Sermons tagged with Community

Good morning, Grace. I'm loving getting to share these times with you on Sunday morning. I hope you're watching along with us live. This morning we arrive at the end of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus was the greatest storyteller to ever live. And one of the main ways he taught was through parables, short fictional stories that are used to make a moral point. And this morning, we arrive at a parable that has confused me and dumbfounded me my entire life. Every time I come across this parable, I read it and I go, God, I don't know what that means. I don't know how to make sense of that. I don't know how to apply that. I don't understand it. I even have a note in my Bible. You can't see it, but there's a note right here that says, Lord, help me see this. Help me understand this parable. And that's why I put it in this series, because I wanted to force myself to dig in and do the work and understand this part of God's word that has always eluded me. So this morning we're covering the parable of the shrewd manager. You can find it in Luke chapter 16 verses 1 through 13. So if you have a Bible there at home, I want to encourage you to open that up. Again, if you have family around, open that up and look at God's Word together. Go through it together. It's always a great practice and habit to interact with the text as you're being taught the text. So open up Luke chapter 16, look in verses 1 through 13, and you'll see the parable there that has eluded me for my entire life. As I dug into the study this week, I became more and more grateful that God kind of pointed me in this direction because I love the message that comes out of this parable, and I find it to be an incredibly challenging one for us as believers. And I say as believers because that's an important part of this parable. If you'll look at the beginning of chapter 16, it says, Meaning Jesus has now turned his attention to just his disciples. Previously, he was addressing the crowds, the tax collectors and the religious leaders and the lay people and just the people in and around Jerusalem or Galilee. And now he has turned his focus directly to the disciples. And there aren't too many parables that are addressed just to them. Most parables are told to the crowds, are told to everyone who can hear, and there's this layered meaning. And sometimes Jesus will go back and explain the parable to the disciples later, like the parable of the sower that we covered weeks ago. But this one is just for the disciples. This one is just for an audience that has claimed with their life, Jesus, we are following you and our lives are about your agenda. We have committed to serving you. So if you're a believer this morning, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then it's my firm conviction that God's called us to be disciples, and therefore, as Jesus addresses his disciples in chapter 16, he's addressing us, you and I, as believers. He's addressing an audience that has committed, and this is what we do when we accept Christ as our Savior, to following Jesus and to use our life serving him. That's our commitment. It's the same commitment the disciples made. And Jesus is saying, okay, in light of that commitment, let me tell you something. So if you're watching this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian, I'm so grateful that you're doing this and investing in your spiritual health in this way. And I hope that this helps move you down the road a little bit spiritually. But I want you to know that this one doesn't apply to you yet. This is one that you can just kind of stand back and consider if you want to be a part of that. But if you're a believer, then Jesus is speaking directly to you. And the parable goes like this. He says there was a master who had a manager in his employ. And the manager's responsibility was to manage all of the accounts, all of the wealth of the master. And the master finds out that the manager's not doing a very good job, that he's squandering his wealth, that he's managing it poorly. And he realizes it's time to fire the manager and bring in somebody new. And the manager gets word of this. He realizes that the master is going to fire him. And he's smart. He starts to look out for himself. And he starts to figure out, what can I do to take care of myself after I get fired? And I love the discussion that he has internally. In scripture, we see that he says that he's too weak to dig and he's too proud to beg. So he's got to figure something else out. And I love that because I think a lot of us, if we were put in this situation, we would go, gosh, I am not in good enough shape to do manual labor. And I'm way too proud to go out there and ask for a handout. So I better figure this out. And he gets the idea that what he's going to do is he's going to go around to the people who owe a debt to his master, and he's going to forgive them a portion of that debt to curry favor with them to kind of create his own golden parachute so that when he loses his job, he'll have somebody that'll give him maybe a place to stay or maybe a couple days worth of food or maybe they'll actually give him a job. So he comes up with this plan to curry favor amongst the debtors to his master to take care of himself in his own life. And so he calls the people who owe his master money, he calls them in and he looks at one and he says, what do you owe my master? And the guy says, well, I owe him 100 measurements of oil. And he says, tell you what, take your bill, write down 50 really quick, go ahead and pay it, and we'll call it even, okay? He gives him 50 measures of oil for free. Then the next guy comes in, he says, what do you owe the master? He says, well, I owe him 100 measures of wheat. And he goes, tell you what, sit down, write on your bill that you only owe 80, and we'll just go from there. And he's forgiving them of their debt to curry favor with them. And that's all the way down through verse 8. And I would expect, if you've read other parables, if you've followed along, I would expect at this point for Jesus to use the master to drop the hammer on the manager. And the point would be that you need to settle up your debts. The point would be like, now you have to pay tenfold what you gave them because it wasn't yours and that we shouldn't steal. I would expect Jesus to really give this manager what for. But that's not what he says at all. As a matter of fact, in verse eight, it says that the master commended the manager for his shrewdness. And I've always gotten to that part of the parable and gone like, what? It feels contrary to everything that Jesus teaches. It was dishonest. It was slick. It was sly. It was icky. Why would the master, who in this case is holding the place of God in the parable, why would God, why would the master commend the manager? And it only gets weirder from there. Listen to what Jesus says. Pick it up in verse 8. It says, What? And then he says this. What? What does that mean? My whole life. I mean, I read that when I was a kid. I'm in high school and I'm reading that and I'm like, yeah, I don't understand that one yet. And then I go to Bible college and I encounter it again with all of the classes that I've taken. And I'm going, yeah, I'm not really sure. That's very clear. And then I go to grad school, and at some point or another, I got this Bible. I got this Bible as an adult. In my 30s, I wrote this note, help me to see this. Still, at every stage of my Christian walk, I read this story. I'm dumbfounded by it. I put it down, and I go, yeah, I don't see it. And so as I dug into it this week and looked at what other people said about it and thought about it, and as I prayed through it, I think I came to the conclusion that there's these two clarifying questions that can help us understand the parable. That if we'll ask these two questions about the parable, I think we can begin to understand it better and then apply the challenging message from it. The two questions to help us understand the parable better are what ability is Jesus acknowledging and with whose wealth is the manager being generous? What ability in this parable is Jesus acknowledging with the disciples and to the disciples and to us, and with whose wealth is the manager being generous? I think if we'll answer those questions, we can arrive at an understanding of this parable that is really very helpful and challenging. To that first question, what ability is Jesus acknowledging? I believe as we look at this, he's acknowledging within all of us the ability and the knack and the knowledge to play politics. Now, no one says that they like politics, right? No one says that they like playing politics. You'll never meet anybody who's like, you know what I love? I just love kind of sch it. We know how to do it. How many of your boss's jokes have you laughed at that weren't funny? How many times do you share a story just to get the reaction in the room that you need so that people will look at you and think you're great? How many of your father-in-law's jokes have you laughed at that are not funny? Now, I know that my dad is going to be watching this sermon, and dad, you need to know that 100% of Jen's laughter has been authentic over the years. Every bit of it, you're hilarious. But for the rest of us, how many times have we laughed at our father-in-law's jokes when they're not funny? How many times have we said nice things that we don't mean because it's the right thing to do? Parents, we play politics with our kids. We know how to ask them to do certain things to get our way so that they don't resist us, so that they just go along with us. Wives, you know how to do this to your husbands. You know exactly how to frame up a suggestion so that the big weekend project is his idea and not yours, right? Even our kids know how to do this. My daughter is four and she knows how to play politics. She knows how to use everything at her disposal to further her agenda. There have been nights when she'll get up out of bed and I'm the first person that she sees and she knows she's supposed to stay in bed, but she'll hug me and she'll say, Daddy, will you lay down with me? And I'll say, sweetheart, why do you need me to lay down with you? You need to go to bed. And she says, because I'm lonely. She's not lonely. She sleeps in that bed by herself every night. She's not lonely, but she knows that I'm a sucker. She knows that I'm going to have sympathy for her. She knows I'm going to feel bad for her and that I'm easy to take advantage of in that state. So she says, Dad, I'm lonely. Will you please lay down with me? She knows what she's doing. And what Jesus is saying in this is that we all know what we're doing. We even have words and phrases for it. We know what it means to grease a palm. We know that we're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. I don't know what that means, but I know that I shouldn't do it. We know that we're not supposed to bite the hand that feeds us. We all do this. We all have used our own shrewdness, our own ability, our own wit, our own charm, our own whatever innate abilities that we have to advance our own agenda. And he's telling the disciples, you know how to do this too. I think what Jesus wants us to see in part of this parable is that we all have a little bit of the shrewd manager in us. We all do. What that manager did is he marshaled the resources available to him, both internal and external, to further his own agenda. He used his own talent and his charm and his wit and his intellect and in concert with the wealth of the master to further his own agenda, to build his own kingdom, to serve himself. He made it about him. And what Jesus wants us to see and wants his disciples to see is that we all have this ability. We all have certain gifts and talents and innate abilities. We all have internal and external resources that we use at different times to build our kingdom and to further our agenda. We are all shrewd like the manager. We've all done it. Because we've all done that, because there's a little bit of that manager in all of us, the second question is hugely important. And answering this question is really when the light bulb started to go off about what this parable is about to begin with. The second question we asked is, with whose wealth is the manager being generous? With whose wealth is the manager being generous? And the answer is the master's. It's not even his wealth. It's the master's wealth. And again, I think this is where the disciples started to realize what Jesus was talking about. And this is where I started to realize what Jesus was talking about. He's trying to get the disciples to acknowledge, listen, the resources that you have, the money that we have, it's not your money. It's God's money. He gave it to you. Everything that you've been entrusted with, the resources that we have, the money that we have, God's made you a steward of that. That's his money. That belongs to him, and he's entrusted it to you. And I think we take it a step further, and we look at the shrewdness of the manager and what that requires, and we acknowledge that the gifts that we have, we didn't earn those gifts. We didn't place those gifts in ourselves. We didn't give ourselves those things. God did. And so I can almost see Jesus looking at the disciples and going, Peter, your courage and your willingness to be the first one out of the boat, your willingness to say the difficult thing, I gave that to you. That's not your resource. That's mine. John, your empathy and your love for others and your depth of knowledge and insight, I gave that to you. Matthew, your knack with money, I gave that to you. Those are all gifts that were given to them by the Father. And I think what Jesus wants the disciples to see and in turn us is that everything that we have, everything that we have was given to us by God. It's not our resource, it's his. And just like we marshal our resources and our abilities to build our own kingdom, what Jesus wants the disciples to see is that because the gifts that we have are his, it is his expectation that we would use those and leverage those to build his kingdom rather than our own. I remember when I understood this for the first time, when that particular light bulb went off in my life. I was 28 or 29 years old. I was a student pastor at my previous church. And that church had a pretty big youth group, and the youth group, it had cool kids in it. The kids were athletes. They were funny. They were charming kids. They were sharp. And I started in April or May and took them to camp in the summer and remember thinking,, how am I gonna win these kids over? How am I gonna get them on my side so that I can minister to them? They really liked their previous youth pastor and I was kind of stepping into his shadow and it's like, well, how am I gonna win them over? And that first day, that Monday afternoon, we had free time and as was my habit, I went to the ball courts. And you grab a basketball, and you throw it out on the court, and everybody comes running. And for a few hours, I played basketball with my guys, with the guys in the youth group. And God, for whatever reason, blessed me with a modicum of athleticism, not a lot. And if you think I'm bragging about being athletic, I can remember the specific moment in my life when I realized I was not an athlete. It involved an African soccer player in college running over me, putting me on my chest, scoring a goal, and then jogging back while he winked at me, okay? So I can remember the exact moment in my life when I realized, dude, you are not athletic. But I did have some ability to hang in there with the fellas. And so we played basketball all afternoon. And simply by playing basketball and by being competent and by staying on the court and staying on teams and doing the right thing, I was able to win them over. That afternoon changed things. The months previous, it was really hard to have conversation with those guys. And after that, it was easy. Something clicked. And I fell into place as a student pastor. And it dawned on me there at Look Up. You know, my whole life, I had been reasonably athletic. Not very athletic, but enough to get by. I had been at least a little bit funny. I knew how to kind of charm people. And my whole life, I just assumed that I had those gifts to build my kingdom. Remember in high school, I used those things. I leveraged everything that I had. I leveraged all my resources to get people to like me, to get girls to like me, to get guys to think I was awesome, to get people to want to be my friend. It was all about Nate. I used it to build my kingdom. And it wasn't until look up at the end of my 20s with the new youth