Sermons tagged with Prayer

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

20 years ago, Grace was launched by a courageous group of faithful believers with a dream to expand God's kingdom in North Raleigh. Part of this dream was establishing a permanent home to serve as a launching point for this ministry. Through the years, God has used Grace to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping and dreaming, now is the time for Grace to go home. Good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor. This is a big, special morning. I'm so excited to get to share with you. I am in the habit of praying before I get up to preach, and in both services, I've just prayed that God would give me the strength to kind of keep it together without just blubbering like an idiot, because it's just, I feel so excited about what Grace is stepping into and getting to share this with you. On most Sunday mornings, on all Sunday mornings, I feel like my job as the pastor is to get up and open the Bible and share with you what I believe is teaching us together. My job is to teach scripture. I try to anchor everything I say in scripture and simply open it up and explain it to us in a way that is hopefully compelling or convicting or inspiring, whatever God has for us that morning. I feel like that's my job. But this morning, I'm going to take a little bit of a departure from that and just share with you what's been going on for the last 18 months. If this is your first time with us or your first couple times with us, this is not a typical Sunday morning, but it's the right one for the life of the church now. So if you allow me that license, I'm just going to share with you this morning and not preach at you this morning. Hopefully, I never preach at you, but you understand what I'm saying. In September of 2018, we went on an elder retreat to a farm in Youngsville. We had our sitting elders, and then we had three of our elders that had been recently nominated and appointed but weren't yet voting. They were junior elders. I still consider them junior elders. And we all sat around talking and dreaming about grace. And two of our elders, Bill Reith and Burt Banks, said that it was time that we start discussing the 10-year plan for grace. What's our 10-year plan for Grace Raleigh? Their very corporate 10-year plans seem important in that world, and so they thought we should have one too. And one of the items that they had on the agenda to discuss was the question of, do we want to own our own permanent home in North Raleigh? Do we want to be owners or renters? Historically, we've been renters, and so this was the question of, do we want to own one day? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, the response of the room was, yes, this is what we want to do. And uncharacteristically, during this discussion, I remained quiet. You may find it hard to believe I'm vocal in meetings. I don't have a problem saying what I think, and sometimes I feel like that's the role, so I should share my two cents. But in this particular elder meeting, as these decisions were being made, I stayed very quiet. And I stayed quiet because I carry with me an acute awareness that this is not my church. This is not my building. These are not my dreams. The church's goals are not my goals. This is our church. This church existed long before I got here. This church existed and did things and people poured into it and developed a life here long before Nate arrived. And so I'm acutely aware of the shoulders that I stand on and that my job is to steward the dreams and the hopes of us, not me. And because that's such a huge decision, I didn't really want to be the driver of that. So I stayed quiet. They quickly decided, yes, we want to be owners. And so then the natural question is, okay, what's the timeline for that? When do we want to begin to make decisions to take us down that path? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, again, the answer in the room was right away. We need to start making decisions right away. We need to start moving towards that now. And I remember thinking, I can still remember where I was sitting. I was sitting on the fireplace looking at those couches and chairs and couch, and I can see the dim room around me. And I remember thinking as everyone discussed this, why don't we pump the brakes a little bit? Let's just, let's chill out. Like I'm, it's a big enough challenge to fill a 200 person auditorium. Let's not build a 400 person auditorium. Let's just wait. I'm not really sure I need that pressure in my life, you know? And then in my head, I'm also thinking, and I'll tell her story in a second, but we had just then that month moved out of a season of tremendous debt. We haven't even announced to the congregation yet that we were out of debt. And now here we are signing up to go into more debt. And I'm going, gosh, maybe we should just like chill out. Can we just be healthy for a little while? But these were the decisions that were made. And I began to understand why we were making those decisions. And so that had set in motion a series of events. Shortly after that, we formed a building committee. And it was their job to go out and figure out how much are we going to need to spend to accomplish what we need to accomplish. So they went out and they looked around and they came back to us and they said, this is kind of what we think. This is what it's going to cost. This is what we think monthly debt service on it would be. And so this is kind of our goal. And so then once we had that goal, we realized we needed to get capitalized. So we formed a capital campaign committee last spring and asked them the question, this is what we want to do. Let's come up with the best way to do it. And so we've been working behind the scenes for 18 months now and are ready to present to us, the church, everything that we've been hoping and dreaming and praying and thinking about. But to understand the decisions that have been made and why we feel like now is the right time, I think we also need to understand the story of grace. Because we have some here who have been here since the very beginning. We have others who have come recently, and I'm not sure we all remember exactly how we got here. So like the video said, in 2000, there was a core group of faithful believers, a group of people from St. Andrew's Presbyterian over on Falls, that said they had a vision and a dream for starting their own church. A church that would be a light in the community that they love so much. A church that would strengthen faiths and strengthen families and watch people come to know Jesus and watch faith get deepened. Watch people walk with Jesus with more depth. They wanted to impact the community of North Raleigh, and so they banded together and they launched, at the time, the church called Grace Community Church. The very first Sunday, this church met on the lawn at the YMCA, and they had no idea what to expect. And that first Sunday, over 1,200 people showed up and sat on the grass and listened to that preacher preach and sang songs together. Everybody was blown away by what happened. And it was that Sunday that God, for the first time, whispered into the ears of those who cared so much about grace and believed in this place, hey, this church is special to me. My hand is on this place. I'm gonna use this church. I'm gonna use this place. Grace matters to me. And so that core of people believed that and believed that God's hand was on this place and believed that God had big plans for grace and believed that God was moving to make this an effective church in his kingdom. And so very quickly they needed space. So they started to meet at a storefront that used to be a Michael's. It affectionately became known as St. Michael's. And the idea was never that that would be a permanent location, but that that would be a temporary space until they had the health and the finances to build a permanent home. That's been the goal from the very beginning. It was just deferred because they needed space so quickly. But then having outgrown Michael's and not yet being totally prepared to go out in health and build a building, they made the decision to rent a space over on Meridian Drive. It was a larger space, 600-person auditorium. They were filling it up and going and blowing, and it was a really, really special time where it was easy to be enthusiastic about grace. Understanding that they weren't yet home, but that soon, when they were ready, they would have a home. And during that season, it was incredibly evident that God's hand was on grace. It was evident that God cared about that place. There was a thriving student ministry, a thriving children's ministry, wonderful people and wonderful families being strengthened and coming to know the Lord, and God worked in that place. But it was also during that season where there was some turmoil and some tumult in grace. There were struggles and trials and dreams got deferred and difficulty to walk through as a church. And it was during this season that some of that hopeful core that helped to start grace with all those dreams began to wonder if God's hand was still on grace, began to wonder if God still had plans for this place, began to wonder if the brightest days of grace were still ahead or if they were already behind. And so grace began to dwindle, and grace began to struggle, and those dreams got deferred. And it was in this season, in December of 2016, that my story intersected with grace. I still remember it was December 8, 2016. I had my first interview with the Pastoral Search Committee. They had asked me to block off enough time for a two-hour Skype interview, which I thought was excessive, but what do I know? I'm not making the rules. So that day, I started to prep and plan for the interview. So if you know me, you know that I don't like to be unprepared. I don't like to be caught off guard. I like to know what to expect. If you ask for a meeting with me, I'm probably going to say, yeah, that's great. What do you want to talk about? Because I got to know it's going to eat me up inside if I don't, if I can't prepare and think through everything that needs to be said. And so going into an interview, you better believe I'm going to be ready. So I started to dig into grace. And at the time on the website, they had a history of grace, just the events that happened year by year. And so I read through that history and I saw the ebbs and flows and the triumph and the trials. And then they had their elder minutes online. So I started to read through the elder minutes for the past couple of years. And I got done with all of that and I thought, yeah, I'm going to cancel this interview. I don't really want to be a part of this church. I got done with that research, and honestly, my conclusion was, I just don't see God's hand on this place. I don't have a lot of hope for that church. So I don't think I'm going to go there. I don't want to waste anybody's time. I need to cancel the interview. And as I opened up my computer to email Holly, who was then chair of the committee, it occurred to me like, come on, big time. You're 36. You don't have big enough britches yet to start turning down interviews. Just take it. Use it as practice. Let's see what happens. So I did. And I did the interview. And it was funny because in the interview, I gave the most honest answers ever because I didn't care if these people liked me. I wasn't trying to get anybody to like me. I was just telling the truth. And then at the end of the interview, they said, do you have any questions for us? I said, yeah. I mean, I've looked at your history. I've read through it all. Grace has been a hard place to be a part of for several years. And they all kind of started smiling, nodding their heads. I said, so there's a lot of churches in Raleigh. What are you doing there? Why do you go to that place? What's so special about it that you're clinging on? And Holly got a big smile on her face. And she said, because we love this place. These people are special to us. Our kids grew up here. Grace means a lot to us. It's our community. And we believe that the best days are still ahead for grace. And everybody nodded and smiled and agreed. And I believed it too. And I realized that God's hand was here and that there was reason to hope for grace and that I too believe that the brightest days were still ahead. It was hard to believe that when I visited in February for my like official visit interview weekend and I came to a service and there's less people in the service that Sunday than there are in this room right now. But I still believe that God wanted us to be at this place, and that God wasn't done with grace. And so in April of 2017, my wife and I, Jen, and our then one-year-old daughter, Lily, moved up to Raleigh, and we assumed we became a part of grace. And when I got here, it was not going well. We were very far in debt. Our line of credit had been maxed out. The bank had frozen our credit cards. There were some people who told me like, thanks for coming, but you'll probably be moving home in about six weeks. We just weren't sure about this place. But there was all kinds of things that happened in that first year that I felt like was just God whispering in my ear, Nate, I still care about Grace. My hand is still in this place. I still have plans for it. I'll never forget the Memorial Day offering in 2017, that first year that I got here. My whole goal was to get through the summer without incurring more debt, without begging and borrowing and stealing more money, right? I just wanted to try to get through the summer without going into greater debt. And in the month of May, we were running a deficit. And going into the last week of the year, we needed an offering of $15,000. That year, we were averaging about $10,500 a week. So we needed 50% more, almost 50% more in the offering to come in that week for us to remain solvent and not have to go into greater debt. And I don't know if you know this about church world, but Memorial Day weekend is the worst, okay? It's the worst. Nobody comes and nobody gives. And I don't blame you because if they didn't pay me, I would go to the beach too. Nobody's harboring ill will about that. But the reality of it is, that's the lowest giving Sunday of the year, every year in every church in the history of churches. So to be praying for 15,000, 5,000 more than what we normally get is an absurd prayer. And I prayed it all week and I asked the elders to pray. We didn't send out an email. We didn't ask for money. We just prayed. If I'm honest with you, I didn't really believe that it would happen. That Sunday, $28,000 came in. Not a single huge gift, just faithful giving from people who cared about grace. Without being asked, I was blown away. That will always stand out to me as the first time I felt God's hand on my shoulders saying, hey, listen, pal, you just worry about preaching. I'll figure out the rest. Let's go. And I knew that God's hand was on his place. Later that year, a couple months later, we owed $17,000 to World Overcomers that took over our space on Meridian Drive. And the deal that we got to get out of there, we still owed them money. And I emailed a lady that I didn't know on a committee that I had never talked to and said, hey, listen, I'm new here. This debt is gonna crush us. Can we please defer to the end of the year because we can't afford to pay it over the summer. And she emailed me back and she said, we love God and we love his kingdom and we love his church and you are forgiven of that debt. Don't worry about it. Again, God tells us his hand is on this place. He's not done with grace. And over these three years, I will have been here three years in April, over these three years, we've seen some of the people who thought that maybe God was done with grace begin to come back and breathe new life into it as well. We've seen people come back and believe that, yes, God's not done with this place. We've seen families added. We've seen our young family small group, Virgin, our three-year-old class is stinking full every week. We've seen more kids on the roster than Erin's had in the history of her tenure at Grace, which is now seven years. We're seeing small groups filled up. We have two established services. We're totally out of debt and saving money for the building already. We are in now a healthy place where we are watching faiths being strengthened. We are watching people being connected with Jesus. We are watching a community being built. And for the first time in the history of grace, we really are walking in health. And that's why we believe that after 20 years of wondering and wandering, that it's finally time for grace to go home and realize the dreams that we've dreamt for 20 years. Now, when we say that, that it's time for grace to go home, that we believe now is the time to pursue a permanent home, a permanent building, there's a couple things to understand. The first is when I say permanent home, I'm careful to say that because we could buy land and build or we could buy a building and upfit. We're open to all options. And I think the question becomes, why now? Why build? Why is it that we want to own our own building? Why is it that we want to own our own permanent home in this community that we love? And there's a lot of reasons for this. And in some business meetings that I'm going to tell you about, we're going to cover those reasons. But I think there's two really compelling ones that I would share with you this morning. The first most compelling reason that this is the time for us to go home and have a permanent home to call our own is to simply look around at this space. Now, we're grateful for this space. If this little room didn't exist, we would not exist as a church. No question about it. God gave us this space and allowed us to get our feet underneath us here. But look around. Does this feel like home to you? If you're not sure, sit behind the pole one Sunday and then answer that question. Where I have to walk over here to be able to see you. Hey, guys. Look in the corners because we have no storage. So we just put extra chairs on the sides and put tablecloths on top of them. That's less than optimal. We have a lobby. We say we're about connecting people to people. And a big part of that is our lobby and talking and being able to catch up with friends. The lobby time, honestly, is some of my favorite time of the week every week where I get to buzz around and catch up with everybody and see what's going on. It's too small. Try to hang out there right after the first service. It has to spill out into the front, whether it's cold or raining or whatever. Speaking of going outside, even if it's cold and rainy, have a kid in elementary school and have to walk outside every week, whether it's cold or whether it's fair, whether it's rainy or whether it's dry, and walk past the aquarium store and down the hallway of offices and get your kid in the repurposed children's space. We're grateful for that space. It just doesn't feel like home. If you think this feels like home, get here early on a Sunday morning when we have to get the air and the fans going because it smells like an aquarium. That's a thing. Come on Thursday, I'll show you. We'd love to have a restroom available in the lobby so that people don't have to walk down the children's space to get to it. If you've ever tried to, when that door's open and kids are trying to get into the nursery and other families are trying to get out of the nursery and you're just trying to get by to go to the restroom, there's a choke point over there that definitely does not feel like home. We'd love to have a playground for our kids to play on. I would love for our students, our sixth through 12th graders, to have their own space. Right now they meet in this space, and Kyle, our student pastor, is doing a phenomenal job with them, and he's gotten that. We're growing. We're running about 40 kids a week when everybody comes. But this space still swallows them up, and there's a limit on what they can do. Students like to be rowdy and rambunctious, and that's great, but we have to kind of keep a lid on that because we have not put enough money in Kyle's budget for auditorium repairs, so he's got to stay within some certain parameters. They need their own space that feels like home for them too. We need to invest in our student ministry. We want adult spaces during the week that feel more like living rooms where it's comfortable to sit in and meet in and have small group in so that our adults who come don't have to sit in repurposed children's spaces around white plastic tables and metal folding chairs. We're happy to do that, but we want other people to come too. We want you to be able to invite people to small group and have it feel comfortable and like home when they come. I dream of having some of our folks who work from home to take a day every week and come sit and work with us as a staff and as a community and make it kind of a hub during the days where people just are. We can't do that in our current space. And more importantly, all the things that I just mentioned, the pole and the chairs and the small lobby with the very nice hutch. If you go to Grace and you call Grace home, we don't think about those things. We don't care about those things. Those aren't really that big of a deal to us. But when you bring somebody for the first time because you want them to experience all that you've experienced at Grace, everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over in order to come here. The fact that you can't even see us from the road. We have signs on our building, but it's useless. Why do we even have that? You can't see it. You have to find us. We've joked that we're like a secret club. You only find us if you get invited. Everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over, that they have to get past so that they can be fully engaged here. As they assess whether or not they want to be a part of grace, those are all things that they have to be willing to move past too before they can really receive what God has for them here, before they can be encountered with the beauty and the grandeur of the gospel. And I just want as few things between people and Jesus as possible. I want people to notice as few things as possible that are detriments to what we're doing here so that they feel at home too and they feel freed up to encounter Jesus in this space. And so I think it matters. The next compelling reason that I think it's wise to build now is because it's really, this is not exciting, but it's true. It's fiscally responsible to own. It's the more financially wise thing to do with the resources that we have. Most of you in this room, you own your home. A vast majority of us do. Why do you do that? Because you know that financially it's the best decision for your family. The same is true for us as a church. We believe that it's the wisest thing to do with the resources that we have. Another thing you understand as you invest in a home now in whatever season of life you're in is if you'll do it up front, if you'll be financially wise in the early years of your life and you make sound choices, then later in the decades to come, you'll have the financial freedom to do what's really special to you with your money. You'll have the financial freedom to really spend your resources on what matters most to you. And we wanna do that as a church too. Right now we give 10% of our offerings to missions, to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. And I'm so proud that we do that. But I wanna see that number grow. What if we can get into a facility and get that manageable? And as our numbers and as our budget grows, our property cost doesn't have to and we can give 30, 40, 50% of what we have to things going on outside the walls of grace and be a generous church. It's more fiscally responsible to buy now so that we can be generous later. And just to kind of further drive that point home, we were in that facility on Meridian Drive for 16 years. In 16 years, we spent $5.4 million on rent. And that's conservative because for a season, we rented some extra space that cost more money. It's probably much closer to $6 million. And coming out of that space, we had debt to show for it. We want to make good choices so that that never happens again. That's why we believe that now is the time to act and move and go home. Now, with those things being said, there's some details that I do want to share with you this morning. And then I'm going to tell you about the informational meetings that we have and why we've chosen to go that route. The nitty gritty of it is, and this will be covered in those meetings, so you don't have to remember all this right now, but you're probably very curious. Our goal in the campaign is to raise $1.5 million over two years. We're going to ask everyone to make a two-year pledge and try to have that by the end of two years so that we can do what it is we think God wants us to do. The reason it's $1.5 million is because in the estimates that we have, we want to build a building that's between 400 and 600 people. The auditorium is between 400 and 600. In church world, once you have the auditorium size, you have the algorithms for all your other space. So it's really a decision about how big of an auditorium do we want. This one seats 200. The elders want us to have a 600-person auditorium. I want us to have a 350-person auditorium. I don't need that pressure in my life. But that's the decisions that we're making. We're open to buying land and building, but we would rather buy a building and up fit. Buying land and building takes more time and takes more money. The only reason we would do that is if there's a piece of land that's so attractive that we just couldn't pass it up. We want the building to be as close as possible to Capitol and 540. This puts us in range of everyone who calls Grace home. That's an optimistic goal. I was having lunch the other day with somebody who's been buying and selling land in the Raleigh area for probably 30 or 40 years. And when I told him where we wanted to be, he audibly laughed at me. But we think that God is going to look out for us. He'll give us the place that we need to be. If we were to buy and build, that could cost as much as $4.5 million, and $1.5 million allows us to borrow what we need to make that happen. If we want to go a little bit smaller, build and upfit, that is going to cost somewhere around $3 million. So 1.5 over two years positions us to do whatever it is we think we need to do. Now, to raise that money, we formed a campaign committee. And the campaign committee began, got a book written by an expert who's done 100 of these. And we started to read, what's the best way to go about this? And what we quickly learned is all the experts have a set way that you're supposed to go about raising funds for a project like this. What they wanted us to do is tear out all of the givers at grace and take like the top 15 families and I would go meet with them personally. Then you take the top 30 or 40 families and the elders go meet with them individually, share all the information, ask for a pledge. And then you take all the other families and we'll just get to you whenever we get to you. We're busy. We've got a lot of things going on. That's how it goes. You tear them out, you have the meetings, and the experts say by going and sitting down in someone's home and presenting to them and making a personal ask, you're gonna get more juice out of that lemon. That's the best possible way to get the funds that you need. That's the way you need to do it. And so because that's the way we need to do it, that's what we set about doing, is figuring out a way to do that. Now that was a challenge because at Grace, we have a long history, nobody knows what anybody gives at Grace. There's one person who knows how much people give. That's a guy named Tom Ledoux. He is our finance manager. He's living his best life in the villages in Florida right now. So you don't have to worry about running into him at Harris Teeter. And in between games of golf, he does our finances. We get a great deal on it. I love that guy so much. And he's the only one who sees what everybody gives. So to tear out our givers, I would have to start learning some stuff that is none of my business. But this was the way we need to do it. This is the money we need to raise. And so we started talking with the elders about it. One of the elders raised a concern. He's like, I'm really not comfortable with that. I don't think that we should do that. I think that we should just ask everybody all at once and let them respond however they want to and let the Holy Spirit move. And my response to him was, I think you need to go play in the forest and sing with the animals. Like, that's Pollyanna stuff, man. We got to get real. But the more I thought about it, and the more we prayed about it, the more I became convinced that that way to raise funds was just not right for grace. The more I thought about going into homes and presenting and asking, the less comfortable I got with it. The more, honestly, the more I saw it being the plans of man trying to figure out the best way to go about this and not making room for the Spirit. And so I thought rather than going to you individually and making an ask that I would just ask you corporately and trust you. I've tried as I've led Grace to trust you to be adults who love Jesus and love this place and trust you to go home and pray about it and allow the Holy Spirit to direct as if he saw fit that you would be sensitive to that and trust the pledges that come in. Another reason I didn't want to do the individual meetings is I began to think about it. And this is really what drove it home for me is, I don't want anybody in the church who gives to the campaign to think that their gift is valued any different than any other gift. We have some families in our church that because they've made wise choices, because God has blessed them, they really do have great means. We have some families in the church who have the ability, if they wanted to, to give in ways that were really impactful for the campaign. They give a lot of money. And that's wonderful. And then we have other families in the church that are far closer to mine and Jen's end of the spectrum that are in their 20s or in their 30s and kind of trying to figure out how to get life together. And some of us even living paycheck to paycheck and any amount that would be given would be really sacrificial. And if these families are able over the next two years to cobble together five or $10,000, I don't want to value that $10,000 any less than I would value the $100,000, $150,000. Because even though the amounts in those two gifts are different, the faith is the same. The sacrifice is the same. The spirit of generosity and obedience is the same. And I don't want to be a part of a system that makes those two people feel any different for what they gave. Because every bit of it is special. Every bit of it is impactful. I got a text this morning from a good friend of mine who just knew that this morning was when we were launching the campaign at the church. And they're a family like us. And he just said, hey, proud of you, rooting for you. Julie and I are committing $1,000 to the campaign this year. I started to cry in my bedroom. It's the same sacrifice. It's the same generosity. The gifts aren't different. And I don't want to treat them that way. So rather than going to your houses and doing an individual ask, we're having these informational meetings and we're asking corporately. There's three informational meetings. You have them on the cards in your seats. They're all identical. We're just asking that you would come to one of them. If you want to come to all three, because you just love this kind of stuff, knock yourself out. But we're asking that you would come to one. We hope that every partner and everybody who calls Grace home will come to at least one of these meetings. At those meetings, we will roll out for you all the things that we would have if I came to your house and sat down with you and talked to you. The type of ask that we're looking for, all the details of the campaign. There's an FAQ sheet on the huts that will give you a little bit more information if you have questions right away. We will go through all of those details. We'll have people from all the committees here that you can ask questions of. There'll be some give and take. And I think that those are going to be some good times for us at the church. That's where that's going to happen. We're hoping that you will come to those. And for the next five weeks, we're going to talk about the next steps of grace. Because I believe that the building, pursuing a permanent home, is just the first step that we need to take as a church that's now walking in health. The question facing grace now is, God, what would you have us do with this health? And so over the next five weeks, we're going to answer that. It's going to culminate in a pledge Sunday on March 1st, and we'll find out if this is a realistic dream. But as I close today, I would just share this with you. I was reminded in my preparation that in July of 2017, we had a business meeting. It was to talk about how to financially make it through the rest of the summer, how to exist as a church. And I remember there was somebody in the back of the room who stood up over there, and they said, hey, and they kind of talked to the room and said, hey, we just need to all give a little bit more and we'll be okay. And I was able to say to him and to everyone, actually, no, you don't. You don't need to give any more. This church is generous and doing everything that it can right now. You don't need to give us any more money. We need to be more responsible with the money that you're already giving us, and we're going to do that. And then I made a promise. I said, as a matter of fact, if you'll trust me, I'm not going to ask you for more money again until we're ready to build a building. So now here I am, three years later, because of God's grace, we've been able to keep that promise, asking you to consider participating in the campaign as we seek to go home. Asking you to consider participating in this above and beyond what you give to operational budget. So the invitation is to go home and just begin to pray and to think and to plan and earnestly ask God, God, how would you have us participate in this campaign? We'll have those informational meetings. We'll have our services for the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, we're gonna come and celebrate and submit our pledges together and we're gonna see what God is gonna do. In the meantime, if you have any questions, my door is open. I will meet with you, talk with you, answer whatever questions I have. If you'd like an individual meeting, we can have that. I'm just not going to impose that on you. But that's the invite. Let's go as a church and pray how God would have us be involved with what he's doing here and the next steps of grace. Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. We know that your hand is here. We know it's on this place. We know that what happens here matters to you. God, we believe as a body that it's time for us to take this step of faith and pursue a permanent home in this community where you've planted us. So God, I earnestly pray that if that's your will, if that's from you, let us marvel at how you make it happen. God, if that's not your will, if this needs to be our home for a while, then make it abundantly clear that that's your will and let us celebrate that too. God, we simply humbly ask that your will be done and that we walk in obedience to what that is. Father, be with these families and these individuals as they go and pray. I pray that they would be sensitive to your spirit. I pray that their hearts would be opened, would be moved by what moves you and that you would guide and direct us to exactly where and how you would have us participate. God, I cannot wait to see all that you do in this season of grace. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

So this Sunday we're talking about parenting. We're in the middle of a series now called I Want a Better Life, and we're focusing on four elements of our life that I think that we would all agree that we want to improve upon. Last week we said I want a better schedule, so we talked about some biblical principles to build our schedules in such a way that we'll invest our time in ways that are beneficial, that we don't regret, that really get accomplished what we want to get accomplished with our time and with our days. Next week, we're going to say, I want a better marriage. And so we're going to look at some biblical principles around building a strong marriage, which I know that, again, no one in this service needs, but the second service is desperate for this message. So we're going to go ahead and move forward with that next week. And then the last week of the series, in the end of January, we're going to say, I want a better me and look at mental health. I've been diving into some research on that already, talking to folks, and I'm excited to share with you whatever it is I learned between now and January 26th. I think that's going to be an important Sunday. But this Sunday, we want to focus on parenthood, and I want better kids. And we all know, fundamentally, that if we want better kids, that we need to be better parents. I used to watch that show, The Nanny, or The Nanny, I don't know what it's called. The one with the lady that would like swoop in and fix your broken children, whatever show that was. And what I found when we watched that show, Super Nanny, what I found when we watched that show was it was never the kid's fault. Like you watch the previews, kids are disasters. And then the nanny would come in, she's supposed to talk to the kids. And what she would do instead is talk to the parents. And it was always the parents that needed to change the way they were approaching parenthood. And so when we say, I want better kids, what we mean is we want to be better parents. And the temptation is that when this is the topic, that for those who are not in the throes of parenthood, currently in the trenches, it's kind of for us to take a step back and say, well, maybe this one's not for me. But I would say if you don't yet have kids, then having children is like this great unknown in the future. We have no idea how it's going to go. So maybe this can help to orient you so that we have some good principles as we approach parenthood. If you're in the throes of it, hopefully you're locked in. You would readily admit, I don't know what I'm doing. I heard people, I heard multiple people in the last couple of weeks when asked, and this is not because I asked them, it just came up in conversation, when asked, you seem to have good kids, what do you do with them? They would say, we just make it up as we go along. Like to be in the throes of parenthood is to kind of not know what we're doing. We've never done this before. And then a lot of us are facing parenthood with having adult kids, kids who are out of the house. And now you have to walk through this transition of how do I support and encourage and advise them as parents without trying to be tyrannical or controlling or dictatorial to them and allow them to be the adults that God created them to be. So I hope that the principles that we talk about this morning can help us no matter where we are on the spectrum of parenthood. And when you think about being a parent and how to be a better one and where we get our information, it's true that a lot of us Google and that there's not a handbook out there. And what we as church people do and what I do is turn to the Bible. God invented parenthood. What does he have to say about it? But here's one of the little secrets of the Bible that all family pastors, senior pastors, children's pastors, and student pastors know, and parents if you're diligent, the Bible really doesn't have a lot to say about raising kids. The Bible really doesn't have a ton to say about parenthood. It's difficult to turn to a passage. If you think about marriage, you go to Ephesians 5, and it's a seminal passage on marriage. This is what marriage is all about. We don't have that for parenthood. We get bits and pieces throughout Scripture, pieces of advice or commandments or encouragements. In Deuteronomy, and this one's profound, so we're going to come back to it later in the sermon. In Deuteronomy, we're told that we need to teach the Bible to our kids. We need to write it on the walls of our house and instill it into our children. We're told several times throughout the Bible, namely in Proverbs and in Hebrews, that a loving parent disciplines their child. Proverbs tells us that we should make punishment a part of our house and a part of our culture, that punishment should be a thing that's a good idea. There's one spot, and it's interesting to me, apparently this was an issue in the early church, but it says, parents, you should not intentionally tick off your kids. So if any of you are out there just really just putting the screws on them just to watch them squirm, knock it off, all right? The Bible says to quit it. So we're not supposed to do that, but there's not a lot of, hey, this is how you raise kids according to God's standards. So as I thought about this topic, and of course my desire and belief that it's my job to approach it biblically, I just began to think through the relationships that we see in Scripture between parent and child. We don't get a lot of glimpses of parenthood in Scripture. So without an idea, sometimes you come up with an idea, I want to talk about this thing. Let me go to the Bible and see what it says about this thing or see if it confirms what I'd like to say. This time I didn't do that. I try to never do that. I just went to the Bible open-handedly. I thought through the relationships that I see in Scripture between parents and children, and I thought, I wonder if there's a theme that we can pull out. I wonder if there are principles that we can see. I wonder if there's some commonalities between them. So the first one I thought of was Abraham and Isaac. God made promises to Abraham. Those promises were going to come through his son. He gives him a son named Isaac. And when Isaac is somewhere in his adolescence, God comes to Abraham and he says, hey, I want you to offer Isaac to me on this mount that I'm going to show you three days journey away. Certainly what Abraham was expecting. It's certainly not what he would have chosen for Isaac, but that's what God asked him to do. So he takes him three days journey and he goes to offer him to the Lord and right at the last moment, the Lord intervenes. But the exercise for Abraham was to trust God's plan with Isaac. Then I thought about Moses. Comes a little later in the Bible. Moses was born as a slave in Egypt and Pharaoh was killing all of the firstborn sons of the slaves, the Hebrew people, Abraham's descendants. And so his mom hopelessly, perilously puts an infant baby in a basket and literally floats it down a river and hopes for the best. She just has to say, I have no control over this boy's life. Here we go, God. I hope that it works out. That's a picture of parenthood we get from Moses. Fast forward a little bit in the Bible, you see Hannah. Hannah's a woman married to a guy named Akina, and she wants a baby really badly. She can't have one. We've walked through that. Some of y'all have walked through that. That's a hard season of life when you want to experience parenthood, and that's being withheld from you. She's praying so intensely for a child in the temple that Eli, the priest, thinks that she's drunk and gets on to her. And she says, no, I'm not drunk. I'm just praying intensely for a child. And the Lord's good to her and blesses her with a son and she names the son Samuel. And as soon as Samuel is old enough to eat solid food, she takes him to the temple and drops him off with the priest Eli and says, here, this was a gift from God. He's not mine, he's yours. I want him to serve God with his life. That's a picture of motherhood from Hannah. Fast forward a little bit further, there's a guy named Jesse. He's got eight sons. And one day, that same kid, Samuel, shows up at Jesse's house and he says, hey, I need to see your boys. And he goes to the youngest son, David, and he says, Jesse, David's gonna be the next next king of Israel. God said so. He's going to be a man after God's own heart. And we don't know what Jesse's profession was. We know that David was watching the flock, so we can guess that it was agrarian. Maybe they had some fields and maybe a farm, maybe a couple different types of livestock. And David was doubtlessly supposed to be a part of the family business. But Samuel shows up as a representative of God and says, hey, Jesse, I've got to change the plans with David. Here's what he's going to be. He's going to be the king. Then you think about Mary in the New Testament. And God didn't waste any time with Mary. As soon as she got pregnant, an angel shows up and talks to her and says, Mary, you're pregnant with a baby boy. The boy is from God. His name is gonna be Jesus and he is the Messiah. Mary, don't make any plans for this one. I got my own plans for this one. And as if to drive the point home, when Jesus was 12 years old, his family was in Jerusalem for the holidays and they leave leave to go back to Bethlehem. And Mary and Joseph, his parents look at each other and go, where's Jesus? Is he with you? They go back and they find him in Jerusalem in the temple asking the rabbis questions, which is another way to say already teaching the rabbis. As if to drive home the point, this boy's got his own plans. God's got an agenda for this one. And so if you look at those models of family dynamics in the Bible, if you look at those models of parenting in the Bible, to me, there is a clear theme. For parents, it may be a disturbing one. It may be one that we don't want to think about. But I think that the biblical model of parenting is releasing your children to God's plan. I think the biblical model of parenting is to release your children to God's plan. What does the Bible have to say about parenting? What are the examples of parenthood that we have in Scripture? I think over and over and over again, that's why I chronicled five of them and not two of them, over and over and over again, we see this model of God's expectation of believing parents to be releasing your children to God's plan, not your own plan. And this might not seem that profound or insightful to you. It might not be much of a surprise that you show up at church and the pastor says, hey, if you want to raise kids biblically, you got to raise them according to God's plan. You got to release them to God's plan. But I think that's a much more difficult challenge than we realize at first. I think that's a more profound command than we understand. And I think that because of this. In our culture, we've kind of all agreed that stage moms and over-aggressive sports dads are not good elements of the culture, right? Like we don't, we've agreed that we don't really support that. When an overactive stage mom gets like super involved and begins to live her life through her daughter, we all agree like, come on man, knock it off. That's not fair to that kid. When a dad does that, when there's a stage dad or a sports mom or a sports dad, and he does that to his kid, we all agree like,, come on, don't do that. You're damaging that child. I read a couple years ago an autobiography by Andre Agassi. He's a professional tennis player in the 90s and the early 2000s, one of my favorite athletes growing up. He grew up in Nevada, and his dad was an over-aggressive sports dad. And when he was four years old, his dad got a ball machine and souped it up so that it could shoot balls at 90 miles an hour. I'm not making this up. And he put it on legs and stood it up at the net so it could fire balls at his four-year-old's feet. Not like easy ones where you can hit here like you're supposed to, would fire them at his feet and then yell at him to return the balls. Like, it was nuts. And he forced tennis onto his kid. He forced him to do that. And what Agassi says in his biography is it took him into his adulthood to realize that he didn't even like tennis. In fact, he hated it for everything that it represented to him. So we all agree that's not who we want to be as parents. Is the over-aggressive stage mom or the sports dad or however it works out. We don't want to do that. But here's what we need to understand. We all have a little stage parent in us. We all have a little bit of an over-aggressive sports parent in us. Because what is the sports parent doing? What is the over-aggressive helicopter parent doing when they decide that this is what my child's going to be? All they're saying is, this is what I want for my child, these are my plans for my child, and this is how I'm going to bring it about. They have the kid, they go, this is what I want for the kid, and this is how I'm going to bring it about, and they force it upon the kid. And the truth of it is, we all have some of that in us. I was just talking to some parents that recently had a child, and they made the comment that a lot of parents make. They said, you know, I thought that I understood what it meant to love a kid, but then as soon as I held them for the first time, I could not believe how much I loved them. I could not believe what it felt like to hold a kid. I could not believe that my heart had that much space for love. And when that happens, when you love somebody that profoundly, you begin to want things for them. It's a very natural part of parenthood. You want for them. You want them to be successful. You want them to be good people. You want them to make you proud. You want the best for them in life. And so without even realizing it, we by default begin to make plans for our kids. And our plans almost always include wanting our kids to be successful. And every house, every family, every little ecosystem, there's small tweaks and small differences. All of our families with all of our different last names, we all have different versions of success, but we all want our kids to be successful. And so we try to put them on a path towards success as we've defined it. We all want our kids to be happy, but each one of our families and our different ways, we define happiness according to our own ecosystem, and we drive our kids, we plan for our kids to find the happiness that we want for them or to find the goodness that we want for them. Each of our families, we have our own moral codes. We have our own set of values where we champion this value over this value in our house. In our house, the debate is which value or character trait is more valuable. One of us says that the most important thing for our children is to be kind, and the other one says the most important thing is for them to be intellectually independent. You guys can try to figure out which camp we are in on that. But we all have that. And what we do when we have kids is we push them towards our definition of success, towards our definition of happiness, towards our definition of good, and that's the plan that we make for them. And we're not, most of us know better than to be the over-aggressive, dictatorial, Andre Agassi's dad firing tennis balls at their feet. Most of us don't slide that far, but to some degree or another, we all have plans for our kids. We all have hopes and dreams for them. We all have definitions of success and happiness that we're chasing. And that's why this is so difficult. Because biblical parenthood is to release your children from your plans to God's plans. The picture of Moses' mom releasing him down the river and hoping for the best is a picture of biblical parenthood. God, I don't have control. Anyways, I'm trusting them to you. And it's not just whatever you want for them in their life is good with me, God. I release them from my definition of success to God's. I release them from my definition of happiness to God's. I release them from my definition of good to God's, which I think is a big deal because a lot of us say, and I'm not thinking of anybody's kid here now, but a lot of us say, oh yeah, so-and-so's a good kid. And when we say that, what do we mean? We tend to mean that they get good grades and don't do any dumb stuff. That's a low bar for good kid. Isn't it? Everybody's a good kid then. He's a good kid. Why? Well, he's still in school. He's managing not to fail out. Great. We release our children from our definition of those things to God's definition. We release them from our plans and hopes for their future to God's plans and hopes for their future. And it is a much more profoundly difficult thing because suddenly we're not shaping them into being replications of ourself and what we want. We are freeing them up to be who God created them to be. To be a biblical parent is to have the mindset and the understanding of God created them and one day they're going to up, and hopefully they'll come to know God. And when they do, they're going to be my brother and sister in Christ, and they're going to be an adopted son or daughter of the Creator God. And it's up to Him to decide what He wants to use these children for. And my job is to steward them until they're ready to be released. So if that's what we're supposed to do, how do we do it? I think there's two foundations for biblical parenting that I wanna share with you this morning. The first is consistently prepare. We have to consistently prepare. I think in your notes, there's a word prayerfully. I just like the word consistently better because I feel like it makes a better point. We have to consistently prepare our children. Listen, if the goal is to raise a child that is released into the wild, to walk in God's identity for them, to be the person that God created them to be, to execute the plan that God has for their life, which I believe he has a plan for everyone's life. If that's what we're supposed to do, to release them to walk in God's plan, how can they walk them. That's why I think this verse in Deuteronomy is so important. I alluded to it earlier. In Deuteronomy, at the beginning of the Hebrew people, God is saying, this is what I want your culture to look like. This is what I want my people's society to look like. And he's talking about his word and how valuable it is. And he says this, verse 18 of chapter 11, you shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. Listen, you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in rarely try to use this stage to try to say like, hey, you need to do this. But this is an instance where Scripture gives me a foundation to say, parents, your children's spiritual health is your responsibility. Your children's discipleship is your responsibility. God set up His culture, He set up His people, and He decided it is your responsibility. God set up his culture, he set up his people, and he decided it is your responsibility to teach your kids