarah would have just been patient and waited on God and his timing, if she had just been patient and waited on God to write the story that he intended, if she waited on his sovereignty and his will, but she got tired of waiting, she thought it should be happening differently than this, so she took control. And as a result of that control, we have this split in the line of Abraham that has echoed down through the centuries that we're still dealing with today, over which we are still warring right now in Abraham's promised land because Sarah took control when she wasn't supposed to. She got in the way of the story that God was wanting to write. And the more I thought about that, what it's like to be getting in God's way when he's trying to direct our life the way he wants it to go, I thought about this. Now, you can raise your hand for this one. Who in here loves themselves a good cooking show? I love a good cooking show. Just me and Jeff and Karen. Perfect. Nobody else likes cooking shows. You're liars. I love a good cooking show. At our house, the things that are on the TV are house hunters, cooking shows, and sports. That's it. By the way, my three-year-old son, John, calls all sports golf. Yesterday I was watching soccer, and he said, Daddy, you watch golf. And in our house, we have a rule. When a kid is making a dumb mistake like that, we do not correct them because it's adorable, and we want them to do it as long as possible. Like the days gone by when, to Lily, anything that had occurred before today was last-her-day. Could have been last year. Could have been last week. Could have been a couple hours ago. It happened last-her-day, and it was great. At some point, she figured it out, and now we don't like her as much. But I love a good cooking show. And my favorite chef, no one will be surprised by this if you know me, is Gordon Ramsay. I really like Gordon Ramsay. I like watching him cook. I like watching him interact. I think he's really great. And so I watch most of what he puts out. And I was thinking about this, getting in God's way. And I think this fits. Let's pretend that at an auction, at a charity auction from Ubuntu, which would be a great prize, I won a night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. First of all, I was given a significant raise. Second of all, I've spent it all on this night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. And the night comes around. I'm so excited. I would be thrilled to do this. It would really, really be fun. I do like to cook. And so let's say that night finally rolls around and I go to his kitchen and I walk in and all the ingredients are out on the counter. And he hasn't told me what he's going to make, but all the ingredients are there. And what I don't know is he's planning to make a beef Wellington. That's one of his signature dishes. I've only had one beef Wellington in my life. I loved it. I would kill to have one that was cooked by him for me. That would be amazing. But the deal is, I look at the ingredients and he's going to teach me how to do it. So he's going to walk me through it step by step. First, you want to sear the loin. Get that, get the skillet nice and hot, sear it. Then you rub the mustard on it. Now dice up some mushrooms. And I don't know where we're going or what we're doing. I'm just following him step by step doing what I'm supposed to do. And his goal is to show me how to make a beef wellington that we've done together. Great. Except stupid me sees the ingredients, sees the steak, sees some green beans, and I go, you know what, Gordon? Actually, I've got this. It's your night to cook with Nate. What I'd like you to do is just go sit behind the bar on the other side. Let's just chat it up. I'd like to hear some of your stories. I'm going to make you steak and green beans. And I take those ingredients, and I get in his way, and I go make overdone steak with soggy green beans, and I slide it across the table to him. Having no idea what I just missed out on. Because I insisted on taking control and making what I thought I should make with those ingredients. I think that when we insist on turning all the dials in our life ourselves, taking control of every aspect of our life. That what we do is very similar to being in the kitchen with a master chef and telling him we've got this. We see the ingredients available to us and we make the thing we think we're supposed to make. Having no idea that he had so much better plans for those ingredients than what we turned out. And as I was talking about this sermon and this idea with my wife, Jen, who has a different relationship with this source idol than I do, she pointed out to me, she said, you know what they're trying to make? If your idol is peace, you're trying to make in that kitchen or if your idol is control. She said, we're trying to make peace. People with the idol of control, you know what they're trying to do with that control? They're trying to create a peace for themselves. They're trying to create rest for themselves. If this is your surface, if this is your source idol, and you try to control every aspect of your life, chances are that what's really motivating you to do that is a desire for peace in all the areas of your life. It's why your spirit can't feel at rest until