group of kids there that I realized, oh my goodness, God didn't make me serviceable on a basketball court for my own good so that I could get people to like me. He didn't give me the ability to come up with a joke or to say a funny thing in the right moment to win people over to me. He has tailor-made me for this season in my life. He knows that the way you win over high schoolers is to be able to run around with them. He knows that the easiest way to connect with any group of dudes is to throw a ball out there and run around and get to know them that way. That's worked on the mission field. When I've gone to Honduras, I can't even speak their language, but I grab a soccer ball and I throw it out on the field and I run around with them and suddenly there's a connection. And I realized in that moment, my goodness, God didn't give me these small gifts so that I could get people to like me for the reasons that I've always used them. He didn't make me kind of funny so that I could win people over to me. He gave those things to me. He tailor made me so that I could connect with these guys that I was going to be ministering to. God knew in my future, he is going to have to connect with high school students, so let me gift him and enable him in such a way that he's going to be able to connect with these kids. And I realized, my goodness, my whole life I've been like the shrewd manager and leveraged all the resources, internal and external, to further my own agenda and to build myself up when God gave me these things to build his kingdom. God gave me these things, not to draw them into myself, but to draw them into God. And since then, I've become increasingly convinced that the Christian life is a gradual realization that all I have is God's, and I'm expected to leverage everything to build his kingdom. I really think that's true. The Christian life is this gradual expectation, this peeling back of the onion of one layer and then the next layer and then the next layer until we gradually understand that everything that we have has been gifted to us for the purpose of leveraging it to build God's kingdom. Yet so often we don't realize that and we use those things to further our kingdom. And Jesus wanted the disciples to see this reality. That if you don't pay attention, if you don't listen to me, you're going to have these gifts and these talents and these resources, but you're just going to be like the shrewd manager and you're just going to use them to build up your own kingdom, and there's something bigger than that going on here. This is why he makes the point that he makes. He says, listen, unless I can trust you with little things, to be shrewd in little things, how can I give you more? Unless you can take that shrewdness and that resources that I've given you and apply those to building my kingdom in little ways, how can I entrust you with bigger ways? If you won't leverage everything you have on this side of eternity, how can I welcome you into that side of eternity? Suddenly, that portion of the parable makes sense. And you know, I see people at Grace doing this in so many ways. I think of somebody at the church who's become a really good friend of mine, who is fortunate and is in a spot in life where they don't have to work. But recently, he had an opportunity come up, like a contract-type deal, a temporary agreement, where he had the opportunity to generate some more income for himself. And he told me, you know, I think I am going to pursue that. But recently, God has laid on his heart just the important work that some nonprofits are doing. And so he told me that he is going to pursue that opportunity to make that money, not to keep it for himself, but so that he can funnel that into the nonprofits that he believes are building God's kingdom and doing God's work. That's a man whose eyes have been opened to the gradual realization that everything he has in his life, his ability to close the sale, to do the deals, to manage the relationships, to play the necessary politics within those kinds of deals and structures, that everything that he's been given, he's now marshalling to build God's kingdom rather than his own. I think that that is the surest sign of someone in whom the gospel has taken root is that we realize what Jesus is trying to communicate to us in that parable, that, oh my goodness, everything I have is not about me. It's about building God's kingdom. I think about Rob Hounchell. In just this small way, a couple years ago, he realized the church didn't have a bassist. And apparently God has gifted him with some musical ability, so he bought a bass and he taught himself how to play it so he could serve the church in that way. And he stands right back there with no light on him, half the Sundays, and he plays the bass for the sake of the church to build God's kingdom rather than his own. I think about Elaine Morgan, who just quietly behind the scenes does so much. Unless you're an elder or part of the missions committee or in the children's ministry, you don't see everything that a woman like that does. And we have a bunch of people like that who show up at all the events and all the things and self to see that, hey, everything we have is God's and we need to leverage it to build his kingdom. But I think we need to see the layers of that unfolding more and more and think to ourselves, God, how would you have me use my resources? How would you have me marshal my abilities to build your kingdom? We need to begin collectively asking questions like, Father, my money is not my money, it's your money. How would you have me deploy it to build your kingdom? Father, you've made me good at building things. You've made me good at starting things. You've made me entrepreneurial. How can I use that to further your kingdom? God, you've given me a business acumen. How can I use that to further your kingdom? God, you've made me diplomatic. I'm a good people person. How can I use that to draw people towards you? God, you've given me a heart of care and of concern and of empathy and passion. How can I use that to express your love in the community and draw people to you and not to myself? We need to begin to ask questions like that and learn the lesson from this parable that everything we have is from God. And it's with his wealth and his resources that we are to be generous and we are to be shrewd and we are to deploy those to build his kingdom. That's why Jesus finishes the parable the way he does. It's the only way that he can finish it. He says, listen guys, now that you understand that I have given you everything that you have and my expectation is that you would use that to build my kingdom and further my agenda rather than your own, you need to understand that no man can serve two masters. There's no possible way you can further your agenda and my agenda simultaneously all the time. Sometimes they're going to conflict. He says at the end, no man can serve both God and money, which I think is another way of saying no man can serve both God and himself. We can't further God's agenda and our own agenda at the same time. They are going to conflict, and eventually we will love one and hate the other. And I think so often in life we straddle the fence where in this way I'm furthering God's agenda, but in this way I'm looking out for myself. And Jesus says, no, I need you all on team Jesus here. Marshall everything you have, all the resources, all the gifts, all the abilities to further his kingdom, not our own. And as we sit and we think about that, what it would look like to use every last square inch of our life, all of the resources available to us to further God's agenda and not our agenda, to build God's kingdom and not our kingdom, I think it can feel pretty intimidating. Almost like sitting at the bottom of a mountain going, gosh, I've got to climb that? How in the world? I don't even see a way to the top. I'm so far from marshalling everything I have to serve God. I'm so invested in building my own kingdom that I don't even know what to do to begin to build God's kingdom. And because it feels like such a lofty goal, I think sometimes we might shy away from it. But if we think of it as a mountain to climb, we don't have to know every step along the way. We just have to know the next one or the first one. And back in another lifetime in February, when we met in person, I shared a sermon about discipleship. I said, at Grace, we're going to define discipleship by simply taking the next step of obedience. So this morning, I would ask you in light of this parable, in light of the reality that everything we have has been given to us by God and it is his expectation that we would leverage that with all of our shrewdness and ability to build his kingdom rather than our own. What's the next thing in your life that you can leverage to build God's kingdom. Not what are all the steps, what's the next step? Not how are we going to climb the whole mountain, just how are we going to take this first step? I hope that you'll discuss that this week in your families and in your small groups. What's the next thing that you can give over to God that you can begin to leverage in your life to further his agenda rather than your own. And maybe we can continue to learn from the parable of the shrewd manager. Let's pray. Father, first we thank you. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. Now, give us the courage to acknowledge them. Give us the courage to acknowledge that you made some of us smart and you made some of us charming and you made some of us good with people and you made some of us humble. You gave us each gifts and abilities, God. Let us embrace what those are and acknowledge that they are from you. And let us leverage everything that we have, both internal and external, to build your kingdom rather than our own. Let us not serve ourselves so often and so diligently that we grow to hate you as a master. But let us serve you so much that we fall more deeply in love with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This morning, we are still in the middle of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus is the greatest storyteller to ever live. And he actually employed stories called parables in his teaching throughout his ministry. And we'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story used to make a moral point. And it's important this morning that we remember that these are fictional because this one that we're going to focus on this morning is maybe the most mysterious, most layered. It conjures up more questions probably than any other parable. In this parable is a reference to paradise and a reference to Hades and what life is going to look like in eternity. And a lot of people try to read into this parable what eternity must look like and what Jesus was saying about eternity. But what I would say to that before we even jump into the parable found in Luke chapter 16 is that that's not the point that Jesus is trying to make. Jesus isn't trying to paint a picture of eternity in this parable. He's trying to make a larger point that I want us to get to today. And I'm actually talking about this up front because Scripture does have a place where it talks about eternity, where it does fill in some of the blanks on what that's going to look like in heaven and in hell, being with God and being separated from God and what it's going to look like at the end of time. And we find that in the book of Revelation. I've been going back and forth in my own head and in my own heart about whether that was something I wanted to dive into as a church. So I want to invite you this week in your small groups, on your Zoom calls, in your check-ins, discuss this with your small group leader. And I'm going to be getting with the small group leaders and asking for feedback from them. And if Revelation is something that we want to go through as a church sometime in the not-too-distant future, then I would love to do that with you. But I just want to kind of gauge the interest level before we dive into that together because it's quite the undertaking. With that as an aside, we're going to set eternity and what this parable implicates about eternity aside today so that we can see the main focus of the parable. We can find it, like I said, in Luke chapter 16. If you have a Bible there at home, I hope that you'll open it up and go through the text with me. I'm going to read some verses, some of them, like always, I'll summarize. And I love it when you have your Bible open and you're making sure that I'm following along with the story correctly and you're not giving me the benefit of infallibility. I would also encourage, if you're watching this as a family, if you have kids with you, what a cool time to open up mom or dad's Bible and have them gather around and go through and consume and look at the text together. What a great time as a family to be able to gather around one Bible, God's Word, and consume that together. So grab a Bible if you have it and open up to Luke chapter 16. We're going to be in verses 19 through 31. It's in those verses that you'll find the parable of Abraham's bosom. And this is how was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. So that's how Jesus sets the stage. There's a rich man who had all he wanted every day. He feasted sumptuously, which sounds a little bit like me in quarantine, but this is what he did every day. That's how he lived. And at his gate, there was a poor man named Lazarus who begged, who ate the scraps off of his table. And the implication is that the rich man really didn't pay much attention to him. And Lazarus was so hard up that the dogs would come and lick his sores. I can't imagine the poverty or the sickness that would render you, that would put you in a place where you just said, you know what? Go to town, dogs. That's fine. It breaks my heart to think about someone living like that. And so these are the two characters. These are the two men, the rich man and then the poor man, Lazarus. And they both died at the same time. And in eternity, it says that Lazarus, the poor man, was in Abraham's bosom. Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people. That was being with him in eternity is acknowledged as being in paradise. And then there was a chasm, and on the other side of the chasm was Hades. And Hades is always associated with fire and separation from God and suffering. And the rich man was in Hades. And the rich man looks across the chasm and he sees Abraham and he cries out and he requests, Father Abraham, can Lazarus come across this chasm, across this divide, dip his finger in water and just give me a drop of water? I'm burning and I'm thirsty. And what's interesting there, if you look at the text, is Jesus chose very intentionally to have the rich man say, Father Abraham. What he's indicating there in that language is that the rich man was a Jew. The rich man looked to Abraham as his forefather. The Jewish culture at that time very much saw their eternity wrapped up in their lineage. He thought that because he was from the line of Abraham, because God made some promises to Abraham, that those promises applied to him, and simply by birthright, simply because of who he was and how he had lived his life, that he was going to spend eternity in paradise with Abraham and with God. And so what Jesus is saying there, it's one of the layers of this very layered parable, is that this man was a Jew and he thought that his lineage and his heritage was going to get him into heaven for eternity. And it didn't. And now he's having to face that reality. And it's a stark parallel because often to me in the New Testament, I find that there's a parallel between the expectant Jewish community and the expectant church community in the United States in the 21st century. We have plenty of people who are cultural Christians who grow up in church, who because their grandparents were believers, because their parents were believers, because they've always grown up in church, they just think they're automatically going to go to heaven. Even though maybe we've never articulated a faith, there's no evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in our life or that that faith and that love has taken hold of us. We haven't allowed God to come in and radically reprioritize our lives. Christianity remains just kind of a sliver of our life instead of our whole life. And it's entirely possible, we see in this parable, to go through our life expectant because of who we are and where we come from that one day we'll be in eternity because it just works out for us. And this rich man found out, no, that's not how it goes. And we would be wise to acknowledge that if we've been church people our