Sermons tagged with Truth

All right, well, good morning there, holiday weekend crowd. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and we are launching the new year with this series called Known For, where we're thinking about our reputation and why it's important and why it's actually valuable to God what His children are known for. And so last week, we talked about you as an individual. What are you known for? More important than that, what do you want to be known for as we sit here at the top of a year? And it's the time of year where we should be thinking about those kinds of things. And then even more importantly than that, what does God want you to be known for? And we see that he actually cares very deeply about how his children are known. And so this week, we want to broaden the circle a little bit and ask, what is your family known for? What do you want your family to be known for? And this question means different things to us at different seasons in our life. For many of us, young families are kind of the fastest growing area of our church, and so we have a lot of folks here who are in the throes of it, like me and Jen. We've got a seven-year-old, and how old is John? 20 months? 21 months? It doesn't matter. He's like one and a half, all right? He's about to be two in April. And so we're in the middle of it, and I was actually talking with somebody earlier in the week, and we were talking about family, family legacy, family reputation. And he used this phrase that he uses with his kids sometimes and that we hear kind of thrown out there. Like, you need to understand that you're representing your family. You need to, what you do stands for your, you're like, you need to think about what your family name stands for. You need to do honor to this family. And I kind of laughed and I said, it's been a long time since I thought about like honoring someone's family name because our kids haven't yet reached the phase where they can bring disgrace on our name, right? She's seven. What's she going to do, you know, that's going to bring us shame. But I can see potential shame from here, you know, like it's coming when they get a little bit older and they can start making some really questionable choices. And so some of you are right in the thick of it, like Jen and I. You're at the beginning of kind of establishing your family. You're looking ahead to who you want your children to be, to what you want their reputation to be, to what your family plan is, to what your goals are. Right now, we kind of talk about in our house that when John and Lily are adults, when they're in their 20s, we'd like to release them into the wild with as few reasons to go into counseling as possible. Understanding that if you grow up in my home, that's tough. It's going to be a challenge. But really, our goal for them is we want them to love Jesus, to love us, and to be people that we respect. Now that may change over the course of time, but that's kind of what we're shooting for. But you have what you're shooting for, and you have how you define those things. And like I said, maybe you're in the middle of it. Maybe you've got young kids and you're kind of projecting forward. Maybe you're like a lot of folks in the church and you're a little bit younger. You just got married, you're not married yet, or you are very single. You are so single that you have not spoken to a member of the opposite sex in like months and months and months. You're very, very single. And so the idea of thinking about family is a little bit awkward for you, but hopefully this is something where we can kind of project forward and think about what kind of family we do want to have, what we want that family to be known for, and who we can look for to help us build that kind of family. Or maybe we're on the other end of it. You've got teenagers. You know, you're kind of in that thick of it. Your family reputation has begun to be established, or maybe you have grown kids. But if you have grown kids, then maybe one day they have families, and maybe you can use what we learned today to guide them as your role in their life shifts. But I think for all of us, that as we think about what are our families known for, there's input from Scripture that can help us think about that maybe in a more clear-headed and healthy way. And so as I thought about what we want in our families, I was reminded of a conversation that I had with a friend of mine who's a photographer. And in her role as a photographer, she gets to take a lot of like family portraits. Just the kind of portraits that typically the wives randomly decide it's high time that we dress in our nicest clothes, pretend to be happy, and take pictures for an hour, right? This is the thing that we're supposed to do. And one of the things that we got to talking about that I thought was interesting, because there's a trend in my segment of the population to take family photos that look very similar. And I won't get into that trend and what they are, but they look the same. And I was talking about this with her, and she said, you know, it's interesting that different ethnic groups all like to take slightly different family pictures, like to dress a little bit different, like to pose a little bit different. They like to posture themselves, put themselves in a little bit different environments. And she can kind of tell what kind of family it is and where they're from based on what kind of family portraits they want to take. And I thought, oh, well, that's really interesting. And she thought about it for a second and she goes, yeah, I really just think it's just the different ways that different cultures portray success. Because when you take family photos, that's what you want to portray, isn't it? We've got it together. Things are going all right for the Rectors. How else would I afford this fancy quarter zip, you know? Like you want, oh, that seems like a nice home. It's nice and bright and white and sunshine spills in everywhere. They must be doing okay, right? That's what we want with our Christmas card when we send that out. We choose one that kind of projects success, projects that we're doing okay. Even like the zany ones, right, where the little kid is crying and everyone's making a silly face and they're like, just real life over here. It's like bull crud. You're all wearing matching outfits. OK, give me real life on Saturday morning when you're all disheveled and the baby's been crying. That's the real life I want. But if you're wearing matching outfits and making silly faces, that's not like we're just being real. No, you're not. You're trying to be funny. And it's not that funny, just for the record. And through that conversation, it kind of helped me see when we think about families and our goals, we all want the same thing. It may look different, but we all want our families to be successful. That's what we want. We want our children to be successful. We want in our marriages to be successful. We want our grandchildren to be successful. We want to be known for being successful. Now listen, we can define that in different ways. There's myriad different ways to approach success. Like I said earlier, right now, Jen and I try to keep it pretty simple. We want our children to love us, to love Jesus, and we want to be able to respect them. And that may be a pretty high bar. I don't know, but that's kind of idealistically how we think about things right now. You may have a different definition of success. Some are good, some are not as good, but I'm not here to critique any of them. Maybe we want our children to climb the corporate ladder. Maybe we want them to marry someone who's really, really respectable. Maybe we want to be able to respect their kids. Maybe we want to see really good spiritual health developed in our children and to see them be spiritual leaders. Maybe we want monetary success for them. I don't know what we're trying to set up for our families or what we're trying to pursue, but I bet that when it gets to the end of it, that what we're really pursuing is success. And the root of this, this desire for success, we can just admit together, okay, we don't have to tell anybody outside of this room, at the root of that desire for success is pride. Just self-centeredness. It's just we want people to think we have our act together. We want people to think we're good parents. We want people to think we did well. We want people to think we're making wise choices. We want people to think our family looks good, that our marriage looks good, that our kids behave themselves, that they've grown up and become respectable adults and they're raising respectable children. I mean, one of the things when you have kids our age, one of the things that's almost unavoidable is trying not to parent for the moment and trying to parent for the person that they're going to become, right? We're not trying to raise well-behaved eight-year-olds. We want a good contributing to society 28-year-old. Those are two different ways to parent there. And so a lot of our desire for success and the way that we can kind of lead ourselves and lead our families is rooted