Sermons tagged with Waiting

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

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.

The Pretty epic, huh? I mean, looky there. The sermon is half as good as the video. Y'all are going to leave here with your hair on fire. This is great. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. So thanks for being here. I thank you for watching online or catching up during the week if that's what you're doing. This is clearly the start of our series in the book of Revelation. I have been studying and prepping for this as far back as the summer because Joseph was a fun series. I loved doing Joseph. I love narrative series where we're just telling stories and seeing what we can learn from the story. The prep time on a Joseph sermon is about two and a half or three hours. The prep time on the Revelation sermon is 10 times that for each one. So you got to start those early. But because I've been doing so much studying, I'm very happy to tell you guys that I have all the answers for you. I'm going to tell you very clearly what happens in the book of Revelation. You can't ask me a question that I won't be certain about. And this is going to be a very productive time for the church. So I'm very much looking forward to it. Revelation, for some of us, has a lot of baggage. For some of us, it doesn't have very much at all. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s. And when you grew up in a Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s, Revelation was a big deal. I don't know if you guys realize that or what your church contexts are, but there was a season in church life when having strong opinions about the tribulation and the rapture was just a part of church. I actually talked to a church one time in a former life. I was a teacher at a private high school, and one of the churches was a small country Baptist church. And they said, hey, we're looking for a pastor if you know anybody. And I said, okay, well, you know, I'll keep my eyes out. And they said, but we're only going to hire people if they believe in a pre-trib rapture. That's a non-negotiable for us. And I started laughing. He's like, why are you laughing? I'm like, oh, you mean that? Like, that's really important to you. And they're like, yeah, absolutely. Well, are you not pre-trib rapture? Because if you're not, I don't want you teaching my daughter Bible. I'm like, rapture is not coming up. All right. We're not covering that in 10th grade Bible. Don't worry about it. I wonder how many of you though have had, like, when I say pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, 1260 days, the four beasts, the man, the eagle, the lion, the ox, the 144,000 Jewish males from the tribes. How many of you know what I'm talking about? You've heard those things before. Okay. And then I won't ask the rest of us, how many of you are like, I got no clue, man. Like, no idea on this. You don't have to raise your hand. But yeah, so like, how do we approach like that wide of a swath of information and knowledge about this book? Because there's some of us that have been a part of really in-depth Bible studies and there's some of us who we've avoided it all together. So in thinking about how to approach the book of Revelation for these next seven weeks, I really thought it was worth noting the tendencies that we kind of tend towards as we approach the book of Revelation. Because again, some of us are very experienced with it, and some of us have never opened it because it's scary or intimidating or whatever. So as we begin, I kind of wanted to begin the series with this thought as we think about how do we approach the book of Revelation. I would contend that most people either overcomplicate or oversimplify Revelation. Most people in their approach to it have a tendency to either overcomplicate it or vastly oversimplify the book. And what I mean is we can overcomplicate it so that we miss the forest for the trees. We can overcomplicate it so much and drill down on things so much and ask so many questions about it. When is the rapture actually going to happen? Because of this verse, I think it's going to happen in the middle of the tribulation. When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? Are people, can you still get saved during the tribulation? What are the four creatures and the beasts and the angels and which angels have which wings and what do they represent and what's going on with the dragon trying to eat the baby and all these different things? what is the mark of the beast? Is it the vaccine? What is all that stuff, right? And so we can kind of drill down and the answer is no, stinking no, that's not the thing. The vaccine is not the mark of the beast. Anyways, we can get so concerned in drilling down on these details that we kind of miss the message of the book. And the thing about all those details that we'll talk about in a little bit and throughout the series is many of them are really not knowable. So to try to figure out what is the creature that comes out of the abyss that has a tail like a scorpion and stings you and it ails you for five months? Is that an attack helicopter or is that a scorpion? I don't know. And you don't either. And there's no way to know. So let's stop worrying about it, right? So we can overcomplicate it and get so mired in the details of the book that we miss the message. But we can also oversimplify it. I had somebody in my men's Tuesday morning Bible study who he's involved in a study in Revelation right now with another small group. He's cheating on me with another small group and it's hurtful. But he said, we were talking about Revelation and he waved his hand and he goes, Jesus wins. That's all you need to know. And listen, that's true. And this is a man who clearly he cares about Revelation and I don't mean to disparage him, but in that moment of just going, meh, Jesus wins, I would tend more towards that camp in my own interpretative approach of it, but that's not enough either. What happens when we overcomplicate or oversimplify the book of Revelation is that both approaches cheapen the message of the book. Both of those approaches really end up cheapening the message of the book in general. If we get so caught up with the details that it matters to us deeply who the 144,000 are and we search through the Bible to try to piece that one together, and we miss the overarching message of the book because of it, then we cheapen the message of the book. If we just dismiss it and say, listen, Jesus wins, that's all you need to know, then we cheapen the message of the book as well because there's a reason that Revelation exists. There's a reason that God called John up to heaven and gave him a vision of what's going to happen at the end of time. There's a reason he told him to write it down. There's a reason that people have died for the preservation of Scripture over the centuries. There's a reason that this book was canonized, was put in the Bible as part of every Bible that's ever been printed. There's a reason that God ends His revelation to us with this book. There's reasons for that, and so it's worth studying. And I would contend that the book of Revelation matters very much to God. And I would actually base it on the way that he starts the book. This is John writing it. Revelation chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. Listen to this. This verse, particularly the third verse, tells us that revelation is important to God. This book is important to God. And it says, blessed are those who read