Sermons tagged with Suffering

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you have a Bible with you, go ahead and open it up and turn it to Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. We have been spending the month of January in this prayer, this prayer that Paul prays over the church in Ephesus. And I've mentioned that he prays similar prayers over the other churches that he helped to start or founded, and then ministers to through letters and through visits as he continues his life. So this prayer is indicative of what I believe Paul prays for all of his churches. We've got a lot of work to do today. This Sunday we arrive at this two-fold petition at the end that we would know the love of Christ and that we would be filled with the fullness of God. And it's pretty much the whole point of the series. Today is what I think about when I think about this prayer. So my prayer today is that God would give me clarity of thought with what to share and how to say it, because this represents for me like four or five years of thought that I really want you guys to get today. So let's get going as we finish up this prayer. I'm going to read one more time with feeling the whole prayer all the way through, and then we'll focus on verses 18 and 19 and really kind of dig into Paul's request and what he's asking for and what it means. Verse 14, And so we arrive at the climactic request, the climatic petition of the prayer where we see here in verse 18 that he's saying, because you're saved, first of all, the very first thing he prays in verse 14 and 15 is that you would be saved through God's goodness, through the power of the Holy Spirit, that Christ would indwell in your hearts through faith. That's that you would be saved, that you would be a Christian, that you would know Jesus. Now that you know Jesus, you're rooted in his love. We talked about those deep roots and how important that is to anchor our faith. We talked about how the communal nature of our faith along with all the saints, but now that he's established those things, he punches. He gets to the thing that he's really asking, and what he's really asking is this twofold petition that you would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and that you would be filled with the fullness of God. That's what he's praying for in this prayer. That's what he prays over them. That's what he prays over you. So this morning, we have to wrestle to the ground what it means to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and to be filled with the fullness of God. We have to talk about what that means, which is a really difficult task. When I'm studying, and I'm in particular studying a verse, I really want to understand a verse. One of the places I'll go is a series that a pastor from Minnesota named John Piper does online. He's retired now, but I think he still does some of these. There's a ton out there. I think it's called, and I should have done my research on this, but I think it's called A Look in the Book. And it's just, it's a black screen with a verse on it, and he's not in the video. It's just his voice in the video, and he just explains the verses to you. He's circling this and drawing lines over here and making notes at the bottom and references to other things. If you are one who enjoys Bible study, if you want help in understanding different passages, Google John Piper, a look at the book, and there's so many verses that he walks through. It's such a helpful resource. That may be the most helpful thing I say to you this morning. The rest of this may be garbage, but hopefully not. But I went and I was, and I was, he did, he does a series, like a 10-part series on these verses. And so I was watching the one where he explains the knowledge that surpasses understanding and the fullness of God because I wanted to see what he had to say about it. He's one of the most theologically deep and professorial pastors I've encountered in my life. And so I wanted to know what he thought. And he made a great point that we're going to make up front here. This is him from that video. He says, the phrasing itself, talking about the verse, admits that we are over our heads in attempting to rationally understand these things. If in the verse, Paul says that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge, and then it's kind of this nebulous, wispy phrase filled with the fullness of God. What does that mean? It's intentionally nebulous. It's intentionally difficult to grasp because it's bigger than we can comprehend. We cannot rationally understand these things, but rather we must experientially understand God and Christ if we are going to understand what Paul is talking about here. And so that's the first thing I would point out to you if we're going to say, what is the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge? What is that? Well, I think the best way to approach it is to say this, a true knowledge of Christ comes from experiencing him, not simply learning about him. A true knowledge of Christ comes from experiencing him, not simply learning about him. I think about it this way. I don't want to brag, but I've been in the ocean a few times. I've been in the Atlantic and in the Gulf. I've been in the Pacific. I've seen where the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean meet off the southern coast of South Africa, which I'm just bragging there. But I have seen it. I've swam in the ocean. When I was a kid, my grandpa lived in Florida. He had a sailboat, and they lived off the intercoastal, and so we would go up and down the intercoastal and look at Christmas lights and stuff, and one time, we went out in the ocean, sails up and everything. I got horrifically seasick and realized I'm a sissy, and that's just my life. I just have to deal with that. So no more sailboating for me. But I've been around the ocean, not as much as some of y'all. Some of y'all have beach houses, you love the water, you've got a boat, you're out there. You'll never find a Salt Life sticker on any car that I own. But I have been there, and I do like it. However, I don't know anything about the ocean compared to a sailor. I don't know anything about the ocean compared to a fisherman who does it professionally. Those guys with the thousand-yard stare, and you look at them, and you're like, those eyes have seen some things. They have some tales to tell about the sea. I don't know the ocean like they know the ocean. They've lived in it. They've experienced it, the good and the bad and the ugly. They know it. We can read about it. We can learn about it. You can learn facts. We can Google pictures. We can look at it from the beach. But until you've lived in it like they've lived in it, you'll never understand the ocean like they understand the ocean either. Jesus works the same way. When we walk with Jesus, we abide with him. When we pursue him day in and day out, we have a lifetime of walking with him. We know him in a way that you can't get to know him by simply listening to sermons or simply reading about him. We should do those things. But those things are introductory things. As we grow to know who Christ is with a knowledge that surpasses understanding, it's an experiential knowledge. These people we know who have been walking with Christ for decades and just seem to have a peace that we don't have. Those people have walked with Jesus. They know him in the way that Paul is describing here. So the question then becomes, if we know Christ through experiencing him, then we have to ask, and I hope you're already asking it in your heads, how do we experience Christ? How do I do that? How do I allow Jesus to show up in my life? I think we experience Christ by this. We experience Christ by taking steps of faith that allow him to show up in our lives. We experience Christ by taking steps of faith that give him the opportunity to show up in our life. I think of a trip I took to Honduras somewhere around 2010. I was a school teacher at the time, a high school Bible teacher and a chaplain. Those were some very lucky kids. And I took the senior class to Honduras. And while we were there, one night, one of my students, this girl named Allison, a really sharp, bright girl, wonderful parents, she kind of came to me and she said, I'm just, I'm really struggling with my faith. And I said, okay. And she said, I just, I'm having a hard time believing in Jesus sometimes. I just, I just kind of feel unsure. I don't want to let anybody down, but I just have some doubts and some struggles. And first of all, that's a wonderful conversation. I think every Christian needs to have that conversation at some point, probably multiple times throughout your life. That's a healthy thing to want to work through. And so we talked about it a little bit, and I said, Allison, I know that this is going to sound funny, but tomorrow we're going to go to this village and we're going to give rice out to the women of the village. And they really need it. So they're going to be really excited to get it. And I'm not going to position you inside the truck where you're grabbing the rice and you're handing it to another student and they're working it down the line. I'm going to put you at the end of the truck handing it out to the ladies. Because Jesus says that whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. And I just kind of believe that if you look those ladies in the eye that Jesus will meet you there. I believe you'll see him as you do his work. And she said, okay. Okay, I'll try it. So that morning, I prayed for her that she would encounter Christ in the service that afternoon. And sure enough, the next night, she came back to me with tears in her eyes, and she said, I saw Jesus. I saw him. I can't explain it. I still have questions, but I believe he's real. Thanks. She made space for him to show up in her life. She said, hey, I need you here. I need to see you today. I need to encounter you today. She made space. She took a step of faith, and he showed up. I can't tell you how many times I've thought, I've had like a nagging sin or a nagging attitude, something that was in my life that I know didn't need to be in my life, but it didn't feel like a big deal. And I got kind of comfortable with it. It was kind of like John every day, my son John, he's two and a half. Every day he grabs a different toy and that's his toy for the day. He's just, there's no favorites. It rotates. It's totally unpredictable what it's going to be. Today it's a puzzle piece of zebra. That's what it is. Great. Tomorrow it'll be something totally different. It'll probably belong to Lily and cause a fight in our house for the entire day. Sometimes we have sins like that that we just kind of carry around. They're just our little pet sin. Not that big of a deal. I'm going to pick a different one, whatever it is. We'll have that. And we don't even want to get rid of it. But I can't tell you how many times I've prayed, God, would you work in me to want to not want to do this? Would you work in me to want to repent of this and get it away from me? And how almost always the same day I pray that prayer, something happens and I get disgusted with that part of myself. And I get so sickened by it that it becomes very easy to just move away. It becomes very easy to repent. And that's nothing more than creating space for Jesus to show up in my life. If you feel like you need to encounter and experience Jesus, pray that he'll show up somewhere. Take a step of faith and make some space for him to show up. Make some space for him to show up in a relationship. Make some space for him to show up in the waiting. Make some space for Jesus to show up in different ways, and he will. And it will deepen your faith, and you'll begin to grow in this experiential knowledge of Christ. So that doesn't wrestle that to the ground all the way, but I think it gives us at least some handles around what it might mean to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. But we still need to understand what it means to be filled with the fullness of God. And I'll be honest with you, I did a bunch of research on that phrase. I did more research on that phrase than the last time I did that much research on anything was when I preached through Revelation for you guys. Other than that, I don't think I've ever done this much research, just trying to get to the bottom of what that meant. But nothing I could find, not even St. John Piper, nothing I could find was sufficient. Nothing I could find made me go, yeah, yeah, that's how I want to explain this to them. Nothing helped me. The one thing that was pointed out that I thought was really helpful and interesting was that being filled with God means there's no part of you left untouched by his goodness and grace. When a container is filled with something, that something touches every part of that container. So to be filled with the fullness of God means that he has touched with his goodness and his grace every aspect of your life, your thought life, your prayer life, your anxieties and your worries, your successes and your failures, your values, your checkbook, your calendar. Do people still have checkbooks anymore? Your credit card and your Venmo account. To be filled with God truly means that he has touched every aspect of your life, which also begats this reality that being filled with God is a gradual process. It's something that takes a lifetime. Because when God hasn't touched a part of our life, it's not because he doesn't want to. It's not because he's not trying to. It's not because he's not telling us that he would like to be involved there too. It's because we're not letting him. Either intentionally or unintentionally, when God hasn't touched a portion of our life, it's not from lack of effort or desire on his part. It's from lack of effort or desire on our part. So it's a progressive thing. I think, honestly, that being a Christian is just to grow in a progressive revelation of the parts of you that God has not touched yet. To grow in a progressive revelation of things that I have not given over to the Father. Through His goodness and grace and His mercy, the Holy Spirit will just show us the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. That's why we say that at Grace we're step-takers because everybody has a next step of obedience that God is beckoning them to take. And it's just going deeper and realizing parts of our life that we have not given over to him yet. But as I tried to wrestle this to the ground and was coming up empty with a good scholarly explanation to offer you guys, I just kind of hit the reset button and thought, well, what is it about the prayer that moves me so much? What is it that I love so much about it that it's on the wall of my office, that I pray it over my family, for myself, that I pray it in every situation, that I pray it