in pride, which is why this next truth really bums us out sometimes. The problem with wanting our families to be successful, with wanting our families to be known for success, with wanting everyone to perceive our family like the Christmas card we send out, is that family is messy. Family's messy. There's no such thing as a perfect family. There's no such thing as the family that actually does have it all together. You think about that Christmas card and that perfect nuclear family, the husband and wife smiling, hugging each other. The children are smiling, happy to be there. The dog that's obedient, which is just a waste in a Christmas card. And they look good. They look like they have it together. Meanwhile, that marriage, that marriage is dead, man. Mom and dad haven't flirted with each other in years. They can't remember the last time they did married people things. He hasn't taken her on a date in a long time. They are two ships passing. But for that picture, they can smile. Those kids see it too. Or maybe one of the kids has developed a behavioral thing that the parents are trying to keep under wraps because they're embarrassed to mention it. Maybe mental health has slid into the picture and it's starting for the parents and for the family to kind of chip away at this image they want to portray. Maybe the husband's job or the wife's job is not going as well as they want it to go. The guy's like one of those guys that just wakes up every day and puts on his work clothes and leaves the house so that his wife doesn't know that he was fired months ago. Maybe there's an unhealthy relationship with alcohol or with pills. Maybe there's stuff going on in the shadows of those lives that we don't know about. Maybe one of those kids is going to grow up to be a royal disappointment. But here's what we know. Because we're all in families, they're messy. They're never what they seem on the Christmas card. And that really jacks with what we want to be perceived as. It really messes with our idea of perfect family that we all want to portray to everyone else. But you know what? That's okay. That's okay because Jesus' family was messy. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but Jesus came from a really messed up family. In Matthew chapter 1, we can see his lineage all the way back to Abraham. So if you have a Bible, I would invite you to turn there. But Jesus did not come from a picture-perfect, cookie-cutter family. I'm just going to pick out one little snippet, verses 5 through 7, and you're going to read them with me. This is the genealogy of Jesus. Fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to Jesus. It's just a list of names, and it seems boring. This is one of those passages in your Bible reading plan that when you come up on Matthew chapter 1, you're like, God, I can skip this, right? Like, you don't really need me to read all these names. We'll still be good. I can still get my spiritual checkmark for the day. Because we don't often focus on this, but this passage has so much in it. So let's look at Matthew 1, 5 through 7. The author writes, was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam. And it goes on and on. There's generations before and generations after. But I want to take just this snapshot so that we can all see how imperfect our Savior's family was. The first name we mentioned is a guy named Salmon. He was married to Rahab, and they had a son named Boaz. Now Rahab, my Bible scholars know, lived in Jericho. Part of the deal with being a good Hebrew is that you trace your lineage all the way down to Abraham. You are purebred. Nothing but Hebrew blood runs in these veins, except if you're Jesus, there's this foreign woman from Jericho named Rahab that is now diluting the gene pool in your perfect little picture-perfect story. And Rahab, to boot, besides being foreign, was also a prostitute, which you wouldn't expect to find in the lineage of the Messiah, and yet there it sits. And they could have just said that Salmon begat Boaz, but they didn't. The author wanted us to know for all of history that Salmon married that prostitute that saved Joshua and Caleb when they were spying, and God honored Rahab. And he honored Rahab not just by saving her family, but by keeping her in Scripture for all of history so that we would know that her life is woven into the story of our Messiah and his imperfect family. And they had a son named Boaz. And Boaz eventually married another foreign lady named Ruth. It was a little bit, I don't know if I can say this in church, but the only way I'm going to find out is if I say it and then people get mad at me. So Boaz and Ruth had a little bit of a sugar daddy situation going on. He was older. She was younger. He was rich. She was not. He married her because she looked good. She married him because he was nice and had money. That's the situation. Now, I'm sure there's more to it than that. There's genuine affection. But when they showed up at the family reunion the next year, people were like, Boaz, dude, you sure about that? You could have just like, you know, left her at the house or something. It was an uncomfortable scenario. They had a son named Obed, who we assume was normal, but we only assume that because we don't have any details. I bet if we had some details on him, we'd find out some stuff about good old Obed. Obed had Jesse. Jesse had David. David is the second king of Israel. He was a man after God's own heart. He wrote most of the Psalms. He is a spiritual hero, but he had his son Solomon with a good friend's wife named Uriah. Again, they could have said by Bathsheba he had Solomon. They didn't. They said by Uriah's wife. They wanted you to know that David was a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. He had the guy killed to cover up the fact that he impregnated a woman that was not his wife. That's messed up. You know. And then David was a terrible father. One of his sons accosted one of his daughters. Another one of his sons, Absalom, tried to overthrow him from the throne. Mounted up an army, kicked him out of Jerusalem, ended up dying in the battle, and David lost a son who was trying to lead a revolution against him. Then he handed off the kingdom to Solomon, who was very wise and yet also a really bad dad. And he left his kingdom to Rehoboam, the last person we mentioned in the passage, who was such a jerk and had such a bad relationship with his brother Jeroboam that there ended up causing a civil war out of the line of Solomon. And all of this is in the line of Jesus. And sure, I've picked out an easy portion to pick on, but I would tell you that it's only easy to pick on because that's who we know the most about. But there's more stuff there. Even Jesus' immediate family. At some point or another, we don't know why, the Bible doesn't offer us details, his dad disappeared from the picture. We presume it was death, but we're not sure. And so Jesus grew up in a single-parent home. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with a single-parent home, but what I would assert is that very few people decide to build a family without a spouse to build it with. That being a single parent, while perfectly fine, was probably not in anyone's design when they started their family. And yet that's the family in which Jesus grew up. And he had half-brothers and sisters. He had a different dad than him. And I don't know what kind of relationship he had with them when he was alive, but I do know that when Jesus was dying on the cross, that he looked at his disciple John and said, my mother is now in your care. Will you take care of her for me in my stead? He did not trust that to his brothers and sisters, and I don't know why. But Jesus' family was messy. And if Jesus' family was messy, what shot do you have, man? But that's okay. I heard someone else say this, and I thought it's such a good point. The family that Jesus came from indicates the families he came for. The mess that Jesus comes from tells us the mess that he came for to sit in the middle of. So we should be comforted by the mess in Jesus's family. Because in a way, it shows us that he's ready for our mess too. And can I just say this? I don't know what your family plan is. I don't know what you value in your family. I don't know what you hope for for your children. I don't know what you hope for for your children's children. I don't know what you project forward. But if your family plan doesn't make room for messiness, then you are just planning for disappointment and resentment. If the plan that you have for your children, if the plan that you have for your marriage and for your spouse, if the plan that you have for your grandchildren and for your legacy does not make room for messiness, then you are simply making a plan to be disappointed and then have other people resent you for that disappointment. You're like my old buddy John back at my old church in Atlanta. He reached out to me one day and he said, hey man, listen, I'm just having some anger issues. Can we sit down and talk about it? I'm just mad all the time. I'm mad at work. I'm bringing it home to my wife and my kid. I don't