aloud, because this was a letter. It was written to the churches. And so there wasn't a bunch of copies. Gutenberg hadn't showed up yet. So there was just one letter and one person would read it aloud. So it's basically blessed are those who read it, blessed are those who study it, blessed are those who invest time in it. So God says that we will be blessed by doing this. And, you know, I was talking to Erin Winston, our great children's pastor, I think a year and a half or two years ago when we were talking about series ideas. And she just mentioned to me that she can't remember Grace having ever done a series in Revelation. And I thought, well, goodness, our church needs to know about this. Our church needs to know this book. We need to kind of demystify it and walk through it and see what we can learn from it. And we wanted to do it for a long time, but then the pandemic hit and this didn't feel like what I wanted to do strictly over video, right? I wanted this to be in person because some of the stuff that we have to talk about in the book is hard. That's not this week, but it's coming. And so I thought that it would be worth it to do this series together. And it'd be worth it to not overcomplicate things, to try to train ourselves to focus on the message of portions of it, rather than get mired in the details, but also get into it enough that we feel like we can understand it. So as we approach Revelation, we do need to do some background work to really understand why it was written. It was written by John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. He was in exile on the island of Patmos about 90 AD is what we think, is when we think it was written. So about 60 years after the death of Christ. He's the last living disciple. All the other disciples have died a martyr's death. He is the last stalwart of the disciples and the bastion of the early church. John really lived a remarkable life. And so God calls him up to heaven and shows him a vision and he writes it down and that becomes Revelation. And what we need to understand is that Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. To be a Christian at this point in history is to take your life into your hands. To be a Christian is to put yourself and your family at risk. It's to go into the catacombs, into underground graveyards, to have your Easter worship service because you cannot be seen in public doing this because you will be killed. It's to know friends and loved ones who have been dipped in tar and used as live torches to light the path into Rome. It's to watch your friends and loved ones get taken and thrown into the gladiator arena with animals that rip them apart. It is a tough time to be a Christian. And so John wrote this letter to them from God to give them hope, to encourage them, to help them hang in there, to help them see a path to a better day. And so when reading Revelation, we can never separate our understanding of it from how the original audience would have understood it. We can never make it mean something that it wouldn't have meant to them. But that also means that it's right and good for us to approach it, mining it for hope. That's the best reason to approach Revelation. It's not necessarily to know what's going to happen at the end of times with great detail, but to cling to the hope that the book offers us throughout it. This is why I love Revelation. If you've heard me preach any messages for any time at all, you've heard me say things like there's coming a day when Jesus is gonna make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. You've heard me talk about Revelation 18 and 19 where he comes down with righteous and true tattooed on his thigh. He comes back not as the Lamb of God, but now as the Lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop. You've heard me talk about that because I take great solace in that in my personal faith. You've heard me talk about Revelation 21 when God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping and crying in pain anymore. You've heard me talk about that because it's in Revelation and it's hopeful and it's what we cling to. So when we read it, our top priority, our first priority ought to be to mine it for hope and to let it encourage us in our faith. That's far more important than some of the other details. And it's important enough to dig in and to see how it might offer us hope the same way it did the early church. As we seek to understand and interpret the book of Revelation, a couple rules of thumb for us as we walk through it together. The first is, it's not completely linear, but sometimes it is. It's not completely linear, but sometimes it's linear. And when I say linear, what I mean is just event after event from start to finish. The gospels are linear. The gospel of Mark starts at the beginning and moves through the story of Jesus to a crucifixion and then ascension. That's linear. It's just, it's all happening on the same timetable, right? Well, Revelation's not like that. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it moves through and it moves, this event happens, and then the very next thing he talks about is the event that follows the one that he just described. But sometimes he jumps. He says, I turn and I saw. And I'll show you in a second what I'm talking about. He says, then I turned and I saw, and it's something else is going on. And the thing that he's talking about over here happened before the thing he just got done talking about. Or it happens years after the thing he just got done talking about. And then in the next chapter over, he's going to talk about the stuff that happens in the middle. And then the next chapter over, he's going to talk about stuff that happened before that. So sometimes it's linear. Sometimes it's not. So you just have to know as you're reading it that he's not presenting us from chapter 1 to chapter 22 all the things in order. Another thing you should know is that it's not completely literal, but sometimes it is. It's not completely literal all the time. Sometimes it's figurative. Sometimes it is literal. Sometimes the words that you're reading are actually going to happen. They're descriptive of a thing that really will take place. Sometimes you're reading it and it's figurative language to describe to you in the best way that John can what it will be like. Or because God is intentionally using powerful imagery, it's a picture of other events that have already happened. So as we're reading it and as we're studying through it, and there's a reading plan that will be, it would be on the, is it on the table this morning, Kyle? Okay. It's there and it'll be online as well beginning tomorrow morning. I hope that you'll read through Revelation with us. I hope that you'll be talking about it in your small groups together. But as you read and study, we need to be asking ourselves as we look at the text, is this literal or figurative? Is this linear? Is this happening in order? Or have I jumped back or to a different place? We'll need to know this as we read. Now, some examples of where it's figurative and nonlinear or literal and linear are easy to find. So I'm going to read a passage from Revelation chapter 12. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to my words as I read. This is a famous scene in the book of Revelation. Just listen. I don't know what diadems are. I think maybe crowns. Cool. Let's just go on to the next thing, right? What's going on there? Well, what's happening there is that John is neither being literal, nor is he being linear. Most scholars agree, and it's not certain, so I don't say it with certainty, but most scholars agree, believe it or not, that this is a picture of Christmas. What if I preached that this December 25th, right? What if I made that the Christmas message? Boy, that would be something. Most scholars believe it's a picture of Christmas. It's figurative. It's powerful imagery that God is using to drive home a point. And that in this depiction, the woman very likely represents Israel. The baby is Jesus. The red dragon is Satan. And Satan is trying to thwart Jesus, thwart the efforts of God. But God rescues Jesus back up to his throne, which means God's throne and Jesus' throne. And then Israel is nourished in the wilderness, which could be a reference to their exile in Egypt as slaves, or it could be a reference to the flight of Mary to the wilderness once Jesus is born and they have to go to Egypt for a couple years because Herod is trying to find and kill baby Jesus. The tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the heaven down onto earth, that's a reference to the fact that when Lucifer was kicked out of heaven and became Satan, that he took a third of the demons with him. So this isn't linear because it's Christmas. This happened 90 years before John even wrote it. And certainly not in order with the other things going on in the book. And it's not even linear within its own depiction because it's talking about fleeing to the wilderness and it's talking about the demons falling from heaven, which happened thousands of years before any of this stuff and the rest of the story was ever happening. And then the 1260 days at the end of it is a reference to half of the tribulation period that Revelation divides in half often in months or in days. So it's literally, as far as the time frame is concerned, it's covering thousands of years in a paragraph. It's got a ton going on there. And it didn't literally happen. It's figurative imagery. So that's neither literal nor linear. But sometimes Revelation is those things. Listen to Revelation 21. At the end of the book, John is given a vision. He's carried to another place where Jerusalem begins to descend. A new Jerusalem begins to descend out of the sky. God is setting it Its length the same as its width. And measured the city with his rod. 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall. 144 cubits by human measurement. Which is also an angel's measurement. Which is nice to know. If you're measuring in cubits. You're measuring as the angels do. So well done. The wall was built of jasper while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, then sapphire, a gate, emerald, onyx, chameleon, chrysolite, beryl, and he goes on and on. And then he says, and the 12 gates were 12 pearls, each of the end of the book. It happens at the end of the story. It happens at the end of time. We can read that, see where it's happening in the book, and know that that's how it's going to happen in time. And it's literal. That's not figurative speech about the specific jewels that are going to be the foundation of the wall or the way that the city is going to look or the size of the city. That's a literal interpretation. So again, as we read, we need to ask, is what's happening here, is it literal or is it figurative? Is it linear? Is it happening in the order in which it's presented? Or in its proper context, should it go in another place? When I was explaining this to Jen this week, she was asking how I was going to approach it, and I was kind of walking her through portions of the sermon. And Jen, she's my wife, for those of you who don't know her, not just a lady I talk to sermons about, but that would be cool. I have one of those. When I told her what I was going to do and how it sometimes is literal, sometimes linear, and sometimes it's not, she said, yeah, but, and she's asked the question that you guys all should have by now. She goes, yeah, but how do you know? How do you know when it's supposed to be one and not the other? Well, that's the tricky part. And the only possible answer to it is you have to work hard. How do I know when it's literal and when it's figured if you have to study? Listen, some books of the Bible are really easy to understand. Proverbs. You don't need to study Proverbs. Just read Proverbs. And it says that we should consider the ant and work even when we don't have to. There's no mystery going on there. That's pretty simple. When it says whatever you do, get wisdom, that's simple. Revelation, not simple. If you want to understand it, it takes hard work. It takes discussion. You have to read a lot of sources. You have to listen to a lot of people. There's no easy path to understanding Revelation. I can't stand up here in seven weeks and explain it to you in a way that will make sense and get everything right. I just can't do it. And people who claim that they can are dumb. They're just being intellectually dishonest. Which is why I think it's important for me to kind of share this idea with you, not just for this series, but as you encounter Revelation as you move throughout the rest of your life, which is simply when it comes to Revelation, be cynical of certainty. When it comes to the book of Revelation, when it comes to who you're listening to and what you're reading and how you're talking about it and how people are presenting ideas to you in whatever form you would consume them, we are wise when it comes to Revelation to be cynical of certainty. Now there are some things in the book of Revelation that we ought to be certain about. Jesus is there. He's in heaven. God is sitting on his throne. He's surrounded by angels. There's going to be a new heaven and a new earth. Satan's going to be dealt with. People are going to be judged. We're going to be called up there. Like there's things that we can be certain about, but there's other things you simply can't be certain about. And for someone to present you information in a way where they are certain, where they don't even acknowledge that there's other theologians, there's myriad other views of this particular passage or this particular idea, and they don't even acknowledge that those exist, well now, I don't know if I believe you about anything. I was listening to a pastor that I really like a lot. He's been one of my go-to guys for years. And his church did a series in Revelation last year. And I thought, oh, well, shoot, I'm just going to listen to his and then steal it. That'll really cut down on the prep time here. This is going to be great. But as I listened, he got to a portion, I think it's in chapter four, where there's these four creatures, these four beasts that are really mysterious. And one is like a lion, one is like an ox, one is like an eagle, and one is like a man. And there's this incredible description of them. And the same four creatures are described in Ezekiel, in an Old Testament book of prophecy, with stunning accuracy and similarity to the four creatures in Revelation. There's very little doubt that both authors, that both John and Ezekiel saw the same four creatures. Now, what are they? And what do they represent? I don't know. But the pastor that I really liked when I was listening to him, he said, well, the ox represents this, the lion this, the eagle this, the man this. Does it not? And then he moved on. And he said it as if he was certain of it. And he said it as if there was no other possible explanation than the one that he just shared. When the reality is we only see them in Ezekiel. We only see them in Revelation. Very little explanation is offered about