your bed is made. And this is true. Why did I think of the things that I wanted to say to the counselor? Because I didn't want to get sidetracked. I didn't want to get surprised. I wanted to walk into that office with peace. Why do we prepare ourselves for the situations that we're going to face? Because we want to be peaceful in the midst of those situations. Why do we prepare for the week and get the Sunday scaries? Because we want to enter the week feeling at peace, feeling ready to go, feeling that we are in a place of rest and not a place of hurry. But here's the problem with the peace that we create with our control. It's fragile. It's threatened. It's uncertain. It's always at risk. We can do everything we can to create peace in our life with the way that we control every aspect of it. But the reality is we are one phone call away. We are one bad night away. We are one accident in the driveway away. One bad business decision. Two bad weeks of just being in a bad spot away from ruining all that peace. There are so many things that happen in life that are outside of our control that any peace that we have created for ourself is only ever infinitesimally small and thin and fragile. And when we live a life, even achieving peace, but when we live that life of a threatened peace so that now we have peace, we've done it, we've orchestrated, we've controlled, we have what we want, everything is ordered as it should be. Things are going well. Then where does our worrying mind go to? All the things that could possibly happen to disturb this peace. All of the threats real and imagined to my peaceful Monday. And then here's what we do. I know that we do it. I've seen it happen. Then we pick a hypothetical event that could possibly happen three months from now to threaten the peace that I've created, and we decide to stress about that today. And it's not even happened yet. But we're already jumping ahead because our anxiety monster needs something to eat. And I am reminded with this idea of a threatened and a fragile peace of the verse we looked at in our series, The Treasury of Isaiah, Isaiah 26.3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Isaiah says, and God promises, that he will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. And so what's our part in that peace? It's trusting in Jesus and not ourselves. And it occurs to me, I'm not saying this for sure, because it could just be poor planning, but I kind of believe in the Holy Spirit and the way that he times things out. I've seen over and over and over again how we've had a sermon planned for eight months, and I'll preach that sermon on that day, and someone will say, this is my first time at Grace. I'm so glad I heard that sermon. That's exactly what I needed. It's the Holy Spirit. I know that we just visited this verse. And I know that we just talked a couple weeks ago about a fragile peace. But maybe we're doing it again because some of us just need to hear it twice. Maybe some of us in this room need to hear this again and let the Holy Spirit talk to us again and be honest with God about what we're holding dear to our heart and what we may be idolizing without having realized it. Because what God promises us is a perfect peace. You know what perfect peace is? Perfect peace is an unthreatened peace. Here's what perfect peace is. Jen's family used to have a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And my favorite thing to do when I would go down there was to kind of separate from everybody, big surprise, and go and lay in the hammock right next to the lake. Because when I got in that hammock, and I could hear the occasional boat putter by several hundred yards away, and I could hear the waves slowly just kind of lapping against the wood at the edge of that lake, and I could hear the birds and the sound of the lake, that was all I could hear. It drowned out everything else. It never seemed to matter what was happening in life when I laid down in that hammock. Everything was at peace and everything was okay. When we trust in God's sovereignty and in God's peace instead of our own, it's like laying down in that hammock next to the lake. Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. God is in control. He knew this would happen, and I trust in him. I don't know what story he's writing. I don't know where he's going. This is not what I would have made with these ingredients, but I know that he wants what's best for me, and he wants what's best for the people that I love, so I trust him with the results of this. It's laying in that hammock and trusting in the sovereignty of God. Perfect peace is trusting in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness, in the truth that we know that he always, always, always wants what's best for us. And that he will bring that about in this life or the next. And we can trust in that. So, here's what I would say to you. My brothers and sisters who may struggle with control. I'm not here this morning to make you feel bad for your worry or your anxiety or to make fun of you for your Sunday scaries. I think all of those things are natural and a normal part of human life. It would be weird if you never worried about anything. I think it's a good goal to grow towards. But I'm not here to make you feel