want to do that. That's not the guy I want to be. Can we meet? I need to talk to a pastor. Sure. I skipped counseling for ministry in college, but let's see what we can talk about. And so he comes in, and he's just telling me, he's like, man, I'm just so angry. day. I get so angry at work, and then I carry it home, and I'm tired of that. And he was a general contractor. And I said, okay, man, well, like, what is it at work that makes you angry? He's like, you know, like, you get in, you've got a plan for your day, you show up, you're ready to do the cabinets, but you can't do the cabinets until the plumber's done, and the plumber's not there yet, and so we're sitting around all day waiting for the plumber to show up, and I'm wasting my money on my hourly employees. We're sitting there twiddling our thumbs doing nothing, and I'm losing money on this project, and it's driving me insane. Or, you know, I'll show up, and one of my guys didn't show up to work, and so I've got to work overtime, and I miss my sons, whatever. Or I show up, and the work is shoddy. They did a bad job. We've got to take the cabinets down. We've got to redo it. We've got to do this. We've got to do that. Or, you know, we forgot a tool. We got to go to Home Depot. We don't have the right screws. We got to run to Ace. Whatever it is, there's always these things that show up in my day and they throw off my plan and it never goes how I want it to go. And it just makes me mad. And then I get so mad. I spend my whole day worked up that when I get home, I'm still that way and I don't want to do it and I don't know what to do. And I said, well, John, I said, I have a little bit of work, a little bit of experience in that field. For six months after we got married, I was a trim carpenter, believe it or not. I was not good at it. I just was one. And I'm frankly grateful to have all of my digits the way I was using a chop saw back then. And I said, I said, John, listen, our experiences aren't the same, but I only had that job for six months. But there wasn't a single day in those six months where I showed up and everything went according to plan. There wasn't a single day we didn't have to run to Home Depot for something where everybody showed up on time and worked hard and diligently. It wasn't a single project we did where we didn't have to redo something. We had to plan for it not to go according to plan. And if your happiness requires everything in your day to go exactly as you need it to go so it can be the smoothest day possible. The only thing you're planning for is anger. So keep that as your standard if you want, but you're just going to exist angrily with maybe one day a week where that doesn't happen. And he's nodded his head. He was like, you're right. And I was like, good. I've solved that problem. You'll never struggle with anger again. Let's move on. When our family plan doesn't make space for our spouse to grow and change and become a different person in their 50s than they were in their 30s, then we're only planning for disappointment and resentment. If our family plan doesn't make space, isn't generous enough to expand and adapt the way we think about faith, church involvement, spirituality, then we're just making a restrictive plan that will lead to resentment. If our family plan doesn't make space for our children to struggle, for someone to get sick, for someone to be hurt, for our children to choose hobbies and interests that don't align with ours, if our family plan doesn't include space for our children to become a different kind of adult than we would have chosen for them, if it doesn't make space for our children to go through struggles that we wouldn't pick for them, then all we're doing is planning for disappointment and resentment. And in some of that mess, listen, in some of that mess, not all of it, but in some of it, don't you know that God is working? In some of that mess, in some of that pain, in some of that hurt, in some of that illness, in some of those struggles, in some of those choices that you can't understand, in some of that growth, and in some of that that change don't you know that God is working in the midst of that I went through things when I was a kid that my parents would have wished away if they could if they could have prayed it away they would have said don't let Nathan deal with this anymore they would have prayed it absolutely out of my life but yet as an adult in my role I know that God was working in those things to fashion me into who he wanted me to be, to use me how he wanted to use me, and it would have been to my detriment to pray those things away. We sat here and we sang loudly, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. We declared loudly that there's nothing better than God. No, there's nothing better than you. I heard you sing it. You're trapped. I've got you now. If you meant it, that means you believe it for your families too. That means you believe it for your marriages too. That means you believe it for your children too. And that even though at different times in our life those elements of our families are walking paths that we might not have chosen for them, we trust that God is in the midst of them, working in what we feel like is a mess, working in the situations that we just casually leave out of the yearly update letter that we don't portray in our Christmas card. And it's not that we shouldn't pursue success. But I was having a conversation with somebody this week, Chris Sasser. A lot of y'all know him. He used to be a pastor at Grace. Now he's moved on to a church that's not quite as good. And he's the family pastor. No, it's a really wonderful church. He does a great job. He's a family pastor at a large church out in Wilmington. And when I was preparing for the sermon this week, I called him just to get his input on family reputation. And actually, Sass is going to be here at the end of the month for a special parent meeting, a special parent seminar that Erin, our great children's pastor, is setting up. The last one she did was before COVID, and I was just telling her the other day, there's things that she taught me that night that still run through my mind as I parent Lily. So if you're a parent, this is absolutely worth attending. If you haven't heard about it yet, just contact Erin, and she'll give you the information. But at the end of the month, SAS is going to come meet with us and kind of teach us how to be better parents, at least in part. And so I called him, told him what I was preaching about, what I was talking about, and asked him for his thoughts. Then he suggested this, and I loved it. He said, maybe we need to reshape the way we think about success. The messiness in families forces us to kind of redesign what success is. And he said, my suggestion to families is that they make health successful. So what I would propose to you is that healthy families are successful families. Healthy families are successful families. And it's important as I say this that we understand that the true definition of health is inviting Jesus into every aspect of our lives. The true definition of physical health, mental health, emotional health, spiritual health is inviting Jesus into every aspect of those things. And I love that word health because I had been talking with Aaron about this idea. Aaron, our children's pastor, not our worship pastor. I don't talk with him about anything. He's not very interesting. But Aaron, our children's pastor, and we kind of said that successful families are gracious families. We kind of honed in on this word grace because she made the great point that the family, the family dynamic is really, according to God's design, is really the first place where children encounter true grace. And if a child grows up in a home where they don't experience grace, how can they be expected to show grace to others? Or, sometimes more damagingly, how can they ever learn to show grace to themselves if no one else shows them grace? And so we were talking about that. The problem with grace is just saying that we want to be gracious families, is that there comes this tipping point where grace becomes enablement. And we don't want to do that. Because there's definitely scenarios and messiness in which the very last thing that husband needs is more grace. What he needs is a swift kick in the pants and some truth. And to look himself in the mirror and to change things. What he needs is a wife that's going to stand up to him and say, no, no, no, that's not what we do here. Sometimes what children need is the exact opposite of more grace. I've met 20-year-olds who had way too much grace growing up. I don't want to be friends with them. So we want to be gracious families. And I would even say we want to err on grace. If we're going to make a mistake, let's make a mistake towards being too gracious, but we can all agree that there comes a point at which grace is the last thing people need. What they need is some truth. What they need is some tough love. So that's why I think this word health is so much better. Because if we understand healthy to be inviting Jesus into every aspect of our