whole life, that's not what gets us into heaven. That's not what allows us to spend eternity with God. What allows us to spend eternity with God is falling on our face and saying, I fall short and Jesus closes the gap and I need him more than anything else. He is the only way to the Father and so I need Jesus in my life and I submit to his lordship in my life. It's to acknowledge that we are sinners in need of a Savior. But the rich man cries out, Father Abraham, can Lazarus please just come across and give me a drop of water? And Abraham explains to the rich man, I'm sorry, man, that's not how this works. This chasm is too deep. It's too wide. It was intentionally placed here so that nobody could go from paradise to Hades and come back. And no one can come from Hades to paradise. It cannot be crossed, so Lazarus can't bring you any water. And the rich man, in response to this, asks what I believe is a heart-wrenching question. He says, okay, fine. Can Lazarus, can you send him back to my father's house? I have five brothers and they need to know about this. They need to know that this is true. They need to know that eternity is not some old wives' tale, that this is actually taking place. They need to know that there is suffering waiting on them, that they are on a path to where I am, and I don't want to be here. Can you please send Lazarus back so that my family doesn't have to suffer like I'm suffering? It's a heart-wrenching question. It's a very human request. It's this realization by the rich man, oh my goodness, all those teachings I heard over the course of my life, they're true. And my brothers are like me. They don't believe them either. Can we please send Lazarus back to prevent them from experiencing what I'm experiencing? I want to know that they're going to be in paradise. I don't want them to put up with this to endure this. But Abraham's response is tough. Look what another reason why I say it's a layered parable because the end of it, he says, if they didn't believe Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe Lazarus. They're not even going to believe it if someone were to rise from the dead. Jesus is saying to this Jewish crowd that's listening to him, without them even realizing it, in a few weeks, I'm going to die and I'm going to conquer death and raise myself from the dead. And even then, some of you won't believe. He's foreshadowing his own death at the end of this parable. And Abraham's response is tough. The rich man says, please, can Lazarus go and share this message with my brothers to prevent them from coming here. And Abraham says, they have Moses and the prophets. They have what we understand to be the Old Testament. They have the scriptures. They have the Bible. God has spoken to them. And he says, no, no, no, just send Lazarus back. They'll listen to Lazarus. And Abraham says, even if someone is resurrected from the dead, they still will not. If they won't listen to Moses and the prophets, they won't listen to them. And it's this stark message. Your brothers are stubborn. Your other rich brothers are stubborn. They've been exposed to the message. God has been speaking to them. We've told you over and over and over again. Since you were a young boy, you all, your family, had the messages of Moses and of the prophets and of the Old Testament, and God's Word breathed into your life, and you have all chosen not to believe it and not to repent and not to submit to God and there's no other voices that are going to help. The message from this parable that we don't want to miss is that if we think God isn't speaking to us, we probably just aren't listening. If we think God's not speaking to us, if we're having a hard time hearing the voice of God and we're going, God, why don't you say something? Why don't you make your will more clear? Why don't you make yourself more clear? It's probably not that he's not speaking to us. It's far more likely that we're just not listening. It's not that the rich man and his brothers weren't getting spoken to by God. They had the Bible. They had Moses. They grew up in a culture that was designed fundamentally to point them to the Father. But they missed it. And they didn't miss it because God wasn't speaking to them. They missed it because they weren't listening. And haven't we seen this happen in our lives? Haven't we seen this happen in the lives of the people around us? I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years with people who are skeptical of the faith. And they'll say something like, you know, if God is real, why doesn't he just make himself more evident? Why does he make it so hard to find him? If God is real, why doesn't he just like show himself front and center? And listen, I don't want to demean or sweep away those questions because they come from a sincere place. They really do. And questions like that make sense to me. But whenever I hear a question like that, I'm just convinced that we're not listening. Because when someone says, if God's real, why doesn't he just come and put himself right in front of us? I think to myself, do you mean Jesus of Nazareth that lived for 33 years and then historically died and was resurrected? Do you mean like that? Or when somebody says, if God's real, why doesn't he make himself evident? I think, do you mean like in nature? Do you mean that God should make himself more evident in his creation? That that's the way that he's chosen to reveal himself to us? Romans 1 says that God has revealed himself to us in nature so that no man is without excuse. When people say, I wonder why God doesn't make himself more evident, I wonder to myself, have you ever looked at the grandeur of a mountain range? Have you ever sat on the peaceful beach and just behold the beauty of a sunset or a sunrise? Have you ever looked at a painting in the sky and not thought, man, God, you nailed that one? Have you ever not sat in the peace and the grandeur of the plains? Have you gone out west and looked at how big and open and wide everything is? Have you been to the Caribbean and seen how crystal blue the waters are? Have you been in the hills and the east coast of the United States and looked at the lush greenery? How do you look at those things and not think, wow, there must be an author to this? Scripture tells us that even if man refuses to praise God, that the rocks cry out, that the heavens declare the glory of God. How can we say that God doesn't make himself more evident when all we have to do is literally step outside and look at his evidence all around us? How can we say that God hasn't made himself evident when we've had the gift of holding a child that we created? One of the things that I marvel at when people say, why doesn't God make himself more evident? I think of this idea of just the size and the scope of the universe. Do you understand that we still haven't found the smallest thing? We still can't find the smallest thing that God created. Years ago, 100 years ago, we thought it was a cell. We thought that a single cell was probably the smallest possible building block of life. And then we developed microscopes and we did some research and we went, oh man, we were way off. There's things that are a lot smaller than this. And then we discovered the atom. We were like, okay, that's got to be the smallest thing. And then we went, oh, that's not the smallest thing. There's like electrons. Those are tiny. And then we went to electrons and we're like, oh my gosh, there's a whole universe of things inside electrons. And no matter how much research we do, we still can't find the smallest, most fundamental thing that all of nature is based on. The universe that God created is infinitesimally small, yet it's unfathomably large. If we zoom out from the smallest thing and look at the largest thing, we still can't comprehend the universe. We still don't understand how it all dances together and hangs there. Science still can't explain the origin of it. Even if we can trace it back through history, through all the different experiments and reading and research that we have, we still don't know how it came into creation besides a creator God. Even Einstein, as he searched for a theory of relativity to stitch together the universe and understand all the things at play here God exists. And we don't just do this with our belief in God, but sometimes we do it circumstantially. Sometimes we're in different circumstances and we'll think to ourselves, why won't God tell me what I should do here? Why can't I hear his voice? I think of an example from several years ago when I was at my previous church. There was a guy who was a good guy, great character, one of my small group leaders. I was a small group pastor, and he and I worked together a fair amount. He came to me and he said, hey, I feel like God has laid on my heart that I need to plant a church. What do you think I should do? And I had to tell him. I'm not one to pull many punches in situations like this. So I had to tell him, listen, man, I don't think you're ready. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think your family's where it needs to be. I don't think where you need to be. I think you should, that's a good goal. But the timing's probably off. It's probably not the right time. And he said, okay, I hear you, but I think I'm gonna talk to the pastor about this. I said, all right. So he goes and he sits down with our lead pastor and he says, hey, I think the Lord wants me to plant a church. And our lead pastor said the same thing I did. Gosh, it's a good goal. It just doesn't feel like the right time. I really don't think I would support that. And the guy said, okay, I'm going to talk to the elders then. So he goes and he sits in front of the elders and he says, hey, I think God wants me to plant a church and I'd really love you guys to support this. And they unanimously and quickly said, we don't think that's a good idea. And after hearing all of that advice, he went home and he told his wife he was no longer going to plant a church and he was a faithful small group leader for years. No, that's never how that story goes. He went, okay, I hear you guys, but God's leading me in another way. And he went and he left us and he went and he planted a church. And sure enough, within a year and a half, two years, that church didn't exist and he had to figure out life again. And he may be tempted at the end of that road to say, God, where were you? Why weren't you speaking to me? And the truth of it was, God was speaking to him the whole time in a cacophony of voices that he invited into his life as spiritual authorities that he just refused to listen to. It wasn't that God wasn't speaking to him, it's that he wasn't listening. And I believe we all do this. I believe we all search for the voice of God. God, what would you have me do here? God, why don't you show up in this situation? God, why don't you make yourself more evident? When God the whole time has been speaking to us. When God the whole time has put voices in our life, has put his word in our life, has put a church in our life, has put family members in our life to guide us, to serve as his voices, and yet we say we can't hear him. So to me, that's the main point. That if we can't hear God, it's not because he's not speaking, it's because we're not listening. But the interesting question that comes out of that message is, what is it that's preventing us from hearing the voice of God? Why sometimes do we struggle so mightily to hear something that's being spoken so clearly? And I think to find the answer to this, we should examine the contemporaries of Jesus. I think if we look at the religious establishment, at the Pharisees and the religious leaders and the majority of the Jewish people at the time of the life of Christ, who did not believe that Jesus was who he said he was, who were not listening to the message of God. I think if we look to them and try to figure out why was it that they couldn't hear the voice of God, that we may be able to figure out why we can't hear the voice of God. And so as I thought about that question this week, why was it that the religious leaders at the time of Christ couldn't understand what he was saying? What was prohibiting them from hearing Jesus, from hearing the message of God? I came to the conclusion that they couldn't hear God because of their own deafening expectations. They had these expectations playing in their ears that were so deafening that they were drowning out the message that God was trying to communicate to them. I kind of think of it like this. For Christmas, I got maybe the greatest gift that's ever been given, AirPods, for Christmas this year. And AirPods have this great technology in them. It's noise canceling technology so that when you put them in your ears, they begin to actively work to cancel out all the noise in your area. So you can literally turn down the volume of an entire room simply by having these in your ears. It's magical. If you have a four-year-old or a Kyle, I highly recommend these. And then when you partner their noise canceling ability with a song that you may be choosing to play from your phone, you can't hear anything. It's magical. Jen, my wife, hates these things because when they're in, I can't hear anything going on around me. I'm in my own little universe. And the truth of it is that when these are in my ear, I can only hear what I want to hear. I can only hear things that are coming through my phone, things that I have intentionally chosen and told my phone, had these expectations playing in their ear that made them completely unable to hear anything else that God was trying to say to them. Those expectations were deafening. Their expectations of Jesus were that he came to be a physical king. They expected him to be a king, to literally come and sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem, to overthrow Herod, to overthrow Roman rule, to rise Israel to national prominence, to literally take over the whole world and sit in a righteous and glorious divine reign over the planet with the Messiah Jesus on the throne. They expected a physical kingdom. They expected that Jesus was going to come from Jerusalem, not Nazareth, not the country, not be a poor carpenter or probably a stonemason if you really get into the technicalities of the words. They didn't expect that Jesus would be a poor stonemason from Nazareth, from the north of the country. They expected that he would come from Jerusalem, that he would be a member of the religious elite, that he would come up through their institutions, through their religious structure and hierarchy. They envisioned that he would be the high priest, that he would cater to them. They did not think he would carouse with sinners. They did not think he would be friends with prostitutes. They did not think that he would associate himself with people who were not amongst the elite. And what they didn't realize is Jesus came to save sinners. He came to seek the lost. He came to interact with the broken. He came to build a church. He didn't come to establish a physical kingdom and sit on a physical throne. That is too small of a kingdom for our Messiah. He came to earth to establish an eternal spiritual kingdom whose throne is in heaven that he will sit next to his Father and reign on for all of eternity. And we as the church and everyone who becomes a believer is a part of the spiritual kingdom that Jesus came to establish. And all of the Old Testament points to that reality, but because they had their own deafening expectations in their ear, they couldn't hear that message from God, and so they rejected it. Their own deafening expectations caused them to reject the Messiah when he showed up in front of them because they could no longer hear his message. And if that's true of them, it makes me wonder about our expectations. I wonder what expectations we have that are prohibiting us from hearing the message of God. A very easy one is the message of prosperity. There are some men and women who are peddlers of the false gospel of prosperity who teach people that to be a believer means that you will be prosperous, that if you have enough faith, God will give you material blessing. There was actually a televangelist at the beginning of this COVID nonsense who told people in his TV audience that even if you lose your job, if you give your last paycheck to this ministry, God is gonna flourish you. The Bible's very clear that guy's gonna get his, just so we all know. But that's a false gospel. It builds an expectation that to become a believer means I will be prosperous. It means I'm gonna close close the business deal. It means I'm going to get the car. It means I'm going to have the wealth. And it's an