badly about that. But here's what I would say. If you're a person who's given to worry and anxiety and seeks to exert control, and when you don't have it, it starts to freak you out a little bit, that doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like laying in the hammock next to the lake trusting in God's protected peace rather than trusting in your fragile, unprotected, risky peace. You see? And so what I would encourage you to do is to see things this way. Excessive worry is a warning light. Excessive worry on the dashboard of your life is a warning light that should cause you to wonder what's really going on and what you're really worried about. A few weeks ago, I talked about those of us with the issue of power being a source idol and how that begets anger, and I said the same thing. Anger is the flashing warning light for us. When I'm having days when I'm excessively angry or frustrated all the time, I need to stop and pause and go, what is the source of this, and why am I so upset, and why do I have a hair trigger? What's going on with me? And wrestle that to the ground. For my brothers and sisters who who struggle with control maybe more than you realize before you walk in the door excessive worry and I don't know what excessive worry is I can't define that for you that's that's between you and God to decide how much is too much but here's what I do know excessive worry is a warning light and here's. And here's what it's telling you. It's telling you I am not existing in perfect peace. And what's our part of perfect peace? To keep our mind steadfast by trusting in him. So somewhere along the way, we've started trusting in ourself a little bit more to grab those ingredients and make what we want. Somewhere along the way, we've started taking control back from God, trusting in our sovereignty, not his, and beginning to create our own peace that is fragile and stressful. And so the question to ask yourself when that warning light starts to go off is simply this, whose peace am I trusting? I don't know what to tell you to do. Because I'll be honest with you. Like I said, I talked this sermon through with Jen. And she kind of said, yeah, all that's true. Okay, I get it. I agree. All true. What do I do? How do we not do those things? How do we not worry more than we should? What are my action steps? And I said, well, what advice would you give to so-and-so? She goes, I don't know. You're the pastor, so I'm asking you. Here's what I would simply go back to, is this question of whose peace am I trusting? Am I trusting in the peace that I've created? Or are my eyes focused on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, so that my mind is steadfast in him and I'm trusting in his peace? Whose peace are you trusting? My prayer for you is that you'll experience the rest of trusting in God's peace. And as I enter into prayer for you, there's a prayer that I found in a devotional that I have from the Common Book of Prayer from 1552. It's amazing to me how timeless the truths of faith and spirituality and Christianity are. And how this could be written today and still every bit as accurate. But I'm going to read this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. And then we're going to enter into a time of prayer together and then we'll worship. Oh God, from you all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works proceed. Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our heart may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Father, we love you. And we thank you that through your Son, we can have perfect peace. God, we are sorry for not claiming this gift that you offer us more readily. God, we are sorry for grabbing the ingredients and trying to make our own peace and write our own story. God, we are sorry that we sometimes trust in our wisdom and our sovereignty more than yours. Lord, I pray that no matter where we sit with this idol or how we might wrestle with it, that we would leave this place more desirous of you than when we came. And God, for my brothers and sisters that do struggle, that do find it difficult to give up control, that do find themselves battling that demon of worry sometimes, God, would you just speak to them? Would you let them know that you're there, that you love them, That you have a plan for them that they don't see but that they can trust? And would you give us the obedience to just do the next thing that you're asking us to do, not worrying about what the result is going to be, but worrying about just walking in lockstep with you? Father, make us a people of peace so that we might give that peace to others and that they might know you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. You guys have packed it out. I thought for a second that you guys were excited about church in June, which is wonderful. But what I've realized is inflation has hit all of us. We're too poor for vacations. So it's going to be a great summer for church. Before I get started, as one of the pastors, I get the opportunity to meet with folks who are new to the church sometimes. And this week I had the opportunity to grab brunch with a couple that's been visiting for a couple of weeks. And they shared with me that on their very first, they were going to look at a bunch of