God's word. The temptation is to say, well, I'm gonna join a good church, and the good church is gonna teach them God's word. And that's true, but here's the thing. If your kid comes to everything we offer, everything, some are extreme and they never miss a week, ever. We get them 58 weeks a year. There are 58 hours a year. 58 hours a year. That's what we have to impact your children. The best programs in the world aren't going to make a big, huge dent. 58 hours a year. If your kid is in middle school or high school, it's even less than that. We are here not to fulfill Deuteronomy 11 for you, but to echo what is happening in your home. Parents, it is our responsibility to train our kids to follow God. It is our responsibility to disciple our kids. It is our responsibility to teach them a word. And listen to me, listen. I'm sorry that this is gruff. It's not optional. We don't get to say, oh gosh, you know, that sounds like something I should do, but I just don't know God's word well enough. Listen, I'm sorry. Then figure it out. Learn it, knuckle down. We've got to. It's our responsibility. No one else can fill that void for you. If you feel inadequate to it, guess what? So does everybody else in the room, including me, but we gotta figure it out because it's on us. And I'd rather just know the truth than try to soft pedal it and make us all feel better. Listen, parents, it's our responsibility to train our kids in the word. Dads, your sons are watching you. They're watching you to learn what it is to be a godly man. They're watching you what it is to love people well. Like it or not, step into that or not, assign yourself as a role model or not, to have kids is to sign up for that. They're watching you at every stage of your life. Moms, your daughters are looking at you. They want to know what godly womanhood looks like. And they're watching you to define it for themselves. That's reality of being parents. So for grace, I want us to step into that responsibility, not shy away from it, and definitely don't say, gosh, I just don't feel adequate to it. Listen, nobody here does, but that doesn't mean that we can step away from it or shy away from it. We do our children a disservice by not stepping into that. If we want to teach our children the word, then we have to learn the word. If we want to teach our children how to follow God, then we have to follow God. If we want to teach our children how to walk in the identity that God has created for them, then we have to walk in the identity that God has created for us. That's why I say we consistently prepare, because it's a daily, hourly effort to follow God and to model that for our children. So that's what we do. And the good news is, if you're sitting here going, geez, Nate, I don't know how to do that, there's a parenting small group. We're starting it up. Harris and Aaron Winston have perfect children and made no mistakes, so we thought that they were the best ones to do it. They're the good ones to do it because when I asked both of them to think about leading something like that, both of them went like, why? We don't know what we're doing. I'm like, you're perfect then. You're perfect. Figure it out together. You can sign up for that. It's going to be Sunday afternoons. If you're in the middle of parenthood and want some help and some other people around you to help figure this out and step into the responsibility you have, that's a good way to start. We consistently prepare. And then the second foundation, I think, of biblical parenting is that we continually release. We continually release. I say continually because that release isn't just one moment. As we walk through those stories in Scripture, Abraham and Isaac, he released him to that sacrifice. Moses' mom released him. Hannah released Samuel. It's not just one moment, though. We're building towards a moment of release when we admit I have no control over this life anymore. But it's also a continual release. In every instant and in every way, at every crossroads in their life, what we're asking is, Father, how do I prepare this kid for your plan? How do I release them to what you want, not what I want? I even think about moments of discipline. I've already learned as a parent that when it comes time to discipline, when your kid is acting in ways that are shameful, I haven't seen Lily do this, but I've definitely noticed with other people's kids, that the temptation, the temptation is to begin to discipline them in such a way that doesn't embarrass you. The temptation is to grab them and to get onto them and to tell them things that you need to act in this way. And really what's going on in your heart is because when you don't act in this way, it causes me shame and I feel like a terrible parent. So I really need you to get right so that I'm not embarrassed in front of my friends. That's one reason to discipline. Another reason to discipline is, this is what I think is going to be best for you. But the best reason to discipline is to say, God, when they act that way, I see this trait in them. And I believe that it's possible that you may have instilled that trait in them because one day it's going to be a great strength. How do I fashion that strength so that they can walk in the identity that you've created for them? How do I discipline them according to your plan, not my plan? How do I advise them to go to college according to your plan, not my plan? How do I advise them to invest their high school hours according to your plan, not my plan? God, when they're old enough to pursue a career, how do I encourage them to follow your plan, not my plan? God, when they're old enough to have kids and they begin to lead their family, what can I do to pray for them and rally around them so that they follow your plan for their family, not my plan? It is a continual, perpetual release where we acknowledge these children are not our own. They are from God and we are stewards of them. So I believe if we want to follow the biblical model of parenthood, we have to consistently prepare and continually release. Because that's such a challenge, because those feel like high bars, I thought it would be helpful for us to have a prayer together. So I'm going to put a prayer on the screen. I would encourage you to write it down. I would encourage you to pray this weekly, if not daily, for yourself as you pray for your kids. But the parent's prayer simply goes like this. Father, give me the faith to see your plan for my child, the consistency to prepare them, and the courage to release them. Father, give me the faith to see your plan. Help me know. We see for our kids the next couple of days, God sees the next several decades. God, help me see a glimpse of your plan so I know I can keep them on the right track. God, give me the consistency in my own walk, in my own character, in my own discipline, in my own pursuit to be the model that they need. And give me the courage when it comes time, Father, to release them to your plan, not my own plan. Father, give me the faith to see your plan for my child, the consistency to prepare them and the courage to release them. I'm going to pray for us. I'm going to pray that prayer, and then we're going to transition into a time of communion. Father, we love you. We thank you for the gifts that you give us and our children. God, I pray specifically for those in this room who really want kids. Will you just give them some? Will you just let them experience that part of what it is to be a human? Bless them in that way, God. God, for those of us who do have the privilege of being parents, give us the faith to see your plan for them. Give us a consistency in our walk and in our devotion to prepare them for your plan. Give us the courage, Father, to release them when it comes time. Help us raise kids that are good, successful, and happy according to your definition of those things. In Jesus' name, amen.