incredibly damaging belief because people who are in poverty and subject to that kind of false optimism sign up for faith with the expectation that God is going to make them prosperous. And then when he doesn't, it leaves them shipwrecked on the side of the road with no faith and no hope in a God that they should have never believed in in the first place. It's a false gospel. And that expectation built up that because I'm a believer, God is going to prosper me is a false expectation, and when it doesn't come to fruition, it shipwrecks their faith. And I don't know where we're getting that in the Bible because Jesus himself was poor. He says, He said, He said, He didn't have a lot of extra money to throw together. A lot of times their meals came down to just the amount of bread that they had. Nowhere in the Bible does it state that if we are believers that we will be prosperous, yet that expectation exists and persists and wrecks people's faith along the way. One that we are probably more susceptible to in our crowd and in our culture, and I've seen this over and over again in the lives of people, is the expectation that to be a believer means that God is going to prevent pain. That if I'm a believer, if I'm walking with God, if I'm walking faithfully, if I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, then he is going to allow me to dodge the raindrops of tragedy in my life. That if we'll just dot our I's and cross our T's and mind our business and do what God asks us to do, then we're not going to get the tough diagnosis and neither is anyone that we love. We're not going to experience that loss and neither will anyone in our immediate circle. That to be a believer is an insurance policy that God is going to protect me against pain. A lot of us have that expectation. We might not say it that way, but it exists. And we know it exists because I've seen so many people who have a solid faith who experience loss or tragedy for the first time, and that faith is shaken to its core. Do you know why it's shaken to its core? Because part of the foundation of that faith was an expectation that my God will prevent me from pain and tragedy when God does not claim that in Scripture anywhere. Sometimes it's built on poor teaching on verses like Romans 8.28 that teach, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. And some people want to apply that to this life right now, saying that no matter what happens, it's going to work out for our good. When really what that verse means is God is orchestrating everything to bring us nearer to him in eternity, that everything will work out for those who love him, for their ultimate good, for eternity in paradise. It might not work out in this life, but it will always work out in the next life. But when we have this expectation that to be a believer is to prevent us from pain, we will inevitably experience pain that runs contrary to that expectation. And I don't know how we got this idea because all through the Bible are people who suffer for God. When God speaks to a prophet named Ananias, he tells him that Saul is his chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. And get this, he will show him how much he must suffer for his name. That same Saul becomes Paul and details at the end of his life, all the ways he suffered for God through the years. Even Jesus himself, we don't talk about this a lot, but by the end of Jesus' life, Joseph, his earthly father, is not on the scene anymore. So it's entirely possible that somewhere in Jesus' adolescence, his mother became a single mom. It's entirely possible that Jesus experienced part of adolescence. The Son of God experienced life, potentially, as someone who lost his earthly father in a single-parent home. Does that sound like God protects people from suffering all the time? James tells us whenever we endure trials to consider it pure joy. Not if we endure them, but when we do. If we want to have a healthy, accurate, vibrant understanding of God, we have to move away from the expectation that to be walking with him means that we get to dodge the raindrops of pain. That's not a scriptural teaching. And that expectation leaves our faith shipwrecked. Another one, another expectation that I see is the expectation that God's going to make sense. The expectation that we'll be able to understand the almighty, infinite creator God. That if I just read enough books, if I can just systematize it enough, if I can just ask the right questions, if I can just seek out the right answers, then one day everything will tie up in this nice, neat little bow when theologically and experientially and philosophically I'll be able to understand God in a way that is satisfactory to me. When Romans 11 says His ways are higher than our ways. When Psalms says that His ways are unsearchable and unknowable and inscrutable. How can we expect to know an infinite creator God who knows good and well what the smallest thing is because He created it and He knows how big the universe is and how it hangs in place because he created it. How can we think that that massive God can be tucked into a little, tight, neat box so that my human understanding can grasp it and explain it to others all the time? It's unreasonable. And then sometimes when we can't make sense of some of the things that God says or does because we can't fit it into our human box of understanding, we walk away from him because of this false expectation that we should be able to understand him all the time. When the Bible doesn't advocate that, it doesn't tell us that we can. We can understand bits and pieces. We can know him, but we won't fully know him until we are in eternity. The last expectation that I would point out to you this morning is the false expectation that the morality of God would mirror the morality of our culture. I've been alive for 39 years. And in those 39 years, I've watched the needle on certain topics move. I've watched our culture say that in one decade, this behavior is unacceptable. And in another decade, say no longer is it not unacceptable, but it is embraceable. And if you don't, then you're wrong. I've watched that needle move where this behavior was wrong and now it is right, where this was something that we don't even really speak about because it's uncouth and now we embrace it and we support it. And sometimes those shifts are good. Sometimes they're good and necessary evolutionary shifts in how we understand Scripture and how we understand our culture. But sometimes the morality needle moves in our culture, and we take the Bible and we rush to squeeze it in and say, oh, this certainly is what God would encourage as well. This certainly is what God is teaching as well. We have to have misunderstood the scriptures in the past. They have to mean this now because this is what our culture thinks and dictates, and certainly that makes the most sense. And instead of taking the morality of our culture and viewing it through the lens of eternal and inerrant Scripture. We take Scripture and we view it through the lens of malleable, constantly changing, argumentative cultural morality, and we try to make God's eternal Word fit into that. And when we can't do it, we throw out the Bible and we say, I guess it can't be trusted because it didn't meet our expectation that God's morality would mirror the morality of our culture. Over and over again, you can probably think of more. We have these expectations of God that he never claimed, that he never gave us, that he never affirmed. And yet because God isn't meeting those expectations, we can't hear him. We have our AirPods in and we can't hear anything except for what we want to hear. And the whole time, God has been speaking to us. God has been calling out to us. God has been making himself evident to us. God has been offering us gentle, unobtrusive guidance through his scriptures and to the people in our life who love him and love us. But we have a hard time hearing him because our deafening expectations are drowning his voice out. And so it makes me want to leave you with this question to think about as you go throughout your week, hopefully to talk about in our small groups if we've developed enough trust to be this vulnerable with one another. Certainly you can see ways that your expectations have potentially damaged your ability to hear God. I know that I have mine. I would even venture to say what I've found in my own life is when God doesn't make sense or when I'm having a hard time with faith or when I don't feel like I'm in sync with him, normally it's a time when I need to sit down and say, God, what am I expecting you to do that isn't a fair expectation of you? And I'll realize it's my own bad thinking and poor beliefs about God that are keeping me from walking in faith with him. It's not his voice. It's not his teaching. It's not what he's doing. So as we wrap up, I would ask you to consider this. What expectations do we need to remove from our ears so that we can hear what God has been saying to us all along? What things have we been clinging to? What beliefs do we have that, like the religious community and the life of Christ, are playing in our ears so loudly that we can't see Jesus when he's standing right in front of us? What expectations do we need to remove so that we can finally hear the voice of God with crystal clarity? I hope you'll do that this week. I hope we'll walk with a more clear understanding of who God is and what he wants for us. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We know you are good. We know you love us. We know you are consistent and you are immutable and you are unchangeable and you are steadfast. We know that you are faithful when we are faithless. God, help us grope our way to faith. Help us see the things in our life, the expectations that we've placed on you that you didn't place on yourself. Help us to humbly admit those and remove them from the equation so that we might finally hear you with clarity. Help me hear you with clarity as you root out the expectations and the untrue beliefs that I have of you in my own life and in my own heart, Father. Be with us in our families and in our friends and in our peer groups even this week. Help us see with clarity who you are and what you never claim to be. And help us walk with a more crystal clear faith, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Happy Easter, Grace. This is the weirdest Easter ever, isn't it? None of us have ever experienced an Easter like this before, and I don't think we ever will again. It makes me so sad because Easter is my favorite holiday. I love Easter. I love getting to see everybody. I love the energy in the lobby and in the auditorium. I love getting to hug everyone's neck and seeing how everyone is dressed and meeting children and parents and grandparents and family. It's just, it's such a great holiday. And Easter is a boisterous holiday. It's celebratory. It's exuberant. It celebrates the victory of victories. But it just doesn't feel like Easter right now. It doesn't feel like Easter at this time in our culture and in our community. We don't feel exuberant. We don't feel boisterous. We feel anxious. We feel unsure. For many of us, it's hard to see a path forward on the other side of COVID and quarantine and economic depression. To have a job right now, if you have one at all, is to have done the mental math of how long can my company continue to pay me? And once that money runs out and they have to make cuts, where do I sit in the spectrum of people in my office? We look over the cubicles and think I'm more valuable than that person. That person's probably going to have a job longer than I do. I think to be employed is to have had to have done that math. I talked to a buddy just last week who said, yeah, man, I have a job now, but I really don't know how much longer they can continue to pay me. That's a difficult stress to be in. And then I think of the people on the other side of that stress, the folks right now who own businesses, who are running companies. And I think, gosh, that's a difficult decision that they have to make. They're walking down that path as well, trying to figure out who can we keep and how long can I keep them and how long can we keep things afloat. Others are furloughed and that's fearful and that's fraught with uncertainty. We may not see a path forward there because will the job that we were relieved of be there when things go back to normal and what will normal look like? Or if you're just unemployed and you're facing the idea of trying to get a job once the economy can get turned back on, man, we're facing job loss at an unprecedented rate. The unemployment rate is close to that of the Great Depression. So a lot of us are thinking, even if I can get back into the job market, what is the competition for those jobs going to look like? These are very real stresses. These are very real fears and sources of anxiety. And then if we think about a path forward, that's uncertain too because what does it look like when we just turn the spigot back on and we can all come out of our caves and get haircuts and see each other and not wear sweatpants anymore? What does that look like? I've talked to parents that are concerned about how this is impacting their kids. I know for me, my daughter Lily is asking questions like, Dad, what is a virus? What do viruses do? There's caution tape over our neighborhood playground right now and every time we go by it, she says, it makes me so sad that the playground is closed. And she doesn't understand, and she's sad that she can't see her friends. I'm sad I can't play with my friends. And what's it going to look like when things are normal again? I think a lot of us are facing the reality that the impact of COVID and what we're walking through right now is going to be more protracted than we ever anticipated. And so the truth of it is right now we don't feel like Easter. It doesn't feel like spring. We feel a lot more like the people of Israel that Isaiah is talking to in the book of the Bible that he wrote. In the Old Testament, there's a book called Isaiah. It's one of the greatest books of prophecy ever written. It's a phenomenal book. And he's writing it to an Israelite people who are God's chosen people. They're God's children. They're his chosen ones. And they wear that like a badge of honor. And they should because God has promised them His protection. And in those promises, He's also promised them that He would grant them land, that it would be what we know of as the modern nation of Israel. That would be theirs forever. Yet in the time of Isaiah, several hundred years before Jesus comes on the scene, they do not inhabit the land of Israel. They're actually enslaved by the Babylonians. They're enslaved, they feel abandoned, they feel forgotten, and they're abused. And for many of them, they were hopeless. They're thousands of miles away from the land that was promised to them. Many of them feel abandoned by their God. God, if you're so good, if you're so real, if you're looking out for us, then why are we here? Why are we growing up as generations of slaves? They felt hopeless. They felt anxious. They were very unsure of their path forward and they didn't even know what normal could potentially look like. And so as I thought about the Easter message, I thought it was more appropriate to look at this verse in Isaiah than it was to start off with the resurrection story and the victory that it celebrates because we feel a lot more like the people in Israel or like the Israelites than we feel victorious right now. And it's to these people, these people who felt hopeless, these people who didn't see a path forward, that God gives this great chapter in Isaiah 43. I would encourage you to read the whole chapter of Isaiah 43 and see the heart and the promises of God brought forth in that chapter. But in the 19th verse, God makes this promise. He gives His children this assurance that I think is so comforting and so powerful and so wonderful that it's where I wanted to land for us this morning. And I can't speak to the posture of God during this passage. I can't speak to his emotions because the scriptures don't reveal much about it. But if you'll allow me the license to make a guess, I picture God in this passage as a good and kind and loving father. I know that when I comfort Lily, I bring her up into my lap and I bring her close to me and I tell her that everything's going to be okay and I try to, I use a calm voice and I try to reassure her and I kind of picture God collectively doing that with his children in this verse. In Isaiah 43, verse 19, God says to his children who are hurting and broken and scared and unsure. He says, behold, I am doing a new