churches, but on their very first visit with Grace, that they struck up a conversation with another couple in the lobby that approached them. And that conversation went so well that they just invited them to lunch. So on their very first visit at Grace, they got invited to lunch and made friends. And I thought that was fantastic. So just sharing that with you, let's be that kind of church, Grace. Now there's a couple of people here for the first time and they're like, but don't, don't be that kind this week. All right. We don't, we would like to go to our own lunch. I'm sure it makes sense in the conversation, but when good things happen, I like to share them with you guys. Last week, we launched into this series called Idols and we looked at kind of how much more given to idolatry in our life we are than we might think we are or might have thought we were. And we talked about this idea that idols can't bear the weight of our worship. And I spent a lot of time saying we shouldn't idolize our children, our families, our spouses, and our communities, different things like that. And I just want to be clear. I meant to say this last week and I didn't say it and I should have. I just forgot. Those are good priorities. It's good to prioritize family and spouse and marriage and even career. That's fine to do that. But they make terrible gods because they can't carry the weight of our worship. And then at the end, I kind of told you what the rest of the series was going to be about. I had somebody tell me before the service started this morning, she was like, I caught up online. I was serving in children's last week and you got to the end about the four source idols, the four invisible idols. And once I listened to that, I did not want to hear the rest of the series. It's like, I was tracking with you on the other ones. Those are fine. I got those in check. And then I talked about the four source idols of power, control, approval, and comfort. And she was like, no thanks. Don't need to hear that. It's going to be too convicting. But it's this idea that there are surface idols. We idolize money. We idolize success. We idolize friends. We idolize whatever. But that idolizing is fueled by a source idol of one of those four things I just mentioned. So we're going to spend the next four weeks, including this week, looking at those different source idols, how they show up in our lives, and what we can do to invite the Holy Spirit into our life to make some space to root those idols out. Five or six years ago, I went with Jen, my wife, to Washington, D.C. with some friends of ours, Heath and Ashley. They flew into Raleigh, and then we drove up together. It was a really great trip. We stayed in an Airbnb. The first night we were there, we looked out the window, and there's this little bar-pub situation going on across the street. And so we said, let's just go over there. It'll be simple. It looks fine. So we walk over there. It was crowded. There was a little bit of a wait. And so I find one of the servers, and I say, hey, how long is the wait, and can we put our name in? And he says, oh, no, we don't do that. It's just first come, first serve. I said, like, free for all? Just, like, grab a table when someone gets up? And he goes, yep. All right. And I found out later it was trivia night. So it was a busy night. So we're kind of standing there waiting for something to pop open. And I excuse myself. I'm going to walk back to the restaurant. I'm going to go use the restroom. In the restroom. Not just in the back of the restaurant. So I'm going'm walking through and I look over and there's this high top table party of three and they're starting to get up there's four seats at the table I'm like perfect so I say are you guys about to get up and they go yeah and I said I'm running to the restroom would you mind waiting when I come back y'all get up we'll take your table and they go that's fine so that's what I did I come back and they see me and they start to get up. As they start to get up, I can see two dudes from either corner of the bar start to center in on this table. Right. So as that guy's, as the dad is getting up, I'm like, thanks very much. And I'll just kind of sit down like there's stuff still on it. They're putting on their jackets. They get their stuff. They move. These two dudes come to my table. And one of them, right off the bat, aggressively says, you can't sit there. That's not your table. That's our table. And I didn't like that. I didn't like that. And so I looked at him, and I said, that's funny, because it looks looks like my table because I'm sitting here. And he said, we've been here. I've watched you walk in. We've been here 30 minutes longer than you waiting for a table. This was the next table up. The right thing to do is to get up and give us this table. So get up. And I said, I don't think so, man. And I'm kind of motioning at my party to come sit down like for in a million years Jen's walking into that situation because I'm trying to tough guy this thing these two dudes are way bigger than me if this goes down it's not going to go well for me and then as I'm doing that they're still giving me lip then the server comes over and he starts clearing off the table. And the guy that was being aggressive says, hey, tell