them in either place. So to presume that we know who they are, what they are, what they represent, and why they exist is not fair. It's not intellectually honest. The most intellectually honest thing to say about them is, they're pretty cool. That's it. They matter a lot to God. They're going to be neat when we see them. They're probably going to be scary. It's going to be awesome. What do they represent? I don't know and neither do you. And don't act like you do. We can make educated guesses. There's plenty of room for that. But we ought to be cynical of certainty as we move through this. And I'm saying that, hopefully, not for your benefit in this series, because hopefully I don't get up here and start teaching you things with certainty that I don't understand. Hopefully I'll teach them honestly and present the sides that exist and are merited. But I say that to you as you move throughout your lives and as you encounter other Revelation studies. Be cynical of certainty. So that's how we want to approach the book. I told you that we would mine Revelation for hope. And there's an incredible space to do that in the first chapter of Revelation. And that's where I want us to focus as we finish up the sermon today. I will also say this for those who know your Bibles well. Chapters 2 and 3 in Revelation are the seven letters to the seven churches. They are wonderful letters. They're hugely important. They're incredibly informative for us, not just of the ancient church, but what our modern churches ought to look like. They're a hugely impactful portion of the book of Revelation. They are so important and so impactful that we're going to skip them. Because I'm not going to reduce them to a week and preach them to you like that. So we're going to skip them. I'm going to set them aside. At some point in the future, we're going to come back and we're going to do a seven-part series as we move through those letters together. But if you know your Bible well, and next week we just open up and we get to chapter four, and you're thinking, why didn't we do the seven letters to the seven churches? That's why, because they're too important to reduce to a week. And Revelation would get too boring to expand to 14 weeks. All right, so we're going to do those later. But as we look at chapter one and we begin to move through the story, I wanted to bring us to what I believe is maybe one of the most poignant moments in all of Scripture. And we find it towards the end of the first chapter. We're going to start reading in verse 12. This is John writing. He says, And these are the words of Jesus now, which will always show up in red during the series. and I have the keys of death and Hades. I get chills every time I read this. John is swept up into heaven. He's told, you're gonna see some stuff, write it down. And he looks and there's someone who is white like snow, who is shining in brilliance, who has a voice like raging waters. And he sees him and he's so terrified that he falls on his feet. He falls at his feet. He collapses in fear. And we learn from those words in red that it's Jesus. And Jesus places his hand on John's shoulder, presumably. And he says, Behold, I am the first and the last. I have died and yet I live. Other translations say the Alpha and the Omega. And I have the keys to death and Hades. I've conquered them. Which is a remarkable moment. But it's more remarkable when we reflect on who John was and what John did. Do you understand that John calls himself in his own gospel the disciple whom Jesus loved? You should probably be pretty certain of your standing before Christ if you want to go around touting that nickname. This John is the John that was the disciple whom Jesus loved that may have been, some scholars think, as young as 10 years old when he was following Jesus. He was so close with Jesus. They were such intimate friends that at the Last Supper, Jesus was close enough to John that he was able to whisper in John's ear that Judas was going to betray him before anybody else did. He was able to communicate with John that closely at the Last Supper because John was, of course, next to Jesus because he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. When Jesus was hanging on the cross dying, when he's watching his savior and friend die, Jesus looks at John and Jesus only said a few things on the cross because you had to push up on the nails to do it. And he looks at John and he says, will you care for my mother? John, this is your mother, Mary, now. That's quite the commission. Can you imagine Jesus himself putting the care of his aging mother in your hands? And if you yourself knew that the end was near and that someone needed to care for your aging mother, who would you choose? Your most intimate and trusted of friends. And John went on from that moment and he cared for Mary. He went on from that moment and he led the church and the council. He saw them through this conversion of Gentiles, this difficult period in the book of Acts. He preached the gospel. He spread the word about his friend. And this whole time, he was promised by Jesus. You see it in the gospels when he tells the disciples, where I'm about to go, you can't go. And they said, we want to come with you. He goes, you don't understand. Jesus is telling them, I'm going to die and I'm going to ascend into heaven and you can't come with me. but where I'm going to go, I'm going to prepare a place for you and it's going to be great and you'll be with me there one day. Do you understand that John, he clung to that hope. He trusted his friend Jesus. He trusted his Savior and he spent the rest of his life caring for the mother of Christ. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming the message of Christ. He spent the rest of his life building the kingdom of Christ. But John eventually ended up as the head of the church in Ephesus, and there he discipled a man named Polycarp and Erasmus, who were the early church fathers that we begin now the church history that leads down to us. John is the linchpin in this. He watched all 11 of his friends, all 11 of the disciples die a martyr's death. And now he's an old man on the island of Patmos writing the last thing that he's going to write. And he's missed his friend Jesus. And he's looked forward to seeing his Savior again. And he spent every day living for his Savior. Every day building the kingdom for his Savior. Every day pointing people towards his Savior. And when he gets to heaven, he sees a figure that he doesn't recognize and he falls to his knees. And out of that figure comes the voice of his Savior, Jesus. Out of that figure comes the assurance that John has waited for and longed for his entire life. Out of that figure rushes the peace that only Jesus brings. He gets his reunion moment. He gets his welcome home. And it tells us that meeting Jesus is the best promise in the whole book. Meeting Jesus face to face, hearing his voice, seeing his eyes, feeling his embrace, that is the best promise in the whole book, man. There's other stuff that happens. We get to be with God. We get to spend eternity. There's going to be loved ones there. It's going to be perfect. There's no more weeping or crying or pain anymore. We're going to experience all of that. It's going to be an incredibly peaceful, joyful existence. But none of it, none of it is better than seeing Jesus in person. None of it is better than your welcome home moment. When he hugs you and he says, I've prepared a place for you. And he invites you to the marriage supper of the Lamb. I was thinking about it