life, then what a healthy family does is when the mess is made, they go, Jesus, how would you have us clean this up? Jesus, how are you using this in our marriage and in the life of our children to bring your glory? Jesus, how could this be shaping them that I'm not aware of? Jesus, should I be careful to pray this away because of what you're using this for? Health looks like when we admit that our marriage is broken and that we've become kind of co-CEOs of this family entity. Sitting down and actually praying with your spouse and saying, Jesus, we're broken. Will you show us how to fix this so that this is a marriage that reflects your love to the people around us? Health says, Jesus, my children are not doing what I think I raised them to do. Can you soften their hearts towards you and can you help me see them through your eyes? Health says, Jesus, I am sitting in the middle of a disappointment here. I am sitting in the middle of a mess, and I need you. Will you show me as a father? Will you show me as a mother? Will you show me as the child of an aging parent how to portray you in this situation? Healthy families don't run scared and hiding from messes because they know they're going to happen and we have the grace and patience for those. But in the midst of the mess, we say, Jesus, will you please come down here and help us? Will you please be here? Will you give me your spirit so that I will know the words to say and the prayers to pray and the things to do so that we can be a healthy family here? I think we need to do away with this ideal picture perfect family. Because we know enough of life to know that that family doesn't exist. So let's be the messy family. That isn't ashamed of it. That accepts it. That knows if we've got three kids, one of them is probably going to be a screw up. And let's live and love and invite Jesus into that. And it just makes me wonder, what if your family was known for being healthy? What if in your neighborhood, the other kids that run around, the other families interact with, the folks that you'd invite over for a barbecue, what if you weren't known for being perfect? What if you didn't try so hard to seem like you had your act together all the time? And what if you just let it be enough to be known for being healthy? What if we were known for handling our kids with grace? What if the neighborhood kids knew that because of the way you talk to your kids, they can trust you with hard things too? What if the other couples on your ball teams and in your workplace and in your neighborhoods saw your marriage and said, you know what, they're not perfect, but it does seem like they love each other. And were willing to come to you when theirs was struggling. See, here's what I think about healthy families. Last week, we said that God cares a lot about your reputation because there's nothing more convincing than a name. There's nothing more convincing. You take someone who's not a believer, they don't have a faith, and what we said last week is they probably got a reason. And if we just sit down and try to talk them out of it, that's largely a waste of time. The better thing to do is to love them like Jesus would over time. What's more convincing towards the faith than someone who claims to love Jesus and then actually loves them like they do? Similarly, what's more convincing towards the faith than a family who claims to love Jesus and yet in the midst of the messiness honors Jesus through it all, invites Jesus into it, portrays grace to the members in the family, doesn't try to project this false narrative about who they are outside of the family, and loves other families in the midst of their mess as well. What could be more convincing than that? At Grace, we get a lot of new families coming in. And I don't know what's going on in all the dynamics in all of those families. But if there are people who have been estranged from church for a long time and they come in and what we try to project as a good godly family is this picture perfect cookie cutter family that's so far from what they are and from what their experience is that it actually discourages them to see what a successful family looks like in this church. What if instead we had healthy families? They said, yeah, come on, get in our small group. We're a hot mess too. Just come on, we'll talk about it. Yeah, we also, we hate our children four days a week. It's just how it goes. Just come on in, We'll talk about this. We'll figure out how to pursue Jesus together through this. Isn't that so much more inviting? Isn't that so much more welcoming? Isn't that so much more convincing and approachable than trying to be picture perfect? So at Grace, let's be healthy. And when I say healthy, what I mean is, let's not pretend that we're not all messes. Let's just invite Jesus into that mess. Let's say, Jesus, how would you use this? How might you have us act in this? How might we clean this up? How might we portray you through this? And let's together, as a church family and as individual families, pursue health. A health that invites Jesus into every aspect of who we are and what we do. And offers the same grace to one another that he offers to us. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. And we do believe that there's nothing better than you. We do believe there's nothing better than what you offer us. God, I believe that many of us in this room have everything that we need for happiness and joy. We have everything that we need for a rich, full, rewarding life. Give us eyes to see those things that we might praise you, that we might worship you, that our hearts might be turned towards you so that we would invite you in more and more. Give us eyes to see your blessing. Help us to turn our eyes to you in the midst of messiness, in the midst of unexpected things, in the midst of disappointment, in the midst of hard marriages, or difficult children, or difficult family dynamics. Would we turn to you and invite you in and ask what you would have us do there? God, I pray that at grace you would raise up healthy families. For the mamas and daddies in the midst of it, God, give us a heart for that. For your son and for inviting him in. God, for the grandmas and granddads in the room who have now shifted to guiding their adult children. Would you give them the words and the wisdom to point them in this direction of help? To a place where we simply invite Jesus into everything that we're doing. And God, with the families that are hurting, that are sitting in the midst of a big mess, would you please just comfort them? Would you let them know somehow, some way, that they're not alone, that they don't have to be? Would you heal what hurts? For the parents that need it, would you give them a vision to see that you might be using this in ways that they can't understand, but they can trust you because you love their children more than they do? For those of us that might sit in the midst of disappointment or pain, I pray that you would be close to us. I pray that we would remember that you are the God that makes streams in the desert and paths in the wilderness and that you do new things. Would we trust those to you as well? We ask all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, 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.

It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This feels like a danged reunion after not seeing you guys for three full weeks. Three weeks ago, I showed up and I said, hey church, let's kind of get our button gear about church a little bit. And then God gave us two weeks off just to see if we would really mean it. So here you are. These are the ones. This is great. I have been so thrilled to get to preach to you guys again this week. I'll mention it later, but I got sick in the middle of the week and thought I had COVID. I do not. Three COVID tests later, I'm certain of it. But I had to call Kyle on Thursday and be like, I don't think God wants me to preach in 2022 like at all, because you might have to go this week. But I got lucky. It was just strep. So here I am. Before I dive into it, it's just strep. You take antibiotics, you're good the next day, nobody cares. And what do you want it about a sore throat for? So it's just strep. It's great. Before I dive into that, I wanted to remind you guys after the service today is Discover Grace. It's a class with me, which, who could turn that down, for about an extra hour where I just tell you more about who Grace is, who we are, what makes us tick, why we do the things that we do. If you want to join the church, become a partner, we have partners here, not members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. And we're looking for folks to contribute to what God is doing here as we band together and build God's kingdom through Grace Raleigh. So if you'd like to participate in that, just stay in this room. It'll be immediately following the service, which means if you're here and you're not going to be a part of Discover Grace, get the heck out of here, man. We've got things to do. No, congregate in the lobby or outside if you can stand it, but we're going to try to get