this, words I can't say in church. He said, tell this guy that this is our table. He needs to get up. And the guy said, I don't really get involved with that. Just kind of backs away. He was like, you boys got to figure this out. So he keeps at me. And I said, listen, man, I can acknowledge that you were here before me. I can acknowledge that you probably deserve this table more than I do. And I'll be happy to give it to you if you ask me nicely and say, please. And he said, excuse me and threatened me one more time. And I said, all you got to do is be a nice guy and say, please, and I'll give you this table. And finally, his buddy goes, dude, just say please. And he goes, he goes, all right, would you, would you mind giving us this table, please? And I said, sure, that'd be great. Here you go. Happy to give it to you. Walked off. Jen's shaking her head. Now, now listen, if you listen to that story and your internal monologue was, God, I don't really know if that's how a pastor should be acting. That's kind of, probably should have just had the grace in the moment to get over being slightly offended and let that person have the seat and maybe, you know, like be a grown up. If that's your internal monologue, that there was a better way to handle that, you're right. There was. And I agree with you. I do think, I can admit that story is funny. I am not proud of it. I wished I would have handled it differently. I do not think anyone is listening to that thinking, and through Nate would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ in that particular instance. If you listen to that story and you loved it, and you were like, yeah, tell them, don't move, make them say please, make them pay you for the table. If you're thinking about what you would have done in that situation and you would have been equally upset, you need to pay attention this morning as we explore the idol of power in our lives. This idol of power, I told you last week I had to admit that it was mine. I didn't want to admit it. Because it sounds like you want to be in charge of everything all the time. And that's really not what it is. That's part of what it is. But what it's really about is we just don't want to be told what to do. Just don't tell me what to do. If you know anything about me, you know I do not want to be told what to do. Karen Lotta got me a mug. I drink out of it at least once a week that says, I was going to do that. And then you told me to. All right. If that's you, then like me, you struggle with the idolatry of power, of being in charge, of being the guy, of being respected. It doesn't mean you have to be the boss everywhere you go, but there's certain pockets in certain places where you're just not going to put up with it. And here's how you can really tell if power is the idol with which you struggle deeply. The manifesting sin of power is anger. The manifesting sin of power is being angry, is having these flashes of anger that cause you to do and say things that you wish you could take back. I acted that way in that restaurant in D.C. because I was made angry, because he had the guts to tell me what to do. And until he acknowledged who had the power, I was not going to back down. It was immature and gross, but that's what was happening there. The besetting sin of power is to be someone who is angry whenever that power and that license and that freedom is threatened. And anger, we know, is a terrible thing to have festering in our lives. If you are someone who struggles like I do with being more angry than we should be sometimes, then you know experientially and intuitively that what James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16, is true. When James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16 is true. When James says, my dear brothers and sisters, take note of this. Everyone, oh 19, everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. And then in the next verse, he tells you why. Because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Now listen, most of you in this room, because I know you, I know that you've been Christians for a while. And so a lot of the big sins, the big stuff that we shouldn't do, you've got that in check, and that's good. But for some of you in the room, maybe even most of us, if I were to ask you, what moments in the last month or two do you wish you could get back? What moments in the last year or two or decade do you wish you could have back and redo them and get again and do them right? If I were to ask you that question and you go to those moments that you wish you had back, I'd be willing to bet that for most of us, what flashed in those moments was anger that we didn't handle well. For most of us, what happened in that was we became angry and then we acted out in a way that we wish we could go take back and have a more level head about. I know that that's the case for me. And see, here's the thing about anger, and this is why we're told to avoid it at all costs. Because unchecked anger will unravel your life. Unchecked anger that you are not dealing with. Listen to me, if you are a person who is prone to anger, who just snaps, and you'll snap at your kids, you'll snap at your co- coworkers, you'll snap at your spouse, you'll snap at the guy driving down the road, and