Sermons tagged with Adoption

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.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

It's good to see all of you this Sunday. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I appreciate you being here on this December Sunday as we continue to gear up for Christmas together. I'm really excited about what we have in store for you, not only for Jingle Jam, but also for our Christmas Eve service. This is our series called Joy. Kyle, our student pastor, opened up the series talking about the joy of the light, of knowing Jesus and of sharing that light with others. Last week, I talked with you about the joy of forgiveness, and I really hope, my sincere prayer is and was, that God used that to bring about maybe some reconciliation in your life and in some of your relationships. I hope that you found that to be a helpful way to think about forgiveness. This morning, I want to talk about the joy of gratitude, the joy that we get when we can be people who are thankful, who are grateful people. The Bible has a lot to say about gratitude in the same way that it has a lot to say about forgiveness as it encourages us to forgive over and over and over again. The Bible encourages us to be grateful many, many times in many ways in many different places. In the Old Testament, David tells us that we are to enter God's courts with thanksgiving in our hearts, that we enter his gates with praise. And so it's kind of gratitude is the posture through which we approach the Lord. In the New Testament, we're told over and over again to be thankful in all things, be thankful always, pray without ceasing, and be grateful for everything. Everyone tells us that. As Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord's Prayer, He models for us a daily gratitude, thanking God for the blessings that we have in our life. We're even told by at least three different authors in the New Testament to be grateful when life is hard, to be grateful when we are in struggles, to consider it pure joy when we endure trials. So the Bible has a lot to say about gratitude. And I think it's because gratitude is one of the more underrated things or character traits that we could have. Fostering a spirit or a heart or a character of gratitude, I think, is something that we forget to do, but it's underrated in its power and efficacy in our life. And I hope today, as we leave, as you guys go back out into your week, that you have a new appreciation for what it means to be grateful and to have a grateful heart. To do that, I want to first talk about a picture of ingratitude, what the opposite of gratitude looks like. So last week I was doing my weekly Sunday tradition, particularly in the fall, which is to kind of go home and collapse. My whole week, the rhythms of a pastor kind of build up to the sermon. You're stressed about the sermon all day. I hope it doesn't suck and that people aren't disappointed who brought their friends and the whole deal. And I hope this honors God. And I hope that I'm not an apostate and the whole deal. And so you just kind of, you focus on the sermon all week and then I give it and I go home and I'm like, ugh. And I just kind of want to shut down for a while. And so in the fall, it's perfect because I get to watch TV. And so last week I'm watching football and the four o'clock game comes on. It's the Chiefs and the Patriots. And something incredibly interesting happened at halftime of this Patriots game. Now, for those who don't know, you may not know who the Patriots are. You may not be, that's football, by the way. You may not be into football, and that's all right. You don't have to know football to appreciate what I'm about to say. I'm going to kind of lay some groundwork for you, all right? So for those who don't know, the Patriots have had what I think is the best 20-year run of any sports team in the history of sports teams. I'm not talking about the best 20-year run in the last 20 years. I'm talking about besides maybe the 1920s Yankees have had the best 20-year run of any team in the history of teams. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely historic. I went back and counted. In the last 20 years, the Patriots have made it to the Super Bowl nine times. They've played in almost half of the Super Bowls. The other years, they came almost just one game short almost every year. To be a Patriots fan is to over and over and over again get to cheer for a winner. It's an incredible privilege to be a Patriots fan. I know this because I'm a Falcons fan. Okay? It is not a privilege to be a Falcons fan. I'm from Atlanta, and statistically speaking, if you combine all of the seasons without a championship, so you take in Atlanta at one point, that was four seasons in one year, hockey, baseball, basketball, and football going consecutively without a championship. Atlanta is the losingest city in the country. And that's statistics. That's not hyperbole. I have longed to be a Patriots fan. I wish that I could celebrate that sort of success. During those 20 years, they've been to nine Super Bowls. They've won six of them. There's only one other franchise that's won six Super Bowls, and they would even trade their last 20 years for the Patriots' last 20 years. They have the best coach to ever coach a sport. They have the best quarterback to ever play the game, and that pains me to say because Peyton Manning's my favorite football player of all time, but Tom Brady, man, you can't argue with rings. To be a Patriots fan has been an incredible privilege for the past 20 years. Yet, on Sunday, the Patriots are playing, playing