over you in every situation that you're in? Anytime God brings to mind somebody while I'm praying, this prayer is what I pray for them. So what is it about this prayer that's so powerful for me? I thought maybe if I could share that, that would be helpful for you as we seek to understand what Paul's praying for here. And for me, the power of the prayer is in the simplicity of the petition that we would know God. The power of the prayer is in the simplicity of the petition that you would know God. That's what he's praying. That's all he's praying. The whole time in a bunch of different ways that you would know God. First thing out of the gates, what's he praying? That you would know Christ. Along with all the saints that you would understand his love that he has for you, that you would be filled with the fullness of God. This whole time through, all Paul is praying is that you would know God. And I pointed out in the first week that I find this remarkable because he's praying for a church that he founded, the success of which he earnestly desires. He wants that church to be successful. He wants that church to grow. He wants that church to impact their community. And yet he does not pray for success. This church is in an era of persecution, high infant mortality rates, low average lifespans. These people knew tragedy. Certainly, I would bet a lot of money or Chick-fil-A sandwich, I bet you Chick-fil-A sandwich, that Paul was acutely aware of suffering happening inside the church. Somebody sick, somebody experiencing grief or loss or persecution. I would bet that Paul knew of specific instances where people were hurting, and yet he does not pray for safety. He does not pray for security. He does not pray for health. He does not pray for circumstances. He does not pray for success. He doesn't pray for any of those things. And I think that speaks volumes because all he does pray is that they would know God. That's it. That's all he wanted for them, that they would know God as if it's a light that shines so brightly that the brighter it gets, the more everything fades away. When I stand up here on Sunday, these lights are in my face. I hate them, but it's part of the deal. They're at like 40% right now. They were so bright a few weeks ago, I couldn't see any of you. I forget, I think it was the rooted sermon. I couldn't see any of you. It was so distracting for me. I was in my head the whole time. These lights can get so bright that everything else fades. And if we have in our hearts a burning desire to know our creator, that light begins to burn so brightly that everything else just kind of fades in importance. There's really nothing else that matters outside of pursuing God. It is the apex pursuit in life. Success doesn't matter. Relatively speaking, health doesn't matter. Failures don't matter as long as they bring us to a place where we know God more deeply. And my prayer for you is that that light will burn so brightly in your life and in your mind and in your conscience that everything else will begin to fade in comparison to knowing God. And this is biblical. Paul talks about it, David talks about it, and Jesus talks about it. In Philippians chapter 3, verses 7 and 8, Paul says that he considers everything rubbish compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing God. David says in Psalms, better is one day in your courts, Father, than a thousand elsewhere. This is a king that has experienced the highest highs that life has to offer, and he says you can keep a thousand of those days if I can spend one of them with you. Jesus in Matthew chapter 13 describes the kingdom of God as something that you sell everything that you own to go claim because of the surpassing value of knowing God. It is the chief desire of Paul. It is the chief desire of God himself that you would know him. And it should be our chief desire that burns so brightly in us that everything else fades away. That's why this is the prayer that I pray for you. That's why this is the prayer I pray over the church, for myself, and over my family. And when I pray it, it sounds like this. This is what I pray. I put it in writing so that maybe it will help you as you pray, but this is the thought that's in my head whenever I pray for anyone or anything. It's this, Heavenly Father, would the events of this circumstance conspire to draw them into a deeper knowledge of you? Whatever the situation is, whatever's happening, my first thought, dear God, with the things that are about to happen to them, to this family, to that place, would those events conspire to bring those people to a deeper knowledge of you? Towards the end of last year, many of you know one of our great partners, one of the great people of grace had a stroke. And we did not know how he was going to be doing. Praise God, he's doing a lot better. But as soon as I heard it, I dropped to my knees and I prayed. And I did not pray that he would be healed. I did second. I did not pray first that his family would be okay. I did not pray first for his safety or his health. The first thing I prayed was, God, would the events surrounding this circumstance somehow conspire to draw him and his family into a deeper knowledge of you? This is an awful thing that's happened. And we don't have to make it a good thing, and we don't have to pretend like it happened because God has a lesson to teach us. I don't think that's how it works. I think cruddy things just happen in a broken world. And when those cruddy things happen, we ought to remind ourselves to say, God, I care deeply about the circumstances and the people in them. But before that, would you please use them to conspire to draw him and his children and his wife into a deeper relationship with you? Would you use this opportunity to show up and show off, Father? I think it's such an important prayer to pray in success and in failure. And I think it's such an important prayer to pray because it does this. I'm going to read this slowly because I think it's important. This prayer brings peace and purpose in suffering, patience in waiting, perseverance in trial, and humility and gratitude in success. When we pray that prayer, God, whatever happens here, whatever's going to happen, would what we take out of it be a deeper knowledge of you? When we pray that prayer, it imbues our suffering with purpose. It imbues our waiting and our grief with purpose and peace. Some of you are in moments of waiting. You're in a season of your life where you're praying for a prayer to be answered and it's not yet and so you're waiting. Some of you are in a season of trial. It's difficult. It's trying. It's hard. Some of you are in seasons of grief. I want you to know, if we pray this prayer over them, those are holy seasons. Those are holy moments. I know that you're hurting. I know that you want the thing. I know that the wait is tough. And I know that it seems unfair. But that's a holy place where God is shaping you. And he's beckoning you. And he's drawing you into a deeper faith in him. Whatever the outcome is of your waiting, it will be a marker in your life when God showed up. So we do not always pray away those things because they're holy moments. And I don't want you to be so drugged down in your waiting and in your hurting that you miss God's drawing in the midst of that suffering. Similarly, when we pray this prayer in the face of success, it begets humility and gratitude. When we sell the company, when we get the job, when our kid wins the thing at the place, when we make the sale, when life goes really good, our very first response should be, God, this success is great. It's really fun. Thank you. Would the events of this success conspire to bring me to a deeper knowledge of you? Whatever happens, however it goes, whatever we decide to do, whatever the next thing is, as I celebrate this God, and maybe even sometimes look to a new reality because of the opportunities that you've just brought me, as I do that, God, would you not let me lose sight of you? Would the events of the circumstances of this success conspire to bring me to a deeper knowledge of you? That puts the success in its proper place, which is simply a positive experience to be used by God to draw you close to him. If you have the success and it doesn't bring us any closer to the father, then the success has no point. Nobody cares. And they're not going to talk about it at your funeral. I know you think they will. I do funerals. We do not talk about your business success at your funerals. Yeah, it's going to hurt. It's going to be hard to walk through. But God, I pray that I would grow to a deeper knowledge of you through it. Yes, this is great. This is wonderful. It's a good thing that happened. But God, let me not lose sight of you. Let it help me walk in a deeper knowledge of you. So I hope and I pray that you'll make this your prayer in 2024. I believe Jordan told you at the beginning of the service, we have magnets on the table right out there. You can put wherever you want to see them. It says one per family, but if you're lingering for like 10 minutes and there's still a bunch and you want a bunch, grab a bunch. Nobody cares. I hope that you'll make that your prayer for yourself and for your family this year. I hope that this prayer will be pressed into your conscience the way that it's been pressed into mine and that it will be your abiding prayer for your family and for your children and for your friends and for your loved one and for your church for the rest of your days. And I hope that the desire to know God will burn so brightly in all of us that everything else will simply fade as we pursue him. Let's pray together. Father, I don't know what's going to happen this year. The way it's shaping up, it's probably going to be nuts. Lord, would you use the things that happen in our lives and around our lives to conspire, to draw us more closely to you? Father, would the desire to know you burn so brightly that everything else fades? Would we be people who desperately want to know and experience the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge? Would we be people who invite you into every part of our life so that we may be filled with your fullness and your goodness and your grace and your mercy. God, we make that our prayer over grace this year, our prayer over our families, our prayer over our friends and loved ones. Help us to know you more, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, and welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service, only because now is not really a good time. This is the second part of our series called Rooted, where we're looking at a prayer found in Ephesians 3, verses 14-19, and we're saying that we're going to make this the prayer for Grace for this year. I've encouraged you to make it your prayer for yourself and for your families. And I shared with you last week that this prayer really colors how I do ministry, how I live life, how I pray for everyone whenever I pray. And so we're taking the first four weeks of the year and we're saturating ourselves in this prayer. For just a little bit of context for those that may have missed last week, or were not paying attention to this part of the sermon, this prayer is found in Ephesians. It's in the middle of the grouping of Paul's letters. If you've not been exposed to the Bible or Paul's letters or Pauline epistles and aren't sure what those are. The Apostle Paul wrote about two-thirds of the New Testament. And the books of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians are written to churches that he started and then wrote letters of advice and counsel and encouragement and conviction, whatever was necessary in those churches, wrote those letters back to them. We preserved them, we put them in the Bible, and now we use them to lead our churches. And in those books, you will find times when he says, hey, when I pray for you, this is what I pray. And they're all very similar to the prayer that we're looking at this year. This just happens to be, to me, the most eloquent one. And so we're looking at it together. Last week, we looked at how we opened the prayer and prayed for everyone's salvation. This is first priority for everyone that he meets. We talked about how that shapes us when that's our first priority. And in that sermon, incidentally, I laid out the clearest explanation I know how to lay out on how to become saved and what it means to be saved. So if you have some questions around that, you can go back to last week's message and listen to that, and hopefully that will help you at least begin to think about things, frame things up for you. Before I dive in this week to the next petition that we find in Paul's prayer, I just wanted to read the whole passage and then we'll focus back on verse 17 and a phrase that we're going to spend our time in this morning. Really, we're going to spend all of our time this morning on one word, rooted, and what it means. So if you have a Bible, open it to Ephesians chapter 3. I asked you guys towards the end of last year to be in the habit of bringing your Bibles and looking through Scripture with me. One of the wonderful benefits of doing that is in the off chance that I say something meaningful to you, you can write it in your Bible. And then years later when you're reading it, that note can pop up and remind you of past lessons learned. So I also have been told, and I'm very sorry for this, that some people for Christmas got ESV Bibles because they're like, we're going to be able to follow along with Nate now in the service. And I think that's a wonderful thing. And then right out of the gate, January 7th, first service of the year, I was like, hey guys, I'm switching to NIV when I preach, just so you know. I ruined a middle schooler's Christmas. That was like his big gift. So I'm going to get you a Bible. I'm going to buy you one. I promise you. It's going to show up at your house, NIV, leather bound. It's going to be fancy. I hate that I ruined your Christmas. Read with me if you have a Bible these verses from 14 to 19 in Ephesians 3, and then some of them will show up on the screen and we'll talk of God. That's the whole passage. This week, we're going to be centered in on verse 17. So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and I pray that you, being rooted and established in love. And then from there, if you look at the verse, he makes some petitions. Because you're now rooted in love. So because you're saved, because you know Christ, because the Godhead has had the threefold effort to bring you to a knowledge of Christ, because God according to His riches has offered you salvation, the Spirit and His power has moved in your heart to want salvation, and now Christ dwells in your heart through faith. So because the Godhead has moved and you know Christ and you are now saved, he considers you