you'll stop singing a praise song to cuss at that person. If that's you, you deal with anger. And I know because I am one, and I have to keep a check on this. But let me tell you something. If you deal with anger in your life, unchecked anger that we don't allow the Holy Spirit to root out of our life will absolutely cause our lives to unravel. How many of us know a dude, it's almost always a dude, who has a power idol that manifests itself in anger? And because that anger is always brimming under the surface, his kids have distanced themselves from him. His wife has distanced herself from him. His coworkers or his employees do not trust him. And sometimes that unravels into alcoholism to mitigate the anger. Sometimes that unravels into divorce or separation. How many of us can tell a story of a life that unraveled because there was unchecked anger there? So if this is us, if this is our besetting sin, we need to listen and pay attention. I think there is no better example of an angry life unraveling in Scripture than that of King Saul. So if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to open to 1 Samuel 18. We're going to be in 1 Samuel 18, 19, 22, and 28. We're going to hit some highlights here. So if you have a Bible, be flipping with me so as I give a little bit of context, you can see that context as well. If you're a note taker, there is a point in your notes before the verses start. I'm just going to move that point down below the verses. So we'll get to it. We'll jump back and fill that out. Don't freak out. But let's look at the life of Saul. Now Saul is one of the most tragic figures in the Bible, I think. Because Saul was the first king of Israel. He was anointed by God through the prophet Samuel. And he had the whole world at his feet. If you really think about it, it should be the star of Saul flying over Israel now. It's not. It's David. It could have been the throne of Saul that Jesus would ascend to. It's not. It's David's. Because Saul's life unraveled. And I would contend with you that it unraveled because of anger produced by his idolizing power. So we pick up the story in chapter 18. Chapter 17 is David slaying Goliath. Then the story kind of picks up and people have started to really like David. He's coming to national prominence. And Saul one day hears this song. Saul has slayed his thousands. David has slayed his tens of thousands. It's always a joke. I'm sure in Hebrew it flows better than that. But that was the song. And this really angered Saul. And here's his reaction and he hurled it saying to himself I'll pin David to the wall, but David eluded him twice Saul was afraid of David. What else could he take but my kingdom? This is my kingdom. This is my identity. I'm in charge here. That's disrespectful to me. This is mine, mine, mine. David is not going to come tell me what to do in my kingdom. I will not give up this rule. I have to protect my power. You see? And so he tries in a fit of rage to kill David. Doesn't work. David eludes him twice. And then he does what kings have done for millennia. He kind of exiles him for a period of time. Leaders of countries have been doing this for centuries. Someone upsets them. Someone in their court is causing too much trouble or noise. You're now the ambassador of Croatia. Go have fun. Get away from court. You're now going to lead these troops in this far-flung territory where we will forget about you. Go. And so his anger caused him to exile David to remove the problem. Well, the problem was David kept having success. And so we see the next highlight in chapter 19, verses 9 and 10. Saul has decided by now he's going to kill David. Jonathan, Saul's son, the heir apparent, is very good friends with David and talks Saul out of trying to kill David. David's a good man, don't kill him. And Saul says, I promise that I won't. But then this happens in verse 9 when David comes back. But an evil spirit from the Lord 20, you see that Saul becomes determined to kill David. Now it's a cold-blooded plot to kill him. It's not in the heat of the moment. It's not just, I'm so mad right now. It's no, no, no. I am going to end this threat to my reign and to my power. And so he begins to pursue David through the wilderness. In chapter 20, what we see is that Jonathan and David have worked out this scheme where Jonathan's going to give David an indication, you have to flee. My father is dead set on killing you. And so David flees and he goes. And in this fleeing, Saul spends the rest of his adult life pursuing David. We're talking about a 10, 15, 20 year period of time where Saul's rage and anger is fueling his life. He is on a singular quest to kill David. It's like one of those dumb movies with Liam Neeson where something bad happens to his family, and the rest of the movie is just rage-filled revenge. He said, this is bad and actually happened. So he's chasing David all through the countryside. And at one point, David goes into this temple, and the priest at the temple helps David and his men, feeds him with the bread that was supposed to be given to God, but it was okay in that instance. I won't get into why. And then he gives David Goliath's sword, and they move on. Well, Saul is hot on the trail of David, and he goes in there, and he finds out that this priest