this week. What it would be like to finally meet my Savior. And how I would probably feel compelled to say I was sorry. And how he would probably just say, don't worry about it. I've covered over all those sorries. And how we would be compelled to say, I'm sorry, Jesus, I should have done more. And he would say, that's okay. I did enough. I did it for you. And I've thought about that moment when the burdens of hope and faith don't have to be carried anymore. When we can cast those things aside because our Savior is looking us in the eye. After all the stresses and all the struggles and all the triumph and all the worry and all the anxiety and anything else that we might experience, the loss and the pain and the sufferings and the joy, whatever it is, after all of it, we as weary travelers will end our spiritual pilgrimage in heaven at the face of Christ and he will say, welcome home. And maybe he'll even say, well done, good and faithful servant. But that's the best promise of the book. That if we believe in Jesus too, that one day we will see our Savior face to face and we can rest. And if you love Jesus, and that's not the part of heaven you're most excited about, I don't know what to do for you. I hope this series can change that. But more than anything else, as we move through this book, that's what we cling to. That Jesus is there waiting for us. And we'll get that reunion moment too. Where we get to meet our Savior face to face. Now, before I close, I never do this because if I tell you guys that I won't be here for a particular weekend, then what I've found is you don't come, which is mean. That's just mean to whoever is preaching that's not me. But I'm going to tell you this time that I'm not going to be here next weekend. I've got a bunch of my buddies I've talked about before. A bunch of us turned 40 this week, so there's going to be seven of us in a cabin in North Georgia making questionable decisions. We planned this back in the spring before I knew that this would be week two of Revelation, which is a week I'd rather not miss. So when I was thinking about who should I get to preach it, Kyle's great, Doug Bergeson's great, we've got plenty of folks here who would do a fantastic job with it. But there's one person who I know that knows more about the book of Revelation than anybody else I know. I'm not saying he knows the most about the book of Revelation, just more than anybody else that I know, and that's my dad. So dad's going to come next week and he's going to preach Revelation 4 and 5. And you'll get to see half of the equation of where all of this came from. To give you a literal picture of how deeply he loves this book, I wanted to take you to Israel with us. Dad and I had the opportunity to go to Israel, maybe about 2013. And we did the tour. We're up in Galilee. We were there for a whole week or eight days or something like that. And we get down to Jerusalem and we're in the Garden of Gethsemane. And from the Garden of Gethsemane, which is where Jesus prayed the night that he was arrested and then crucified, you can actually see the walls of Jerusalem, and you can see the Temple Mount. And so this is what you see from the Garden of Gethsemane. And you can see in kind of the bottom right-hand corner of the portion of the wall is a gate. That's the eastern gate. And when we were just walking along and we saw that, my dad said, that's the eastern gate. And I said, oh, cool. And then I looked at him and he was crying. And I said, dad, why are you crying, man? It's a gate. And he says, that's the gate that Jesus is going to walk through when he returns. And it moved him. And he doesn't get moved to tears very often. But he was moved by that. Because one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to walk through that gate. And he knows it. And he believes it. And he knows his Bible. And he knows it so well and he believes it so much that it moved him to tears. So I couldn't think of anyone better to come and teach us a portion of the book of Revelation next week. So I hope you'll come. I hope you'll be kind to him. I hope he tells you some stories about me that make you laugh and like me a little bit less. And just you're thinking, oh, he must be an experienced teacher and have done this before for Nate to be asking him to do this here. No, he's an accountant. He's taught Sunday school a bunch of times, and I think it's going to be really, really great. So I hope that you'll give him a warm welcome when he's here next week and know that I'll be beaming from ear to ear watching him online with my buddies. So with that, let's pray, and then I've got an announcement for you guys, and we'll worship some more. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for how you love us. God, thank you for this book of Revelation. I pray that we would see clear and simple messages coming out of it. God, I pray that you would give us wisdom as we move through it. Give me wisdom as I teach it. Wisdom that I have no business having. Maybe just a special blessing for these next few weeks. God, I pray that we would always find the hope in it. That we would always see the justice in it, that we would always see the good news that we can cling to, God. Be with us as we go through the series. I pray that it will enliven our hearts to you. I pray that it will increase our passion and desire for you. And I pray that it will give hope to folks who might need it really badly right now. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.

Christmas is coming. The Advent candles mark this season of waiting. They help us pay attention to our longing for a Savior, for Jesus, the reason for our Christmas celebration. He gave us our first gift, our greatest gift, His love, which is perfect because we live in a world starving for love. We live lives starving for love. We're lonely, longing for a place to belong. We crave affirmation because we wonder if we really even matter. We long to be known and understood and accepted, don't we? Our whole selves, our real selves. In the midst of our shame and feelings of unworthiness, we desperately want, no, we need to be loved as we are. We long for Jesus because he loves like that. We read it over and over again in the Bible. We love because He first loved us. God is love, so you can't know Him if you don't love. And this is how God showed His love for us. God sent His only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they have done to our relationship with God. Friends, if God loved us like this, why can't we love each other? God's great miracle at Christmas was to love us up close, personally. Emmanuel, it means God is with us. So today we light this second candle of Advent as a reminder of God's love because the God who loves us knows we need his love. So he came to earth to be with us. Jesus coming means that we have that love. You are loved. Receive it. Welcome him into your home, into your brokenness, into your hurt and your shame and your sadness. Welcome him into your heart, into your places of joy and celebration and thanksgiving. Ask Jesus to fill you with the light of his love so that you can be light in a dark world. Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to get to be back with you up here preaching. Last week, Erin kicked off Advent for us. Erin is our wonderful children's pastor, and she did a phenomenal job kicking off Advent at Grace. If you didn't get to watch it, I would very much encourage you to go and do that. If it gets boring while I'm preaching, just jump over to our messages page and watch that one instead if you missed it. I wouldn't blame you. She did a great job of framing up Advent in that it's a season of expected waiting. It's a season where we as believers prepare ourselves for the coming of the Messiah and all that it means. And so every week we focus on a different thing that Jesus brought. Last week was hope. This week is joy, or this week is love. Next week is joy. The week after that is peace. And then on Christmas Eve, we get to focus on Jesus. So this week, as we settle into this idea of love, I wanted to take you back a couple of years ago. It's a Saturday night, Sunday morning, about 2 a.m., 2.30 a.m., something like that. And Jen and I are awoken by our dog, Ruby, barking. I have a golden retriever named Ruby. If you know me, you know I would like to not have a golden retriever named Ruby or any dog by any name, but Jen loves her, and so we keep her, and Ruby is about as good of a dog as you can have. I have a friend that has a dog named Rocco, and Ruby is way better than Rocco, but at about 2 o'clock, 2.30 in the morning, we were awoken by her barking, and she never barks inside. And so we were both a little bit startled, and I go scrambling down the stairs, but I fully expect I'm going to get down the stairs, Ruby's going to have her nose pressed up against the window, and there's going to be a rabbit or a deer or another dog or something in our yard. It won't be that big of a deal, but as I'm going down the stairs, Ruby's going to have her nose pressed up against the window and there's going to be a rabbit or a deer or another dog or something in our yard. It won't be that big of a deal. But as I'm going down the stairs at our old house, we moved back in April. At our old house, as you're going down the stairs, you can see the front door and then you can see like the window pane next to the front door and then the stairs going down our front porch to the sidewalk. And as I'm going down the stairs at 2.30 in the morning with no shirt on, I'm looking out that window and I see two men start to walk up my porch stairs. It's two dudes in their 20s. And I was instantly terrified. What are these guys doing here in the middle of the night? And what I should have done in the moment is stopped, turned around, gone back into my room, grabbed a gun and a phone and called 911. That's what I should have done. Instead, what I did was leap down the last eight stairs into my small foyer and press myself up against the glass panel right as they came to the stairs. And when I saw them, it was two guys and one of them was carrying a beer bottle, but he wasn't carrying it like he was drinking it. He was carrying it like he was about to swing it. And I thought, oh, it's about to go down. It's happening right now. So I thought maybe they are just trying to like sneak in and steal a couple things. So I press myself against the glass and I bang it as hard as I can. And I say, get off, get off my porch, get out of my house, get off my property. And they start to argue with me. At one point, I'm trying to get them to get off my porch. At one point, he holds a phone up against the glass and he says, is this your address? And I say, yeah, but that doesn't matter. Get off my property. By this point, Jen's at the top of the stairs. Lily's two years old at the time. She's crying in her room. I'm flipping out. I am waiting for my door handle to start jiggling. And when it does, my plan is to go to the kitchen and get a knife and come back and meet them. Like, I'm ready. But then I keep telling them to get off my property, and they go, they treat me like I was a crazy person. They walk back off the stairs. I go upstairs. I get my gun and a phone, and I told Jen, look out the window and tell me what you see. And she says, there's four men standing at the end of our driveway. And I'm like, I only got five shots, you know, so let's make sure that I'm careful. And so I call 911. They send somebody out. The guys start to walk down the street. Long story short, they were just out probably partying, got an Uber to a place they thought they were supposed to go, put the wrong address into the Uber and ended up at my house and ruined my night. Now, here's why I bring that up. I sat in Lily's playroom staring out the window until 4.30 in the morning, like not moving a muscle in case they came back. But I bring that up because I want to ask the question, what is it about us? What is it about me that when I saw a threat to my family, I jumped down the stairs and bang on the glass and have a plan to go get a kitchen knife and fight two dudes who are trying to break into a house? Like, listen, I don't want any of you to take advantage of this. I've never been in a fistfight. I don't know how valuable I would be. I know that I would fight dirty, and I know that you'd really have to hurt me to get me to stop. Other than that, I'm pretty sure I'd be terrible at it. If I started fighting these two dudes, I was going down. But that didn't even occur to me. I just instantly threw myself in harm's way because two people that I loved were upstairs. And I ask what is it that would make me do that because I am certain that any of you who love anybody would have done the same thing. Any dads who are listening would have not have hesitated to do and react in the exact same way that I did more or less. Any mamas listening would do whatever they had to do to protect their kids. We would do anything for the people that we love. And I think the reason that we do that is because we do genuinely and deeply love them. I love my wife, Jen, and I love my daughter, Lily, and I would do anything for them. Of course I would do anything for Jen. Do you realize that my wife Jen and I have been together nearly 18 years? We've been married 14 years. She puts up with me daily and weekly. You understand that? Like I'm a gross human. I have terrible manners when there's nobody around. She puts up with that. I'm a pain in the rear. She puts up with that, and she loves me, and she supports me. Of course, I'll do anything that she needs. I loved Lily when she was born, but I love her even more now. Just this last week, she's in the back seat singing along to a Wren Collective song, and I turn around. She's in a big girl booster seat now, and I start crying like a moron because I just can't believe that I get to love this girl. Like, I just love her so much. And you would do the same for your families and for the people that you love because love is this compelling thing because typically when we love people, they've done something to warrant that love, right? That's how it goes. They've showed up for us. They've listened to us. They've hugged us. They've cried with us. They've laughed with us. They've seen us at our worst. They hope for our best. Like the people that we have in our life who we love, who if you think about, if they picked up the phone and they called you and they said, hey, I need this, you would do anything to be able to provide that for them. Those people have typically reciprocated the love that you offer them. That's kind of how love works. It builds and we reciprocate it. That's what makes God's love for us so miraculous, because he didn't do that. He didn't wait for us to earn it. He didn't watch you live your life and then decide to love you. He didn't wait for you to reciprocate his love and then say, yeah, now my affection is growing for you. As a matter of fact, this is how Paul writes about God's love in Romans chapter five. I'll pick it up to deserve it. He loved us before we did anything at all to deserve it. We had