that now you are rooted and established in love. Now you're rooted in love. And listen, today I'm going to say you're rooted in love. You're rooted in the love of Christ. You're rooted in the love of God. You're rooted in Christ. To me, for the concept for this verse, that's all synonymous. Okay. Iocating some things here. So, I'm going to say all those words, but what I mean is rooted and grounded in the love of Christ, which I think totally agrees with Paul's intent when he was writing this. So, because you're saved, you're now rooted and grounded in love. And because you are, here's what I pray for you, that you would have the strength to comprehend with all the saints. And that's what we're going to look at next week is the communion of the saints. And why that's always so important. And then to know the love that surpasses knowledge. That you'd be loved by Jesus. That you'd be filled with all the fullness of God. So in that way, this concept that we're looking at today of being rooted in Christ's love is the fulcrum of the whole passage. I sum it up like this. Being rooted in Christ's love is the concept through which the rest of the prayer flows. Because you're saved, you're rooted in the love of Christ. Because I know that you're rooted in the love of Christ. Here's what I pray for you. I think the other petitions flow from this petition. So it's important for us, if it's the fulcrum of the passage and the prayer, if it's kind of the therefore, we need to understand what it means to be rooted and established in the love of Christ. We need to know what that means and have an appreciation of it. If we don't value that, if we don't understand it, if we can't define it, then we really can't comprehend the rest of the prayer. So when I sat down to write the sermon, I knew that was where I needed to focus. What does it mean to be rooted in the love of Christ? We're naming the whole series Rooted. So this must be a pretty important idea. And I have sometimes, often for series, I'll have a series guide where whenever I sat down and kind of framed up the series, which for me, this was in October or November that I framed this up. I keep a document on my computer because I don't know where else you keep a document. And I'll sum up each week. Let's focus on these verses this week. And I'll usually leave myself a two or three sentence guide, sometimes more, of what to think about and what to talk about and how to approach it so that when I hit the week that I'm prepping it and that I'm actually writing it, I'm not hitting it fresh. I've already done a little bit of prep work for it. So I opened up the document a couple weeks ago when I was writing this sermon, and it said, you know, verse 17, rooted, established, and loved. And then the guidance that I gave myself was, explore what it means to be rooted and established in love. Like, thanks, November Nate, because you're not helping January Nate at all. So whenever I don't know what to do, I just read stuff on the internet that other people have written about this until I get an idea. They teach that in seminary. And one of the places I wanted to go is to explore root systems. Let me just understand roots more and see if that sparks something. And I'll be honest with you. I kind of don't like when pastors do this, when they take one word. I'm going to do a lot of research about this word, and we're going to draw out a ton of lessons from this one concept, from this one word. Look at everything I've learned about root systems, right? Because I don't think it's totally fair to what the author intended, because Paul did not have Google, and he was a tent maker from a relatively cosmopolitan city. I do not think he had an exhaustive knowledge of what root systems do when he wrote this. So for me to go and dig deeper into it to figure out what we can learn about root systems and how we can apply that to the passage isn't necessarily fair to his intention when he wrote it. And sometimes when pastors do this, we kind of mislead the congregation, the people who are listening, to believe that this was the original author's intent too, and this is the only way to understand the passage. So I'm just saying that up front so you know I'm not trying to do that this morning. What I will say is, as I began to learn about root systems, which was some exciting stuff. I was on like botany websites in like college. I started to read like a scientific, I don't even know what you call it, write up on it, paper. And I bailed. I was like, yeah, this is not, I can't understand this. But as I did the research and started learning, to me there's just so many parallels firing off that I thought this is worth it to sit in here and figure out what we can learn about root systems that also apply to our spiritual lives. So that's what we're going to do this morning. One of the things I saw and read about, and this is not a surprise to anyone, if what I'm about to say about how root systems function, if this first point surprises you, if you learn right now, you need to go back to school, I think. But one of the first things that I think is profoundly important about root systems is this. Being rooted in Christ anchors us. Being rooted in Christ anchors us. On, I believe, Tuesday of this week, we had a big storm. The big storm blew through sustained winds of 25 to 30 miles an hour, gusts of 45 to 50 miles an hour. It was a big storm. They even canceled school. We did a half day for school, which, as an aside, is patently absurd, all right? I went to elementary school in the 80s and 90s, and there's no way in the world it was going to be so windy that we canceled school. Like, it's going to be really raining hard when you get off the bus, so we're just going to let your mom pick you up at 12. That didn't happen. They didn't care if a stick blew off a tree and hit you in the head on the way home. That didn't matter to them. We're doing school, but now the world is run by sissies, so we come home at noon. Fine. I just need to get that off my chest. Thanks, guys. When I woke up the next day, I go outside to assess the damage, and my neighbor has recently redone his yard, and he has some plants that he's planted, and then over those plants, he's placed a basket about this tie. It's like tent structure. It's got some meshing around it. And I think it's to keep so that the deer don't eat the plants and so that the people who own the plants can never actually enjoy them. I guess they have to walk up and take over the basket and go, boy, that's a beauty. And then they just put it right back down. I don't know. It seems to defeat the purpose of plants. But that had blown into my yard, which no problem. I picked it up. I walk it over. I don't know what, I just picked one. It's just because this is the plant it needs to protect. But do you know why the basket was in my yard and the bush wasn't? Because the basket wasn't rooted. The bush has roots. None of you woke up after that storm on Wednesday morning and noticed that your shrubbery had blown completely out of your yard because they're all rooted. So one of the first things that roots do is they keep us anchored. And here's why that's important. Because sometimes the winds of life blow, and those winds would seek to uproot us from our faith if they can. There are things that happen in life, grief, loss, tragedy, disappointment, disillusionment, doubts, that when they occur, if we are not deeply rooted, we will blow away and we will lose And in that loss, they had deep questions of their faith. But they stayed grounded where they were because their roots were deep. It reminds me of the parable of the sower, where the sower sows seeds and it lands on different kinds of soil, and some of it lands on shallow soil and the roots don't grow deep and the enemy will come and snatch them up, or things will happen and they will be uprooted. We need deep roots to keep us grounded in our faith. I remember a time in my life that's more recent than you'd probably want it to be if I'm your pastor, where I experienced profound doubt in my faith. The way that I kind of describe it is I grew up in the church, good leaders, good folks. I went to Bible college. I went to seminary. And I feel like those things kind of equipped me with boxes or categories to place all my experiences in life, to be able to explain why do bad things happen to good people and why do good things happen to bad people. I've got a box for that. I can explain it. Why did we experience this loss? I've got a box for that. I can explain it. What should I do in this situation that's morally gray? It's not morally gray. It's black and white. Let me explain to you why I've got a box for that. I can explain it. And so I felt like I kind of got pushed into adult life with a set of boxes and categories that could explain everything that has happened to me and will happen to me and will happen to the people around me. And then I became a pastor. And I started noticing, slowly but surely, that everything I experienced doesn't necessarily fit into one of my boxes. I started to need new boxes. I started to need different categories. And that pushed me into a season of profound doubt, of not being sure if it was all true true anyways because my experiences in life did not fit to the categories I had been given I'll say this here if this resonates with you if that's something that you've walked through or are walking through or are experiencing I would love to have coffee with you and talk about that but I can can tell you this. The only thing that kept me in my faith was the fact that God and his goodness over time had developed deep roots for me in my faith. And I could not abandon it. And the wind was blowing hard. But it kept me grounded where I was because I agreed with Peter in that confession. You are the Christ. Where else are we going to go? When we struggle or are disillusioned or disappointed, it's important that we have roots to keep us grounded in our faith. I think that this is probably what the author of Hebrews was referring to when he wrote this verse in chapter 6. Read it with me on the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, and then he continues. He writes about this anchor that we cling to for our soul. And that hope that we have that we cling to is a hope in Christ. It's a belief in Christ that anchors our soul in Him. And so our roots serve us as an anchor that holds fast to our faith no matter what the world is doing, no matter how hard the winds are blowing. So the first thing that jumped off the screen to me as I read was that our faith anchors us. That's incredibly important. Our being anchored in the love of Christ anchors our faith. The next thing I learned, and again, this is not a shocker, but I think thinking about it can be profound for us. Being rooted in Christ nurtures us. Being rooted in Christ nurtures us. The primary function of the root system, and I didn't know this, which is, I should probably go back to school. I did not do well in science. The primary function of the root system is to draw nutrients out of the soil. Yes, it anchors it, but the primary thing that those roots are doing is drawing life out of the soil. I thought the leaves were responsible for that. That's a different deal. It's the roots. They draw life out of the soil. And so when we are rooted in Christ, we are drawing life from the very soil in which we are planted. This is very similar to what Jesus talks about in John chapter 15, verse 5, when he says this, I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. Other versions have the word abide. If you abide in me and I in you, if you remain attached to me, if you stay rooted in me, you will bear much fruit. It will nurture you. You don't have to worry about all the other things. You don't have to worry about how it's going to work out. You don't have to worry about the right thing to do all the time. You focus on being rooted in me, and I will produce in you what I need. I will care for you, and you don't have to worry about the rest of it. I'm not going to belabor this point, because in the spring we're going to a series called Final Thoughts where we go through the Upper Room Discourse which is found in John chapters 14 through 17. It's Jesus' last thoughts with the disciples before He leaves and goes to Heaven to prepare a place for us. In the middle of that, chapter 15, He talks about abiding me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. We're going to spend two whole weeks on that in March. So I'm not going to belabor it here. I'm going to draw up two points about this nurturing thing that I think matter today. The first is this. When a plant has a good root system, you can cut it to the quick. And if the roots are healthy, that plant will grow back. Even though there's nothing on the surface, even though it looks dead, even though it looks like things are done for that plant. And we all know that this is true instinctively because weeds. Because we all hate pulling weeds. Maybe you don't. I hate it. I hate pulling weeds. I hated like like, when I was a kid, and my dad would be like, all right, we've got to work in the yard today. Let's go pull weeds. I'm like, oh, no. And he would always say, get it by the root. And I never would. I would just rip it out. Sorry, Dad, he's right there. I never would do it. He knows this anyways. I'd just rip it out and throw it away. You can't see it. It's gone. What happens? That's coming back. Now, as a grown-up with my own yard, when I'm pulling a weed and I'm trying to jiggle it and do what you're supposed to do to get it out by the roots and it breaks off and I don't get it, I'm like, dadgummit. I know it's just coming back. I'm going to do this in another couple of weeks. When a plant has a good root system, it doesn't need anything above the surface. It can just regrow, oftentimes bigger and stronger than it was before. Sometimes life cuts us to the quick. Sometimes we get chopped all the way down, and we're not even really sure if we see a path forward. But because the root system in Christ is healthy, we grow and we flourish. If you've been coming to Grace for a while, you've heard me talk now and again about my college roommate, Chris Gerlach, who, when he was 30, died of a widow-maker heart attack. Perfectly healthy guy, just throwing a Frisbee and dropped dead. He left behind Carla, my wife Jen's college roommate. We're all really close friends. And two boys. Five and three. And I remember sitting with Carla at the visitation. And even the day of the funeral. Just in this back room with her and some friends. And I just remember watching her vacillate between tears and just kind of icy numbness, thousand yard stare. And I remember Jen talking to her in the weeks and months subsequent to Chris's loss. Carla had been cut to the quick. She didn't know how she was going to go forward. And as Jen talked to her, we both saw, slowly but surely, hope begin to creep back into Carla's life. Belief that her voice could be okay. Belief that she might find joy again. Clinging to Christ, letting him be the anchor. Remaining committed to being a person of devotion and to prayer. And we saw her slowly but surely grow back and begin to flourish again. This last October marked 10 years since Chris's death. Carla is married to a wonderful man who loves Jesus and loves her boys, and her boys love him. They have a daughter together. It's a new life. She's flourishing in Christ. When our roots are deep and healthy, even when we are cut to the quick, we can still, because of Jesus, regrow and flourish. Some of us today may have come in here feeling like you were just sheared down to the ground. There will be hope. Your roots in Christ will serve you, and you will flourish again. Here's the other thing I learned about root systems that I did not know. The deeper the roots, the more mature a system of roots, the less irrigation and fertilization matter to that plant. Did you know that I did not know that? The deeper the roots are the less fertilization and irrigation matter to a particular plant and I think this has really interesting implications in the Christian life because what it means is the deeper our roots in Christ the more established with we are, the more mature our faith, the less all the extra stuff on the surface matters as much. Meaning, when you're a new believer, when your root system isn't really firmly developed, you're just learning and exploring, you need good sermons. You need good worship. You need the books that the latest pastor, Christian influencer has written and then are showing up on Instagram. You need those things. You need the Bible studies. You need the small groups. You need all the extra sprinkles of Jesus in your life. You need the Instagram feed that comes up and shows you a verse and a thought for the day. You need all those things. Those things are good and they're helpful and their return on investment is good. But the deeper you get, the longer you walk, the more mature you are, the healthier and deeper your roots, the less those things impact you. The less your faith needs those things. It doesn't mean that they're not helpful. It doesn't mean that it's not helpful if I preach a good sermon for you, if you listen to a good podcast or another pastor during the week or even another pastor on a Sunday, whatever. It doesn't mean that sermons don't help you. What it means is if you don't get them, you're fine because you've got this and you've got prayer. There is a time. I'm not even sure if I would call it a threshold, but there is a level of depth and maturity that a Christian develops where a church service and a sermon and worship really are not what move the needle for them spiritually. What moves the needle for them spiritually is spending time in God's word and time in prayer. That's why I always say that's the most important single habit that anyone can develop is to get up every day and do those things. There comes a time when your communion with God is so deep and so rich and so good that if that's all you had, you would flourish. And we know this is true because we can think of the older saints that we know, people with weathered faiths, with deep roots, where you get the profound sense that they kind of come to church for you. They're not coming for them. They're coming to serve. They're coming to help. I think of old pastors that I know that are flourishing with God because all they need is their Bible and prayer and they grow and they flourish and their faith sustains. I think it's really interesting, the idea that the closer we grow to God, the deeper our roots, the more established we are, the less we need all the extra stuff, and all we really need is him. Last thought. Being rooted in Christ awes us. It amazes us. The last thing that I noticed or that I learned was that botanists are really good at explaining what's happening in a plant above ground, but they're remarkably bad at explaining to you what's happening in a plant below ground. Root systems are really tough to study. They're really difficult to learn about. It takes a whole lot of effort to even see what they're doing. They don't understand how the roots are taking nutrients from the soil. It doesn't make sense to them. They can't explain it. They can explain a lot about what's happening above the surface, but they can explain very little about what's actually, comparatively speaking, about what's happening below the surface so much that in botany circles, which is not a phrase I ever expected to use in a sermon, but in botany circles, or in life, really, in botany circles, the roots are known as the hidden half, which is like, yeah, duh. But what they mean is they just don't understand it. And in the same way, and here's the thing too, is what's happening above the surface is almost entirely reflective of what's happening below the surface. They know it's true, they just can't explain how it works. And in the same way that a botanist or a scientist can't fully explain to you what's happening below the surface to produce what's happening above the surface, neither can a pastor or a theologian fully explain to you what God is doing in the depths of your heart as he works on your soul to produce what's happening above the surface. It's even more mysterious. I don't know or understand how God works in our heart to change us and mold us and make us more like him. I just know that he does. I can't explain to you all the ins and outs of how it works, but we see on the surface kindness, goodness, and faithfulness, and gentleness, and self-control. We see the fruits of the Spirit being born on the surface. We see graciousness, and magnanimity, and kindness, and patience being born out on the surface. But we can't explain to you in detail, with precision, what's going on under the surface. God just works in mysterious ways. We're told His ways are higher than our ways. We're told in this passage that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge. I wish I could explain to you everything that goes on in your heart when Jesus takes up residence in there and how he changes us. I just, I can't. I just know that he does. I can't explain to you. I have a friend back home. I went to my old church. His story, his testimony is that he was an alcoholic and dealt with it for years and woke up one morning after a bender and just felt awful, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, physically wrecked. And he cried out to God. He said, God, I hate this. I believe in you. I give you my life. Please take this addiction from me. And he will tell you, from that moment on, not only did he not ever touch alcohol again, he's never even wanted it. Now that, some would argue, is miraculous. It defies science. Addiction recovery does not work like that. But it did for him. I can't explain that to you. And I also can't explain why for some people the battles and struggles they carry into a profession of faith, for some people, those battles are instantly over. And for other people, they linger for mind-numbingly frustrating years and decades. I don't know why God removes some sin or some proclivities or some addictions overnight in some people and over long, difficult, tearful battles for others. I don't know why he does that, but that's what he does. I don't know how this concept works. One of my favorite psalms, one of my favorites. A concept that I love, that I think about a lot, is this psalm that says, Delight yourself in the laws of the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Which sounds like it means, it sounds like God can serve as kind of a genie if you'll just focus on Him. Right? Just delight yourself in the laws of God, and in His statutes, and His words, and His holiness holiness and pursuing the things of God. And he will give you anything that your heart desires, which for me used to be like maybe a yacht and a private chef. But now if I could just get two kids who weren't picky eaters and didn't wine, I'd be like, this is, hallelujah, I'm all in God. But that's not what that verse means, and we know that. What that concept means, if we delight ourselves in the things of God, in the holiness of God, in the pursuit of God, in the law of God, in the word of God, that as we do that, he will slowly, over time, shape our heart to beat in rhythm with his. And the things that we desire will be the very things that God desires, and in that way, he will give us the desires of our heart because God's will triumphs all eventually. Now, how does he shape our heart to beat with his? I don't know. For some, it's pain. For others, it's success. For others, it's time. For others, it's an experience. For some, it's reading. For some, it's music. For some, it's nature. For some, it's hiking. For some, it's church. For some, it's small group. For some, it's prayer. He uses all of those things to shape us over time so that our heart beats with his. How does he do it? I don't know, and there's no formula for everybody. If there was a formula that we knew, our small groups ministry would be a lot better. But we don't know the formula. We just know that when we're rooted in Christ, over time, he produces in our life fruit that sometimes we can't explain. This is why circling all the way back to the beginning, I believe that Paul prays that we would be rooted and established in the love of Christ. Because when we are rooted in the love of Christ, we are anchored against anything that life can throw at us. We are nurtured by our connection to Christ and can weather the storms and eventually can commune in ways that we don't yet understand. And then, because we're rooted in that way, we can have the strength to comprehend with all the saints the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God. So now that we understand why it's important to be rooted, we can come back in the next two weeks and better understand what it means when he talks about the saints, the love of Christ, and the fullness of God. We're now prepared to understand the rest of the passage. All right, let's pray and we'll worship together. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the folks that you've brought to grace. Thank you for the folks who aren't able to make it but are participating online. Lord, I pray that you would develop in each of us very deep roots, that we would be rooted in your love and your son in such a way that nothing can tear us apart from you. God, for those who have been cut to the quick, I pray that they would see a glimmer of hope for flourishing. For those for whom the winds are blowing pretty hard right now, I pray that you would keep them anchored to the hope of Christ. And God, if we can encourage people around us with this, I pray that we would. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning and Happy New Year. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your New Year. For those for whom this represents a New Year's resolution to come to church with more consistency, I will try my best to not make you regret that while I'm preaching this morning. I've also, I feel like I should just address this, I've been told this morning that I look like I'm going on a ski trip, that I look snuggly, that I look like an author. And then Keith back there in the hat, he's wearing a hat in church. He's sacrilegious. He told me that the white balance was off and asked me if I could change my sweater. So this is, I'm going back to the quarter zips next week, but start off the year with a sweater. Here we are. Speaking of starting off the year, I wanted, I thought a lot in the fall about how to start 2024. What was the best way for us as a church to launch into a new year? And the passage that came to mind is maybe my favorite passage in the Bible. And I know that if you've been coming to Grace for any amount of time, you know that my favorites mean nothing. Because I play it pretty fast and loose with favorite. But this one is so favorite that when we moved into our house, we moved into a new house in July of 22. And I first time in my life, I had a committed space for my own office at home. The first thing I did is reach out to Jen, my wife, her cousin, who is a wedding calligrapher, or I guess just calligrapher in general. I got her to write this out for me. We framed it, and it's in my office. It's that favorite. It's a prayer that we find in the book of Ephesians. So if you have a Bible with you, I would love for you to open that up, turn to Ephesians chapter 3. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, asked me if I could start to preach. Well, he said, can we buy new ESV Bibles for the church? Because you always preach from the ESV and it's confusing because you read from your Bible and it doesn't match anything anywhere. And I said, how about instead I'll just use my old NIV Bible and I'll preach from that. So you should be able to read along with me this year, which is a welcome change, I'm sure. So turn your Bible to Ephesians chapter three. What you'll find in verses 14 through 19 is a prayer. This is, this prayer has shaped almost everything about the way, and I'm tempted to say the way that I do ministry, but that's not really it. It's really the way I live life, the way I think about others, the way I pray for others. This prayer is what I pray over every new baby that's born to friends or to people at church. This is what I pray over people who are getting married, high school graduates, college graduates. This is what I pray over my children. It's what I pray over the church. It's what I pray over you when you're sick. It's what I pray over you when you are in times of plenty. It's what I pray over you when you are in times of need. This color is how I pray for everyone in my life. And so I wanted to start the year off by going through this prayer with you. So for the next four weeks, all the Sundays in January, we're just going to stay right here in Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. It gives us a lot of time to pull it apart and look at it and understand it. Now one of the things that I think is really interesting about this prayer is you can find a prayer pretty similar to this in a lot of Paul's letters. This prayer is not dissimilar from what he prays for the rest of the churches. Now for those of you who don't know the Bible well enough to know Paul's letters, that's what I'm referring to, a significant part of the New Testament, two-thirds of it, is letters from Paul to churches. Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians. Those are letters to churches that Paul started on his missionary journeys, and then he writes a letter back to them for whatever reason, to admonish them, to encourage them, to convict them, to whatever, different purposes for different letters. And so in the middle of his letter to the church in Ephesus, he says, he prays this prayer. And what captures me, well there's a lot that captures me about the prayer, but one of the things I notice first when I read this prayer is the opening line. We're not going to read it just yet. But the opening line, we do read it, you'll notice. He says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father from whom every family on heaven and on earth is named. So what he's saying in that first sentence is this. For this reason, I bow my knees. This is why I pray for you when I pray for you, which I do. This is what I pray. And if this is what Paul prays for all of the churches that he started, and if this prayer shows up in other letters, then isn't it worth examining the prayer and praying it over people in our lives? We're actually making this the prayer for grace in 2024. I believe there are some magnets involved. Are there magnets involved? Are we doing those? Yeah, yeah, we're going to do some magnets. In the next week or two, we'll have magnets with the verse printed on it so you can put it on your refrigerator, wherever you want to, so you can see it. And we would invite you to, along with us, make this your prayer for you and your family and the people you love and for grace in 2024. But when you think about what the prayer is, one of the things that stands out to me is what Paul does not pray for. I think almost as powerful as what he does pray for are the things that he leaves out. And this is what shapes the way I pray for people a lot. I want you to think with me, and I mean this. Do this exercise with me. Put yourself in Paul's shoes. The church in Ephesus is a church you started. You know the people there. You care about them. You spent time with them. You write them in other letters that you want to go there. But there's a wide door open for a great work where you are now. You can't go there now, but you long to be with them. And then you're writing them a letter. And you say, hey, when I pray for you, this is what I pray. What would you pray for them? We would probably pray for safety, right? Because persecution was rampant in the ancient world. So we'd pray for safety. We would probably pray for circumstances. I hope you heal up. I hope this works out. I hope God shores up your family. We'd pray for different situations going on in there. I think we would probably, if we're the leader of the church, pray for success. May God add to your numbers day by day, those who are being saved, that kind of prayer that we see in Acts. I think that we would pray for those things. And when we pray for people we know, what do we pray for them? Don't we pray those things for safety and for circumstances and for success for them? So it's interesting to me that Paul does not pray for safety, circumstances, or success in this prayer. You will not see those things in this prayer. And it stands out to me because I don't know if I have the right to call myself a history nerd, but I read a lot of it, and I listen to history podcasts, so do what you want with that. Thanks, I'm a nerd, Jeff says. But the ancient world knew what suffering was in a way that is totally anathema to us. Birth rates, infant mortality rates, most children, I mean a good number of children just dying in infancy or as really, really young kids. The average age is significantly down, suffering rampant across the board. And yet Paul does not pray for safety or for circumstances or for health. He's a church planter. He's ambitious, uniquely ambitious in the scope of human history. He wants this church in Ephesus to succeed. I know he does. I know he wants it to grow, but he does not pray for that. Look, look at what Paul prays for. And I think you'll understand why we're going to spend four weeks in it. I'm going to's the whole prayer. This morning, we're going to narrow down our focus to the first thing that he prays for. So there's a bit of an introduction. He says, this is when I pray for you, this is why I pray. For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from every family on heaven and on earth is named. And then the first thing that he prays is that according to the riches of his glory, that you would be strengthened with power through the spirit in your inner being, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. The first thing that Paul prays for is salvation. The first thing that he prays for, for his church, is that they would be what we would call saved. That they would know Jesus. And it's interesting to me theologically, it's not much of a point, but I thought it was worth pointing out, the threefold involvement in the salvation process of salvation, what happens in salvation and how the Trinity, the God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit, the Godhead are all three involved in the salvation process. If you're a note taker, this is down in your notes, but I've moved it up to this point in the sermon because I felt like it fit better here. But just notice in the salvation process that salvation is the result of the Father's riches, the Spirit's power, and the indwelling of Christ. We see all three parts of the Godhead involved in the salvation process according to the riches of His glory, God the Father. That you'd be given power through the Spirit. That you'd be indwelled with Christ the Son. So it's interesting to me that the Trinity shows up in the salvation process. And it's interesting to me that the first thing that Paul prays for is that they, church in Ephesus, you, global church, would be saved. Now, we're going to talk about why I believe it's so important that this is the first thing he prays for. But before we do that, I want to stop and I want us to understand what it is to be saved. Because I've been in church world literally my whole life. And I've been in ministry world for over 20 years, which is crazy to think about. And I've had enough conversations with enough people who I know are good church Bible-believing people who in that conversation betrayed to me a lack of understanding around salvation and what it is. So while I know that it could seem rather elementary to start the year with these two fundamental questions, how do I get saved and what happens when I am saved? I also know that if I were to talk to all of you and ask you those questions, that the answers would probably not be clear and concise and unilateral. So I think it's worth defining those things here. So what does someone have to do to be saved? And when I say saved, what I mean is to exist in right relationship with God. And actually, we're going to define this in a little bit, what happens when we are saved. So I'll leave it for that. But what does someone have to do to be saved? Well, Paul answers this in the book of Romans. Romans is the most thick theological, densely theological book in the Bible where he goes to great lengths to explain what salvation is. For the first eight chapters of Romans, he is building a systematic argument, an understanding of what it means to be saved. So if it takes Paul eight whole chapters to help a church arrive at a fluency with salvation, then certainly we can say what I'm going to give you this morning is the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more questions around salvation than I'm going to answer today. And if you have those questions, I would highly encourage you, talk to your small group leader. Talk to a friend who knows scripture. Come talk to me. Talk to someone you trust. Ask those questions. These are good questions to ask. But if we look at Romans chapter 10, verses 9 through 10, we can let Paul tell us what we have to do to be saved. Look at this with me. If you declare with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. So, what do we need to do to be saved? We are saved when we confess and believe. That's what it is. We are saved. We become a Christian when we confess with our mouth and we believe in our heart that Jesus is Lord. This is a more concise way of saying what I say often. Often, you can probably complete these sentences, I hope that you can by now, but I say often that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. A shorter way to say that is Jesus is Lord. Just within that is all that context. So we are saved. We are a child of God when we confess with our mouth and believe in our heart that Jesus is Lord. It's that simple. It's also worth pointing out, because of conversations I've had, what doesn't save us. Because I've been around church people long enough to know that we're not always trusting in the right thing to save us. Some of us put our faith in things that are ancillary, auxiliary to the salvation process. I know if you grew up in my tradition, it was really, really important that you nailed the prayer. You had to get the prayer just right. Anybody grow up praying the prayers? Yeah. And then you look at that as my salvation moment. This is when I asked Jesus into my heart. And then I'm saved. And then if you have a background like me, you're in church all the time. And so multiple times, I prayed that prayer for the first time at four and a half. I was at Sunday school. They told me about hell. That place seemed pretty bad. I was like, what do I have to do? You got to pray this prayer. I'm like, I'll pray it. I'm in. Seems easy. And then I told my parents about it. And my dad, who graduated from a Bible college, quizzed me. I passed the test. We went out for Butterfinger Blizzard. I was way more excited about the blizzard than I was that I was an adopted son of the king of the universe. So it's actually useful to point out that our understanding of salvation changes over our lifetime. What salvation was really clicked with me when I was 17. And I have a fresh and new depth of understanding of what it means to be a child of God every year that I walk with him. I think that's why Paul tells us in Philippians that we should work out our salvation with fear and trembling. When you're walking with God, your understanding of what it means to be his child and a citizen of heaven evolves and grows along with your faith. But I can remember, subsequent to praying that prayer when I was four, I'd be in other gatherings and there'd be a speaker, a youth event or a kids event or whatever. And at the end, he would do this thing. It was always a he in those days. He would do this thing and he would say, everybody bow your heads. Every head bowed, every eye closed. And then he'd say, if you don't know Jesus, would you just slip up your hand? I heard somebody over here say slip up your hand. We know slip up your hand. We know that. I have PTSD from slip up your hand. And then you're down and then the speaker would be like, I see that hand. Bless you back there. I see you. Do all that stuff. And who knows if hands are really going up or not. Some guys, I know for a fact, some guys fake it. Nobody's raising their hand. They just do it anyways. But you can't look, because if you look to know nobody's raising their hand, then it's like double whammy. You just sinned too, so you've got just trust the guy. Slip up your hand, and then he says, repeat after. If you just raise your hand, repeat after me. And so you repeat this prayer. And I can remember sitting there, and I would hear elements of that prayer that I didn't pray in my prayer. And I'm like, oh no. I'm damned. Like literally. This is a problem. So then I would pray that prayer just to make sure I was good. I've prayed the salvation prayer a bunch of times. I've gotten all the elements. Now here's the funny thing. The power of what saves me is in my desire to get the prayer right. It's confessing with my mouth that Jesus is Lord and believing in my heart ardently, oh no, if he's not really my Lord, I need to say the prayer right. The belief and the confession is what God is working in to save my soul. I believe, I really do, my daughter Lily is almost eight. She's confessed with her mouth that Jesus is Lord. She believes in her heart, I know that she does, that Jesus is Lord. We've never sat down with her and prayed a prayer. I'm sure we will at some point. And that to her can be the marker of her salvation. That's fine. But Lily's as saved now as she can be because she's confessed and believed based on that passage in Romans. I'll tell you what else doesn't save you. And I don't say this lightly because I know that we have a lot of different traditions in here. And it's one of the things I love about our church, but baptism does not save you. It is not something that saves you is described as salvific. Baptism is not salvific. If,, and I say this very gently, if you are one who is sprinkled as a child, or you had your child sprinkled or baptized, and you're trusting that as what has saved them, I don't think you'll find that in Scripture. I don't think that's what we can cling to. We believe that baptism is actually, we teach that baptism is actually for people who have articulated a faith, who have articulated a confession and a belief, and that we baptize by immersion. I would stop here and say, if baptism is something that the Holy Spirit's been gnawing at you about, and you're hearing this at the beginning of the year right now, and you're going, oh shoot, he's talking to me. I am. I am talking to you. You should do it. Let's talk. But baptism doesn't save us. Baptism is a public profession of a private prayer. It simply declares that we're a child of God. Another thing that doesn't save us, and I bring this up specifically because I've been in conversations where parents have referred to this. And forgive me if I'm wrong on the wording. I did not grow up in a Presbyterian tradition or a tradition with this, but I believe somewhere around the age of 13, you take a confirmation class. Is that right, Lane? You nodded your head. Okay, good. You go through confirmation. And I've talked with parents before who are saying, how can my kids act like this? They went through confirmation. I know they're saved. And I had to say, to be saved, you confess with your mouth and you believe with your heart and isn't it possible as a 13 year old kid to be in a group of your peers going through class with the teacher that you respect and saying the things back to them that you're supposed to say and signing the papers that you're supposed to sign and being paraded up on stage like you're supposed to be paraded without ever actually believing what you're being taught. Doing it because this is what your peers are doing, this is what the teachers expect, this is what your parents expect. So that's not something I would cling to as evidence of salvation. We are saved by confessing and believing. That's what saves us. Now, what does it mean to be saved? When I say this word saved in right relationship with God, becoming a Christian, a believer, all the words, what do we mean? Well, Jesus tells us what he means in John chapter 5, verse 24. Look with me. These are the words of Christ. He tells us what it means to be saved. Very truly, I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged, but has crossed over from death to life. When we are saved, Jesus himself tells us we will not be judged and we will cross from death to life. What it means to be saved, the simple way to think about it is being saved means I am a citizen of heaven. That's what it means. Simple way to say it. And it's such an important concept. That's why I chose it, that we're a citizen of heaven. Once we are saved, we don't belong here anymore. Earth is not our home. We are aliens and sojourners in a foreign land. And one day, God will take us home. But right now, we are aliens here. And our job as aliens and sojourners is to take as many people as we can on our way home as humanly possible. That's what we're here for. But it means that this place isn't our place and it's a really important concept, but I'm going to get a chance to preach about this concept in the middle of March, so I'm not going to belabor it here. But that's what it means to be saved, that we are no longer judged. We are no longer judged for our sins. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we have confessed and believed, once we have become a Christian, that when God looks at us, we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. That when he looks at us, he does not see our unrighteous deeds. He sees us covered in the sacrificial righteousness of Christ. The way it's phrased in Isaiah, and we're going to be in Isaiah after Easter. We're going to do a series called The Treasury of Isaiah, and I get to preach out of Isaiah 1, verses 10 through 18, and surprise, surprise, one of my favorite passages. The way it's phrased there is God says, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. So when we are saved, we are no longer judged. We are no longer declared guilty for the things that we've done. And listen, this is, I know, I would say heady, but it's not, I don't know. I don't know how to describe it. This is esoteric. God does not exist in time. He exists outside of time. We think. Who knows? Because I don't even think anyone understands that sentence. But because that's true when we become Christians, when he brings us into the fold, he forgives us of our sins past, present, and future. He forgives you of all the dumb stuff he knows you're going to do 10 years from now. We act like it's just from this point back, and it's all points. He covers over you with his righteousness and does not judge you. And then it says we pass from death to life. Death, whenever we see it in scripture, is always descriptive of an eternity absent of God. Just being dead, being cut off from God. So we pass from death to life. This is the punishment and the curse in the Garden of Eden. In the first couple chapters of the Bible, in Genesis chapter 3, we see the fall of man. And because Adam and Eve chose to sin, God says, you will now experience death. You will now be cut off. I think of it this way. I think of a tree and our sin, we're a branch on the tree, and our sin cuts us off of the tree and we fall to the floor helpless and essentially lifeless. Because we might not be dead yet, but we're going to die pretty quick. And then when we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ, we confess and we believe God and His goodness picks that branch up off the ground, grafts it back onto the tree, connects us to our source of life. We pass from death to life. That's what it means to be saved. We are now citizens of heaven, children of the King of the universe. So, if you didn't know that, now you do. If you did know that, then you just got to check the boxes. I'm good. Okay, I understood. Either way, that's a good outcome. Now, where I want to press us as a church in 2024 is thinking through the reality of where Paul chooses to put this prayer. This portion, this particular petition within the prayer. It's the very first thing that he prays. He prays for other things. He prays that we would be along with all of the saints. He prays for community. We're going to spend a week on that. He prays that we would know the surpass, that we would feel the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. We're going to talk about that. He prays that we would be filled with the fullness of God. We're going to talk about that. But before he can pray for those things, he has to pray for this thing. He prays for their salvation. I pray that you would know Jesus. It's the first thing that he prayed. It's the most important thing that he prayed. And it's interesting to me that he prayed it to a church, to a church full of people who very presumptively know Christ already. You don't just casually go to a Christian church in ancient Ephesus. It's not what the cool kids were doing. You don't just wander in there to try to make a sale. Like you go because you mean it and yet he prays for their salvation. I am deeply convicted that salvation was Paul's first priority and prayer for all he encountered. Salvation, that they would simply know God, that they would know Jesus, that he would dwell in their hearts through faith, was his first priority and prayer for every person that he encountered in his life. And it makes sense, doesn't it? Why would I pray anything else for you if I'm not praying that you know Jesus? Nothing in your whole life matters if you don't know Jesus, and everything after that matters in a completely different way once you do know Jesus. So why would I ever pray anything for you except that you would know Christ? And I said, this prayer shapes the way I pray for people. It shapes it in this way. Now when I pray for people, and some of you probably have heard me pray this, whether it's success or difficulty, I pray that all the events and circumstances in that situation would conspire to bring you closer to God, would conspire to bring you to a depth of Christ that's more full than you have now, that everything in your life would be, would conspire to bring you closer to Jesus. That's how this prayer color is my prayers. And I think it's incredibly important that Paul's first priority in prayer for every person that he meets is that they would simply know Jesus. Convicted of this, after I wrote the sermon this week, I emailed the elders. Every week, I come up with a prayer schedule for the elders. A little while ago, last year, I think sometime, we agreed. It's the dumbest agreement ever, because it's right there in Scripture, that one of the purposes of elders is to serve the church through prayer. So we said, how can we better do this? And we decided that every week I would make a schedule Monday through Sunday of here's what we should all be praying for today. Here's the one thing to include in our prayers as we pray for grace this week. And I write those on Mondays. And so when I finished writing the sermon this week, I wrote to the elders and, and it was the, you elders don't know, sometimes I sit there and stare at my screen for like 30 minutes. There's a huge hassle, but they're important to do. I did this in five minutes. And I don't remember the exact order, but it was Monday. Pray for your children that they would know Jesus. Just pray for your children that they know Christ. If you're sure that they already know Christ, pray that they would know him more deeply. Tuesday, pray for your small group, by name if you can. Pray that everyone in your small group would know Christ. If they already know him, pray that they would know him more deeply. Wednesday, pray for your service teams, the people that you serve with, including other elders, by name if you can, that they would know Jesus, that those who know Jesus would know him more deeply. And then it was community and neighbors. And then it was extended family. And then it was the people of grace, as many people as you can by name. And then the staff on Tuesday came in here and we went through the church. And one of the things I like to do sometimes, I don't do it as much as I need to, is I just sit in seats and I pray for the people who come to mind. Because you guys are creatures of habit, although the Morgans, you all are messing me up today. You guys are creatures of habit. You sit in the right seats. And I sit in your seats and I pray for you. And I go over there and I pray for you. And we pray that you would know Jesus. That's the prayer. Now here's the conviction. If that's Paul's first prayer and priority for everyone that he meets, shouldn't that be ours too? Shouldn't our first prayer and priority for every person we encounter be that they would know Jesus? What else are we praying for them if we don't do that? And then I started to think about this. What would happen if I shifted my perspective to Paul's perspective, and every person I encountered, the first and primary focus I had for them was I hope you know Jesus. How would that change my countenance? How would that change my life? How would that change my day to day? How would that change how I parent my children as they interact with others? How would that change my level of frustration in traffic? Think about that. If your first prayer and priority for everyone that you met, I think it's we did that, that what we would find is that we would begin to see people as objects of God's affection and not obstacles to our progress. We would begin to see people as objects worthy of God's affection, worthy of that reckless love that chases people down that we just sang about. And we would quit seeing them as obstacles to our progress. Now, I wrote this point specifically for me. So if it's helpful to you too, great. But I don't do so good with that sometimes. I was going to tell you guys a story about an interaction I had over the Christmas break, but the sermon's gone long enough, and I don't really have time to, and I don't really need to give you all the details. Just if I give you the premise, you'll fill in the blanks from there, I promise. I went to an AT&T store over the break. That's fun. I didn't say anything. Like if you just looked at the script, if it was a court transaction, and you just saw the words that I used, you wouldn't think I was being a jerk and that I had totally lost my patience. But if you hear them in a certain tone with a certain look on my face, you would understand that I was less than kind. And as I thought about this, I just deeply regret that interaction. And interactions like that that happened in my life. Where this person that I'm seeing is not an object of the Father's affection. This person that I'm seeing is an obstacle in the way of what I need to do. They're an annoyance. They're an obligation. Whatever word you want to fit in there. And so here's my encouragement to you. Make that your goal in 2024. That everyone you encounter, you would first think of as an object of the Father's affection. That your first priority for them would be that they would come to know Jesus. Pray that for your children. If they know him, pray they would know him more. Pray that for your coworkers. Pray that for your neighbors. And consider what would happen in your life, how your year would look different than 2023. If every person you encountered, your prayer was, God, I hope they know you. And if there's a way to move them towards that right now, I pray that you would use me to do that. How would that change your year? How would that begin to change your heart for others? So that's the challenge to you in 2024. As we make this our prayer for our families and our church and ourselves, we'll talk about the rest of what it means. But as we think about others and as we encounter others, let's let Paul's priorities be our priorities and make our first prayer and only priority for them be that they would know Jesus. As I finish, I'm going to pray. But before I do that, I'm going to leave some space for you to pray as well. I would encourage you right now to pray for the people that God's been bringing to your mind. Pray for the people in your life who might not know Jesus, that they would come to know Jesus. Pray with boldness and with faith. I love that we opened up the service with the song, There's Nothing That Our God Can't Do. Because some of us need to be reminded of that if we're going to continue to pray for that person to know Jesus. I have people in my life that I go through, I go through droughts of praying for them. Because sometimes I just don't think it's possible. But that's a faithless thought. Take a minute. Pray for the people in your life who don't know Jesus that they would know Jesus. If you're a parent, pray at first for your children. And just go out from there. And after a minute or two, I'll pray to close us up and Kyle's going to come up and we're going to have communion together. Heavenly Father, we just want to know you. Lord, would you give us your heart for those who don't know you? Would you give us just a portion of the desire that you have for us that we might feel that desire for you? God, for all the names that just got lifted up to you, we pray with faith and hope that they would come to know you. Lord, if there's a way to use us to bring others into a saving faith in you, I pray that we would open ourselves up to that. That we would be courageous, sensitive, bold, and caring. And we would share you with others. God, if you have an opportunity to use grace to bring people closer to you, we pray that you would do it. We offer you this space in our lives and ask that you use us in your plan to bring people into a saving faith with you. God, we thank you that you make it possible for us to know you. And we pray that you would give us the heart that you have to reach the people who don't. In Jesus' name, amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This is the last week in our series called The Songs We Sing, where we're looking at some of the songs we sing as a congregation, finding them in Scripture and allowing that Scripture to imbue them with a greater purpose. To finish up the series, because of the timing of it, I wanted to do a Christmas song. And so I'll tell you the Christmas song we're going to do here in a little bit, but I thought it would be appropriate as we launch forward into December and all the things that we have waiting for us post Thanksgiving. Hopefully you got your house decorated yesterday. Our house was decorated in early November, so early that I asked Jen, can we please not put the wreaths out so our neighbors don't think we're crazy? So those are going out today. I've been listening to Christmas music since November the 1st. That's the rule in our house. And if you don't like it, you can shove it because that's what we do and that's what we like. And so I'm very, very ready for Christmas. But as we move into Christmas, there's something that I want to hit on and talk about that I mention every Christmas season, and this morning we're just going to rest there because I feel like it's good and appropriate, and you'll see why probably halfway through the sermon, but I also feel like God was in the direction and the theme of the message this week. Because I write these three weeks in advance, and I wrote this without knowing all that would happen this week. But I remember very vividly the Christmas that changed all Christmases. I remember the Christmas that was a clear delineation of, yeah, Christmas will never be again what it once was. I remember that Christmas. Growing up, Christmas was wonderful. It was magical. I don't know what your traditions are, what you do in your family for us. Now, sometimes we had to go to Florida and see my dad's side of the family and my step-grandpa and grandma and my weird cousins, and that wasn't as fun. You just did it. That's a family thing. That's where I started to learn that sometimes you do things for family, even though you don't want to, and you don't like them, and they don't like you, but we're going to perpetuate this for 30 years. So that's what I learned from that side of the family. But for the other side of the family, man, it was magical. So we would go every Christmas Eve, I think after service, I don't know, to Mama and Papa's house. I'm Southern, and so those are my grandparents' names. We would go to Mama and Papa's house, and we would have Christmas Eve dinner, and then we would open up all the presents from all the families, all the aunts and uncles. My mom has two sisters and a brother, so there's four kids, and then all their kids. I think I had five cousins and then different spouses through the years and things like that. So it was a big, full house, very fun. I've told you before that my Papa, I would be the Grinch, and he would be the sleigh, and we would sneak into the room and steal Mama's presents. It was very, very fun. And then we would go home. Santa would come, wake up the next morning. What does Santa bring us? We were allowed to pick our favorite toy, go back over to Mama and Papa's house. And we would spend the whole day there, leftover lunch. And the adults would play games. The kids would run around. It was super, super fun. And my Papa was the hub of all of this. He was the glue. He was the big, huge personality, so magnanimous and magnetic that everyone was drawn to him. Everybody loved him. And I always felt like I was his favorite because I was, and he told me so. But everybody loved Pawpaw. And then in the fall of 2000, when I was 19 years old, he had a massive heart attack and he passed away. And as Christmas approached, there was the sense in our family, and I guess it was amongst the children, the aunts and uncles, where they just said, you know, I'm just not sure if we're going to be able to make it through a normal Christmas at Mama and Papa's house. So maybe we should figure something else out. Because that Christmas was coming up and we all knew it was going to be hard. And so they decided in their infinite wisdom, you know what let's do? Instead of going to Mama and Papa's house, let's go to breakfast at the Ritz in downtown Atlanta. I think maybe Buckhead. Let's go to the Ritz-Carlton. They have a really good Christmas brunch breakfast. It's going to be great. And so that's what we decided to do. So I wake up Christmas morning and I shower. I've never showered on Christmas in my whole life. What am I doing? I would stumble out of bed, go down the stairs. What does Santa bring me? I'll perpetuate this as long as you need me to. If it gets me presents, what did Santa bring me? And then, you know, you'd go to Mama and Papa's house, but I'm just putting on some combination of sweats that I find probably on the floor of my room. I'm not getting dressed. I'm going with a hat on or bedhead. I'm not like doing my hair. And now all of a sudden I'm showering. And then I'm buttoning buttons. Who buttons buttons on Christmas? What a drag that is. You're supposed to be comfortable on Christmas. And I get all dressed up and we go down to the Ritz. And the Ritz is so nice that it feels like we don't belong there. It feels like someone's going to ask us to leave. Like a couple of weeks ago, I've got a good buddy who is, he works at one of the nicer country clubs in the area. And I played a round of golf with him, and then I had an elder meeting, and I needed to get the golf stink off of me, so he said, hey, I'll sneak you into the men's locker room. You can take a shower over there. So the whole time I'm taking a shower in the men's locker room, I'm just, I'm scared. Like, I'm hoping that nobody is going to ask me my member number, and they're going to ask me to leave because I don't have the net worth to shower with that water. Like I was, I was nervous. And so the whole time it was kind of like that sense the whole time we're at the Ritz, I'm afraid someone's going to come up to us and be like, I'm sorry, you're going to have to go eat with the poors. You guys can't be in here. It was just too nice. It was weird and it was rigid and I hated it. But I knew at that Christmas that Christmas would never be the same again, and it hasn't been. We have our own kids now. They understand the miracle and the majesty and the magic of Christmas, and it's fun again to see it through their eyes, and that joy is returning. But for me, that was the Christmas that marked the last really good Christmas. It was also the Christmas that taught me this. Christmas, and all that we're about to embark on, is a joyful season. It's good. It's magical. It's fun. I love going outside in the morning and making bacon and the steam is coming off the blackstone and I'm holding my mug and there's steam coming out of that and there's steam coming off of my breath. I like the wintertime. I like how Christmas time kind of ushers in that sense of winter. I like the decorations. I love the music. I love the themes that we do here at the church. I look forward to family jammy day every year. We all wear our Christmas jammies. I'm in for all of it. I love the parties, the elder party, the staff party, the other parties. I love them. It's great. Let's do all the Christmas stuff. Christmas is a joyful season. But that Christmas taught me that Christmas is a joyful season, but not for everyone every season. Christmas is a joyful season, but not for everyone every season. That year taught me that for some of us, Christmas is hard. And so as a pastor, I never want to move through a December with the hooray and the praise and the joy and the exuberance and't we all happy, and isn't this the best, and isn't this wonderful? And not acknowledge that for some in our faith family, no, this season is not wonderful. And some of you, I know some circumstances, some are unknown to me, but I know that some of you are facing hard Christmases. Some of you are looking at a Christmas that isn't going to be the same. You're looking at a Christmas and there's going to be an empty seat at the table. It's going to be hard. You're walking into Christmas and it's a reminder. Not of what you have. But of what you don't have. Of dreams crushed. Marriages shattered. Children prayed for but not yet received. I know those Christmases. For some of us, Christmas, this time of year, is a reminder of what we've loved and lost, of what we've yearned for and not been given, of what we've had and has been broken. And so we never want to move through a Christmas season without acknowledging that for some of us, some seasons, Christmas is hard. So if that's you this season, then this morning is for you. And I believe this song is for you. The song we're focused on this morning, if you have a bulletin, the cat's already out of the bag, is O Come Emmanuel. O Come Emmanuel. And I put this here, I was trying to decide between O Holy Night and O Come Emmanuel because I think O Holy Night might just be the best song lyrically that's ever been written. And Aaron gently told me, we're not doing that twice. Okay. We're not, we're not going to do that here. And then again on Christmas Eve. So you got to pick. So I went with O Come Emmanuel. That was it. That was a whole thought process because I do love this song and I do think it's, it's really lyrically rich and important. And I think it's a great Christmas song. If you're not familiar with it, you will be by the end of the service today, I promise you. But most of us probably know that. What I did not know about O Come Emmanuel is how sad it is, how much the song languishes, how much it expresses this yearning, not, oh, Jesus, come because we want to celebrate you, but Jesus, come because we need you, because this place is broken and life is hard. I live in a world where bad things happen to good people and it doesn't make sense, so Jesus, please come. What I did not know is that it is steeped in scripture and it is absolutely the anthem for those of us for whom Christmas is hard this year or in future years. So I want to show you what I mean. I'm going to read you the lyrics where if you Google O Come Emmanuel, you'll find a bunch of verses and stanzas, a bunch of lyrics. And so it's kind of like, which ones are we going to sing? So I had to ask Aaron, our worship pastor, which one are we doing? He told me which one. And we're singing three verses in there. And so from just those three verses, I want you to see how much scripture is packed into the words that we're going to sing here at the close of the service. So the first verse of O Come, Emmanuel goes like this. I'm not going to sing it to you. O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appears. So I want you to see first and foremost that the whole name of the song, and this isn't going to be on the screen, is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. And that comes directly from Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14. And if you have the notes, if you have the bulletin, you want to write that down, you can check my references. But that comes from Isaiah 7, verse 14, where it's the end of a long messianic prophecy. I'm probably going to say messianic prophecy a couple of times in the sermon. That simply means an Old Testament prophecy that is about Jesus, the Messiah. So it's a messianic prophecy. And the conclusion of that, it tells us all these things about Jesus and who he's going to be. And then at the end, he says, and his name will be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. It might be the most remarkable name of Jesus because it captures within it the truth that he came down from heaven. He condescended and took on flesh and became like man, became man to be with us. Emmanuel captures who Jesus was and is. So first we see from the very first line that it's pulled right out of Isaiah chapter 7. And then with the rest of it about ransom captive Israel, that comes from Isaiah 35 10. And it's there at the bottom of the screen. Those who have been ransomed by the Lord will return. They will enter Jerusalem singing, crowned with everlasting joy. Sorrow and mourning will disappear and they will be filled with joy and gladness. So the author of this song, the writer of this song pulls this right out of this prophecy in Isaiah 35 where he refers to Jesus as the ransomed of the Lord. He comes to pay the ransom, or he refers to us as the ransomed, and he is the payment for that ransom. And there's an allusion here in the verse that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appears. In this verse of the song, we see this languishing and this anguish of the nation of Israel crying out to God, God, we don't belong here. There's something not right here. Will you please come and get us? Will you please come and pay our ransom? We are enslaved and we are in another nation in which we don't belong. And when we see the nation of Israel referred to in Scripture, it does and often is referring to the actual physical nation of Israel and the citizens of that nation, but it is also almost always referring to the children of God and those who believe in God. So the church, you and me, if we have placed our faith in Christ, and so this resonates with us. We resonate with the words in Isaiah 35 that God is coming to ransom us, that we feel like they feel, that we don't belong here. We are in lonely exile. There has to be something more than this place. There has to be something more than this world that you have to offer. Would you take me from here and bring me to heaven? It's a cry for us to be relieved of this. And then we move into the next verse that we're going to sing. It goes like this, O come thou day spring, come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night and death's dark shadows put to flight. This is taken from the end of Luke chapter 1, verses 78 and 79. What a long chapter. Because of God's tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death and to guide us to the path of peace. So we see again, the author of the song pulls directly out of Luke, and he puts to song the expression of these verses at the end of the prophecy in Luke chapter 1. Oh, come thou dayspring, come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here. They are saying, we are sad, We are depressed. Life is hard. This is a bad Christmas for us. We feel broken. It's right there in the words. Come cheer our spirits. We need you. By thine advent here. Clouds cover my vision and blot out my hope. I feel in the depths of despair, Emmanuel, come. Please come, O day spring, and cheer us and disperse these clouds. The last verse. O come, desire of nations, bind in one the hearts of, straight out of Scripture, straight out of Haggai, the desire of the nations. Other translations have it as the treasure of the nations, but I like this one better. This is King James. I like the desire of the nations. Whether you know it or not, whether you realize it or not, if this is your first Sunday in church, your soul has longed for Jesus your whole life. He is the desire of you, the desire of me, the desire of all the nations. And I love the titling here in that verse. And then the prayer is that he would bid thou our sad division cease and be thyself our king of peace, taken right out of the classic Christmas story in Luke chapter 2 beginning in verse 13 and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and goodwill towards men. This is the gift of Jesus that he brings peace and so so the prayer in the song of come Emmanuel is, would you please bring peace and would our sad divisions cease? It's the understanding that when Jesus shows up, he's going to heal things and bring peace with us. It's the understanding that when Jesus shows up, I don't know if you've thought about this, but when Jesus shows up, he will demolish and abolish. What's the word I'm looking for? Different denominations. He will demolish and abolish denominations. There will be no more Presbyterians. Praise Jesus. We will all, we will all of us, do you know this? We will all be Pentecostal. We will be. We'll be filled with the Spirit. We'll be cheering. We'll be going nuts. The Pentecostals in the end, they're going to win. I'm telling you. There will be no more Baptists. That's not going to happen. No more Catholics. They can drop it with the robes. None of that stuff. He's going to demolish denominations because we don't need those. Those divide us. He's going to heal our family wounds. Some of y'all, your Christmas is going to be tough. And it's not going to be tough because you've lost someone. It's going to be tough because that someone's still sitting there. And they're hard to get along with. And someone that I love very much has taught me that hurt people hurt people. And me and him know that because we hurt each other often. But we always reconcile very quickly. Some of us, there's division, there's hardship in our families. And it's not because the people in your families are bad. It's because hurt people hurt people. And they don't know how to heal themselves. More than likely the ship has sailed on that healing. So they just need grace. And when Jesus comes, he's going to heal them so that they can love you perfectly as Jesus loves them. This prayer, this song is a prayer that Jesus would come and he would heal our divisions. That what's happening in the Gaza Strip would not happen anymore. That warring cultures would find peace and love with one another. That hurting families would be healed and be able to love one another well. That his own body, the church, would knock it off with the divisions and the denominations and would come together, finally answering Jesus' prayer of unity in John 17. That's what this song is for. And so if you sit down with the words of O Come, Emmanuel, what you see is that it's a song of pain. It's a song of languishing. It's a song of hardship. And what we learn from this song is that a right and good response to despair is to long for the return and redemption of Jesus. That's what this song teaches us. That a right and good response to despair is to long for the return and the redemption of Jesus. That when something happens that we can't explain, it's right and good and biblical to say, come Lord Jesus, we need you. That's why I went through the pains of showing you all the verses that are expressed in this song that says over and over again, oh, come, Emmanuel, oh, come, Emmanuel, oh, come, thou dayspring, oh, come, desire of nations, all different names of Jesus. Jesus, come, we need you. When something happens that's hard, that we don't understand, that wrecks us, it's a right, good, biblical, righteous response to say, Lord Jesus, come. This Monday morning, this last week, like a lot of you here, I woke up to a text from Julie Sauls. Julie is on staff with us and does a little bit of everything. Howard is her faithful husband and a good friend to a lot of us. And I woke up to a text that he had had a stroke at about 4 a.m. He had been rushed to the ER and then rushed to another ER. That he was in surgery. There was 100% blockage in his carotid artery. And that they did not know. They didn't know. They didn't know if he was going to make it. They didn't know if he was going to be okay if he did make it. They didn't know what recovery might look like. They didn't even know what was happening in the surgery room. They just knew that he was there and it was serious. And if you don't know Howard, and I hesitate to say this because it's going to get back to, and I'll have to own up to it. This is for him. That's the only reason I'm wearing this stupid-looking tar heel on myself. He's a big fan. Jules, if you and Howard are watching the hospital, here you go, pal. And don't tell him this next part. If you don't know Howard, it's to your detriment. He's one of the good ones. Genuinely good. What I always say about Howard is whenever there's something happening at the church, some function, and things need to be done, if you try to figure out the crappiest job, Howard's already doing it. That's Howard. He's a good man. He's far too young to be having strokes. And as Jen and I were talking on Monday, Lily, our daughter, who's nearly eight, could just sense that something was up. So she started asking questions. And in the best way we could, we tried to explain to her what a stroke was and what that meant, what the potential road ahead for Mr. Howard was going to be. And Jen asked Lily, do you remember what Mr. Howard says to you every week when you come to church? And she responded, every week, as Lily and the family are walking down the sidewalk, most of the time Howard's outside, and when he sees her, he always says, Lily. And she acts embarrassed, but she loves it. And Jen said, do you remember what Mr. Howard says to you? And she said it. And when she said it, I just kind of got up and I hid my face from Lily. And I put my face on Jen's shoulder and I cried. And I told her, I really hate my job sometimes. Because I don't want to be the person that has to bring comfort here. Because I don't know how to do that. Because that morning, we didn't know if Howard was okay. I didn't know if I'd ever hear my friend's voice again. I didn't know if his kids would get to hear him say their name again. If Julie would ever hug him again. I didn't know. And I didn't want to have to be the pastor to come back here and be like, well, there's a reason for everything. So I cried. And we're thankful to know that there was just been a slow trickle of good news since then. Howard's doing well. He's moving both sides of his body, starting to speak. We're praying for a full recovery. He's gaining on it bit by bit. And there are others here who have walked that same path. And we know it's hard. And so I'm glad that he's doing better and I'll tell you what else I'm glad about. Jen went to see Julie and Mackenzie, his daughter, yesterday at the hospital. And Julie was choking up, bragging about you guys, about how this church has shown up for them, about how we have loved on them. And it just makes me so proud to be a pastor of a church that does that. I tell everybody I can, we've got the best church ladies in the business. But in the middle, I'm trying to compose myself so that Lily didn't see me crying. I remembered that I was preaching this on Sunday. I remembered that God put it here. And I remembered that it was okay to not feel like I had to be the agent of comfort. That it was okay instead to be able to respond with my church, oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. Jesus, please come. Please come and end this stuff. Please come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Please come so that I don't have to answer questions. I got a question this morning. It's the question to ask. I saw somebody, very first thing out of their mouth, why do bad things happen to good people? Brother, I don't know. And we're not going to know. We can ask that question all we want. I'll just tell you as a pastor, there's no answer to that. We're not going to know this side of eternity. I know that if I were God, I would mess it up, but bad things wouldn't happen to good people. But when we get to eternity, we're going to know why they do. On this side of eternity, I don't know. What I do know is that it is right and good and biblical and righteous when we hurt to say, Jesus, come. Just stop this pain. Stop these wars. Stop cancer. Knock it off with the empty chairs at the dinner table. Heal the people who hurt us. Jesus, come. This place isn't right. This world doesn't fit. I know that this isn't what you want, God. Send your son to redeem us, to get us again. Jesus, come. It's right and good in pain and in disappointment and in loss and in loneliness and in despair and in depression, to not have an answer for it, to not see a silver lining, to simply throw your hands up and put your head down and say, Jesus, please come and rescue this. It's a mess. Please come. That's what this song is. God, it's a mess. Please come. Send your son. Rescue us. Fix this. Let us exist in your perfect peace. Jesus, come. It's a right and good response to despair. And here's why this song is a Christmas song. Because Christmas reminds us that Jesus has come and instills hope that he will do it again. That's what Christmas is. Christmas reminds us every year Jesus has come. And because of that it instills hope that he will come again. Every year we acknowledge Jesus did come. He did come as a baby, meek and humble and lowly. He did come in a manger to a Virgin Mary and to a father, Joseph. He did arrive in Bethlehem that day. He was taken back to Nazareth. He did live a perfect life and die a perfect death. He did come. God did keep his promise that he made to Abraham 4,000 years prior that the nation of Israel clung to generation after generation as they are subjected to judges and terrible kings and slavery and being drug away from their nation. And they see the temple being built and they see it being torn down and they see it rebuilt again and they weep because it's a shadow of what it was. Through all of that, God was with them and God kept his promise. And we see God keeping his promise in the beginning of the gospels and the Christmas stories. And that's what we celebrate, that God kept his promise and he sent his son. So Christmas reminds us that Jesus has already been here. He came. God did what he said he would do. And because he did, because we saw that promise fulfilled after 4,000 years of waiting, we know that he will keep it again one day too. And we can cling to that promise. That's what being a Christian is. It's believing that it was Jesus who did come in a manger that day, that he did die on the cross, that he did go to prepare a place for us, and one day, we don't know when it will be, but one day he will come crashing back through the clouds and he will claim us and he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. We know that to be true. To be a Christian is to cling to that hope. And so sometimes that hope gets covered over by the clouds of night. Sometimes circumstances make our tether to that hope fragile and thin. Sometimes things happen that we don't understand that we'll never be able to explain. And when they do, we cling to that hope that Jesus will come again and we say, do it soon, Lord. Do it soon. That's what we sing when we sing, O come, Emmanuel. That's what we celebrate when we celebrate Christmas. Jesus did come, and because I believe he did, I know that he will again. That's what Christmas reminds us of. So even if this Christmas is a hard one for you, we have this song, this anthem to declare. And the good news about this song is, it's not just the bad stuff. Oh, come, Jesus, it's hard here. The chorus is rejoice. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel. Rejoice, oh, rejoice, because he's coming again. He came for you and he will come again. Rejoice, rejoice. We have reason to rejoice. And so here's the invitation. In a few minutes, we're going to sing this song together. If this Christmas is hard for you, I want you to declare this. To throw up your hands and to put down your head and to say, Jesus, come. This is hard. Come. And choose to rejoice in that truth. Here's the other thing. If you're in a good season, and this Christmas is a good one, you're blessed, and you're happy, and you're joyful. And you have all the things and all the people around you that you want to have around you, and you're looking forward to a truly joyful Christmas season. Wonderful. Here's what I want to ask you to do. I want you to sing. I want you to sing as loud as you can, because I want you to be the voice for people who can't muster that voice this morning. If they don't have the strength to sing, let them hear you singing. For those of us that don't have the voice to rejoice yet, let's let our church family carry us with their voice to God's throne as we declare this. So we're going to do that in a few minutes together. But before we do that, we're going to have communion together. Because we thought it would be right and good and appropriate to finish up this series and usher in the Christmas series by doing communion together as a church. Communion is one of the traditions that Jesus himself started. At the Last Supper, the night he was arrested, yeah, the elders can come forward and start to set things up. At the Last Supper, the night he was arrested, Jesus took bread and he broke it. And he handed it to the disciples and he says, this is my body that's broken for you. And then he took the wine and he poured it. And he says, this is my blood that spilled out for you. Every time you do these things, I want you to do them in remembrance of me. And so churches through the millennia have observed communion. The body, the bread is God's body that was broken for us. After he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death. The blood, the juice is the blood that was spilled out for us in that perfect death. And in celebrating communion, we acknowledge that to live sometimes is to suffer. But Jesus took on the greatest suffering on the cross. He became suffering for us so that one day we would have to suffer no more. He is the Prince of Peace and He did keep the promises and He will fulfill them again, and we see the depiction of that on the cross as He suffers for us so that we don't have to. He didn't come to just be a baby and live a life. He came to die that death. And so it's good for us to acknowledge that here too. So here's what I'm going to ask you to do. I'm going to invite you to stand and then we're going to pray together and then we'll take communion and then we're going to close the service out with O Come Emmanuel and then we'll go into our weeks. Father, thank you for communion. Thank you for sending your son who became Emmanuel, God with us. Thank you for the perfect life that he lived. Thank you for the death that he died for us. Lord, as we prepare our hearts to take communion, I just pray that we would allow you to do work within us, to rid us of what doesn't need to be there, to infuse us with what does. God, I lift up those for whom this Christmas is going to be challenging. I pray that they would take this song and this desire for you to return as their anthem that would encourage them through this season. God, we lift up Howard as he recovers. Be with him in that recovery. We lift up the other people in our church who are hurting now. We hurt with them and you hurt with them and we pray that you would heal them too. God, we pray all of these things in the name of your son, Emmanuel. Amen.

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