has been helping him. And you can imagine how he responds in chapter 22 verses 16 and 17. But the king said, you will surely die Ahimelech, you and your whole family. Ahimelech was the head priest in this particular temple. Then the king ordered the guards at his side, turn and kill the priests of the Lord because they too have sided with David. They knew he was fleeing, yet they did not tell me. If you keep reading, what you see is that the king's officials didn't want to have anything to do with that. They did not want to kill these defenseless priests. So Saul turns to someone who would, apparently, Doeg the Edomite. If you're pregnant, you're looking for a boy name, Doeg. Great. Doeg, I don't know, kills in cold blood 85 priests at the word and the bidding of Saul. His rage has now spilled over where he's killing 85 innocent men because they sided with his enemy. And we can see his life spiraling towards unraveling. And then in 28, we have one of the most curious conversations in scripture where Saul goes to see the witch of Endor, a medium, and somehow or another has a conversation with the soul of Samuel. Now, what I'd like to do is spend the next 12 minutes explaining to you exactly what happened and that I understand it. I'm kidding. I have no idea. I don't understand this chapter. I don't know how we talk to mediums and how he's talking to the soul of Samuel. But this is what happens. And's this powerful king. He goes to see a witch, and he's laying prostrate on the ground with nothing left in him, so much so that his men worry about him and have to carry him out. The next day, he dies on the battlefield along with his sons, just like Samuel said he would. It is a picture of a life completely unraveled because he allowed his anger to exist in him unchecked. And what I want you to see from the story of Saul that we can relate to is when power is our idol. Being the king of our kingdom becomes our identity. When power is our idol, when you will respect my authority, you will respect who I am, you will not tell me what to do. When power is our idol, we take on the identity as the king of our small kingdom or the queen of our small kingdom. And so when someone comes into your workplace and they threaten your expertise, they question you. They think you don't know what you're doing. No, no, this is my kingdom, and now we're mad because you're threatening me. When someone's hired and you think they're going to take your position, and so you become adversarial with them, that's you being the king of your kingdom. If you run a business, you have employees, and one of them gets out of line with you and you take personal offense at that. It could be you just being angry because you're the king of your own kingdom. And we see and saw what he was really mad about was David was threatening his identity. He was threatening who he thought he was. And when you have a power idol, when people question you in your kingdom, that really makes you mad. Let me tell you how I know this is true. This has been something for me and parenthood that's become so important. So parents, if you're in the thick of it right now, if you have children in your home, I'm speaking specifically to you. I would like to share with you something I've learned about my anger and frustration towards my children. There are times when your children say disrespectful things to you. Things that you don't deserve. They say things in anger. They flash hot. They lash out. They disrespect. In southern terms, they show their tail. And let me just tell you, when my kids get mouthy with me and start saying stuff that I would never say to my parents, I get real hot, real fast. I start to do the, hey, uh-uh. You will not talk to me that way in my house. What does that even mean? In my house. Oh, tough guy. It's the banks, dude. For like 27 more years. To come off it. But I flash hot. And I get mad. And I put them back in line. And I think back to my childhood. Because in our house, we don't spank. Maybe I'll regret that choice. But we don't do that. We just try to go about things in other ways. But growing up, they did not share that policy. And if I said some of the stuff that my kids say to me, to my dad, my tail would have been worn out. My dad was the, he was, he perfected the slap and grab in the four seat car. The no look, slap and grab right on my thigh, slap it, squeeze it as hard as you could. I'm writhing in pain. And you know what I did? I shut up, is what I did. It's masterful. But here's what I would ask you, parents. When your kid says something disrespectful to you, bosses, when your employees say something disrespectful to you, and you get hot, you get angry. What's fueling that anger? Is what's fueling that, because for me, when Lily says something to me that she shouldn't say, and I get hot, I'm not angry because, oh, baby girl, I just want you to grow up to be better than that and manage your emotions, and I've told you this so many times, and I really want to help you manage your big emotions. I know you have big feelings, but you've got to learn to manage those. And it's fueling my anger because I'm just so frustrated with watching you trip over yourself like this and you don't have to do that anymore and there's a better way. Is that what's fueling my