the Chiefs, and the Patriots this year are having a good season, not a great season. There's some rumblings in their fan base that they may not be as good as they once were. It's looking like they may not win the Super Bowl this year. And at halftime, the Patriots are running into the locker room down two scores, 21 to seven. And as they're running into the locker room at Gillette Stadium, do you know what those Patriots fans did? Booed. They booed them. Can you believe this? After one bad half of football, and it wasn't even that bad, they booed them. They let them know loudly and clearly, you stink and we're dissatisfied and we deserve more from you. And I sat on my couch in shocked disbelief and I thought, and I'm sorry, you bunch of entitled jerks. Do you have any idea what I would do for the last 20 years that you've just gotten to enjoy as Patriots fan? If you're a 10-year-old Patriots fan, you just figure that they win the Super Bowl. That's just what happens. It's your birthright. Do you know what I would do to trade places with you? Try being a Falcons fan for like a season, you jerks. Like, it made me mad. They were so entitled. And as I thought about that, and listen, we have some Patriots fans at the church. They're lovely people. Steve, our worship pastor, he's kind of a Patriots fan. He's not really a sports guy, but if he were, he claims to be a Patriots. From everything I can tell, he seems to be a great guy. And so I'm not trying to run down all Patriots fans, but the ones in that stadium that day, my goodness, the entitlement on them. And I sat on my couch and I was kind of stewing and calling the names in my head and couldn't get over the audacity of it, texting my friends, did y'all see that? But of course, as I sat there, anytime you cast blame on somebody else, my mind begins to go, well, am I guilty of the same thing? And I realized we all are. We're all of us in that way, this pains me to say, we're all in that way Patriots fans. We all act like that because they were simply entitled. And to be entitled is to be forgetful of the past and desirous of the future. To be entitled is to forget everything that got us here, is to forget all the blessings and all the things I've enjoyed up to this moment, and then to not be aware or cognizant in this moment and just desire us of the future. And isn't that what they were? As they're in the stands and they're watching this one singular bad half of football, totally forgetting the last 20 years that they've had, that they've gotten to enjoy being a fan like nobody else on the face of the planet. In that moment that they booed and expressed their displeasure, aren't they simply forgetting all the things that they've enjoyed up to that point and only thinking about what they want in the future? Haven't they forgotten their past and become desirous of the future? And isn't this what we do? Haven't in our lives, all of us, at different points, been entitled jerks? If you don't think you have, look at your kids at Christmas. Come on, your kids expect stuff, right? They're not like hoping that maybe they get a present. They gave you a list in September. My three-year-old already has this figured out. Everything she saw over the course of the list, can you make sure and tell Santa that that's a thing that I want? Our kids grow up entitled. Entitlement says, I deserve this. It's my birthright. This is something that I've earned. You should give it to me. I don't have to be grateful for it because I deserve this anyways. That's what entitlement is. If our kids aren't enough to help us realize that this is a path that we are all on, how long does it take you and your life right now to get tired of the new shiny thing? How many weeks or months after that promotion, you finally get the job, you finally get the promotion, you finally get the thing, you get the position that you wanted, you've closed the sale that you've wanted, you're so happy about it, praise God, this is great. How many weeks does it take you to resent those coworkers too? How long does it take you to think, I wonder what's next? How long does it take you to forget what got you there and be desirous of what's ahead? How long does it take for the new car to become the one that you want to sell? How long does it take after we buy a new house to put the Zillow app back on our phone and just see what's out there? How about this? How long did it take you after you got married and all the happiness and all the pomp and circumstance around that day to have an evening where you looked across the living room and you thought to yourself, I could have done better than this. For Jen, it was about three days. How long does it take us to be dissatisfied with the blessings that we have, to forget our past, to be totally lost to the present and be desirous of the future and in our own way be booing our life because of a simple bad half? To be shaking our fist at God and saying, God, why do I have to deal with this? Why do I have to go through this? Why can't I have that thing with no mind at all to everything that he's already given us? How long does it take us to become entitled? And the problem with entitlement is it's the antithesis of gratitude. If the Bible tells us to be grateful, to be thankful, to give thanks in all things and at all times and in all circumstances, if that's a characteristic that we're supposed to embody, then we should acknowledge that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. It's the exact opposite of gratitude. And we should also acknowledge that there is a natural drift towards it. You haven't all been entitled jerks because just in your soul you're a bunch of jerks and we're a bunch of brats. It's all us. We're all that way. Gratitude is something you have to choose on purpose. We don't naturally drift towards gratitude. We naturally drift towards, I deserve, I earn, this belongs to me. We naturally drift towards being forgetful of our past and desirous of what's in the future with no mind to what's going on in the present. That's a natural drift that we have. I don't think, and I'm not here this morning so that anybody feels badly about it. I'm just here so that we will acknowledge it and understand that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. Because entitlement says, I deserve this. And gratitude actually confesses something. I learned this in my research from an Irish monk, and I thought it was a good way to think about gratitude. Gratitude is a confession. To be grateful for something confesses that this is a gift that I do not deserve. Gratitude says, this thing that I have in my life, this person, this relationship, this material possession, this house, this opportunity, this skill set, this location in time and in space and in geography, all the things in my life, gratitude acknowledges this is a gift that I do not deserve. To go back to our original illustration, those Patriots fans have not done anything to win those Super Bowls. Nothing. They've not done anything that any other fan base hasn't done. They just have the luxury of being born in New England and getting to cheer for Patriots. And good for them. But it's a gift that they got that they did not deserve. Being a Falcons fan is a punishment that I've received that I do not deserve. God and I are still working that out. But to be truly grateful for something is to confess, this is a gift that I've received that I do not deserve. If you feel like you deserve it, if you feel like you've earned it, then you can't be grateful for the thing. If you're a salesperson and you go out and you slay the dragon and you get the big commission check that comes from slaying the dragon, you don't walk into your boss's office and go, thank you so much for this check. This is such a sweet thing for you to do. No, it was negotiated. You earned that. You deserve that. The gratitude comes in when we reflect on the skills and abilities that got that deal done, and we thank God for blessing us with those. But gratitude has to confess that the thing that I'm grateful for is a gift that I do not deserve. The other thing that gratitude does that I think is so very powerful is it anchors us in the present as we remember the past. Gratitude anchors us in the present as we remember the past. We're not fast-forwarding ahead. We're not looking to the next thing. We're not anxious or desirous about the future. We haven't forgotten the past. We're reflective on the past, the moments that conspired to bring us here. We're anchored in the present, and we remember the past. The best example of this I've seen that I think of often is, I call him my Uncle Edwin. He's really Jen's Uncle Edwin. Jen's dad, John, has a twin sister named Mary. She married a guy named Edwin, and they live in Dothan, Alabama. If you didn't follow that, Jen's aunt and uncle live in Alabama. And every Thanksgiving, we go down to Dothan, Alabama, and we have Thanksgiving with the Morrises. Jen's family, the Vincennes, go down with the Morrises, and we get together and we have Thanksgiving. And Edwin and Mary have three daughters that are about our age, and they have kids now too, and it's just a really great, sweet time. It's one of the great gifts in my life to have been grafted into that family. I'm very grateful for that. And when we go to Thanksgiving, we have the meal. It's a big, good meal. It's one of the best ones I have of the year. There's still an adult table and a kid's table. The parents sit at one table, and the average age of the kid's table now is like 36, but it's still the kid's table. And we have way more fun at the kid's table. There's always much more laughter going on as we swap stories and catch up and reflect on old ones and things like that. And at one point or another, I've caught Edwin doing this several times. He comes into, he leaves the adult table to have his cup of coffee or a camera or dessert or something, and he'll stand off in the corner. He's not trying to be noticed. He's not trying to speak. He's not trying to get anyone's attention. And he'll look at what's happening in his kitchen, And he'll just grin from ear to ear. And sometimes I'll watch him kind of wipe away a tear. And I've never spoken with him about those moments. But I know that Edwin is a man that loves God very much. And I'm certain that in those moments, he's standing there and he's just soaking in what he considers to be one of the great blessings in his life, of the family that he has. He's anchored in the present and he's thankful for the past. And in that moment, he's grateful, acknowledging this family is a gift that I did not earn. And it's tempting to jump ahead. It's tempting to be desirous of the future. It's tempting to be anxious about what could happen. And there's different times and different seasons of life with the Morrises that he could have jumped ahead. During one of those Thanksgivings, he had a daughter that was going to vet school who dropped out to go to art school, which no parent wants to hear. Now, fast forward that, and it worked out really well for her. Another time, he had a daughter who was dating a guy that he was actively praying against every day. Not in a funny way, even though it is funny, but in a very serious, concerned dad kind of way. And God answered those prayers too. But in that moment, when he's standing there, grinning from ear to ear, grateful for what's going on in front of him, he's not anxious about the future. He hasn't forgotten the moments that have got him there. He's anchored in the present, and he's grateful for God's gifts. But more than those things, more than humbling us so that we acknowledge that things in our life are gifts, more than simply anchoring us in the present and helping us reflect on and be grateful for the past, I think there's something far more powerful that gratitude does. And I think we see that in a story tucked away in one of the gospels, in Luke chapter 17. If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 17. I'm going to start in verse 11, and verses 16 through 19 will be up here on the screen. I want to read it for you. On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by 10 leopards, talking about Jesus, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Okay. So I want to say something very, very clear right here. He's going through Samaria. There's racial tension going on. The racial tension going on there. There's a whole separate set of issues that we could talk about. But there's 10 lepers. And in the ancient world, leprosy was the death knell. It was the death knell. It was the worst possible disease that you could get. It was the worst possible diagnosis that you can receive. If you received leprosy, it was contagious, so you were ostracized. You had to go live in a colony with a bunch of other depressed people who were losing their skin and their limbs and their digits all at once and just marching towards death together. It was a really, really difficult diagnosis. And so there's 10 lepers, and they cry out to Jesus. And look what they cry. They say, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So what do all 10 of them already know? That's Jesus. He's the Son of God and he has the power to heal us, right? They already are acknowledging that that's Jesus and we believe he's the Son of God. They've admitted that. Then Jesus answered, were not 10 cleansed? Where's everybody else? Didn't I heal 10 of you? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at this, this is so powerful. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Let's not miss what's happening in this story as we reflect on gratitude together. These 10 lepers looked at him and they said, Jesus, Master, we believe in you. We believe that you are who you say you are. We believe that you have the power to heal. Will you please heal us? He says, yeah, go and show yourself to the priest and you'll be healed. And so they run off to go to the priest and on their way, they are healed. And as they are healed, we can only assume. Now, we don't know. There's not a lot of details. This is conjecture. But something happened in the minds of nine of them that they didn't think it was important to go back and thank Jesus for what he did. I like to think that their minds immediately became desirous of the future. They became desirous about who they were going to tell and what they were going to do and who they were going to see and all the next things that they wanted to do in light of this healing. Maybe in their head, they went, gosh, that Jesus is a great guy. And they went on and they did their thing. But what they didn't do is express gratitude. What they acted like was that they were entitled, was that they somehow deserved that healing. Jesus is the Savior of the world. He's the Son of God. He has the power to heal. He sees us. He should heal me. He owes this to me. That's what God does. God heals, so heal me. Thanks, great, and then they move on. Only one of them was so moved by his experience with Jesus that he went back to him and he said, thank you. Thank you for healing me. And in that moment, we see gratitude. We see an acknowledgement. This gift of healing is a gift that you gave me that I did not deserve. Thank you. And Jesus' response is fascinating to me. After he notes what the others did, he said, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you well. That dude just got saved. You understand that? We call it getting saved when someone is returned to harmony with God. Our souls were created to be in harmony with our creator God. They were designed to be in union with him. Our sin breaks that union. It is forever broken. There is no way to restore us into that union. So God sent his son to die on a cross so that we wouldn't have to, so that by placing our faith in him, we can be restored into union with our creator God. Your soul longs and clamors and claws for harmony with your creator God. That's what it does. If you're here this morning and there is an unease in your soul, if you're not a believer yet, but there is something that you just can't seem to wrap your mind around, if you've clawed for happiness in your life and then gotten there and found that it was empty, it's because your soul was designed to claw for harmony with our Creator God. And Jesus restored the soul of that leper. Gave him what his soul really longs for. And why did he do it? Because the leper was grateful. Don't you see? It wasn't enough to just go, hey, you're Jesus and you can heal me if you want to. Thanks, see you later. No, the leper came back and was grateful. Thank you for what you've done. And Jesus says, your faith, he doesn't say gratitude. He says faith because the faith is implicit in the gratitude. To be truly grateful, you have to admit, you've done something that I couldn't do for myself. Thank you, Jesus. Your faith has made you well. I'm worried as I read this story that we don't understand that gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God. Gratitude is the gateway to harmony with God. Don't you see that these nine lepers did what so many of us do, particularly in the South, just give mental assent, acknowledge, you're Jesus, you're the Son of God, and if you want to, you can do these things for me, but it never goes beyond that. They had the beginnings of faith, but they weren't truly grateful for who Jesus was and what he did. And because of that, they never received the actual blessing that Jesus came to give them. He didn't go through Samaria that day to heal people of leprosy. If he did, we would have seen him healing a lot more people. He walked through Samaria that day to bring some souls back into harmony with God. He walked into Samaria that day to save people. And the only one that got saved was the one that expressed gratitude for what he did. And I worry about how many of us can sometimes be like the lepers. And once we receive the blessing from God, once we receive the taste of Jesus, once we receive a little bit of the blessing, we go, thanks, that's good. And we don't stick around for the true blessing that God has for us because we're entitled. I don't want us to miss the power of gratitude. This guy didn't have to pray the sinner's prayer. He didn't have to have everything figured out. He didn't have to understand the ins and outs of the New Testament. He was from the priest that Jesus sent him to go see wasn't even a Jewish priest. It was a hybrid religion. He didn't even understand what it meant to have faith or to be a believer. He was simply grateful to Jesus for what he did. And to Jesus, that was enough. Your faith has made you well. We cannot miss the power of gratitude. It's a gateway to harmony with God. And I really think that what happens when we're grateful is that all paths lead to God. I think gratitude always leads to God, which in turn always leads to joy. I think gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God, is a guaranteed pathway to joy. That if we can begin to express gratitude in our lives for anything at all, that what that will ultimately bring us to is gratitude. It doesn't take me very long to do that in my life. If I look at the things I'm grateful for in my life, I look at Jen and I look at Lily. It doesn't take me very long to end up thanking God for those things and to find joy and harmony with God. If you look at the things in your life, it doesn't take you very long to think of the things that you're grateful for and find a path that leads us back to God. I think it actually kind of works like this. As I was thinking about it this week, I thought of this map that I remember seeing online. If we can put it up there. This is a map of all of the streams and rivers in the United States and how they all lead to the ocean. Every last one of them. You can pick any tendril that you want to and at one point or another, it's going to end up in the ocean. A brook is going to lead to a stream, is going to lead to a creek, is going to lead to a river, is going to lead to a bigger river, is going to lead to a basin, is going to lead to an ocean. And I think that gratitude works the same way. Even if you think about the things in your life that you think you've done, the accomplishments that you think you've made, the businesses that you think you've built, the children that you think you've raised, who gave you the gifts and abilities to do those things? Who decided in his sovereignty that you were going to be born in the United States in a first world and even have the opportunity to exercise those gifts? Who decided that you weren't going to be born in the slums of Delhi and instead were going to be born here? God did. Our very gifts, our very location, our friends, all of our blessings are a result of God's goodness in our life. That's why I think that all gratitude is simply a path that leads us back to God, that leads us to joy. That's why I think that the Bible tells us over and over again to be grateful in all things, even in the hard things. I think that even if Christmas is difficult, because for some of us, Christmas is a reminder of loss. If we want to find a path to gratitude, even in the midst of a Christmas that reminds us of loss in our life, that loss hurts so much because there were times that were so sweet. And we become grateful for those times. And we see God working in them. And it serves as a pathway that ultimately leads us back to God where our souls will find harmony with Him and we will find joy. Gratitude is incredibly powerful because it is a gateway to harmony with our creator. All paths of gratitude lead to him. And I am convinced that once we are in harmony with our God, once we are grateful to him, all those pathways lead to joy. So let's go and let's be grateful together. Let's be anchored in the present, remembering the past, and be grateful to our God for the things that He has done in our lives. Let's pray. Father, we love You. We truly are grateful to You. We're grateful for the memories that we have. We're grateful for the scars that we bear and the lessons that we learned as a result of those instances. God, we're thankful for all the different blessings that you've placed in our life, for the relationships, for the possessions that bring us joy, for the places that make us feel safe or cozy or happy. God, we're so grateful for all of those. We're thankful for the means to earn those things, to make the sale, to close the deal, to figure out the account. We're grateful for the discipline to go to work and to learn more and to sharpen our sword. We're grateful that you built us all with our gifts that allow us to go out and serve you and enjoy the blessings that you've given us. God, may we actively fight against entitlement. May we be people who acknowledge every day that the things in our life are gifts from you that we have not earned and acknowledge that in your goodness, you've given them to us anyways. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