thing. Even now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it? I will make paths in the wilderness and streams in the desert. I love that verse. What a wonderful verse of comfort to his children. To bring them up onto his lap, to comfort them, to embrace them, to bring them into himself and say, I know that you feel hopeless, but I'm going to give you hope. I know that you feel forgotten, but I see you and I remember you. I know that you feel abandoned, but you're not abandoned. Even now, even though you don't see it, I'm working for you. Don't you see it now? If you look carefully, can't you see the work that I'm doing for you? Even in a very practical way, they were surrounded by thousands of miles of wilderness. There was all this uncharted territory between them and the land that God had promised to them. And God says, I will make a path through that wilderness. And even though that wilderness is surrounded by desert, I will make streams in that desert to sustain you. I love the message there in Isaiah 43, 19, where God says, hey, I'm doing a new thing. I'm going to make a path for you. I'm going to make streams in the desert. I'm going to make the impossible possible. I know you don't see a way out. I know that you feel forgotten. I know that you even feel betrayed by me, but I have not forgotten you. I remember you and I see you. And I think it's important to note that these people have every right to wonder, man, has God forgotten about us? Has God forgotten about me? He made me these promises. I've done all the right things. Is he still looking out for me? And God in Isaiah 43, 19 says, yeah, I am. I still care about you. And I heard one time that a good book or a good verse is 50% content and 50% timing. It depends on when it encounters you in your life, what's going on in your life. And that's maybe why this verse is so powerful for me because I remember when I encountered this verse and when God made a new path for me in my life. I have proof that this verse is true and that the heart of God stays true for His children. In October of 2014, and I've told this story to grace people before, so I won't belabor it, but for those of you who may not be aware of this part of my story, in October of 2014, Jen and I found out that we were pregnant. And we had struggled for many years to get pregnant. It was the prayer and the cry of our heart that God would allow us to be parents. And we had people and communities praying around us. It was an incredible movement of God and always encouraging to know that these people were looking out for us. And in October of 2014, we found out that we were pregnant. And we were exuberant. We were so happy. I can't remember joy like that. But in early December of 2014, we learned that we had miscarried. And in our life, the way that things have gone for us, that was the deepest, most profound sadness we'd ever had to walk through. I felt broken. And even though I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, I was mad at God. I felt abandoned by him. I was looking at all these other people who had kids and had families, and I would think arrogantly, why did they get a family? What have they done? I've organized my life around you, God. This isn't fair. But I was just mad at God, and I was just flailing and thrashing. And in the midst of that, I got asked to preach a sermon. I was on staff at a church, and the new year was coming, and that was typically a time when I got asked to preach. And so I got asked to preach in the beginning of January. And I wanted to be a good soldier. I wanted to do my part, and so I agreed to do it. But I didn't want to preach. I was mad at God. I don't want to get up there and start talking about his truths. And so in all that, I went to Jen, my wife, and I said, hey, I have to preach in a couple of weeks. What should I preach about? And she showed me this verse in Isaiah. She pointed it out to me in her Bible. And she said, I need you to preach on this verse. I need you to preach on a new thing because that's what I need. And I said, okay. And I wrote her a sermon. And it's the only time in my life that I can remember writing a sermon for one person where I thought, I hope the rest of you get something out of this. But for me, I just hope that this encourages my wife. And I wrote it for her. And even, can I just tell you, even as I preached it, I didn't believe it. I didn't, I didn't, I was preaching about God doing a new thing and I didn't want a new thing. I wanted my old thing back, that baby that we had. I was convinced it was a boy and his name was going to be Sam. And I didn't want a new baby, I wanted Sam. But I preached it. And I got through it. And we just kind of muddled on. But around Mother's Day of that year, we found out that we were pregnant again. It was joy of joys. And that pregnancy is what gave us Lily. This is my daughter Lily right here. This week, I taught her to ride a bike. She looks amazing in that helmet. I wish all of you could have heard her screaming and laughing and exclaiming and giggling at her ability to ride a bike. It was incredible. It was one of the gifts of this COVID time that we have that part to ourselves where she can learn. And you know, every time I look at Lily, I'm reminded that she's my new thing. She's my new path. Every time I hold on to her, every time I help her fall asleep, every time I pray for her, I remember how I felt in December of 2014, and I hold on to this new thing that God did for us. I hold on to this new path that he made for us that I would never not choose, that I'm so grateful for. Lily is my reminder that God continues to make new paths. And it may seem weird that this is what I'm talking about on Easter, that it's some obscure verse in the Old Testament, but I wanted to help you see how Lily is my reminder that God still makes new paths because I believe that Easter stands out throughout all of time as God's yearly reminder that he continues to make new paths. Isn't that what Easter is? Isn't that what the disciples stumbled upon? The story of Easter is that Jesus was crucified on Friday and he was put into a grave And as the body of our Savior went into that grave, all hopes of a future went into it with him. That grave, that tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea was a dead end. There was no paths out of there. It was it. There was hopelessness in that tomb. And as the disciples sat around quarantined, ironically, on Saturday, they had no hope. They sat in the middle of a dead end. They were anxious and unsure of a path forward, just like us and just like God's children of Israel in the nation of Babylon when Isaiah was writing. And then on Sunday, on Easter morning, Mary goes to the tomb and she hears maybe the greatest sentence that's ever been uttered in history by the angel of God who is at the tomb. And he says to her, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Jesus is risen. And in that moment, what we see is that all of history turns on its axis and God has won the victory of victories. He has conquered death and hell with the resurrection of his son. He has restored us to a relationship with him. What our sin broke, that death and resurrection repaired. And because of Easter, there are no dead ends. Because of Easter, there are always new paths. Easter itself is a new path where Mary walked into that tomb feeling as if she was entering into a dead end, into a hopeless situation with no path forward. And God, in that moment, I can almost hear Him whispering, Behold, the new thing, the new path, the stream in the desert. And because of Easter every year, we're reminded death has no sting. Because of Easter, we have my favorite quote that says, for we are not given to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. There is no pandemic. There is no death. There is no disease. There is no bad news. There is no tragedy that can overcome the victory and the joy of Easter. And isn't it great? Isn't it remarkable? I wish that we could be together for Easter. I wish that we could celebrate this as a family. But isn't it wonderful that in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, in the middle of isolation and global uncertainty and anxiety, God has placed this most holy and high of holidays to remind us, I still make new paths. I still do new things. You may not see a path forward, but I do. You may not know what's going to happen next, but I do. You may feel abandoned by God. You may feel let down by God. You may be looking around going, God, I've done all the right things, man. I've tried to be nice to my wife. I've tried to be nice to my kids. I've tried to support my husband. I've tried to give when I can. We try to be generous people and my life feels like it's falling apart. And where are you, God? And Easter is his reminder for us that he's right here. Can I also tell you that that message, that simple message that God still makes new paths, he still makes old things new, he still makes beauty out of ashes is why we're filming here in this place. It's why we've chosen this park, not just to make it springy for Easter, not just to remind us of the promises that nature brings in at the end of every winter, but because this park used to be a city dump. This is the park that used to be the landfill for Raleigh. This place, where I am, everything here used to be filled with trash and fire. It was undesirable. It was the last place anyone or anything wanted to end up. This place was one big dead end. And God, in His goodness, has made it beautiful again. He has literally laid new paths in this place that families walk on and enjoy. There's a playground that children play on. This has become one of the prettiest places in the whole city. And to me, it's a reminder and a symbol of the fact that God still makes new paths. So if you need a reminder, if you need some encouragement during this Easter season, come out here, walk around, look at the greenery, experience the beauty, and be reminded this Easter that even as you sit at home, even as some of us are fraught with uncertainty, even though it might feel silly to be all dressed up for Easter and still sitting on our couch, just remember, God still makes new paths. The same God that made one for Israel, that has made one for you in the past, that has made this place beautiful, will make a new path for you too. And isn't God good for placing that yearly reminder in the middle of our uncertainty? Let's pray. Father, you're good. You're good even when we don't know how. Even when we don't know how everything's going to work out. Even when it's hard to see that goodness sometimes. We know that you're good. Father, thank you for conquering death for us. Thank you for conquering tragedy for us. God, I lift up anyone who feels uncertain, anyone who feels anxious, anyone who might be saying, I don't want the old, I don't want anything new, God. I just want things to go back to the way they were. I pray that we would take solace and comfort in your word. I pray that we would take solace and feel peace from your promises. And that in the gentle way that you do it, that you would draw us into you and you would remind us that you are still the God who makes new paths. It's in your son's name we pray, who died and was risen for us on this day. Amen.

Hey, Grace. Shocked? I bet you are. I'm sure you were expecting Nate, but instead it's me, Easter Kyle. Why am I here? I'm here to tell you that I am downright bummed. Why are you bummed, you ask? I'm bummed because I'm not going to be able to see my entire church family on Easter next week. Now, sure, I'm upset because I'd love to be able to shake hands and give hugs and just see everyone, but I'm mostly upset because I wanted to see those Easter threads. Personally, I just got this suit for our Easter service. Now, I bought it, and I was like, well, if we're not going to meet together, we've got to make a video because people need to see this. Now, not only do I have my Easter clothes, but I know that you do too. I know you guys prep months in advance for what you're going to wear. And so we don't want that to go to waste. And so what we have decided to do is next week, we would love for you as you wake up, to wake up a little bit earlier for our 10 o'clock service, get dressed in your Sunday and your Easter best. I want to see dads wearing pastels. I want to see daughters wearing their dresses. I want to see everyone looking fresh to death. Now, once you've done that, I want to be able to see it. So we need you to throw it on Instagram, throw it on Facebook, and tag Grace Raleigh. I can't wait to see everyone looking their Sunday best. Good morning, Grace. Thanks, Kyle, for that announcement. I do hope that next week you'll get up, put on your Easter best, and share that with all of us so that we can see it. I think that'll be a fun way to make the best of spending Easter together. I'm so glad to have this time with you on Sunday mornings. If you're watching this on delay, again, I understand schedules get crazy, but my hope is that we're all watching this together on Sundays at 10 o'clock so that we can experience being together. Hopefully you are in the lobby on the YouTube website talking with people, saying hello, and engaging with some of the folks from the church. If you're watching for the first time or for the first couple of times, thanks for being here. We're so glad that you are. We are in the middle of a series called Storyteller, looking at Jesus and the stories that he told called parables. You'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story that's used to make a moral point, and Jesus was the master storyteller. He was the master storyteller and used these to make these incredible points. And this week, we arrive at what I believe is the most famous of all the parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan. And you know, a few years ago, I was reading a book, and I did some research this week to try to figure out what the book was and to get the quote exactly right. But after about 10 minutes of some really intense Googling, I just decided to give up because I remember the main idea that I took away from this book. And one of the things that the author said was, you know, in life, to go from competency to mastery, you have to learn to find joy in the nuances of a particular subject or a particular topic. And I thought that that was a really interesting point that we can kind of get to this place of competency relatively quickly by learning some of the basics around whatever discipline or topic that we're pursuing. But if we want to master it, we've got to learn to find joy in the nuances and the little things. And I think the same is true of Scripture. I think if we want to be masters of God's Word, if we want to understand it well, if we want to be able to explain it to people and really take hold of it, then we've got to learn to find joy in the nuances of Scripture. So even though this is a well-worn parable, most of you probably know it. Most of you at home, if you pause this right now, you could probably tell it to the other people in the room. Even if you're watching this and you're not necessarily a church person, you didn't grow up in church going to Sunday school where they taught you these stories, you probably still at least have heard of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And we think that we know the point of the story. The point of the story is that everyone is our neighbor, and that's one of the points of the story, and that's a great point. But I think if we sink into the nuances of this parable, what we'll find is that there is a greater point waiting on us. This parable is found in Luke chapter 10. It begins in verse 25. So if you have a Bible there with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn, open that Bible to Luke chapter 10, and you can follow along with me as I tell you this story. So Jesus is teaching, and it says that a young lawyer asked him a question. So we need to understand right away that a young lawyer is not necessarily how we would think of a lawyer, someone who's gone to law school. A young lawyer in that context, in that culture, really had been going to seminary because the law was based on God's word, on what we call the Old Testament, what they call the Tanakh. The law was based on the law of God. So a young lawyer was really kind of a young theologian. And he's presumably talking with some friends, having one of those debates that you normally have. I went to Bible college, and there was all these different debates. In your college, whether it was Bible college or a liberal arts school, you engaged in debates about philosophy and about politics and about