never even existed. We weren't even a figment in our parents' or grandparents' imagination. God just decided that he loved us and he sent his son, his only son, whom he loved and whom he was well pleased. Jesus came down and he died for us even before we deserved it. And make no mistake about it, this was a huge sacrifice. Jesus came down and the night that he was arrested to be crucified and to die for you and I, out of his deep and abiding love for us, he prayed in a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. And he begged God, stressed to the point of sweating blood, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please don't make me walk this path of crucifixion. I'm scared. I don't want to. And then he did because he loves us. He loves us when we've never done a single thing to deserve it. The only approximation I think we have of this love in our human experience, the type of love that God lavishes on us, is when we hold our brand new baby. If you're a parent or an aunt or an uncle, you know what it is to hold this child that is hours old and know in your soul you would do anything for this kid. For your heart to be so full of love that you can't stand it. We know what that love is. But God's love is even bigger than that because not only have we never done anything to deserve it, but he knows everything we're going to do. Imagine holding this child and knowing all the worst things that this person is ever going to do or be capable of and then trying to have that type of love well up within you. There'd be mixed emotions there, right? This is why I think God's love for us that he gives to us without ever earning it is miraculous. But the bigger miracle is that he continues to love us without borders. The bigger miracle of God's love, it's a miracle that he loves us before we deserve it, without deserving it at all, but he loves us knowing that we're never going to. He loves us without borders. This is why I know that's true. Because in Romans 8, Steve brought it up as a devotion a few weeks ago, and it rings so true this morning. Romans 8, to me, is the greatest chapter in the Bible. We did eight weeks in Romans 8 a few summers ago, and it finishes this way in what I think is the crescendo of hope. For it says, We cannot be separated from that love. And I phrased it that way, love without borders. God loves us without borders. This is a concept that I actually picked up from my counselor. And he was talking about human relationships and the borders that our love has in human relationships. And to me, it really makes a lot of sense that we love people in our life, but we love them within certain parameters, right? We love people within certain parameters. Kyle Tolbert's here this morning, Christmas Kyle, you may remember him earlier in the service. And I love Kyle. But if I'm honest, I love Kyle with some parameters. There's some borders around his behavior and around his actions. And if he ventures outside of those borders, it's going to impact my affection for him. This is how we love everybody. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a reality of life. If you think of me as your pastor, hopefully we have some sort of mutual affection for one another and you have an affection for your pastor. But you have parameters around me. You love me with borders. You give me affection with some boundaries. And if I were to go outside of those boundaries, then your affection for me would change. Just would. And it works the same way for our great partners. If I'm being honest, I love the great partners. But if I'm being honest, I love you within some boundaries. There's some things, there's some parameters around your behavior that if you were to do this thing or that thing, it would change my affection for you. And now some of these borders are necessary for our own self-protection, right? Like husbands and wives love each other, but even in those, the most intimate of relationships, there's borders around that love. Jen loves me very much, and she's offered me very generous borders for the continuation of that love, but if I begin to act in a way that's harmful to her or to Lily, well, now I'm acting outside the bounds of the love that she's offered me. So sometimes as people, we need these boundaries and these borders to protect ourselves. That's why I think God's love is phenomenal. That's why I think that's the biggest miracle of God's love. Because he loves us without borders. He puts no stipulations on our behavior. He has no expectations on us. He just says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I've given you my son. I've given you everything. I've made a path so that I can spend forever with you. That's how much I love you. And if you really think about it, this is so powerful because we know that we love with borders. We know that other people love us in some ways contingent upon our behavior or the parts of ourselves that we allow them to see. And so very few of us, very few of us in life are fully known and fully loved. We reveal bits and pieces to ourselves. When you have an acquaintance, someone that you meet, whatever your public persona is, whatever that is, you present that to them. And the more they get to know you, the more the layers begin to peel back. And you're like, will you accept this layer? If I show you this side of myself, will you continue to love me for who I am or is that going to cause a fissure between us and now you can't love me like that anymore? And so we're very careful about who we let in and how vulnerable we become to people because we don't want to do anything to disturb the relationship that we have. And even in our most intimate of relationships, very few of us are fully known by our parents or our spouse or our close friends. There's always portions and pockets that we hide. Are these people over here who get this version and these people over here who get this version? And there's not a Venn diagram in our life of where somebody who fully knows us would intersect and know all the parts of us. And it's a sad thing to not be fully loved. It's a sad thing to pine, to be known and to be seen and to be vulnerable and yet to be accepted anyways. And it's an incredible gift that God gives us to love us without borders. Because none of those expectations are there. None of those parameters are there. Every time we realize our vulnerability to God, we are met with the warmth of his love. And so, God loving us without borders, what that means is this means that we are fully known, fully seen, fully vulnerable, and yet completely and limitlessly loved. We are fully known, we are fully seen, we are fully vulnerable, we are completely exposed to God the Father. All the things that we've done that would bring us shame. Some of the things that we have sworn to ourselves we are going to take to our graves. God knows about those things. The moments in our past that when we think of them they're painful because we don't like that version of ourself or what we did that night or that season or whatever it was. Jesus was with us in those moments and he was loving us anyways. The things in our future, the things that we're capable of, the thoughts that we have, the critical things that we think, the awful attitudes that we espouse and we continue to foster, Jesus is with us in that ugliness. And he loves us anyways. In our vulnerabilities, when life is heavy, when everyone in the world expects us to be strong and inside all we say is, God, I need you. I'm not strong enough for this. I can't do it. I can't be who they want