started in here so that those folks who participate with kids can get their kids and get them home for lunch. The other thing is that I've been touting now for three weeks. I don't even know if it's worth the wait. It's a special announcement that I have for you guys. Just something I wanted to share with the church. Two years ago, February of 2020, when we were naive babies and didn't know what pandemics were, we did a campaign series called Grace is Going Home. And I kind of put in front of you as the church that at that time for 20 years, now for 22 years, Grace has never had its own permanent home. We were founded in 2000 and have always rented our space and kind of moved from space to space. And we've kind of been a church of wanderers and wonderers, wondering when we would find our home. And we believed in 2020, at the beginning of it, that God was moving us to find and step out in faith and pledge towards a permanent home. And you guys as a church pledged $1.5 million, which I was blown away by. And at no point did I expect that to actually come in, but it was a very nice gesture that we made there at the beginning of the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit and remember the bottom fell out and everything's the worst and nobody knows if we're going to have any money or we're just going to be trading Bitcoin for the rest of our lives. And it was a little perilous there. And so we just made a decision as a notary board, we're not going to mention it. We're not going to ask people for it. We're not going to send out letters and say, hey, here's what you owe. Here's what you pledged. If you could kind of honor that, like we didn't do any of that stuff. We just kind of mentioned it a little bit. And then at the end of years, we would say, hey, if you want to give more, because sometimes people do that at the end of years, you can give towards the campaign. And so the announcement is that as of the end of 2021, the end of December 2021, we have $1.5 million available to us right now to go get whatever land or building we need to get. I never, never thought that was possible. I can remember being in elder meetings and we said, how much should the campaign be? And I said, I think our goal should be 1.25. That felt high. I was expecting about a million to come in because that's what experts say will happen. But I'm the one that has to drive the train on this thing or so I thought like a dummy.'s the Holy Spirit doing all the work, and he didn't really have to do anything except get out of the way. And the elders were like, let's do 1.5. And I'm like, you're stupid. You're dumb. It's easy for you to say that because you don't have to stand up here and ask people for it. Why don't we just do 2 million? Let's see what happens. We should have. We should have done that. But we did 1.5. I never thought it would come in. Then we hit the pandemic. Never thought it would come in. Our campaign is not even supposed to be done until the end of February. We have two more months. Well, one more month on this now. But I told the elders going into the end of 2021, listen, whatever we get at the end of 2021, let's just take that from God. That's what we need. He's going to provide for us what we need to build where and when he wants us to build. And so after 2021, we're done talking about it. We're done asking for it. There's still some pledges out there that are lingering that I'm sure will come in. I have heard, and I know that there are some of you who will give, but you're waiting until we identify the land or the property. That's okay. I understand that. So I expect more to come in to that end once we find where we're going to go. But guys, we're done. We did it. Campaign's over. We got what we need. Now we just wait for God's direction on land and where to go. And that could be a minute, just being honest with you. That probably won't be this year. Okay. We've had a team of good, sharp people, the best people in the church at this particular thing, looking for commercial real estate for us. They have not stopped looking for the duration of the pandemic and all the stuff, all the office buildings and churches and stuff that we thought was going to come available because of the pandemic, that ain't happening. Ain't nothing out there. So we're looking and we'll see, but we're happy to wait until God makes it clear that we're supposed to move. But the thing I'm most proud of about this is this. We did this the right way. We raised this money as a church with, listen to me, no discernible strategy at all. We didn't have a dumb thermometer in the lobby. We didn't send out trinkets in the mail. We didn't keep you guys updated on, hey, we're at third base now. Let's make that final stretch. No, we didn't do any of that dumb crap. We just prayed. And we just believed that God, if this matters to you, you'll make it happen. And guess what? It mattered to him. This place matters to him. I like to say that God likes grace. I don't know why he does. He just does. He likes this place. And he's going to take care of us. And I'm very proud of the course that we charted through it as a church and the way that you guys responded to it. And I will say this too, the course that we charted is not at all a testament to my leadership. It's a testament to the leadership of your elders. Because when we started this journey, I was all about doing it the way the consultants say you need to do it. I was 100% behind sectioning off the givers in the church, me going and meeting with the people who had the highest capacity to give, doing a silent campaign before the campaign, and doing it the professional way that you're supposed to do it. I was all about that. And I took that to the elders, and the elders gave me really strong pushback. That's not right. That's not a good fit for grace. That wouldn't go over well here. I wouldn't do that. And I like, listen, I'll just tell you guys in the elder meeting, sometimes we get a little pointed. We will, um, we will say direct things to one another. And there was some direct things said in those meetings. And I pushed pretty hard. I believe I may have told one of the elders to go frolic in the forest with the animals if that's how they thought we were going to do it. It's possible that I said that. But through the elders' pushback, the Holy Spirit worked in my heart too, and I became convicted that the way we needed to do it is to just let him do his work. And so I am so grateful to our elders for charting the course for grace. That was the right course and the God honoring course. I am proud of our partners for honoring God with your pledges. And I am just overwhelmed with God's goodness to us and how he brought us to accomplish that goal with no strategy in a pandemic when at times there was zero people or 40 people a week even using the building that we're pledging to build. It's pretty cool. So let's pray and thank God for that and then we'll dive into this series. Father, you are so good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for caring about us. Thank you for pursuing us. Thank you for reminding us, God, in myriad ways that you love us, that you care about this place, that what happens at Grace matters to you. God, I just pray that when the right spot becomes available, that you, through your spirit, make it abundantly clear to every person involved that that's exactly where you want us to be. And Lord, I just pray that we would be patient for you to move there just like you moved in this campaign. We trust you with all of our hopes and our dreams and our future, and we pray that what we hope and want for grace is exactly what you hope and want for grace. May your will be done here. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. Our new series is called Colossians. It's creatively titled after the book that we're going to study. If you have a Bible, you can go ahead and open there. It's towards the middle of the New Testament. It's just a short four chapter book. So maybe a little tricky to find, but hopefully you'll find it and read along with it on the reading plan and those things. I'm going to confess something to you about this series because I think it's actually kind of funny and informative for how I kind of arrived at some conclusions this week. But when you plan a, when you plan series, when we plan series as a staff, we kind of, we'll approach a season, the January to Easter or Mother's Day or whatever. And we'll kind of look at that season and we'll think, okay, what are the series that we want to do in here? And there's always one or two that I know I definitely want to do. And so you take the series that you really want to do and you put those where they need to be. And then you kind of see what your time blocks are and what you have space to do otherwise. And so I knew I wanted to start out the beginning of the year with this series called Consumed. And I knew that I wanted to share with you guys what was on my heart about our need for being consumed by church. And then the others were going to be consumed by community and consumed by making disciples. I didn't get a chance to get to that, but we'll get to those topics in the spring. And then we were able to do a response to what does it look like to be consumed by the church. That was on video that we did, I think, last week. So if you haven't seen that, I'd love for you to watch that one. So we knew we wanted to take January. We wanted to do consumed. And then I'm not going to get into too many details about it, but we've got a Lent series coming up that I think is going to be eight total weeks, maybe seven. I'm not quite sure. I forget. But I'm very excited about that and all the things that we're going to be doing. And we've known since Lent of last year that we wanted to really hammer home Lent and focus on that as a church this year. So you can go, everyone's going to be challenged to fast from something. You can go ahead and begin to prayerfully consider what that might be for you if that's something you want to participate in. So I'm very excited about that Lent series. And so we knew where we needed to place that. And that left us with four weeks here in February to do another series. So I'm looking at the staff. I'm like, okay, we got four weeks. We need a series. What do you want to do? So I've been listening in the fall. I was listening to the book of Colossians with John every morning. I'd get him up. I'd feed him his bottle, and I'd turn Colossians on on my Bible app and then just read Colossians to both of us. It's four chapters. We've got four weeks. How's that sound? Everybody's like, yep, sounds great. Colossians is a good book. Cool, let's go. And then we started jokingly referring to this as the filler series, the series in between the two ones that we actually care about. And we would never tell you that because every series is important, but that's how we were joking about this particular series. Even the graphic, Carly sent it to me and I think the graphic looks really good. Carly didn't love it. She was like, here it is. I know this isn't a big deal series. So what do you think? I'm like, that looks great. That's fine with me. I think it looks really, really good. So even to that, we're focused on Lent, right? So this week I dive into research on our filler series. I'm like, okay, God, what do you got for us in Colossians? And I just couldn't help but chuckle, even just 30 minutes into research and reading and praying, at just how very relevant and necessary this book is for us, at how very rich and good I think it's going to be for us. I'm so excited about what I get to preach to you this morning that I'm a little bit emotional about it. I'm afraid I'm going to cry at times that don't make any sense, so I'm going to try to keep it together. But I'm really excited to share with you this message of Colossians. I think Colossians is tucked away in the New Testament and is typically relegated to Bible studies sometimes. And that we don't really study it very often. And we might not even be super familiar with what it is and what its message is. And the more I have gotten into it, the more I thought, gosh, this is going to be so good for grace right now. So God in his goodness, and maybe in those mornings when I randomly landed on Colossians, the Holy Spirit was preparing my heart for the series that he knew he wanted us to do in February that is anything but a filler series. But one of the things that first tipped me off that this would be a good series for Grace right now is the background on the church in Colossae. Paul didn't start this church. Somebody else was running this church. Paul was actually in prison and he got a letter from the person who was running this church. And the letter basically said, hey, Paul, we're doing great. Our folks love God. Our folks are all in. Our folks are full of faith. They're standing up to persecution. Like we've got a really good spirit here. And I thought that feels like grace to me. We're doing a good job. The reaction to, hey, let's be all in was so good and was so encouraging. And it made me so proud in our campaign. It made me so proud. I feel like we're doing pretty good. I feel like we've got a good spirit here. I feel like we've got a good thing going. But the leader of the church told Paul, but they're facing tremendous pressure that I'd like you to speak to. And the pressure was essentially to fold into old ways of legalism or to transition into new ways of liberalism. So there was forces being exerted on them from outside the walls of the church and sometimes from within the walls of the church to recede back into legalistic Judaism, where your spirituality is measured by your ability to follow the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more spotless your life is, the more spiritual you are, the more God loves you. That's how we gain favor with God and respect for man. There's legalism following the rules well. Or this slide to liberalism. Actually, none of those rules really matter. They're not important. Those were never actually meant to be rules. Do whatever you want, no matter what, and God loves and accepts you all the time. Which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism, since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts you all the time, which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts us all the time, but it's doing away with any sort of standards that we need to hold in our life and just embracing every ideology that comes along. And I thought, well, that's pretty similar to grace too. Frankly, that's really similar to any church, particularly in the Southern United States. Every church in the Southern United States right now faces that tension from within and without. There are some people that want to drag us back to legalism, right? My parents grew up in Southern Baptist churches where all the skirts had to be below the knees, where you weren't allowed to be seen at the theater, where you weren't allowed to go dancing or play cards or gamble or any of that stuff. And I don't go dancing, and I don't play cards because those are boring, but I gamble sometimes because that's fun. We don't do that stuff anymore. But every now and again, there's a part of us that wants to go back to that familiar legalism, that we've got to follow the rules better. We have to decide. We have to draw lines in the sand. This is a sin and you can't do that and you can do this. And we want to put up barriers around our behavior and define people's spirituality by how well they follow the rules. That's a comfortable, natural place for the human instinct to go. And if we don't watch it, some of us will always slide towards legalism. In the same way, we're in a culture now that's trying to tell us that none of those rules really matter. All the trains get off at the same station. Everything's really the same. It's you have your faith and we have our faith and yada, yada, yada. We don't really need all those standards. There's a push on the church to let go of some of our tenants so that we can be more acceptable to our culture. And so like the Colossians, we are a church that's doing good, that loves God, that has a heart of faith, but exists under some pressure to go liberal or to go legal. And so Paul writes to encourage the church in Colossians. And in his encouragement to the church in Colossae, I think we can find a lot of encouragement to this church here in Raleigh. And so the question becomes, well, if Paul is writing them to then encourage them in their faith, how does he do it? What does he write to them? What's the first thing he points to, to encourage them in their faith? And I thought about, well, if it were me, if I wanted to encourage our church or any church, or if I'm Paul and I was trying to encourage that church, how would I do it? How would you do it? Would you like me do it strategically? I would probably want to talk to the leader of that church. What's going on? What kind of things are they facing? The legalistic crowd. What kind of rules are they really caring about? The liberal crowd. Where are they coming from? What's their ideology? What are they trying to do? And I would have wanted to directly address those arguments. Like an attorney, let's just break this thing down. Let's address all their arguments. Let's build out a nice rebuttal here so to give them a good foundation to stand on. Let's do this thing strategically, right? Well, Paul didn't do it strategically. Paul did it very simply. And it's so simple and it's so pure and it's so powerful that it convicts me that maybe as a pastor, I don't do this enough for you guys. But Paul didn't choose to encourage them strategically. He didn't choose to figure out where they were and kind of read the tea leaves and try to hit them right where their heart was. He just did it very simply. Paul encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus, plain and simple. He encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus. And when I say this, what I mean is he begins in chapter one, verses one through 14 are really kind of this preamble. He says, hey, you know, I think my God, every time I remember you, I think of you in my prayers. This is what I pray for you. The prayer in Colossians looks very similar to other prayers and the other letters that he's written to the church that are basically, hey, I just want you to know God more than anything else. I want you to know God, grateful for your faith, grateful for your testimony from your church. And then he gets into how he wants to encourage them. And this is what he writes. And this is verses 15 through 23. I'm going to stop a couple of times and talk about some things, but keep your Bibles open. I think this passage is worth reading. It's such a sweeping and stunning portrayal of Jesus. And you know, it's funny that I've come back to this because a few years ago in the spring, we did a series in Hebrews. And I said that Hebrews had the most incredible description of Christ in the Bible. And I preached it to you guys. And I got an email from Brandon Reese right over here, who was in the men's group. And he said, that's a great picture. There's an equal one to it in my mind in Colossians. And so now here we are two years later, and now we're talking about that depiction of Jesus in Colossians. And I want you to read it with me, and we'll kind of digest it together. This is what Paul writes, beginning in verse 15. I'm going to take a break there. I want you to understand what's going on here. What Paul is saying is Jesus was present at creation. He's agreeing with the gospel of John that says, through him all things were made and without him nothing was made. He was present at creation. All of creation hinges upon him. All of his existence now rests upon him. He is saying that all things belong to him, that he is the reconciliation. And if you read this, what you really find is that this is what Paul is saying, that all, everyone who's ever lived has held Christ, whether you realize it or not, as the epicenter of your history and the epicenter of your hope. Which means for every person who has ever lived, all of your understanding of your past hinges on Christ and all of your hope for your future hinges on Christ. That's what that means. Even if you go all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first thing they learn is that God created them. How did he create them? Well, according to Genesis 1 and John 1 and Colossians 1, he created them through his word, Jesus. He created them through his son. So Adam and Eve, with a brief two-day history they had, looked back to the creation of the earth with the hope that it was Jesus who actually did it. Their history hinged upon Jesus. And then when they sinned and they fell and suddenly they need reconciliation and forgiveness, their future hope for that reconciliation and forgiveness without them knowing it hinged upon Jesus. And then over the course of the Old Testament, God begins to shed some light on exactly what that future hope is going to be on the Messiah. And we see whispers in Jeremiah and Isaiah and in the prophets as they kind of shed more light on who this Messiah is going to be and what this hinge of history is going to come to do. And then Jesus shows up in the gospels and he personifies God's goodness and loveliness. And we'll talk about that in a second. And he lives a perfect life and he dies on the cross for our sins. And so all of history to that point culminates in the death of Christ as he fulfills his divine nature to do that for us. And then we move forward into the church era. And now as people who exist in 2022, we look back on the death and the burial and the resurrection of Christ as a hinge of history. All of our history is contingent upon him. And then we look forward to, as we preached in the fall, revelations, when Jesus comes down in Revelation 18 and 19 to come back and rescue his church and to take us back up to heaven with us. He is the hope of our future. So for every person who has ever lived, Jesus is the epicenter of your history and he is the epicenter of your hope. Jesus is the confluence of heaven coming down onto earth and earth experiencing heaven. He is the nexus of the spiritual world meeting the physical world. Jesus sits in the middle of everything. Everything. There is nothing without him. Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we admit it or not, whether we comprehend it or not, Jesus sits at the hinge of all history, of all creation, of all love, of all majesty. And that's the picture that Paul is painting to the church in Colossae and to us is this grandeur of Jesus. And he doesn't stop there. I love this next sentence. I think it's verse 19. For in him, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. We'll pause there again. Much of what I'm about to say comes from this book that Kyle recommended to the staff called Gentle and Lowly. And I can't recommend it to you highly enough if you're a reader. If you're not a reader, become one. It's good. And read Gentle and Lowly. But I love that phrase in verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. What does that mean? This is a clumsy explanation, but it's the best that I can do. I can only try to size it up like this. Do a little mental exercise with me. And just picture in your mind, I don't know how you're gonna do it, just figure it out. Picture in your mind how much you think God loves you. Just how much you think he loves you. And try to wrap your head around that for a second. How much grace do you think God has for you? Wrap your head around that for a second. Grace for your humanity and for who you are and loving you despite of your faults. How much mercy does God have for you? Willingness to look over times you've slighted him or things that you've done. How much compassion does God have for you in your sin and in your hardships? Wrap your head around those things. And then let me tell you this. It's more than that. It's more than that. And now wrap your head around that new reality. But it's more than you can fathom. It's more than that. Wrap your head around that new reality, and guess what? It's more than that. Wrap your head around that reality, and it's more than that, and it keeps going. We cannot comprehend the love and the grace and the mercy and the compassion and the goodness that God holds in his heart for us. It is beyond human comprehension, and I am convinced that the whole Christian life is an exercise in expounding our understanding of how much God loves us and has mercy for us us and then realizing that's not nearly enough to capture how he loves us. And that overwhelming love, that overwhelming goodness, that overwhelming grace and compassion that we cannot fathom is personified, listen to me, is personified in the person of Jesus. That's what it means when it says the fullness of God, all of his grace, all of his mercy, all of his compassion, all of his love was pleased to rest on the person of Christ. And if you want to know how much does God love me, look at Christ crucified and answer the question for yourself. If you want to know how much mercy and compassion does God have on me, look at Jesus weeping with Mary and know that that's the compassion that he has for you. If you want to know how much grace and mercy does he have for me, look at Jesus with the adulterous woman as he defends her from the death penalty and know that that's the compassion that Jesus has for you. If you want to know how much Jesus forgives you, look at him telling Peter to forgive 70 times 7, which is as many times as is necessary, and know that that's God's forgiveness for you. If we want to know how God feels about us and how much he loves us, look at the person of Christ on whom his fullness is pleased to dwell and know that that's how much God loves us, that that's the compassion that he has for us. That that's the grace and the mercy that he offers us. That's what it means when it says that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell on him and then he finishes up this description of Christ in this way. In verse 21, He says, Why did God send the culmination of all history, the fullness of his love and compassion? Why did he send that down here? To get you. To come and get you. To reconcile you back to him so that he can experience eternity with you. Listen to me. Why does Paul choose, when he needs to encourage the Colossians to hang in there, when he needs to encourage them to stay pure in their faith, what does he do? He points them to Jesus in the stunning depiction of Christ. And why does he do that? This is why. Because Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. I don't know if you think about God's love for you in this way, but God loves you. God desires you. God chases after you. God sent his son to win you. And then he left the Holy Spirit to nip at your heels whenever you run from him so that you would turn and accept his embrace. He is coming for you. He desires you. He is yearning for you. He does not sit back and wait for you. He pursues you. So he sent Jesus to come and get you. And he left his spirit to keep the chase going until you finally give in and give up and say, God, I'm yours. Because that's what he longs for. I told you this week I had strep. On Tuesday, I began to feel a little sick, and so I realized with all the COVID junk going on, I