life in general, and you solved the problems of the world. It's one of the great things about being that age is the different conversations and ideas that you exercise. He's probably doing this with his buddies, and he sees Jesus, this well-known teacher, this rabbi, and he asks him a question. And so he said, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? That's his question to Jesus. What do I have to do to inherit eternal life? Another way of thinking about that is, what does God want from me? What does our Creator God expect from us? What does He want me to do? When Jesus responds like a rabbi does, He responds in the form of a question. And rabbis often did this. They didn't just come out and say the thing. They didn't just come out and make the point. They asked questions. They wanted to lead people to their own truths. And so rather than just coming out and answering him, he says, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, what do you think? What does the law say? How do you read it? Which is a way of saying like, you're a student. You've studied this. You ought to know the answer to this question. What do you think it is? And the lawyer refers back to a well-worn passage in Deuteronomy, Shema Israel, and something that they repeated before every time they had synagogue or temple. And he repeats that and he says that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Amen. And Jesus says, that's right. And he says, and you should love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have read it correctly. And we know that in other places in scripture, Jesus says these two things, love God and love others, sums up the whole Bible, the whole law and the prophets. And so, so far, this young lawyer is tracking right with Jesus. He's doing really good. But then he says, the Bible says, in order to justify himself, he asked. So the lawyer is having this conversation with his buddies. He's talking to his friends. He's debating over here. He's making a point. He's asserting something about who his neighbor is. And then Jesus is there. And so to kind of show off in front of his buddies, get Jesus to justify his answer in front of his friends, we presume, he says, yes, and who is my neighbor? Apparently that was the discussion or the debate of the time. There's a little bit of uncertainty. Is it just Israelites, the people of Israel? Is it the friends of Israel? Is it the people in my immediate neighborhood? Is it the whole nation? Is it the surrounding nations? Is it even people that I don't like? There was some debate about that question. And so this young lawyer invites Jesus into that debate with his friends to justify himself. And Jesus, rather than just answering his question, begins to tell a story. He says, and who is my neighbor? And Jesus replies in verse 30, he says, a man was going down to Jericho. He starts in on the story. And it's at this point where I can almost feel the countenance of the lawyer shifting. He's bold enough to ask Jesus the question. Jesus asks him a return question. He nails it. He gets it right. Love God, love my neighbor. And Jesus says, that's correct. And he's like, you see, I told you I'm right so far. He's feeling pretty good. And he says, and who is my neighbor? And Jesus says, there was a man on his way down to Jericho. And you can almost see the lawyer going, oh no, what have I gotten myself into? I can see the disciples over to the side. I can see James elbowing Peter. Peter, Peter, shut up, man. Listen, this guy's stepping into it. As Jesus starts into his story, that's when everyone begins to lean in and go, oh gosh, what's the point that he's making? And so Jesus says there was a man on his way down to Jericho. This is a well-worn road. It was very traveled. Jerusalem is in the mountains and Jericho is on the coast of the Dead Sea. And so people would often walk down to Jericho. And so that's where this man was. And he was attacked by robbers. There were some robbers hiding out in the nooks and crannies of the road because it goes through valleys. Incidentally, the road to Jericho goes through the valley of the shadow of death that David refers to in Psalm 23. That's a freebie. I'm just giving these things out. So he's walking down this road, and he's jumped on by the bandits, and he's attacked. He's robbed, they strip him of all of his things and they leave him on the road half dead and dying. And Jesus says, after that happens, a priest comes walking by. And they would expect, like we would expect, a priest to know what to do. A priest is going to do the right thing. A priest is going to care for this man, but he says the priest just walks on by him. Then Jesus says a little while later, a Levite walks by. And we would again expect, or that audience would expect, a Levite to know the right thing to do. And to help us understand what a Levite was and why they would have this expectation, To be a Levite was to be a part of a tribe of the 12 tribes of Israel. The 12th tribe was the tribe of Levites, and they were the priestly tribe. To be a priest, you had to be a Levite, but not all Levites were priests. Some were assigned duties in the temple. So the easiest way to think about it for us, because this is a priest who had leadership in the temple or in the church, and then a Levite who had duties and other leadership in the church, the easy way to think about that for us would be a pastor and an elder walked by. And so in our context, we would expect, like they would expect, that a priest and a Levite or a pastor and an elder would know the right thing to do, would do the loving thing. But in both cases, the priest and the Levite walked by the man and left him to die. And for years and years, I thought that they did this because they were jerks. I thought they did this because they were hypocrites, because they got up on Sunday and they said the stuff they were supposed to say, and they shook the hands they were supposed to shake, and they hugged the people they were supposed to hug, but then during the week they didn't really practice what they were preaching. I thought maybe they thought they were too important or too good, or that his case was hopeless, and so they just walked on by. And my whole life, I've judged the priest and the Levite for being terrible examples of love. But someone pointed out for me a couple of years ago a tension that was going on there that I didn't notice when I was a kid and encountered this story for the first time. You know, the man on the road was dying. He was essentially dead. And the priest and the Levite are not allowed to touch dying things. They're not allowed to touch something that's dead or dying. If they did that, they would become unclean. It's a violation of the law that they uphold to reach down and to help this man. Because they can't do it without touching him and without getting messy. They can't do it without getting unclean. So it's entirely possible, it's entirely possible that they saw this man, they wanted to help him, they felt genuine empathy and sorrow for him, but knew, I can't do this. I will become unclean. I am a priest. I am a Levite. I have duties in the temple and I need to be able to perform those, so I can't help this man, and they walk on by. Then Jesus introduces a Samaritan into the story. And you've probably heard that there was tension between the Hebrew people and between the Samaritan people. And maybe you don't know why that tension existed. Maybe you could perfectly articulate it, but for those who can't, this is why there's tension between Jews and Samaritans. The Jews were God's chosen people. They were descendants. The Hebrew people were descendants from Abraham. And throughout their history, by edict of God, they had taken great pains to maintain the ethnic purity of the line of Abraham. They were forbidden to marry people from other nations. They had to protect and maintain this line. And the Samaritans were a race of people from folks who had intermarried with other countries and other nations and other ethnicities. And so they had lost the purity of the race of the Hebrew people. And because of that, they were ostracized and forced to live in their own cities and their own towns. And so there was racial tension between the Jews and the Samaritans because the Samaritans weren't pure like they were. The other thing that deeply offended the Jews about the Samaritan way of life is the Samaritans claimed to worship the same God. They claimed the same lineage. They claimed that they were just as good with God as the Hebrew people were and that their forefathers went back to Abraham as well, just like the Jewish people did, and that they worshiped the same God and that they executed the same religion. But their religion actually gets traced back to a split in the kingdom between Jeroboam and Rehoboam when Jeroboam instituted his own religion to make money and keep the tax dollars there. It was this political maneuver that he made, and the Samaritans are the descendant of that fabricated religion that is kind of part of the Jewish faith, but not the entire Jewish faith. If we wanted to understand it in our context, it would be this religious division that we see between Christians and maybe Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses claim to worship the same God that we as believers do, but they believe different things about Jesus than what we do. And so while the claim is that everything is the same, what we as Christians believe is there are nuances there that actually make those very different. And so there is ethnic tension between the Jews and the Samaritans, and there's religious tension between the Jews and the Samaritans. And they didn't live in the 21st century with political correctness where we sweep over all of those things and be nice to everybody anyways. They lived in an era where hate was perfectly fine, and so they hated each other. Jews despised the Samaritans. They wouldn't even walk through their towns. They would inconvenience themselves and walk around them. And the Samaritans likewise were justified in despising Jews. They were justified in disdaining them, in there being tension between those two groups of people. And so when Jesus introduces the Samaritan man into the story, he's doing it on purpose. He's making a radical statement. And this is where everyone can feel the story begin to turn and the lawyer has to be going, oh no, what am I going to do? He's going to make me look like an idiot. And this Samaritan has every reason to leave this man dying on the road because this man is likely a Jew and he has every excuse to not help him. But look at what he does. We pick this up in verse 33. It says, but a Samaritan as he journeyed came to where he was, the man who was injured and dying. And when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and he bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper saying, take care of him and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back. Look at the remarkable love of the Samaritan. He doesn't just kneel down and give him some water. He doesn't just kneel down and bind up his wounds and give him oil and wine. And if he's making a journey, he likely needed that oil and wine for himself. He didn't make provisions to help someone convalesce, to heal someone, and to patch someone up. He didn't make provisions for those things as he went on his journey. He needed that. And it would have been enough if he knelt down and gave up his oil and his wine and bound up this man's wounds, touched him, becoming unclean, and the Samaritan understands the same rules that the priest and the Levite do. He just decides that this is more important than remaining ceremonially clean, spiritually clean. And so he kneels down and he touches him and he binds him up. And that would have been enough. That would have been love, but he doesn't stop there. He picks the man up and he lays the man on his animal. Presumably, he gave up his seat and now he has to walk the rest of the journey while this man rides on his animal. And he takes him to an inn. And it would have been enough to take him to an inn to drop him off and go, hey, this guy's dying. I need a room. And just leave him there and let it be the innkeeper's issue. But he brings the man to his room and cares for him overnight. He has a sleepless night to care for this man. And I don't know about you guys, but I have a four-year-old in the house. So every now and again, we have sleepless nights, and I would not choose them. I like to sleep. This man gave up a night of sleep to care for this man who was dying, and that would have been enough. But then he leaves some money with the innkeeper. He says, I have a thing to do. Here's two denarii. Here's 200 bucks. Take care of him. I'm going to come back through town. When I come back through town, you spend whatever you have to to help him get right. And when I come back through town, I'll pay you back for whatever you have to spend. Remarkable love by the Samaritan. And Jesus finishes his story and he looks at the young lawyer and he says, now you tell me, which of these three love their neighbor? And the young lawyer can't even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He simply says, the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus' response is remarkable. He says, yeah, now you go and do likewise. You go and love like the Samaritan did. Often we make the point of this parable that our neighbor is everyone, even somebody that we should justifiably dislike or have disdain for, even people who are mean to us, even people who are different than us, even people who are different ethnicities or backgrounds or heritages than us. We should love everyone, and we kind of make that the point of this story. But I don't think that Jesus makes that the point of the story. I think when we sink into the nuances of the story, what we see is that there's a lot more going on there and that the way Jesus ends it, the point that he's making to the lawyer is not trying to define the neighbor, it's trying to define love. And the way that Jesus defines love is very simple. I'm stealing this from a speaker and an author named Bob Goff who has a book by this title, and I think it is the point of this parable. And I think the point that Jesus is trying to make is that love does. Love does. Love acts. Love doesn't make excuses. Love doesn't walk past. Love doesn't explain away. Love is not convenient. Love does. Love helps. Love is my father-in-law. He's driving down the road in the middle of winter. He stops at an intersection and there's someone spinning a sign on the side of the road on a particularly cold day. And this person doesn't have a jacket. And a lot of people might just pray, God, help that person feel better. I hope that shift is done soon or give them genuine empathy on their way by. But my father-in-law pulls over his car, gets out, takes his fleece off and hands it to him and says, here, you need this more than I do. That's what love does. Love acts. I think so often we think loving thoughts. We want to do loving things. We have loving ideas, but we don't put them into action. And Jesus' instruction to the young lawyer is not to say, hey, everyone's your neighbor. It's to say, you go and you love like the Samaritan did. And so what we see in this story is that loving our neighbor is easily excused away, but love doesn't make excuses. Loving our neighbor is easily excused away, but love doesn't make excuses. I have a friend whose wife is a nurse. She's been a nurse their whole marriage. They have three boys, one's in sixth grade, and then they go on down. And she only works at the hospital about once every two weeks, whatever the minimum amount of time is to keep up with her licensing and her employment and all those different things. And in the midst of COVID, it came to be her turn to come in and do a shift. And she could have very easily excused away, I've got boys to think about, I've got a family to think about, my mom and dad live in our neighborhood, we see them sometime, I don't want to expose myself and expose them. She could have excused away what she needed to do, but she felt at the end of the day that loving her neighbor was to go in and care for the community that needs care right now more than any other time in our life, was to go in and give a break to the nurses that have been exposing themselves to this danger and to this threat on a daily basis. She could have excused away what love was and stayed home and no one would have blamed her. But love does. Love acts and it doesn't make excuses. We've all done this. We're driving down the side of the road, we're walking on the sidewalk, someone asks us for money and we think, we feel a tinge that we should give them something, we should care for them in some way, but then we excuse it away and we explain it away and we say, well, they're just going to use it to make poor choices. We're on the way home. Somebody's on the side of the road and it looks like maybe they need some help and we think that we could pull over, but then we remember, well, you know, dinner's on the table. The kids are expecting to see me. The family's ready. I don't want to inconvenience them, so I'm going to go on. And the parable of the Good Samaritan reminds us that, yeah, love is easily excused away. We can explain those things away if we want to, but that love doesn't make excuses. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see that love is messy. Loving our neighbor is messy, but love gets messy. Whatever, I don't know what the Samaritan was wearing that day, but they were good. They were probably decent tribal clothes, and what he didn't want on them was dirt and blood and grime. But he knelt down, and he cared for this man that was beaten to within an inch of his life, and he got messy. He lost a night's sleep. He got down into this person's problems with them. And we know that love is messy. When you're sitting in your office and you ask someone who passes by, hey, how you doing? And they come sit down in a chair and they go, well, we kind of internally go, oh, I did not bargain for this. I have a lot of things to do because we know that we're about to get messy. We know that they're about to start telling us some stuff and we're about to get in the middle of this thing. And so often we kind of refrain and we go, I don't want to make their problems my problems. I don't want to get in their business. I don't want to make this messy. I don't want to get involved in that. And so we kind of keep to ourselves. But what loving our neighbor means is acknowledging that loving our neighbor is messy and that love gets messy. This is why I love our Stephen ministers so much. At Grace Raleigh, we have Stephen ministry, and we have different people in the church who are Stephen ministers, and that's what they do. They get messy with people. Stephen ministers are trained to go in during hardships, during difficult diagnoses, or during losses, or in the face of addiction, or in the face of depression, or just times of high anxiety. And they go and they sit with people week after week, hour after hour, and they get in this mess with them, and they trudge through life with them, and they love them back to wholeness. They get messy with them. It may be that you feel that you need a Stephen minister right now. You need someone to talk to. You're anxious, and you need to share that. If you'll go to our website, graceralee.org slash care, you can find everything you need there to raise your hand and go, hey, I need to talk to somebody. Or if you want to love your neighbor by joining the ranks of Stephen ministers, you can sign up there and email our leader, Bill Reith, and get involved in loving your neighbor that way. But this story of the Good Samaritan shows us that loving our neighbor is messy and that love gets messy. Finally, in the story, we see that loving our neighbor is costly, but that love invests. Loving our neighbor takes something from us. It took the Samaritan's oil and wine. He gave him 200 denarii and said, I'm going to come back and pay this man's debt. Sometimes love costs us something. I remember when this lesson smacked me in the face a couple of months ago. We just recently moved, but before that we lived very close to the corner of Falls and Spring Forest. And there's a Harris Teeter Shopping Center in there. And there was somebody opening up a store for pets, I think called Pet Wants or something like that. And there was individuals who had been working in there for several days. It was late at night. It was like nine o'clock at night. And they're still in there trying to get ready. And I always root for locally owned places. I always root for people who have invested all of their savings and their hopes and dreams and opening up this thing. And it really kind of pulled on my heartstrings to see them in there working late and pouring their hopes and dreams into this place and their misguided affection for pets. And so I thought, man, I really want to encourage these people. So on my way into the grocery store, I knocked on the door and they kind of looked at me and I just kind of waved and they opened the door and they said, hey, we're not open yet. And I said, no, no, I know. I just want you guys to know that I'm rooting for you. I hope this goes well. I know that you've poured a lot into this. I've seen you working hard and I'm really rooting for you in this. Just wanted to encourage you. And they said, wow, great, thanks. They said, we're gonna open tomorrow. You can come back. We're giving away free yada, yada, yada. And I said, yeah, okay, great. And I walked away and I thought, I'm not coming back tomorrow. I'm not buying stuff for my dog. That's Jen's department. But I got to feel good because I was a good neighbor and I wished them well. But by the time I got back in my car and drove off, I thought, if you really love them, you'll go in there and you'll buy some dog treats. If you really want to support them, you'll go in there and you'll spend some money. If you really want to show them love, then it's going to cost you something. This is not about your ego boost and feeling good about yourself. This is about actually doing what they need you to do to love on them. And now, in light of the story of the Good Samaritan, I realize that love invests. Love is costly. It takes from us. But Jesus says that if the Samaritan was the one in the story that showed love, that we ought to go and do likewise. So grace, we're called to be good Samaritans. And that doesn't just mean that we're called to love everyone. That means that we're called to a love that acts, to a love that does, to a love that doesn't excuse things away, to a love that gets messy, to a love that invests. And now some of you, you may feel like the person that was left for dead. You may feel like COVID and the economy and the markets have just attacked you and robbed you and left you. You may need some people to love on you right now. And I would say this to you, if you are a part of Grace or you're watching this at all, and you feel like that person who's just been left on the side of the road, you're feeling beat up, if you're facing joblessness, if you are anxious because some of the jobs that you had lined up are getting canceled or are getting deferred and you don't know if you're gonna make up that income, if you're worried about being able to pay your bills, would you please let us know? Would you please tell us? If you're watching this on our website, on the live page, at the bottom, there's a space where you can submit a prayer request. Please tell us. On our website, you can find the email addresses of the staff. Email us. I don't want anybody, listen to me, I don't want anybody in our church hurting, facing job loss, not knowing how they're going to pay their bills, facing this time by themselves. I don't want it to be a secret that you've lost your job and you don't know what you're going to do and you don't know how you're going to care for your family, tell us. Let your church love you. Let us invest in you. Let us wrap our arms around you. I would hate to know that any of you are carrying a private anxiety or a private stress and we aren't able to do anything about it. Please let us love you if you feel like the person who's been beat up and left behind. For the rest of us, what a unique time to love our neighbor. If you have the means and you can, go support, go spend money at local places, go do the curbside pickup things, go get meals that you could just make at your home if you can afford it, if you can support in that way, go and do it. It doesn't seem like this is going away anytime soon, so we've got weeks to think about how we can love our neighbors and what love can do in the midst of this crisis. Let's right now, Grace, in whatever capacity we have, be the good Samaritans that love our neighbors well. And let's remember that love does, it goes, it acts. And let's take action. Let me pray for us. Father, we understand that you have made us conduits of your love, that we are able to love others because you love us, because you invested in us. Your love for us was costly and you paid that cost. Your love for us is messy and you got messy. Your love for us could have been excused away, but you didn't do that. You didn't make excuses. You came down here and you loved us and you continue to love us. And God, give us the power and the faith and the courage and the vision to love people like you love us, to love people like the Samaritan loved that person that day. Give us eyes to see the needs around us. Give us the courage to meet those needs. Let us in this time be defined by being a church that loves well. Be with us throughout our weeks, God. Be with our families. Give us grace and patience with each other. And it's in all these things, in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Grace, good morning. My name's Nate. I'm the pastor here of Grace's Virtual Church for at least the next eight weeks. We've never done anything like this before. Churches have never faced a problem like this before, how to do virtual church in the face of a pandemic, in the midst of social distancing and quarantining, but I happen to believe that grace was made for eight-week hiatuses. Grace was made to be sustained by just our connections. It makes me so sad that we can't all be together right now, seeing each other, enjoying one another, singing with one another. I think that's probably what I'm going to miss the most over the next eight weeks is the corporate worship. I can't wait for the Sunday that we get to come back and cry out to God together. But until then, this is where we are. And I believe that we're built for this. We are a church that is built on connections. We say we connect people to Jesus and connect people to people, and those connections matter now more than ever. I believe as the weeks and even the months roll on, we are going to feel potentially more and more isolated and increasingly desirous of connection with others. And so we're going to work very hard as a staff to provide these connection points during the week. I hope that you're watching this live so that you can have a sense of participation with everyone else. I hope that you even got here a few minutes early and were participating in what we think of as the virtual lobby or the chat feature and where this video is being watched. So I hope that you did that. If you're watching this on delay later in the day or in the week, I hope that in this upcoming week, you'll make it a priority to be a part of the church at 10 o'clock every Sunday. I'm excited about those opportunities. We're going to be doing devotions and worship moments. Steve's going to be doing worship moments on Facebook Live. Aaron and Kyle and I will be sharing things, and we're going to do everything we can to have lots of opportunities for interaction. So it's vitally important that if you have Facebook or you have Instagram, that you follow us in those places so that we can all participate and share and watch together. My hope is that as we're kind of allowed by the CDC and the governors to come out of our caves and maybe meet in small groups, that maybe we could progress to watch parties together as small groups in our homes for sermons and for different things. But we're going to get through this. We're going to weather this storm, and we're excited about the opportunities to meet as a virtual church over at least the next eight weeks. We're in a series now called Storyteller, and we're looking at the parables of Jesus. Jesus told short fictional stories to make moral points, and so we are in the middle of that as a church. And I have a parable that I had prepared last week when we had to cancel the services that I was ready to preach about this week. But on Tuesday of this week, I had my men's group here in this space at 6 a.m. surreptitiously against the better judgment of others, and we met. And there was only five of us, don't worry, and I'm going to follow protocol moving forward, and we'll do Zoom calls. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's bedhead for those that still have hair. And we studied Mark 8 this week. And we went through Mark 8. And I've read Mark plenty of times. But this conversation in Mark 8 in verses 14 through 21, I've never noticed it before. It's a conversation between Jesus and the disciples. I've never really noticed it before. It's never really mattered to me before. And I'm not sure if I remember it, but this week as we read it and we looked at it as a group of men on Tuesday morning, it really hit me square between the eyes. And this conversation has really heartened me and encouraged me over the course of this week. And it's been a crazy week. New things come out every day. Every day we see new curves. We're all amateur epidemiologists. We all know what the words flatten the curve and extend the curve mean. We're all looking at other countries to see what's going to happen there. I feel like every day this passage gets a little bit more relevant because every day the fear gets ramped up just a little bit more. And so what I wanted to do for our first virtual service in the midst of a pandemic is take a break from the parables. We'll come back to those next week. I get to do the parable of the Good Samaritan and several others, and I'm really excited to share those with you. But this week, I just wanted to pause and maybe give us a word of comfort from a conversation that happens in the Gospel of Mark. So if you have a Bible there at your house, I hope you do. I hope you'll scramble and grab one and pull it out and be looking at this passage as we go through it together. But in Mark chapter 8, beginning in verse 14, there's this really important conversation with the disciples. I'm going to read part of it to you, and then I'm going to explain to you what's going on. So in chapter 8, verse 14, they had just fed 4,000 people, Jesus did, and now they were going across the Sea of Galilee on a boat. And even though it's called the Sea of Galilee, it's really a lake, but even though it's a lake, it's pretty big. I've been on it, and you can be in the middle of it and not really see anything but water. So it takes a long time to get across the Sea of Galilee. It says this, Now they, being the disciples, had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, this is Jesus, Watch out, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. When we read that passage, we normally focus in on the words of Jesus, which is the right thing to do, that they would beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. And I've noticed that part before, and it's likely that most of you have too. But the part that never really mattered to me was the disciples' distress over having no bread. So they had just fed 4,000 people. Jesus decided to feed the 4,000 because he noted to the disciples that they had been with them for three days, and some of them were weary and might faint if they had to go home then. So it had been an arduous few days for the disciples as well. Then Jesus takes their bread and he breaks it up and he puts it in baskets and they serve all the people. They serve the 4,000 people. And then after that, they get in their boat at night and they're going back across the Sea of Galilee. And they realize collectively, we only have one piece of bread. And we're not talking like a big healthy loaf here. We're probably talking like a smaller piece of bread like this, and they've got 13 mouths to feed. And this isn't a small problem. This is not like when we're at work and things get jammed up and we realize I'm going to have to skip lunch today, I'm not going to eat until dinner, or I'm going to have to run out and get something, or we don't have any food in the house, or whatever it is. This is a legitimate issue because they're hungry. They've already been pushing themselves. They've already gone without food. They live in what we would understand to be is a third world country. So there's no guarantee that when they get to the other side that there's going to be anything open yet, because it might be the middle of the night or early morning. And there's no guarantee that there's even going to be things for sale. And we don't know what their financial situation was if they had the means to just go buy the bread that they needed. They don't have their fishing equipment with them. They don't have their gear with them. They can't just catch some fish and grill them up and be okay. And so in this moment, the disciples are filled with uncertainty and fear. In this moment, the disciples are filled with uncertainty and fear. They're holding this single piece of bread going, what are we going to do? How is this going to work? We're going to go hungry. How are we going to get out of this? We're in the middle of a lake. We're miles away from shore. We have no energy to sustain us to get there. We have no guarantee that once we get there, we're going to have food. What are we going to do? In that moment, they're filled with uncertainty and fear, and it's a legitimate fear. And it's that part of the story as I was reading it, and the disciples are wringing their hands over what to do because they are legitimately fearful and uncertain about their future, that I realized, my goodness, this is all of us right now. This is every one of us. Our culture, our society, our community is filled with uncertainty and fear. We are collectively the disciples on the deck of that boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, holding on to our last piece of bread going, what are we going to do? This week, I posted on Facebook, I asked people, hey, I don't even really know how to do this, but in the face of the coronavirus and pandemic and social distancing and market crashing, what are you fearful of? What are you scared of? And in a couple of days, I haven't checked it in a little bit, but in a couple of days, I got 53 comments. I've never gotten 53 comments about anything. And what it tells me is, man, people are scared. People are fearful. We are collectively very unsure about our futures. I have a pessimistic friend who regularly throughout the day sends me articles that are more and more depressing about how much longer this is going to take and what it's all going to look like and when things are going to spike. And I know that you have those friends too. You may be that friend. And it's a manifestation of this fact that we, like the disciples, are full of fear and uncertainty. And our fears are legitimate. I was talking to somebody this week. They are a family now of three because some of their kids have moved out of the house, and they overnight became a family of five. Her brother and her son had to move back. She's got a son who just started a job that he loves in New York City. But where he works has been shut down, and he's had to come home on furlough, and he doesn't know what his next step is. He's got to be filled with anxiety and fear. His mom is filled with anxiety and fear because she doesn't know how she's going to cope with five people in the house when there used to be three. It's a different dynamic. I was texting with someone who has kids in college, and he said that, I asked him, is everybody back home? Are you enjoying that? And he said, yeah, yeah, everybody's home. It's been great. So far, we've played games every night. And I thought, that's really great for week one. You're going to be real tired of games in week five. It's a legitimate fear to think through how is that going to look and how is that going to go. And those are small anxieties. Getting enough toilet paper, that's a small anxiety. There's ways around that. There are some things that we're fearful of that we know are going to work out, but there's other things that we're fearful of that we don't necessarily see a path for. My heart breaks. I think of a ministry called Refugee Hope for an apartment complex behind the Falls Village Shopping Center on the Falls of News. Everybody in that apartment complex is an immigrant. Almost everybody, up above 90%, they're immigrants. And almost everybody in that complex, it's my understanding, have jobs that are hourly and not salaried. And most hourly employees are facing a significant curtailing or total deletion of their hours. Wondering when their last paycheck is going to be. Wondering how they're going to make it from here. One of the guys that posted on the Facebook posted the question that I asked about, what are you fearful of? He identified with that fear. He said, man, I work a job that is relying upon new jobs, and I'm not getting any new jobs, and I don't know where the next paycheck is going to come from, and I'm concerned for my family and how I can provide for them in the midst of this economy. We have other people who are immunocompromised, and they live in constant fear. Because one of the really scary things about the coronavirus that we're learning is it seems like it's possible to be asymptomatic and feel entirely healthy, yet be someone who is carrying it and unknowingly infecting other people. We have somebody who comes into the office to process giving, someone from the church, and she had to ask the staff, would it be possible for you guys to just not come in for an hour and a half so I can get my work done? Because she doesn't want to carry something back from us who feel fine to her husband that has some challenges that the coronavirus would really aggravate. I'm walking down, I shop at Walmart at 5.30 in the mornings to get the things that we need, and someone coughs, and I turn around, and I walk in the opposite direction. We don't trust anybody. We can't handshake. We're sanitizing our hands all the time. We are fearful. And I've seen in the past times when we were fearful. I've seen people be anxious. Somebody loses their job and they're not worried about how they're going to make this up. But I'm not sure I've seen a time in which there was so much fear. There was so much uncertainty. I'm not sure I've ever seen a time when everybody could relate. Some people are in retirement or nearing retirement and looking at the stock market and may even be close to pulling the trigger on retirement until these last couple weeks happen, and now we don't know. We're just weathering the storm. And whatever it is that we are fearful of, whatever the disappointments are that we are facing over the next couple of weeks or months as we are in the midst of the uncertainty of a pandemic and how prolonged it will be and how profound the impact of it will be, it occurs to me that we are just like the disciples on the boat holding the piece of bread going, how is this going to be enough? How is this going to be okay? Which is why I believe that Jesus's response to the disciples in that moment is such a powerful response for us in this moment. This is what Jesus says. In the seven for the 4,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up? And they said to him, seven. And he said to them, and I love this statement, do you not yet understand? Do you not yet understand? I want to be careful to point out here that Jesus' tone with the disciples is one of frustration. They've just freshly seen the miracle, the feeding of the 4,000. They've been walking with him for a year or more by now. They've seen plenty of miracles, yet they're holding this bread, and they don't seem to be piecing it together that they can have faith in Jesus providing them bread in the future. And so Jesus says, do you not yet understand? So his tone with them is frustration. I believe that Jesus with us in this moment would not take that tone. I think he would take a more empathetic tone. I think he would remind us that he is the God who sees. I think he would remind us that he is the God who weeps with us. I think he is the God that would remind us that he is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. So I do not think that Jesus' tone with us in this moment would be one of frustration, but I do think the message would be the same. That the heart of what Jesus says to the disciples is the heart of what he would say to us. And I find it so interesting in this moment that Jesus didn't point to what he was going to do. He pointed to what he had done already. He didn't point to what he was going to do. He didn't say, I know there's only one piece of bread, but look, I'm going to break it. I'm going to fill these baskets over here. There's going to be enough for all of you. Don't worry about it. He didn't say, I actually stored away some fishing nets, cast them over that side of the boat, and you're going to catch a bunch of them. We're going to grill them up, and we're going to be fine. He didn't say, I know a shop owner on the shore. When we get there, we're going to have a feast. I've already got it set up. He doesn't paint for them what he's going to do. He just tells them what he has done. Because I miss sports so much already, I'll use the sports analogy. Jesus didn't point to the game plan. He pointed to the scoreboard. He didn't tell the disciples what the strategy was going to be. He didn't try to ally their fears by immediately resolving the situation. He didn't put them at ease by saying, don't worry, I have a plan. He just said, do you see what I've done? Do you remember the miracles? Jesus' message to the disciples, what he says is, I have given you bread before. I've given you bread before. He doesn't say, I'm going to give you bread in the future. He doesn't say, this is how it's going to go. He just goes, guys, listen, I've provided for you before. I've given you bread before. Do you remember the 5,000? And they say, yes. And it was more than 5,000. The Bible says there's 5,000 men, which means that there was women and children there. So the numbers are between 15 and 20,000. And on five loaves and three fishes, gee, if three fish, I don't even know, you guys can't laugh at me because you can't talk to me right now. With five loaves and three fish, he fed between 15 and 20,000 people. And there was 12 baskets left behind, an abundance, an overflow. And then a little while later, he did it again. He fed 4,000 and there was another abundance and another overflow. And when they are concerned because they only have one loaf of bread and they're filled with anxiety and uncertainty and fear, Jesus comes to them and he just gently says, hey, I've given you bread before. And I think that's such a powerful message for us right now. I think that's such a powerful reminder for us right now. That in the face of our uncertainty and fear, Jesus reminds us that he has given us bread before. In the face of our uncertainty and fear, in the midst of this pandemic, in the midst of an economic collapse, hopefully temporary, Mark 8 screams at us through the centuries, I've given you bread before. I don't think it was any accident that I stubbornly decided to meet with my men's group this week. I don't think it was any accident that we happened to be on Mark 8. And I don't think it was any accident that over the course of the week, I couldn't get it out of my head and just wanted to share that simple message with you that, hey, God has given us bread before. He's provided for us before. He's met us in the midst of our fear and uncertainty before, and He'll do it again. I think about Jen and I and where we sit right now. In 2007, in April of 2007, we bought our first house. And in May of 2007, the market crashed. And within a couple months, it was worth a fraction of what we paid. And we're sitting there going, great, this is not how it's supposed to go. We're supposed to buy a house and then develop some equity and then sell it and then we're living large. And that's not how it went for us. That wasn't our story. And so here we are 13 years later. We want to be real careful about when we bought a house and how we decided to do it. And we closed on a new one on March the 9th and then found out that day because someone texted me who's not my friend that the markets had crashed for the worst time in history, and we're going, great, clearly, it's terrible for the country for Nate and Jen to buy homes. And it makes us fearful, and it makes us uncertain, this sense of deja vu, and here we go again. But in this passage, God has whispered in my ear, hey, man, you never wanted for anything. You had all the things you needed. You made your payments fine. I sustained you with employment. I've given you bread before. And he'll give it to us again. And Jesus doesn't need for me, he doesn't need to point to exactly how it's going to all work out. I don't need to see the value of my home projected out over the next 10 years by Jesus himself to feel, okay, all I need to know is for him to point to the scoreboard and say, look what I've already done. I think about grace. The last time I preached, the last time I preached, it was a celebration. It was March 8th, and I was going, look at what God did. Look at the pledges that came in. It was above and beyond anything that we expected. Man, these are going to be high times for grace. It is green pastures and sunshine and rainbows ahead. I did not see global pandemic and market crash coming. It is an uncertain time for all churches. But here's what I know. Grace has seen harder times. We've seen thinner times. God has given us bread before, and he'll do it again. He has provided for us in the past, and he'll look out for us in the future. When we launched the campaign, I preached, I believe, on February 2nd, and the main point was me saying, hey, God's hand, in one one way or another has always been on this church, and we believe that it remains. And then when the pledges came in and we celebrated that together, we said, look, God's hand is on the church, and we're going to walk in faith into the future that he's painted for us. And pandemics and economic failures changed nothing. God's hand is still on this place. And we're still walking into the future that we believe he's created for us. And I don't know what your fear is. I don't know what your uncertainty is. And I wouldn't seek to mitigate it or minimize it or dismiss it by saying, hey, God's gonna take care of it. Because sometimes we don't know what it looks like for God to take care of things. But we do know that Isaiah 41.10 is true. We do know that we serve a God that says, do not fear for I am with you. Do not be dismayed for I am your God. I will strengthen you and hold you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. We know that's true and we know we can cling to that. I don't know how God's gonna provide bread for you and your family. I don't know how God is gonna see each and every individual of grace and of those watching. I don't know how God's gonna see us through this season of uncertainty. But I would be willing to bet that God has provided bread for you before. I would be willing to bet that each one of you watching and listening can remember a time when you felt like the disciples on the deck of the boat going, I don't know how this is going to work. And that was years ago, and as you reflect back, you marvel at the way that God provided in the midst of uncertainty. And just because now, instead of some of us feeling uncertain and some of us feeling good about life, just because all of us share this common fear and this common uncertainty, just because it's universal does not mean that we serve a different God or that God can't provide. And I don't know what the weeks ahead hold for us as individuals, as a faith family, as families. And I don't know the uncertainty that you face, but I would simply encourage you in moments of anxiety, in moments of fear and uncertainty, remember Jesus' simple message from Mark 8. Do you not yet understand? I've given you bread before, and I firmly believe that he will do it again. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you, and you are good. You are near the brokenhearted. You tell us that we do not need to be dismayed, that we do not need to fear, that you will strengthen us, that you will uphold us with your righteous and your mighty right hand. And so God, we pray for that. We pray for that strengthening. I pray for the heartening of those who call grace home. I pray for the encouragement of those who are watching this and listening to this right now. Help us remember the ways that you provided bread for us in the past. Help us remember the ways that you've come through for us before. And help us have faith that you'll come through for us again. In this time of trial, God, let us cling to you as I always pray for this church and for the people that you love. May everything that happens over the next eight weeks, over the next months, over this pandemic and this quarantine and this distancing and all these things that we're not used to, may you use these circumstances to conspire to bring us closer to you. And God, we faithfully pray for and anticipate the day when we can come together again and celebrate you. In the meantime, may we remember that you provided for us before. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.