anger? No. What's fueling my anger is you better get right because I'm the boss here. You're not. My voice is louder than yours. You want to find out? I'll make it. Parents, how hypocritical is it of us to yell at our children for not managing their emotions well? What the heck are you doing? You verbal bully. That's what I do. When anger flashes like that, it's really helpful to stop and go, where is this coming from? Am I angry because I want them to do better or am I angry because I've been disrespected in my kingdom? And if it's the second, grow up. Get over it. Give grace. Let them have the table. When you're an employer and an employee says something to you that you don't care for, are you upset because they had the audacity to question your authority at work? Probably so. And that's not good. That's us protecting our kingdom. When your spouse asks you a question and you flash hot at them, a lot of times it's because they're questioning us and we don't care for it in our kingdom. And so if that's you, if this is something that you struggle with, if anger is a part of who you are, what do we do? How do we allow the Holy Spirit to begin to remove this idol of power in our life? I think it's as we can't just say, hey, just stop being mad. That's not going to help. So what do we need to do? How do we think about things? I think we think about it like this. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. You don't have to be the king of any kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of the kingdom. Just acknowledge it's not yours anyways. You don't have one, and you're never dead. And when you die, poof, it's gone. His kingdom exists for all eternity. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom and you gleefully serve Jesus. You humbly serve Jesus. Can you imagine? Imagine the different story that is written with Saul's life if he simply would have done that. Let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. And understood, Israel's not mine. It doesn't belong to me. It didn't belong to me when I was born. It will not belong to me when I die. And if Jesus wants to give his kingdom over to another person, fine. It's his. I'm here to serve. And what's remarkable about that is that was the attitude of his son. There's a part in the narrative where Saul says, don't you know he's going to take the kingdom from you? And Jonathan's essentially like, I think that's great. David's a great guy. He's going to make a good king. That's awesome. Can you imagine how much different the story is that is written with the life of Saul if he simply would have let Jesus be the king of Jesus' kingdom. Moms and dads, especially dads, you're not the kings of your house. Jesus is. Let him be the king of it. Your authority doesn't need to go unquestioned all the time. It's not your job to keep everybody in line. It's your job to point everybody to Christ. And when we respond, dads, in anger that's unwarranted, then the only way that's left to point our children to Christ after that is to go humbly apologize for not pointing them to Christ in the first place. Try to do better the next time. Bosses. Where you work, your department, your company, that's not your kingdom. That's Jesus's. You let him worry about that stuff. You're his servant there. If we would simply let Jesus be the king of his own kingdom and acknowledge that it's not ours, how much different will you handle the disrespect of your children? How much differently, how much more grace will you give your spouse? How much more grace will you give your coworkers, your employees, your boss, if you'll just acknowledge this isn't mine anyways? I think if we can bring ourselves back to this thought, just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. That we can allow the Holy Spirit to begin to slowly chip away and show us where we hold these idols of power in our life that are manifesting themselves in unchecked anger. So I would encourage my angry brothers and sisters, the ones of you who really liked that opening story, let anger be a warning light that flashes in your life. And when it happens, take a step back and ask yourself, am I angry because Jesus' kingdom has been threatened or am I angry because mine has? And then remind yourself, I just need to let Jesus sit on his own throne and I'm gleefully here to serve him. Let's pray. Father, give us open eyes, minds, and hearts. Let us see how these different idols and really sources of sin work their way into and manifest themselves in our lives. Help us see ourselves as you see us, as broken, sinful, but yet loved and clothed in your righteousness and value. Help us understand, God, that our power is pretty useless when we don't have a kingdom we're worried about protecting. And God, remind us as we go through our days and our weeks and our months that all we need to do instead of trying to protect our kingdom and our identity is to find our identity in you and to simply let you sit on your own throne. God, I pray that we would do that and I pray that for those of us who are prone to become angry, God, I pray that we would know that, we would acknowledge that, we would take steps to keep that in check so that you might bring about in us the righteous life that you do desire. In Jesus' name, amen.