me to be. God says, I know. I love you. I'll make you who you need to be. The miracle of God's love is not just that he loved us before we'd done anything to deserve it, but that that love perseveres regardless of what we do. And in him we are fully known, we are fully vulnerable, and yet fully accepted. And this is the thing that we all pine for. This is what we want. More than anything, that's what we want. If you think about your actions, think about your actions as an adolescent. Think about yourself in high school and then in college. Everything you did screamed, will you accept me now? Am I good enough now? Have I earned the world's affection and acceptance now? And the older we get, it doesn't change. That desire doesn't change. Am I good enough now? Am I enough now? We just learn more nuanced ways to pine for it. And I think what happens is, even though as Christians we know we are loved deeply and fully and completely and without hesitation, I think we tend to forget that. We go throughout our years, we go throughout our days, and we know that we have the affection of the Father, but for some reason we pine for it in other places, and we look to it from other people, and we put on other facades because maybe they will tell me that I'm enough. And I was trying to think about what this would be like, and I remembered one night this summer when I went over to Greg and Laura Taylor's house, and I was in their backyard. And now they have maybe the greatest backyard setup I've ever seen in my life. I was over there with a bunch of guys and we all made a pact to never show our wives this backyard because we don't want to do near the amount of work that Greg has placed into it. At the end of his yard, you go out, there's a deck and then there's like a water feature and there's like sidewalk and a garden, and there's probably like live dancing gnomes there. They just were off that night, and they were walking to the end of the yard. At the end of the yard, there's a fire pit, and the fire pit is level on the ground that you're walking on, but it's on a slope, so the end of it is about four feet high. So it's stacked up from the ground. It's stone that Greg hand laid. He probably hand hew it too out of his own rock. And he just laid it there. And then in the middle, there is a pit. It's like two feet deep. It looks like a big stone donut. And there's chairs all around it. And there's wood, like endless amounts of wood for fire. I have no doubt in my mind that Greg researched the best possible firewood and then chopped it down by hand and then brought it to his house on a burrow. And there it is. It's ready. We're waiting for the fire. And so I want you to imagine being invited over to the Taylor's house, which, lucky you, and sitting around this fire. You've got all the wood you could want. It's the perfect fire. It's the perfect environment right there on the edge of the yard and the woods. It's really peaceful. And it's cold out. And he's got drinks and he's got s'more setups. And you're sitting in there at that fire. And you get up. And you start to wander through the woods. And you're gone for a few minutes, long enough for Greg to go, hey, what are you doing? And you go, I'm just grabbing some wood. And he's like, you don't have to, man. I got all this. I brought it in last week. You're like, no, no, no. I'm going to make my own fire. He says, what? Why? I have a perfectly good fire over here. And you go, no, no, no, I'm just getting a little chilly. Just thought I'd make my own. And you just go wandering through the woods, picking up like wet twigs and a couple of leaves, and you wander out of the woods, and you've got this bundle, and you set it down, and we think, okay, they're going to get it together and come sit with us and warm themselves on this good fire. And then you start to walk back in the woods, and we go, you still going to build your fire? And you're like, yep, yep, just one second. And you just keep going back and you try to make this fire and it's never gonna be as good as the one that's in the pit. His wood's way better than yours. His fire's gonna be infinitely better than yours ever could be. And you don't even have s'mores. Like, what are you thinking? I think sometimes we forget that God loves us fully and completely, and we go pining for it in other places. I think we tend to forget, and we build our own fires. We tend to forget that God loves us, and so we wander into the woods, and we get these cruddy sticks and twigs, and we assemble our own little sad fire over here with God's got the one raging over there, and he says, just come on. I've got everything you need. Just warm yourself. It's here. Come in. He invites us into his love. And we go, no thanks, God. Actually, I do want the warmth that that fire provides, I'm just going to make my own really cruddy version of it over here. And I think that this is why we need Christmas. And this is what the Advent season does for us. Because Christmas is our yearly divine reminder that God loves us without hesitation, without borders, and without end. It's this time once a year as we observe Advent. And Advent is a time of expectant waiting where we prepare our hearts for the coming of the Messiah because so often we just flippantly say, yeah, Jesus is the reason for the season. Or we post something ridiculous. I'm sorry if this offends anybody, but it's ridiculous. Santa kneeling at the crib of Jesus as if to say like in this house, Jesus is a bigger deal than Santa. Yeah, no kidding. We do all these little things to kind of give this token appreciation of Christ. And sometimes we forget to just slow down and let the weight of the gift that he is sit on our shoulders. We say that God is love. We sing that God loves us. But how often do we sit in the reality of this love? How often do we sit and let it wash over us that God loved me before I did anything to deserve it, knowing I would never do anything to warrant it. And he loves me. He is the only being in the universe to pick up our own things and to build our own fires as a replacement for the love that God offers us. And so Christmas exists as this time once a year where God beckons us back to his love to warm ourselves at his fire and to remind us of who we are and how much he loves us. So as Christmas approaches, let's not observe it for another year, flippantly regarding giving passive intellectual assent to the love of God, but let's sit in the majesty and the miracle of it and be together grateful for it as Christmas approaches. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you so much. We love you, as your word says, because you first loved us. God, without that, we know that we never could. We could never have the slightest inclination to love you. Father, if there is anybody listening who doesn't know your love, who has not received your love, if we are out in the woods collecting our own wood, trying to make our own fire, trying to fabricate what it is that you've already created for us, God, I pray that we would drop all that junk right now and rush to you. Lord, if there's anybody who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. For those of us who, like me, move through this season with so much urgency and so much purpose and this feeling of busyness that can sometimes produce in us a flippancy as we consider your love, may we slow down and be hit with the weight of it this morning. Father, as sincerely as we can say it, we say thank you for your love and thank you for your son. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen.