Sermons tagged with Surrender

Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long has it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Oh, today, Moses and the Ten Commandments. That's enough of that. We are, we are. That was 10, 10 long weeks, friends. Once more time with feeling on that. If this is your first Sunday with us, this is the 10th part of our series, Kids Stories for Grownups. We've been showing that video or a portion of it every week, and I want to throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see it. So I'm glad, I'm glad that that has run its its course and we've got more videos for you in the future. As we wrap up the series, we're going to wrap it up looking at the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. And though it is one of the shorter stories that we will tell in this series, I would argue that it is perhaps the most impactful one that we've covered in these 10 weeks as far as how what happens here in Exodus chapter 20 through 32, what happens there resonates and reverberates throughout all of Scripture. And that when we share this story, we have to ask about the story. What were the Ten Commandments for? Why did God give them? And so we're going to dive into that. But in answering that, I really want two things to happen. First, I want God to stir our affection for Jesus this morning. I'm going to tell you right up front that the whole point of the service and the message this morning is that you leave here with more affection for Jesus than what you entered in with. That's my prayer for everybody, that simple prayer. The other thing about talking about the Ten Commandments and the law is properly understanding the law and the commandments helps us understand our Bible better. So I say often, as often as I can, A, I can't be the only source of Bible that you're getting in your life. 30 minutes a week of whatever Nate chooses to share is not enough. It's not sufficient to learn God's word for ourselves. And you'll learn it with my terrible slant and biases, and you'll be as off kilter as I am. So don't do that. The other thing that I say as often as I can is the best habit that anyone in the world can develop is to wake up every time, wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. To do that and to understand our Bibles better, we have got to understand the law because it shows up over and over and over again in the New Testament. Half the tension in the New Testament is these new believers trying to figure out what to do with the old law. So we might be tempted to kind of throw it away and be like, well, you know, a sermon about the Ten Commandments doesn't apply to me too much because those laws really don't apply to me too much anymore. I don't have to worry about those. That's for Old Testament people. But as a New Testament Christian, we're going to see today how the law turns and puts our affection on Jesus. And we're going to, I hope, have a deeper understanding of God's word as we read it with a proper understanding of the law and the intent behind it. So the story of the Ten Commandments takes place in Exodus chapter 20. And many of you probably think that you know the story. Moses goes up on the mountain. You might even know that it's Mount Sinai. Two points for you. You can get your free coffee on the way out the door today. But in Exodus chapter 20, Moses goes up on the mountain. God gives him the Ten Commandments on two tablets. He carries him back down the mountain. He's like, here's the rules now. This is what we have to do. Except a careful reading will tell you that that's not really what happened. What happened is in Exodus chapter 20, the presence of God rests on Mount Sinai and all the people of Israel, all the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrew people who have been wandering the desert and following this God, backed away from the mountain and said, we're terrified. Moses, you go. You do it. You go see what he wants. We're scared. And so Moses goes to the mountain, and from the mountain, the voice of God tells him the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, but he doesn't stop. He actually continues to give Moses laws for his people all the way through Exodus chapter 32. So for 12 chapters there, God is doling out laws. If you carefully study the Old Testament, you'll find that there's about 632 laws, and most of these show up in this discourse from Mount Sinai. And then when he gets to the end of it, at the end of chapter 32, he writes, God writes everything down. He said he gives them the meeting notes. He said, here's what we talked about. Here's the laws for the people. Carry these down to them. And so Moses goes back down the mountain with the stone tablets that do contain the Ten Commandments, but more than likely, because the Bible says things were written on the fronts and backs of them, more than likely is all of the discourse from those 12 chapters. And Moses carries those down the mountain. So if you don't learn anything for the rest of the sermon, maybe you've at least learned something about how the story of the Ten Commandments actually goes. Just to tie a bow on the story, Moses gets to the bottom of the mountain and sees that the people have made a golden calf out of earrings and jewelry, and he's ticked because they need this sign for their God, and he's so mad at them that he throws these freshly inscribed tablets on the ground and breaks them, which I don't know if he was supposed to do that or not, but Moses has a very clear anger issue throughout his life, and this is more evidence of that. God calls him back up on the mountain, and he says, okay, listen, I'm going to tell you all that stuff again, but this time you're writing it down. Okay, Moses has to write it down. God says, I'm not your secretary. All right, I did it before you once. Now you've got to copy it down. So Moses writes it down, brings those tablets back down the mountain, and those are the ones that existed in the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of the Old Testament. That's the story of the Ten Commandments. Now, whenever we cover the story of the Ten Commandments, the right question to ask is, what are they for? What are they for? Why did God give them? To what end? Especially now in New Testament, post-Christ era, or during Christ era, he's eternal, but after Christ was on earth and he's changed everything, and after the crucifixion and the resurrection, now how do we handle the law? Now what is it for? So this morning, we want to look at that story of the Ten Commandments, but then really ask, why did God give us those things? Because understanding this, again, will point us towards Christ and will help us understand our Bibles far better. The presumed purpose of the law, when it was given and when we encounter it, I believe, is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency and in our sufficiency, earn God's approval. When the law is given, there's a very clear path forward. Okay, good. Now I've got a plan. Now I know how to move forward. These are the rules that God wants me to follow. These are the ways that I can relate to him. For his children, there's a very clear path forward. I can follow these 632 laws. I can learn to follow them really, really well. And as I learn to follow them well, I can be spiritually sufficient and I can earn my God's approval. God says, we say, God, how do I make you happy? He goes, here, here's all the rules. Follow these rules super well and you'll make me happy. And I will give you my approval. And we can, in a sense, behave our way into eternity. We can behave our way into harmony with our Creator if we will simply learn to follow these rules well. And this, to us, and to the Hebrew people at the time, had to feel like good news, great, clarity. Finally, we know what to do. Think about it this way. Think about if you could sit down and read the Bible on your own without any knowledge whatsoever of what's contained in those pages. You don't know who Jesus is. You don't know anything about the Bible. You don't know how the story ends. You're reading it from Genesis on, and you're just paying attention to the narrative, trying to figure out how it's going to go. And so in Genesis 1, you see this instruction, hey, don't eat the fruit of this tree. Why not? Don't worry about it. Just don't do that. And then they mess up and they sin. And sin curses the earth. And curses the earth so bad that as you read along, you realize that in Genesis chapter 6, God decides I need to hit the reset button. I regret the way that this is going. And so he sends the flood. And all that's left behind is Noah and his family. And all God does to Noah, his only instruction to him, he doesn't give him the rules. What does God say to Noah? Hey, man, I want you to build a boat. What's a boat? Well, it floats in water. Well, what for? Just trust me, man. Just build a boat. But he doesn't give Noah the rules. And so you're reading along, you're like, man, this God is mysterious. How does he, how is he speaking to Noah and not the other people? And then you get to Abraham. He's called out of Ur of the Chaldeans in the Sumerian dynasty. And God comes to him and he says, hey, man, I want you to give up the future that you thought you were going to have in your dad's estate and I'd like you to move. Okay? Where? Don't worry about it. I'll show you. Man, this guy's mysterious. And how do I know that he's talking to other people besides Abraham? Is he only talking to Abraham? Where is this God? What are his rules? And when does he need us to follow them? Where is the clarity? And yet, Abraham gets to where he he's supposed to go and he meets a king there named Melchizedek who knows the will of God just as well as Abraham does. And we see that God is speaking to people all through this time, but we don't know where and how. And then he doesn't really give any more clarity to his son Isaac or to Jacob or to Joseph. And then 400 years go by and this Moses guy shows up. And what does he tell Moses? I want you to free my people, okay? Where do you want me to take them? I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna be a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Just follow me. And you're reading along going, man, this God is tough to follow. And then out of nowhere, Exodus 20. Hey, hey, hey, here's the rules, guys. This is what I want you to do. And I think our knee jerk as people would be to go, good, finally, thank you. Now I've got a plan. Now you're not just this weird cloud that I follow around and try to hear or just trust that Moses is hearing your voice. I mean, how weird would that be? If I got up here and I said, listen guys, I'm the only one who can really hear God very well, so you just need to listen to what I have to say. But that was the situation. And so with the law, good clarity, I have a plan. I can move forward. And don't we love that as Americans? Don't we love a good plan? I know in my life that when things start to go bad, when I'm not happy about what I'm doing at church, or I don't feel like I'm doing my job over here, or I don't feel like this part of my life is going very well and it's caused some pain and I try to figure out the best thing to do, what do I do? I sit down and I come up with a plan and then I work the plan. And there's great comfort in a plan that you think is going to succeed. And then you can work the plan. And so here, God finally gives some clarity. You want to make me happy? Here, follow the rules. And I think our human brains go, great, finally, a plan. I can do this. But I've always wondered, why did it take God so long to give him this plan? Why did God wait so long into the history of his people, a couple thousand years, to give him the rules? I think it's because God wants a relationship with us. And if we go back and we follow those first rules, those first instructions that he gave the early saints, we see that that's all he was really looking for. Adam and Eve, just trust me, don't eat of that. Why? Don't worry about it, just trust me. Noah, build a boat. Why? Just build it. Trust me. Listen to me. Do what I ask you to do. You're safe with me. Abraham, I want you to move. Where? Don't worry about it. Just go. Trust me. Follow me. Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your only son. But why? How? Abraham, don't worry about it. Just go. Obey me. Moses, lead my people. Where? Just follow me. At every instance, the beckoning of God is to follow him. Trust me. Work into a relationship with me. Get to know me. Pursue my heart as I pursue yours. And I think the real reason, when we consider it, that God waited so long to give the rules is because he knew that we would make them into a code, that we would begin to codify our relationship with him. Instead of pursuing him, we would just codify it, make a code of laws out of it, and go, here, this is all I need to do. I don't need the relationship anymore. What God knew is that relationships become contracts when we reduce them to codes. Relationships become contractual arrangements when we reduce them to a code of laws. Imagine if we did this in our marriages. I did a wedding yesterday, and I got to the portion where I did the vows. And at the vows, you vow affection to one another. You make promises to one another to have and to hold, richer for poor, in shape and not. However, we promise we will always love one another. What if instead of exchanging vows, we exchange our contractual agreements that we had negotiated prior to our marriage? And then on our anniversary, we revisited our contracts to see if we wanted to update them at all as ways to maintain the approval and affection of one another. Can't you just hear the contract negotiations? I think I would open with, for weekends in the fall when football starts, from noon on Saturday until when I go to bed on Sunday night, I would like to be able to treat my children like a railroad tycoon from the early 1900s. I would like to sit in my parlor, unbothered by them. Occasionally, they come in, and I laugh at them, tousle their hair, tell them they're cute, and then send them back to the nanny and I watch my football. This would be where I would start. And my wife would inevitably say, okay, but on Fridays and for at least one hour a night, you will engage with imaginative play with your children. You will even do Barbies. Also, once a week, I need some mom time. I need to go to Target, and I need to have lunch with people, and I need to go waste money on Starbucks. I'm going to need to do this, and I would say, okay. Once a week, I would like fresh flowers on the table. What kinds of flowers? You've got to help me out here. Can you imagine if we just negotiated our relationships and went back and forth? You give me this and I'll give you that. It robs it of its heart. It robs it of the love and affection that we experience in those things. The joy of marriage, the depth of marriage is getting to know one another over the years, is knowing when I do this, she's going to feel loved. When I do this, she's going to feel aggravated. When she sees me do this, this is what stirs her affections for me. So that by the time we've been married 30, 40, 50 years, we know each other better than any other soul on the planet. And that connection there was not achieved by making rules and negotiating contracts with each in attempting to follow those rules, we would rob the relationship that we have with him of its heart. And we don't need to look very hard in Scripture to see that he was right and that this is true. There was 1,400 years between Moses receiving the law and the gospels beginning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where Jesus comes on the scene. And when we get to the gospels, we see Jesus address the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the rule keepers, man. It is their job to read the rules, to interpret the rules, and to tell everybody what the rules mean, and to tell everybody how you're going to follow them. Like, it says don't work on the Sabbath, okay? Well, some Pharisees interpreted that as don't go out and plow the field with your donkey on the Sabbath. That's not allowed. Others were so strict with it that they said, if your sandal has a nail in it, that's heavier than it needs to be because it's metal and you cannot wear those sandals on Sabbath because that's work. So they had to figure out what do the rules mean and how do we apply them and how do we tell people whether or not they're following them. They were the keepers of the rules, the watchers of the rule book, and they should have known as well as anybody how to follow them. And if you follow them well, the way that God intended, their hearts should be rendered to God. They should be some of the greatest, most trustworthy people on the planet, except you guys know, what does Jesus call the Pharisees? Whitewashed tombs. He calls them a brood of vipers. He says, You're a brood of vipers. You're a bunch of hypocrites who had taken the religious authority that they were given and leveraged it for personal gain and personal power and then set up a system around themselves to protect their personal gain and their personal power. And they were complete hypocrites and their heart was very far from the Lord. They have figured out how to heartlessly follow God's rules and maintain a facade of righteousness. And I just wonder if that sounds like any segments of the church that we have today, where men, and it's almost always men, are in charge and they've set up systems so that they stay in charge and they can personally profit from the spiritual authority that they have. And it's gross. And it happened then and it happens now. Whenever we set up a system around who follows the rules the best, what inevitably happens is people claim that they follow the rules best and that you should follow them, and then they cast judgment on you and they exact taxes from you. And it's disgusting. Which is why I hope that if Jesus saw me, he would at least say, well, you're a messy tomb. You're dirty. And I would be like, that's great, because you're going to wash me off. But that was the condition of the Pharisees. They were a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, because they had so perverted the law over the years as to make it this thing of if you can follow it well enough, you can behave your way into God's affection and approval. And we need to watch it because we do that too. I remember when I was in high school, there was certain rules you had to follow. Every church, every group of Christians has them. Some rules that if you follow these rules, now you're righteous, now God loves you, now you're a good Christian. When I was in high school, if you didn't drink or do drugs, if you didn't cuss, if you didn't do anything with your boyfriend or girlfriend that you're not supposed to do. And you're a good Christian. Congratulations. Are you a jerk to everyone in your life? Yes, but you follow those rules, so you're fine. Meanwhile, we take the person over here who has a genuinely good heart and is gentle with people, but doesn't check one of those boxes, and we tell them that they are apostate and they need to go to youth group and probably some camp where they pledge purity or something like that. Every community of faith has its rules that it wants to default to. And we have our rules too. And we have our things where I just need a plan. If I can do this and this and this, then I'll be a good Christian. And without realizing it, we begin to try to behave our way into God's affection and approval. The end of that road is the Pharisees. The end of that road of trying to behave our way into God's affection is frustration and hypocrisy and a heartless obedience to God. And what's more frustrating is, in this following of the rules, it is possible to do it completely heartlessly, to follow the rules and not even love the rule giver. I went to a Christian college. There was lots of rules at that Christian college. I thought they were all stupid. But I followed them. Well, a better example is Jen went to a Christian college. And they had a lot of rules. And she didn't agree with all of them. But she followed them. Not because we had this deep and abiding affection for Toccoa Falls College and just a sense of loyalty to it. Not because we loved the rules and thought they were great. But because that was what was asked of us. And so we did. We can do that with God too. We all know how to go through the motions and follow the rules so it looks like everything's together. Meanwhile, our hearts are empty. And then Jesus comes along and he makes this heartless obedience harder. Jesus makes the heartless obedience harder when he shows up because he starts to redefine the law, to correctly define the law, to fix people's understanding of it, to help them see it's really impossible to follow it without heart. You can't follow the essence of the law without following the heart of the law. And he comes along with what is the single most convicting two verses for any man who's ever lived. He says this in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 and 28. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. What that means is, I can only speak for the dudes, every one of us is an adulterer based on what Jesus taught. Now, we should not back away from that and consider it figurative. He meant what he said, and it's true. But until Jesus said this, plenty of us are going through life going, if I just don't commit adultery, the physical act of it, with someone else's spouse, then I'm squared away. I'm righteous, I'm good. And Jesus says, no, no. If you even look at them with intent, you're guilty. And then we all go, well, then I'm guilty. He even says that you've heard it said that we shouldn't murder anybody. Thou shalt not kill. And all of us, I would hope, can check that box. Yeah, you know, 40, I'm going 41 years. I'm in my 42nd year so far, no murders. Really nailing that one. But if you've hated someone in your heart, then you're guilty of that as well. And you go, oh, well, then I guess I'm a murderer. And the more you examine the law, the more frustrated you should become. Those of you in your life who have tried to white knuckle your way to holiness, who have just tried through sheer determination, I'm going to be a good Christian. I'm going to follow the rules. I'm going to do what God asked me to do and behave our way into God's affection. What always happens? You fall on your face. And when you fall on your face, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you go, I wasn't holding on tight enough that time. Now, this is the time when I'm going to white knuckle my way to God's affection. And Jesus, in this gentle way, whispers in your ear, no, you're not. No, you're not. And so when we examine the law and we hold it up to ourselves, what we realize is this is impossible. It brings us to this inflection point of frustration where sooner or later, sooner or later when you've fallen off the horse enough times, when you've tried to follow the rules well enough, when you've tried to behave your way into God's affection and approval, and when you've disappointed him again and you've let him down, and you've got to pick yourself up again, sooner or later you're going to say, I don't want to do this anymore. And it's at that point that a lot of people walk away from the faith because they believe that faith is following rules well, and it's not. But the law has to get us to this point where we surrender. We say, I can't do this anymore. There's no possible way I can follow the law. And when we're there, when we understand that we cannot behave our way into heaven, and I know, I know, listen, I know that I say that, and all the Christians in the room go, yeah, no, it's God's grace. I cannot behave my way into heaven and into God's affection. And yet, you live out your faith like that's what you can do. You know intellectually that you can't behave your way into God's approval for you. And yet, boy, you try, don't you? I'm just talking to myself here. So lest we sweep aside, no, I don't do that. Yes, you do. We all do. But it's at that point when we realize that we can't, that we're ready to hear the message from Romans 8, 1 through 4, where Paul writes about this exact thing. And I'm going to read it to you, and it's going to be a little bit murky, but there's a couple phrases we can key in on to really help us understand what he's talking about. He writes this. He washed off our tombs. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Paul says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For those of us who trust in Jesus and his sufficiency, our tombs are clean. We are alive in Christ. He's taking care of us. Because God has done, by sending him to die on the cross, to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death and to have a perfect resurrection, God has done what the law, listen, weakened by the flesh. But he sent his son who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. He sent Jesus to live a perfect life and to perfectly follow the law, the only person in history who's ever done it, to die a perfect death, to have a perfect resurrection, to ascend back into heaven, and then begin, according to Romans and Hebrews, to advocate to the Father on our behalf. And in that action, he covers over our weakness, and we are restored into the life of the Spirit and into harmony with our Creator and into affection from our Father God. That's what Paul is saying in Romans. He's telling us the purpose of the law is to show us our need for Jesus. And so in light of that, I told you at the beginning, we presume the purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency. And in our sufficiency, so earn God's approval. But what we see through a careful examination of ourselves, standing up against the law, what we see in the teachings of Jesus is that was never the purpose of the law. The purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual surrender and in Christ's sufficiency, receive God's affection. You see the difference? When we act like it's to achieve our own spiritual sufficiency, we butt our heads up against the wall until we reach a place of surrender. And we say, Jesus, I can't follow the law. You followed it perfectly. I'm totally reliant on you. I'm done trying. I'm done trying to behave my way into heaven. I'm done trying to behave my way into God's affection and into my Father's approval. And I surrender to you. I confess, you died, you lived a perfect life, you died a perfect death, and then you resurrected for me. And you are my path to harmony with my creator. And I am insufficient entirely to do that at all. I am completely and totally reliant upon the sufficiency of Christ and his death on the cross. That is my only path to affection with my father. And then in Christ's sufficiency, we receive, not earn, God's affection, which is far better than approval. We don't want our dads to simply nod in a condescending approval to us. Yeah, you're good. Yeah, you're okay. Yeah, you're allowed. We don't want a distant, heartless approval from our God. We want that affection. We want Him to love us. We want Him to take joy in our joy. We want Him to mourn when we mourn. We want Him to hurt when we hurt. We want Him to love when we love. We want to know that our Father God is right there. We want his affection. And to get that, all we have to do is surrender. Quit trying so dang hard. And what it looks like is this. How about, how about instead of deciding all the things you're going to do to live the life that you think God wants you to live and to be the person that you think God wants you to be and all the plans and all the rules and all the white knuckling that we're going to do, how about we scrap that? And how about we make our only plan is to wake up every day and remind ourselves of the love that Jesus has for us. I heard one pastor call this preach the gospel to yourself. Remind ourselves that we fall at the feet of Jesus, that we rely on his sufficiency, that we trust in his perfect life and in his perfect death, and that God, the Bible says that this is love, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Before we earned it, before we deserved it, before we had any claim to it whatsoever, God sent Jesus to live a perfect life and die a perfect death so that we could experience eternity in heaven with him, so that we could walk in the affection and the love of our Father, so that we could be at harmony with our Creator. Remind yourself of that every morning. Remind yourself every morning, Jesus loves me. My Father loves me. Not for who I'm going to be, not for how I'm going to behave, but He loves me because He sent His Son for me. And if anyone were to ask me, why does God love you? I would point to the cross and I would say, because of what Jesus did, not because of anything that I've done. And remind yourself of that overflowing love every day. I love that verse in the book of John that says, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Remind yourself of that grace every day. And what you'll see happening is when we surrender to Christ and we remind ourselves of his love, that our affections for the people around us are stirred as well. We'll be more gracious with our husbands and our wives and our children and our friends and our co-workers and the bad drivers. When we daily remind ourselves to surrender to Christ's sufficiency, when we choose surrender over sufficiency, God stirs our affections for Jesus. When we simply remind ourselves, I am insufficient, I have nothing to offer, Jesus has everything to offer, and I rely on that. When we remind ourselves of that, God stirs our affection for Jesus. And in stirring our affection for Jesus, he stirs our affection for one another, which by the way, isn't that the whole point of the law anyways? Didn't Jesus say that loving God with all your heart, soul, and your mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself sums up the whole law and the prophets? This is how it does it. Instead of trying to be a people who are worried about the rules and all the right behaviors for Christians, which, by the way, will stop us from looking at other Christians and saying on social media, well, it's pretty unchristian. I thought you said you were a Christian and now you're da-da-da-da-da. If we would move away from a rule-following Christianity and towards a daily surrender to that Christ, we will find waiting for us an affection for Jesus and an affection for others that will help us walk in harmony with the law anyways. So the whole point of the law and the whole point of this morning is to grab our faces and point them to Christ and help us remember that he alone is worthy of our affection, that he alone is worthy of our devotion. And if we would quit trying to follow the rules so darn well and fail and get up and try hard again, if we would just surrender instead of trying so hard, surrender to the sufficiency of Jesus, that he would fill our hearts with affection for him, that that affection would overflow to others, and then we would finally be people who keep the law and walk in devotion and affection to Jesus. So I said my prayer for you at the beginning was that you would leave here with your heart stirred more for affection to Jesus than when you came in. That you would leave here desiring Jesus more than you did when you entered in. And my further prayer is that that would be a sustained thing, that some of you, gosh, maybe a few of you, would finally quit trying so hard and just wake up tomorrow morning and say, Jesus, thank you for loving me, and see where that leads. In a minute, the band's going to come up, and we're going to sing a song called Jesus, We Love You. There's a chorus in there, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Let's stand and sing this song as one church with one voice and one agreement and one surrender to pour everything out at the feet of Jesus and let him stir our affections for him. Let's pray. Father God, we are grateful for you. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us the law so that we can see how much we need you. God, I pray that we would want more of you, that we would simply want more of Jesus, that we would want to know you better, and that in that pursuit we would feel a freedom from the things that trip us up, from the things that seek to hold us back, that so easily entangle. But that maybe, God, by focusing on you, by focusing on your son, we can run the race that's set before us as we were finally, finally intended to run. Focus our eyes on you, Jesus. And let us trust you to take care of everything else. In Jesus' name, amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and 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. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. That was great, Kirk and the band. It was really good. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So if I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. And sincerely, thank you for being here on this cold holiday weekend. It's really great to look out and see faces, ones I hope will be smiling and not yawning here shortly. If you're wondering why is Nate limping around and on a stool, well, to much of your glee, I have gout again. So I know the worst part of gout, which is very painful, is not the pain. I can limp around for a couple of days and really not fuss about it very much. It's you. It's the jackals here, the hyenas that circle my pain-ridden corpse as I have to admit things like this. But that's what's going on. And I'm only telling you now because I'm referring to him as Uncle G. Uncle G's come for a visit. He's going to show up later in the story this morning. So it's important that you have this preface right now. We are in the fourth part of our series in Colossians, where we've moved through the book of Colossians together. And admittedly, it's portions of the book of Colossians. We've not moved through the whole thing. We've just kind of moved through and selected the things that seem to me most relevant to grace. And I've really enjoyed being able to do this in ways that were unexpected. I've really enjoyed this series. And so what we've been through so far is to look at this church in Colossae and acknowledge that they were a church that existed with some pressure. They were doing a good job. They were loving God well. They loved one another well. And in that way, I felt like they were similar to grace, but they're also similar to grace in the pressures that they were facing from within and from without. In the culture in which they sat, there were pressures for them to skew legalistic in their practices and in their theology. And then there was pressures for them to skew liberal in their practices and in their theology. So Paul's goal is to write them and encourage them to stay true to the true faith. And so how does he do that? Well, he does that in the opening chapter and for us week one by painting a soaring picture of Christ and who he is and focusing us on him. And then he lets us know that we are actually our brother's keeper, that the spiritual health of the people around us who we love and care about is your responsibility as one of God's children. And so we carry that together to try to bring everyone to spiritual maturity. And then last week, we talked about this idea of living as a new creation, as focusing on Christ, daily letting His love and His grace and His mercy and His compassion wash over us and so put to death in us the things that would have us behave as our old self or the bad, less healthy versions of ourself. And so this week he finishes up the letter with what's commonly referred to as the household codes. And they show up a couple different places in Pauline epistles or in Paul's writing. Okay. And so we're going to be looking at those this morning and I'm going to start start to read the passage. And immediately you're going to think to yourself, oh boy, this is a sticky one for 2022. What's he going to do? I'll tell you. But let's read together and then we will look at the meaning of the passage together. I'm picking it up in Colossians chapter 3 verse verse 18, and I'll read through the very beginning of Colossians chapter 4. Read with me, if you will. Paul writes this, For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. All right, there's a lot there and a lot of dynamics covered there. The dynamic covered between husband and wife, between father and children, and then between master and slave. And some versions have the word bond servant put there. And really that's an attempt of the editors of that particular translation to soften the original text and say, no, no, no, it didn't mean slave, it meant bond servant. And that's intellectually, okay? So as believers, we should encounter what it says in Scripture and deal with it with honesty without trying to artificially soften it. So the word there is slave, which is problematic, and we're going to refer to that in a second. But as we read this passage, and as you hear it, my anticipation is that you would expect me now to break that down. What does it mean? Wives, submit to your husbands. What you going to do, sucker? That one's pretty sticky, right? In 2022. And then we read the rest ones, and then there's the problematic things for Christians about provisions for masters and slaves and the whole deal. So what are we going to do with that? Well, the answer is we're not going to talk about that. All right. I'm going to talk about something else. Now, why am I going to talk about something else? Well, two reasons. The first one is the one that you're assuming right now, because I don't want to. I don't want to do that. That's too much work and too much effort and too much thought and too much parsing out all the words. And honestly, I don't think it's what Grace needs to hear most right now. So we're not going to camp out on gender roles in the home, okay? We're just not going to do that. Second, I think that there's a bigger theme here to these verses that is super important to us, that is very relevant to us, and that is worth camping out on. Before I just jump to that, though, I will say this to fight back just total cowardice on my part about the first verse, wives submit to your husbands, gender roles in the home, things like that. I will tell you two things, and only these two things, and I will not offer much explanation. If you want more, talk to me about it. Email me. I've never once turned down a lunch opportunity, especially if you're buying. I've never once done that. I always respond to emails. So if you want to talk more about this and these themes, I'm open for that. That's just not where I want to camp out this morning. But since we're there, I will say these two things. I will say it is my personal understanding and belief based on not just this scripture, but myriad passages, that in the structure of marriage, God has chosen to give men the tie-breaking vote. But it is also my belief based on other passages, particularly Ephesians 5, where men are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it. That men are to sacrifice everything we have for the sake of our wives, and therefore, though we have the tie-breaking vote, it is our holy responsibility to use it as little as possible so that when it is used, it can be trusted. Okay. The other thing that I will say about that on kind of the opposite end of the spectrum is we cannot just pluck that verse, wives submit to your husbands, out of context and understand it at face value. We have to put it in the context in which it rests. And the context in which it rests is in the following verses, there's a lot more provisions about how slaves are to behave and how masters are to behave towards slave than there is about family codes. So if we're going to contextualize and culturalize the instructions about masters and slaves, then we can't just do it to one part of the passage. So the whole passage is best understood with the nuance of the culture going on around it and with some good academic study, not simply plucked out of context. We cannot understand verse 18 in a way that we would not use to understand the passages that follow. That's what I'll say about those two things, or about that thing, those two things. Now, to the bigger point. There is something going on in this text that I think applies to all of us right now and is a far more relevant sermon than just how do we parse out these particular things. And to get to that point, we do need to understand the cultural context in which these things rest. These are, again, household codes, where Paul is saying, in light of the gospel, in light of Jesus and who he is, in light of the provisions that I'm giving you, in light of putting on a new self and how do we live this Christian life, how are we to organize our lives? And what we need to understand is these codes that he gives out here in these verses, these instructions, and the ones that we find in other Pauline writings, like Ephesians, are given in a Roman context. These cities are Roman cities with a Roman heritage. And those cities and those cultures are incredibly patriarchal. They are man-centered. The man of the house, the father, the patriarch of the family, is a king of his little fiefdom. Now, they're little pathetic kingdoms. I mean, there's nothing to be proud of, but he is the king. The wife is the property. She is subservient to him. Everything is built around him. Everything focuses on him. Everything exists under his direction with no question and with no questioned authority. The wife is someone that is there for use or not use, for purpose or no purpose, and she can be cast aside just as quickly as she is added into the family. The marriage covenant is a marriage contract, and he can terminate it whenever he wants. She can terminate it never. Children are accessories to the marriage. They are future heirs. They are not little people. They do not have rights. The rights that they have exist under the authority of the father, and they have no more rights than he wants to give them. Slaves, likewise, have no rights. They exist under the rule of the man of the house. They exist under the rule of the master. They have no one to appeal to. They have no other authority. He literally is the king of his small kingdom. That's the way that the Roman culture and society was set up. As an aside, can you imagine the abuse and misogyny that went on in that culture, where a man is in charge with unquestioned authority of all of the people in his life. Thank God we have figured out how terrible of an idea that is. My heart breaks for the women and children that were in that culture. And all of that makes Paul's writings incredibly radical in the time that they were received. He says, husbands, treat your, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. More on top of that, in Ephesians, he says, love your wives as Christ loved the church, laying himself down for them, giving himself up for them, which is totally radical to the Roman view of wife as accessory. It's a completely different train of thought. I can't be harsh with them. I have to consider them. I have to be nice to them. I have to listen to them. Yes, man, it's called being a human. You have to do all those things. And then it says, do not provoke your children to anger, which is not something that a Roman father would ever consider. He doesn't care if he makes his kids angry. He doesn't care if they don't like him. He doesn't have to. They're just there as accessories to the marriage. And one day there'll be heirs. And one day maybe they can contribute to the wealth of the home. But right now I don't have to care about them, Which, having a nine-month-old, I understand that mentality sometimes. John likes to play a really fun game of, hey, I'm going to kind of cry all day, and you just figure out how to make me stop doing it. Fun. Let's go, buddy. But children were accessories to marriage. They had no rights. And then slaves, I don't need to explain to you how much they could be mistreated. We know the crimes over the centuries. And so for Paul to come in here and say, hey, masters of the house, you treat your slaves, paraphrase, treat them however you want, but God's watching you. And however you treat them is how he's going to treat you. However you judge them is how he's going to judge you. The mercy that you apply to them is the mercy that he will apply to you, which again is radically different than what's happening in the rest of Roman culture. So Paul is telling the church in Colossae, if you want to be believers in light of Jesus and the fact that he is now in your life, your family needs to look radically different than the families that are around you. And bigger than that, he's telling them this. He's telling them that right now, your family life, your life is centered on the man. It's centered on the father. It's centered on the husband. It's centered on the master. He needs to be decentralized, and Christ needs to become the central figure and tenant in your home around which everything revolves. And he's primarily addressing the man here because the rest of them are under no auspices that they are the focus of the home. They don't need to reorient how they expect others to treat them. They need to reorient where they put the father of the home and put Jesus in the center of that. So what's going on here is radically different than everything in the Roman home. And this is the larger theme, I believe, of the household codes that we find in Colossians and in Ephesians, which is to say this, that Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. That's the point, I think, of this passage, the larger point that is more applicable and important for us to consider this morning, that when we become believers, Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. So to these cultures, to these families that were entrenched in this patriarchic, unhealthy culture in ancient Rome, Paul says your life needs to look completely different. You need to completely reorient your family and household life around Jesus and not around the Father, not around the man. It's got to look radically different. And I actually, in those notes, I said Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives. And I don't know why I did this. I intentionally softened it a little bit when I turned in the notes on Thursday. But in thinking about it over the weekend, it's not invites, it's insists. Jesus demands that we would radically reshape our lives around him. And it's so much so that I would say that our lives after Jesus need to look a lot different than our lives before Jesus. Our lives with Jesus as Lord of our lives by necessity will look a lot different than our lives without Jesus as the Lord of our lives. And if those two versions of ourselves and our lives and our priorities look pretty similar, there's probably a problem going on there. And the problem is this. I think we often attempt to fit Jesus into our lives rather than reshaping our lives around him. We often attempt to find ways to kind of shove Jesus into our life in this predetermined shape in a way that he will fit. And we're more interested in making Jesus fit into our life than we are about reshaping our life so that Jesus takes it over. There's kind of two illustrations I would use here. The first is pretty simple, but maybe it's the one we need this morning, so I'm just going to leave it in. But it's as if we become a Christian and when we become a Christian, Jesus is going to move into our house and he's going to now live with us. He's now a part of our life. And so a lot of us probably have a guest room. And when we realize that Jesus is going to be moving in with us, we're like, well, I got to update this thing. The thread count is too low for Jesus. So we go and we get the finest Egyptian, we get 800 or more thread count for Jesus is what he needs. And we get all the best things and we make sure that there's a good charger. We don't give him the one that's chewed on or frayed. We give him the nice charger for the nightstand. And we buy, maybe we buy a new small TV and we put it over there and we hook it up to an Apple TV and the whole thing and we go ahead and we cover his Apple TV subscription because it's Jesus and he probably wants to watch Ted Lasso. And so we kind of set up everything for him, right? And we're ready. And then Jesus moves in. And he says, look at this guy, this is a nice guest room. And we're like, well, yeah, I mean, you're moving in. So we wanted to make sure it was up to your standards. And he's like, well, no, I mean, I'm taking the master. That's your room. I think some of us just prepare a nice guest room for Jesus, and then everything else stays the same. Another way to think about this, that I actually wanted to do a visual aid illustration of, and so I need to beg your forgiveness and your imagination, because I'm going to invite you to imagine this illustration with me, since I'm not able to do it. And here's why I'm asking you for your forgiveness. I was not able to do it because I had to go get some materials and prepare it, and I had a couple afternoons where I probably could have, and I just didn't. I'll do it this weekend. And then over the weekend, you know, we had a kid get sick, and some unexpected things happened, and my old buddy Uncle G came to visit, and it's not really a time to be walking around stores, and I just didn't have time to do the things that I needed to do. So I failed you as a pastor. I did not budget my time wisely, and I sit up here illustrationless. So if you'll accept that tepid apology, then I will invite you to use your imagination, because here's what I wanted to do, okay? Here's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go get like a big block of like modeling foam, if that's even a thing that exists, and get a square one, and then have a board with a big hole cut out of it, and say the foam block represents Jesus, and the board with the hole in it represents us. That's our life. And what happens is we take Jesus, the square, and we try to fit it into the circle, and it doesn't work out. And so we're faced with a choice. I can reshape Jesus according to who I think he ought to be and to what my life already is and just kind of shove it in there and make it work, or I can change my life. And what most of us do, all of us in different ways, choose to do is we choose to reshape Christ according to who we already are and just assume that he probably is too. And we remake Christ in our image and then we make him fit the life that we've already chosen to live. And there's a bunch of examples of how we do this. I'm just going to give you a couple this morning. When I was thinking about how is it that we do this, what are practical ways that we kind of reshape Jesus in our own image to make him fit into our existing life, the very first thing that occurred to me, as touchy as it is, is politics. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans, and everything in the middle. I don't know if libertarians in the middle or if it's like over here on the other side of Republicans. I don't know where that belongs, but all of the parties. I have known people who just assume that because this is my political affiliation, certainly Jesus agrees with me. Certainly because this is the most important moral value for me, it's also the most important moral value for Jesus. And sure, my party doesn't champion some of the causes the way that it talks about in Scripture, but we cover the important ones the exact same way that Jesus wants to. And so I know that my political party is the right political party. And further, the other political party, those people are not even Christians. They think they are. They're stupid. And if they went to my church, my pastor would tell them. No, I would not. I would not. I'd tell them in person, but not corporately like this. And it's funny to chuckle at, but what's really disappointing to me, and I've seen it more and more, if we don't think that this is true, is the fact that I have seen a lot more Christians change their faith than change their politics. I have seen a lot more Christians who are, they are clinging to their political party, they are clinging to their social justice paradigm, to the way that they think about cultural issues and the way that they think about political issues and then be met with places where it seems to clash with their faith and one of them has to give way way, and it's not their politics. It's not their faith, rather. They choose their politics. I've seen a lot more Christians adjust their view of who they think Jesus is according to what their certain politics should be. And I've seen very few believers, just being honest, I've seen very few believers who change their politics in light of the Jesus that they learn about. And I think that that's a big problem. Another way we do this is with our time, right? We become Christians and we see that Jesus makes certain demands of our time. Jesus says, I'd like to meet with you every morning. I'd like to meet with you every day. I'd like to meet with you in prayer. I'd like you to study me. I'd like you to get to know me. I'd like to spend some time with you. And our response is, listen, Jesus, I do too. I want to spend time with you. You seem great. But I'm sleepy, okay? So I'm not going to set that alarm. Jesus, listen, I want to spend time with you too. But it's the playoffs, all right? So I'm going to be up late. Jesus, I know that I need to prioritize church. I get it, and I'm going to. But it's football season, and I'm going to be tailgating. You know what happens at tailgates. So I'll see you during basketball season, Jesus. And he says, hey, I'd like to spend this time with you. I'd like to do these things. I'd like you to reprioritize your life. And we're like, I will, but not right now because there's other things that I'm doing. I'd love for you to connect with people in small group who can encourage you and push you towards me. Jesus, I'm gonna, but right now I'm just kind of tired. And so even though we know that he places certain demands on our time, we just decide we can't give those right now. Sometimes we reshape Jesus by hanging on to just blatant sin in our life and just excusing it away and being like, listen, I need a Jesus who accepts me as I am. I just need someone who just takes me in as I am. And listen, Jesus does love you as you are. But he also tells the adulterous woman, after he loves her as she is, to go and sin no more. He balances grace and truth. But some of us just hang on to sins that we have in our life, figuring it's not that big of a deal, and Jesus couldn't possibly mind. Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm drinking too much. I know I'm drinking. It's not healthy. I'm starting to hide it from people. This is not very good. But Jesus has bigger fish to fry, so I'm just going to hold on to this one. Yeah, maybe I regularly look at stuff I don't need to look at, but it's better than actually cheating. So I'll just hold on to this one for a little while. Maybe, and this one's personal, maybe I drive like a jerk. Maybe it's possible that I bought a nondescript Honda Accord that does not have the church sticker on the back of it so that I can continue to drive however I want and not make anyone think poorly of the church that I lead. Maybe I sometimes can drive in such a way that the pastor of a church ought not drive, but certainly Jesus has bigger fish to fry than that. And so I just hang on to it like a dummy, like it's okay to just weave through traffic with my six-year-old in the car. He says, Daddy, you drive fast. Like, yeah, no, I like driving fast. But we have these things that we just allow in our life as if Jesus doesn't call us to repentance. And I know that last week we talked about let's just focus on Christ and that will kill the nature in us that wants to sin. And that's very true. But on the same hand, we are called to repentance, to walk away from the sin that Jesus shows us in our life. And so very often we handle it casually and we just allow it in our life as we just move on. And Jesus says it has no place there. And we're like, well, this has a place in my life or you don't. So come on and make some space for it. Another easy example I think of is our sexual standards. Scripture's, I think, pretty clear. Sexual activity outside the bonds of marriage is classified by Scripture as sexual immorality. And Scripture teaches against sexual immorality. But we go, yeah, I mean, I got loud and clear. Makes total sense. Jesus, I get it. But it's 2022. Come on. We don't really still mean that, do we. And for each one of these examples, as we talk about shaping Jesus to fit our politics, just trim off a corner of the block and to fit our standards on sexuality and trim off a corner of the block, and to fit into our schedule, and for his goals to fit in with our goals, and for his priorities with my life to fit in with my priorities of my life, and just trim off portions of Christ until he became a rounded circle that was able to fit into our pre-existing life. And I think that this is what so many of us, including me, do to Christ. As we look at the rough edges, we look at the things that don't fit into how we've already organized our life and our priorities, and we say, certainly you don't mean that, and certainly you understand it can't fit. And so we change our Jesus rather than changing ourselves. When what we need to do, and I was gonna have another fresh square and another fresh board with a square hole in it, is not change who Jesus is, but fundamentally change who we are. Fundamentally reshape our lives for the standards of Christ. Not clinging to the things that we used to cling to, not prioritizing the things that we used to prioritize, but opening up our life to Jesus and saying, Jesus, what's in here that doesn't fit? Show me the parts of my life where I need to make space for you, but Lord, please don't let me insist that you reshape yourself for me to have the audacity to say, well, now I'm willing to include you in my life. And so that's the question I wanted to invite you to this morning. What is it that we have in our life that we refuse to reshape? What are the things that we are clinging to? Political thought? Sexual purity? Blatant sin in our life? Our time? Our goals? Our talents? What is it that we're claiming to where we're kind of keeping Jesus in the guest bedroom? We're kind of saying, you just stay over there. When you fit into my life, I'm gonna let you come in. When you don't, I'm gonna expect you to change. What are the places in our life where we're asking Jesus to change who he is instead of being willing to allow him to change who we are? That's what I'd like us to prayerfully consider as I close here in a second. Is to say, Jesus, where are you not fitting? And how can I change to accommodate you and quit insisting that you accommodate me? As I read through this radical reshaping of the Christian family in a Roman context, I can't help but think that the most important thing for us to draw out of this passage is our very human tendency to reshape Christ in our own image and our refusal to be reshaped in his. So this morning, let us open ourselves up in prayer to where we might need to reshape our lives around who we know Jesus to be. And let us further pray that as we pursue Jesus and know him more and learn more about him and he becomes more real to us, that different aspects of him are opened up to us that then demand that we make more space for him. And let us be generous and quick in making that space. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this morning. We thank you, God, for grace, for all that you're doing here, for what I think is a palpable sense of enthusiasm and energy as we move forward and maybe, maybe finally begin to think about what a post-pandemic world looks like and what grace might look like in that world. God, thank you for Colossians and all the truth that's found in it. I pray that we would be people who are focused on you, who radically reprioritize our life around you, God. We give you permission to reshape us in your image and we repent of trying to reshape you into ours. Give us courage and honesty and integrity this week as we examine our lives and ask where we need to make space for you. And God, when we do that, I pray that we would be met with your grace and with your peace and with your joy. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this cold February morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope everybody's got fun plans, or if you don't care about the Super Bowl at all, I hope you have a nice dinner planned for yourself. This is the third part in our series going through the book of Colossians. And this week, as we approach it, I wanted to approach the text with this kind of idea in mind. We're going to be in Colossians chapter 2 and then on through chapter 3 in some different portions of it. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. And then if you're at home, please turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. I would also call your attention to the bulletin. The bulletin looks a little bit different this week. There's no place for you to take notes. So note takers, you're going to have to get creative. Instead, I've put a prayer on the bulletin that we're going to pray at the end of the service together. You'll pray silently as I pray it aloud. And by the time we get there, hopefully the prayer makes a lot more sense and is meaningful and is something that you will carry home with you. But we'll talk more about that at the end of the service. If you're watching online, this bulletin is attached to the grace find that you should have received this week. So you can download that if you want to, or you can just email someone on staff and we'll be happy to send it over to you if you find it helpful and want to pray it throughout your week. But as we approach the text this week, I wanted to start here. I'm not sure if any of you have ever tried to eat healthy, okay? By the looks of most of us, this has been an effort at least at some portion of our life, but there have been a lot of times in my life when I have decided that I'm going to begin to eat with some wisdom. I'm going to start to eat well. I'm a person who's had a lot of day one workouts, and I've had a lot of day one diets. Okay, there's more in my future. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Not today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. This is not the day to start a diet, but tomorrow is fresh and hope springs eternal. But whenever I decide that I'm going to eat well, right? I'm going to eat responsibly, which is like a rabbit. Whenever I decide I'm going to do that, I feel like I am a person who is at war with myself. I feel like I am two separate people. I am one person who wants to eat well, and I am another person who just loves food so much that he's angered by me who wants to eat well. Because I love food. I don't know about your relationship with food. Mine is probably not healthy. If I know that I'm going to have a certain dinner that night or that we're going somewhere like a restaurant or something like that, I already know what I'm getting and I wake up thinking about it. Like I look forward to it throughout the day. That's how much I love food. For the Super Bowl tonight, we're going to have pigs in a blanket. I'm going to dip them in spicy mustard. I'm going to eat more than I should. I'm already excited about it, okay? That's just how I am about food. So when I decide that I want to eat well, it's really difficult for me. And I don't know about you, but I have certain stumbling blocks. It's pretty easy for me to eat well around the house. I kind of do a good job not snacking when I'm not supposed to. I don't drink the soda and stuff when I'm not supposed to. I drink black coffee and water, and that's pretty much it during the day. That's not very challenging. But what is challenging is when I'm trying to eat well, and my sweet wife on a Friday or Saturday will say, you want to go Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do, okay? I always want to go to Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit. That answer is never no, okay? You ask me, Nate, do you want a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. But you just had three. I don't care. You're offering me one. I want another biscuit. I like biscuits in the morning. So that's tough, all right? The other time it's tough is when I go out to eat. Because I'll go out to eat. I'll go to places that I like, and they have food there that I like. And one of the places I think of is Piper's. I go to Piper's because I meet people there for lunch with a lot of regularity. That's kind of my default spot. And they have salads, like I see them on the menu, right? They got grilled chicken and some fruit or some whatever, some balsamic whatever, less delicious thing that they have there. And I know that I need to order it. And I have girded my loins. I'm ready for this choice. And I go in there and I don't even look at the meat. I look at just the salads. I don't look at the other things. But see, here's the thing. This Piper's has one of the best Reuben's in the city. They really do. It's delicious. And that's what I want, right? I want the Reuben. And I've been thinking all day about how I shouldn't have the Reuben. And I've made the decision, I'm going to get the salad. I'm going to eat the thing that I don't want. But then it's like Satan's working against me or God's just giving me a special grace and telling me it's okay. I'm not sure which sign. And the table next to me will receive a piping hot, crispy toasted Reuben. As I'm sitting there trying to muster up the discipline to order my salad. And I look at that Reuben and I look at those fries and I look at that ketchup and the waitress says, what do you have? That! I want that Reuben. I did not want a salad. And I cave, right? So for me to be on a diet is for me to live at war with myself. I bring that up because I think that you'll know that this is true. Those of you who have been a Christian for any amount of time, to be a Christian is to be at war with yourself. To be a Christian, to be a believer, is to know the good you ought to do and yet still struggle to do it. I even think, and this is a sad reality, it should not be the case, and hopefully God can deliver us from this, and hopefully this sermon moves the needle on this a little bit, but I even think that to be a believer is to be constantly disappointed with how spiritually mature you are and how spiritually mature you think you should be by now. Because we know the good things we're supposed to do. We know the kindness we're supposed to show. We know the greed we're not supposed to have and the pride that we're supposed to iron out. And we know all the different things and our hidden sins and the stuff that we look at and whatever it is, the stuff that we consume. We know what we're not supposed to do and we know what we are supposed to do. And we try like heck to be that person, but we are a person who feels at war with ourself because there is the person within us who wants to eat right and there is the person within us who really loves a good Reuben, whatever that might be for you. And they exist at war with each other. I am convinced that to be a believer means to live in a state of tension within yourself of who you know you should be, of who you know God created you to be, of who you know God designed you to be, and yet not being able to walk in that. There's a verse that's super challenging for me where Paul tells us that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And I don't know about you, but I don't get to the end of too many days, much less weeks, where I look back on that week and I go, yeah, this week I was obedient to that verse. And if we're honest as Christians, it gets tiring to know that that's true. It gets exhausting to constantly fall short. Paul actually describes this tension in one of my favorite passages. It's one of the most human things to me that's written in the Bible, particularly by Paul in Romans chapter 7. In Romans chapter 7, Paul writes specifically about this tension in the Christian life when, in my inner being, but I see in my members another regenerated person as God has rescued my heart and claimed it and one day will whisk me up to heaven. He's given me eternal life and I'm living as a new creature that we're going to talk about more in a minute. I feel in this inner being a desire to live the righteous life that God has called me to live. And yet, also in my body, is a desire to revert back to my old self. It is a desire to revert to who I am without Jesus. It is a desire to indulge the flesh. It is a desire for the things that I used to consume that I know I don't need to consume anymore. That exists within us. And then he exclaims at the end of it, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Who will finally give me victory? How will I finally live the life that I'm supposed to live? And so that's where we arrive this morning. In Colossians, is this age-old question that all Christians face, that Francis Schaeffer, an author in the 20th century, framed up in a book entitled, How Should We Then Live? Meaning, in light of the gospel, in light of what we talked about in week one, the picture of Jesus that Paul paints for the Colossians, remember, they're facing pressure from within and without to go back to rules and aestheticism and to be legalistic and add on more rules than what is necessary so that they can live a righteous life, and then pressure from the more liberal part of their community to say none of the rules matter, how we live doesn't matter at all. You have total grace to do whatever it is you want to do. And so Paul, to that pressure, paints a picture of Christ as the apex of history and the apex of hope, as the connection point and nexus between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, how he is the creator God over everything, this majestic picture of Christ. And so the question becomes, how do we live in light of that picture? How do we live in light of the gospel? I am saved. I am a new creature. God has breathed new life into me. I am no longer a slave to sin, as Paul describes in Romans, but now I have this option to move forward with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in me and to live a life worthy of the calling that I have received. Now, how do I do it? How do I do it? That's the question that we come to in Colossians. And it should be a question that matters to each and every Christian. Father, how do I live a life worthy of the calling that I've received? How do I grow into spiritual maturity? What do I do practically? How do I live the Christian life? And it's an important question because it dictates how we pursue God. And to this question, I think we often answer it in the same way that we're trained to answer any other question in our life about how we get better at a particular thing. If you want to get better at exercising, what do you need? You need more discipline. You need to wake up. You need to do it. You need to be more disciplined in the way you pursue exercise. If you want to eat better, what do you need to do? You need to be more disciplined. You want to do better at time management. You need more discipline in time management. You want to be more focused. You want to be more productive. You want whatever it is, however it is, you want to grow and be better. What is the fundamental requirement of that pursuit of better? It's discipline. We need to do better. We need to come up with structures and systems that we follow, and I'm going to white knuckle my way to success here. And the most disciplined people within our field, they achieve the most success. The most disciplined people at the gym look the best in a t-shirt. The most disciplined people, when they go out to eat, they have the healthiest hearts. Like discipline is the root to how we accomplish success. And so, because that's true, and so very many areas of our life, even though we could philosophically talk about whether or not that's true, because we think that's true in so many areas of our life, we also just by default apply that to our spiritual life. If I want to be more godly, then I need to be more disciplined. I'm going to set up more rules, more regulations. I'm going to get up at this time. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the type of person that is defined by these things. We focus on our behavior and our self-discipline. And I think when we are faced with the question of how do I then live? How do I become the Christian that God has created and designed me to be? I think that in our culture, our default answer is to attempt to white-knuckle discipline our way to godliness. And here's what Paul says about that knee-jerk reaction that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Listen, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom and promoting self- we be the people that God asks us to be? And their response, it seems, at least initially, was white-knuckle discipline, aestheticism, following the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more God loves you. It's a very simple exchange. That's what legalism says. And so they're just going to be try-hards. They're just going to be do-betters. That's just what they're going to do. And to help them try really hard, they set up all these rules and parameters around their life. And they say, whoever can follow these rules the best is the greatest Christian. But Paul says, that's fine. Set up your rules. Have all your standards. Set the boundaries really far away from the actual boundary. He says, but all those rules and all that, the way that it looks, the way that you're living, just dotting all the T's and crossing all the I's and really, really, really having these policies in life that keep you on the straight and narrow. Paul says, yeah, those have the appearance of wisdom. And I would add in our vernacular, godliness, but they do nothing. They do nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh that is the reason for the sinning that we need the rules for. For instance, let's say that what you struggle with is pride. Okay, I'm having to make some assumptions here because I don't have the struggle, but if you do, let's say that something that you struggle with is pride and you go, you know what, God, I gotta get rid of this. I gotta be better. I'm gonna be better at being more humble. I'm gonna try to push out my pride. And so we take intentional steps. Maybe we're people who will maybe kind of fish for compliments sometime, or maybe we'll ask people what they thought about something. And really all we want them to do is tell them that we did a good job or that we're good at this or that we're good at that. And there's ways, if you're a prideful person, there are ways to go through your life and get the people in your life to affirm you. And if you are this person, you're exhausting, okay? I've exhausted others. I say that as a friend. That's not a good road to walk. But let's say that you're a prideful person, and so you need other people to affirm you all the time and the things that you're good at, but you realize in light of the gospel and in light of God's word that pride is not good, and so we need to iron this out of our life. So we go, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to ask other people for compliments. I'm not going to ask other people to affirm me. I'm not going to seek my value in other places. And then once you get really good at that and you haven't done that in a couple of weeks and you still feel good about yourself, then what do you do? Boy, I am proud of myself for not needing other people to tell me I'm good. Now we're taking pride in a new thing. What Paul says is there is this part of our flesh that is going to manifest negative things in our life, pride, greed, selfishness, lust, whatever it is. And we can put parameters around those things, but they're going to leak out somewhere. You can follow whatever rules you want to follow. You can white knuckle yourself into some good discipline. I've seen some people who can keep themselves on the straight and narrow for years, but those negative traits that exist within you, those things are going to leak out somewhere else. And I know this because I've met a lot of people who can follow the rules really well, and they're jerks. It's just their flesh leaking out in other ways. So what Paul says is we cannot white knuckle our way to godliness. Discipline, self-control, more rules, more standards. Those do not get us to spiritual maturity. Those do not put us in a place where we can live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. That's not the answer. In chapter 3, thankfully, I believe that he gives us the answer. And I think it's a refreshing one. Because when we try to get to godliness by white-knuckle discipline, just I'm going to be a try-hard, I'm going to be a do-better, what happens is not good. Because if you have ever in your life decided, yeah, I'm going to be a better Christian, and I'm going to do it by taking these steps. I'm going to do it by instilling these standards in my life. I'm going to do it by my own effort and me trying hard. And maybe we pray a prayer, God, I am never going to do this again. God, I am always going to do this moving forward. God, I swear that that will never be a part of my life again. And we make these big promises and we make these big claims. And listen, we mean them. But here's what I know about you. If you've ever promised God that you will never or that you will always, then you have failed. That's what I know about you. If we ever have promised God, I will never do blank. I will always do blank, we have failed in those promises because we can't keep those commitments, because we're broken. Because of Romans 7, the things that I do not want to do, I do, because it's part of our nature to fail in that way. And because that's true, after we make up our mind enough times that God, I'm never going to, or God, I'm always going to, and then we fail, we get to a place where either we just feel like this broken, wretched Christian, and we're thinking, God, I'll never be good enough for you. I don't think I'll ever be good enough for you. Just please let me be saved. Just please let me just hang on until I get to the end of my life. Please usher me into heaven. I know I'll never be who I'm supposed to be. I know that I can't pursue those things, but please just accept me as I am. And we kind of just live this broken down, hopeless Christian life where we feel like we're limping our way to heaven. Or worse than that, we try so hard and we fail so many times that we get so tired of trying that we can't find it within ourselves to do it anymore. And then we conclude, God, your word says that I'm a new creature. Your word says that you will help me. Your word says that you will empower me. And yet I fail over and over and over again. So I can only conclude that you don't keep your word. And then we just wander away from the faith and we give up on God because righteousness is too hard because we've only ever tried it by ourself and we've never invited God in in the way that he needs to be invited in, and our white-knuckle disciplining to try to be better and more godly to pursue the faith that we want so earnestly ends up costing us our faith. So that's not the way. We find the way in Colossians 3. And I would sum it up like this. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving, by focusing on who we are rather than how we behave. And here's what I mean. In this chapter, we're going to see this idea introduced here by Paul, but introduced in plenty of other places by Paul in the New Testament, of the old and the new. The old you and the new you. The old you is who you were without Jesus. The new you is who you are with Jesus. The old you, the Bible says, was a slave to sin. I had no choice but to do things that displeased God. I had no chance at all. But the new you infused with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit does have the chance every day when you wake up to walk that day according to the life that God has called you to. We have a chance when we wake up to live today in honoring God and actually finish the day living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day. We've got a chance. There's a new us. And the new us desperately wants to please God. And so this is what Paul says about old self and new self in Colossians chapter three. This is what he says about being versus behaving. Look at Colossians chapter three, verses five through eight first. Put to death, Paul says, therefore, what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idol rules. But here's what we need to do. We need to put to death these things, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, covetousness, anger, slander, all these things. And at first, it sounds like that's a little bit in tension with what he just said. He said, if you want to be godly, if you want to be who God created you to be, it's not about following the rules. It has an appearance of wisdom, but that's not really helping any indulgence of the flesh. And then the very next chapter over, he's saying, put to death these things, which feels like rules and standards that he's giving us, except he's not giving us behaviors. He's telling us to put things to death. Remember how I said that if you follow rules, if you're trying to break yourself of pridefulness and you put rules around your pridefulness and then it just leaks out and into another area of your life. Jesus is, Paul is acknowledging that. See, it's not about trying to follow the rules because those unhealthy things just leak into other portions of your life. It's about actually putting the pride to death. It's about actually putting greed and lust to death in your heart so that in your heart there is no place for them to dwell. And if there is no place for them to dwell, then they will not produce the behaviors that you're trying so desperately to control. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we don't need to put parameters around our old self. We need to put our old self to death. And we do this by focusing on being. How do we put those things to death? This is what Paul says in Colossians 3. I'm going to read verses 12 through 17. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, we live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? In the phrasing of Hebrews 12, verse 1, What the world do I live the life that you want me to live? I think what Jesus would say is, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Jesus, what rules should I follow in this new life that you've called me to? How do I run the race that you've set before me? Jesus says, just look at me. Just keep your eyes on Christ. This is actually in complete harmony with Romans 12 that tells us that we should run the race and that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles us by, in verse 2, focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. So how do we live the life that God calls us to live? We daily make ourselves aware of Christ's love for us. We daily make ourselves aware of what God has done for us. If we will daily reflect on the fact that Jesus in heavenly form condescended and took on flesh and lived amongst us for 33 years and put up with everything that we have to offer and continues to walk with us and continues to love us and continues to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you as an individual, leans into God's ears and says, she's good. She's with me. She loves you, Father. I died for her. If we will let that reality wash over us daily, how could we not put to death the pride that exists in us by walking in humility at the love of God that we receive? If we are struggling with anger towards other people and frustration and impatience, how is it possible to spend a portion of your day every day focusing on the reality of God's patience with you? Focusing on the reality that as many times as you've said, God, I will never, or God, I will always, and then you failed, that God has been right there to help you clean up the mess every time. How can we not grow in forgiveness of others when we constantly remind ourselves of how forgiven we are? How can we not grow in patience to others when we constantly are focused on the patience that God has to us? If we will focus on God's overwhelming grace, that he died for us while we were still sinners, that he pursues us while we run away from him, that even though we fail him over and over again, he continues to love us with a reckless love, that God loves us while we were unlovely, that God sees us fully and knows us completely and still loves us unconditionally. If we let those things wash over us every day, how could we not look at other people and be more loving and patient towards them in light of how loving and patient God is towards us? Do you understand that these things that we clothe ourself with in Colossians 12 through 17 necessarily put to death our old self that Paul tells us to rid ourself of. So if we want to get rid of malice, what do we do? We focus on Christ. If we want to get rid of pride, do we put parameters around our pride? No, we focus on Jesus and who he is and realize that we have no right to our pride. If we want to be more gracious people, what do we do? We focus on Jesus' grace to us. Say, Jesus, how in the world do I live the life that you call me to live? Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And Jesus says, focus on me. Focus on me. So I would tell you, if you are a Christian who lives at war with yourself, you do not have a discipline issue, you have a focus issue. If you are someone who struggles with greed, you don't have a greed issue. You have a focus issue. If we try to be more godly and more pleasing to him by focusing on the behaviors that we need to do better, we will fail over and over and over again. But if we can put our focus on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith and let his grace and goodness and mercy and love wash over us daily, then those things will necessarily put to death the very root of the behaviors that we do not like. So again, if we are struggling in our walk with God, we do not have a discipline issue. We do not have a sin issue. We have a focus issue. We need to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We need to pursue him more with more urgency. We need to let the truths of how he loves us wash over us more. And those will necessarily put to death the elements of our character that we do not like, that produce the behaviors that we do not want to do. You can think of it this way. Our old self cannot survive where our new self thrives. Our problem is we have a new self and we have an old self and we feed them both the same amount of food. We give in to them both equally. And so they both just exist in this tension and if we ever want to put to death our old self, then our new self has to thrive. And our new self thrives by clothing ourselves in the characteristics of Christ and we clothe ourselves in those characteristics by focusing him and daily letting his goodness wash over us. So it's very simple. How should we then live? How do we get to the end of a single day? Living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day? By focusing our eyes on Jesus on that day. By looking at him that day. And letting everything else fade away and take care of itself. Because it's that simple, and because that's what we need to do, I wrote a prayer for us as a church. In a few minutes, I'm going to read it and pray it over us as a church and invite you to read it along with me. If you find it helpful, I would love to invite you to put this prayer somewhere where you can see it, where this is a thing that you will pray daily. Put it on your desk, or in your car, or on your mirror. If this is helpful to you, I would encourage you to pray this every day until it's not helpful to you, until the principles of this prayer are so ingrained in you that it is part of your daily prayer. But if we want to live a life as Christians that we are called to live, then I am convinced that this needs to be a fundamental prayer that we focus on very regularly. Not necessarily the words that I've chosen here, but the ethos and the attitude and the posture that's presented in this prayer and the acknowledgments of the truths that are in this prayer that are from Colossians chapter three and other portions of scripture as we seek to live the life that God calls us to live. So I'm gonna pray this over us and invite you to pray it along with me. Father, I know I am your child and that in you I am a new creation. Though I know this, I struggle to believe it. Because I struggle to believe, I struggle to walk as you would have me walk. So Father, help me learn to walk in this new self. As I put on the new self, I ask that you would help me see others through your eyes and so clothe me in your compassion. Help me regard others as your beloved children as you clothe me in your kindness. Remind me of the way you love me when I am unlovely in order that I might humbly love others in the way I am loved. Remind me today, Father, of who I am in you. As you clothe me in these things, let them put to death in me the remnants of my old self. Let your humility drive out my impatience, my anger, and my pride. Let your compassion and kindness suffocate my jealous and selfish heart. Let the way you see me overshadow and obscure the way I see myself. Help's name, Father. Amen.

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