should probably mask up in the house and try to stay away from the kids. Wednesday felt like garbage. Thursday was the worst. Literally, I never get sick ever. I've never been as sick as I was on Thursday in my adult life. But by Thursday afternoon, I got some antibiotics, so Friday I was right as rain, baby. It was great. But on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm in the house, and I'm with my kids, but I can't touch them. I'm an affectionate guy. I pick up and scoop up Lily all the time. I pick up and scoop up John all the time. I love holding my babies. And there was one night, I think it was Thursday, Jen was laying with Lily singing her songs and I was standing in Lily's doorway with my mask on just waving at Lily in the bed and she waved back at me and she said, I miss you, Daddy. And I had to go cry in my bedroom. I yearned for them. All I wanted to do is scoop them up. All I wanted to do is pick up John and eat those fat baby cheeks. Is grab Lily when she got home from school and make her tell me about her day. She doesn't do it, so I say, tell me three good things that happened. That's all I wanted to do. All I wanted to do is scoop up my kids, man. And it was like this weird quasi-torture sitting in the house looking at them and not being able to scoop them up. If that's torture for me for three days, knowing good and dang well I'm going to get over this and I'll pick them up again, what must it do to our Father in heaven to watch us and so desperately want to pick us up and to hold us and to cherish us and for us to hold him at arm's length. Because Lily waved back at me and said, I miss you. And I knew that she wanted to hug me as soon as I was able to do it again. How much more would that crush your parent heart if you waved at your kid and they said, I miss you. And they said, if God yearns for me the way that I yearn for my children, if God yearns for you and the people you love the way that you yearn for your children, the way that I yearn for mine, how much must it hurt his fatherly heart in heaven to watch his children run from him, begging them, please just stop running. Please just turn around for a dang second and let me hold on to you. I sent my son to catch you. I left the spirit to keep up the chase. How much must it hurt his father's heart to not be able to hold his babies, to not be able to embrace his children, for us to run from him and to wander off from him. When all he wants is for us to be with him. When all he wants is to hold us. When all he wants is his son or his daughter to talk to him. And tell him about our days. Y'all, God, he yearns for us. It's all over the Bible. Jesus says it like this. He says he leaves the 99 sheep that are safe to go get the one who's lost and wandering. And I think that we make such a mistake about how we view the gospel and the love of God in our life. I think that sometimes we have this attitude that God's like, you know, take it or leave it. I sent my son, he died for you. It's there if you want it. It's yours if you don't want it. You don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. I sent my son. He died for you. It's there. If you want it, it's yours. If you don't want it, you don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. Guys, take it or leave it isn't yearning. Take it or leave it is not what we see in the Bible. Take it or leave it is not what we see pouring out of scriptures and shouting at us through the book of Colossians. What we see in the Bible is a father in heaven who earnestly in his guts yearns for you, who wants you, who loves you. And now for some of us, you've never known that love. You've run from it your whole life. You've never accepted Christianity. There's things about it you can't get your head around. And so you're still running. And I'm begging you that you would let God catch you today. I'm begging you that you would let today be the day that you would embrace your heavenly Father. But there's others of us who have been caught, but after we've been caught, there's been the wandering. And in our wandering, sometimes we feel so badly for what we've done that we think God must be disappointed with us. He can't be yearning for me anymore. And so we keep ourselves at arm's length from God out of a sense of guilt or shame. And to you, I would simply ask, if God came after you when your soul was fundamentally opposed to him, why would he not continue to pursue you when your soul feels actual guilt of your sin? If God chased you down and yearned for you and pursued you before you were his child, then how much more does he still love you now that you're his child? Why would he ever stop loving you? Listen, when God forgave us, when you accepted Christ, he forgave you for all of your sins, past, present, and future. He already knew you were going to go through the season of wandering when he chose to save you. He doesn't love you any less. As a matter of fact, God's, I believe, primary emotion as he looks at you in your sin is not anger, but pity and compassion because of what you're giving up to be away from him when he just wants you close to him. Listen, if you've never known Jesus in your life, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you have doubts and you're not sure about your faith, God yearns for you and will chase you down through those doubts. He's still after you. If you are wandering away, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you're holding on to pet sins that you're not sure you want to give up yet, God is going to chase you through those sins and he will chase you down and the Holy Spirit will nip at your heels until we give in and allow him to embrace us. If you are experiencing incredible victory in your spiritual walk right now, good. God loves you and yearns for you on a deeper level than you can still ever imagine. God loves you and yearns for you deeply. And that's all that the church in Colossae needed to know to be encouraged in their faith. And so my prayer for you this morning is that you will walk out those doors knowing in your guts that God loves you more than you thought he did when you came in here. And as I thought about the best way to finish up the service this week, I was reminded of this song called Reckless Love. Because in that song, there's lines of, there's no walls he won't kick down or lies he won't tear down coming after me. There's all these things that God will do to come after us. But the part about the song I like is that it's called Reckless Love. And when it first came out, there was some kind of dumb arguments about whether or not it was really appropriate to use the word reckless because we didn't want to accuse God of being careless or thoughtless or somehow errant in his love for us. But that word reckless doesn't mean mistaken. The word reckless implies this. When you offer your love to someone, when you expose yourself, you make yourself vulnerable to them and they reject you. That hurts. You take that personally. I don't care who you are. And there's only so many times you can offer your love freely and wholeheartedly to someone and have them reject you before you start to guard yourself against it. And the love you offer isn't as much or it isn't as pure or it isn't as grand. Or even maybe you wall yourself off to it entirely because you just can't stand the pain anymore. We learn self-protection. God's recklessness is that he has no self-protection. God's recklessness is you can reject him as many times as you want to and he will never stop coming after you. It doesn't matter how many times we hurt him, he's gonna continue to come after us to get us, to claim us. And so we should sing and marvel at this reckless love. So I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna sing together, but I would invite you to experience the song however you wanna experience it. If you wanna stand and sing, stand and sing. If you wanna sit and you want the lyrics to wash over you, let them do that. If you wanna kneel at your seat and pray, pray. If you wanna come up here to the front and pray and have me kneel over you and pray with you, I'll do that too. However you wanna experience this song, you experience it that way, but I'm gonna pray, the band's gonna come up, and then we'll finish with that song together. Father, boy, you are good to us. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you pursue us. We thank you that you sent your son as the personification and embodiment of your earnest yearning for us. I simply pray, God, that we would be more certain of your love for us as we leave than we were when we showed up. God, we are your children. We are your sons and your daughters. I pray that we would let you love us like that. May we please quit trying to perform. May we please quit insisting that we get our life in some semblance of order before we come to you. May we please tear down all the roadblocks that exist between you and us and just allow ourselves to feel your overwhelming and reckless love for us. It's in your son's name on whom all of history and hope hinges that we pray. 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.