All right. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning to all of you. I'm so glad to be here. And as Nate said, I've just gotten to know Nate over the last few months. We did a funeral together. A member of our congregation, my old congregation, had passed away. His daughter was very involved in the youth ministry here. And so that's how Nate and I got to know each other. And just an interesting note, I was a pastor of an Anglican church. And in Anglican churches, oftentimes the senior pastor is called the rector. So I met Nate. I'm like, man, I think you're in the wrong outfit. But anyway, it's really been a pleasure to meet him. And it's really been a thrill because I don't know if you know, Church of the Apostles used to be located on Sumner Boulevard right next to Grace Community. And so over the years, I got to know a little bit about Grace Community and I learned some of the great ways that God has used you all as a church, but I also know that you've been through some heartaches in the last several years. And so I was thrilled to find out that you had a new pastor and a new rector. And what I was even more thrilled about is that I can tell he really loves you guys. He prays for you. He's delighted in you. He loves the gospel and he loves sharing the gospel with you. And I want to encourage you as his people to encourage him, you know, to let him know how much his ministry means to you, not just in the hard times, because he will minister to you in the hard times, but when you're experiencing good things, when you're learning things from him, let him know. I can't tell you how much that encourages a pastor's heart. The second thing before I start, I want to commend you because I know that a number of you also were in Grace Community through those hard years when there was a lot of transition and you weren't sure what was going to be happening. And I bless you for your faithfulness in that time. The Lord is blessing you and he's bringing great fruit to your ministry. And I'm just so glad to be part of it today. So I wanna join you in prayer now and thank God for all these things. Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for your grace in our lives. We're so grateful for your promise that through Jesus, your son, and the power of your Holy Spirit, you are here right now. You are affecting the words that will be preached and the words that will be meditated on and the word read and the word spoken. That it might be a living word that gets into our hearts and our minds and that it changes us, Lord, that it shapes us for your purposes and for your glory in the world. We offer you ourselves now, Lord, for that. We ask humbly that you would do that, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts would be pleasing and. Ephesians has six chapters, and it's a huge task because literally every chapter you could probably preach about 10 sermons out of. So I'm going to do my best to preach 10 sermons to you today out of Ephesians 1. No, I'm going to focus in really on one specific word, and I'll use it to take us through Ephesians 1. So if you want to turn to Ephesians, there's Bibles in the seats in front of you. I'm going to be reading out of the NIV here. And I want to focus in on this word blessing that Paul talks about, this word blessing. How many of you feel blessed today? Yeah. What does that mean? Have you ever wondered about that? When you ask somebody, how you doing? And they say, oh, I'm blessed. I'm blessed. What are they talking about? You know, so often what we're talking about, what I'm talking about when I say blessed is things are going right in my life. There's material blessings. I can look around and say, man, I've got a wife. I've got two wonderful girls. I've got grandchildren. And by the way, have you ever heard the saying that if I'd have known how much fun it was to have grandkids, I would have had them first. Absolutely true. But you know what blessings they are. People say, I'm blessed because I have a good home. I've got a good job. I'm driving a Maserati. I'm not driving a Maserati, but you know, I mean, people look at the material things in their lives and they say, I'm blessed to the extent that they have them in abundance. And when they lack them, they seem to lack a sense of blessing. Now, this is not bad. In fact, in the Old Testament, the majority of the blessings have to do with material blessings. When it says the Lord bless you and keep you and the Lord be gracious unto you, graciousness is spelled out in the Old Testament by saying, may the Lord increase your flocks, your grain and your new wine. May the Lord increase the abundance of your tribe, your children, and your grandchildren. God speaks very unashamedly about pouring out material blessings on his people. But when we get to Ephesians, Paul speaks of spiritual blessings. And so the question comes, well, what is that? What would it be for us to be a people who, when we answer the question, how are you, can say I'm blessed, not just because of the material things in our lives and not feel a lack of blessing if those material things aren't there, but actually to say, I'm blessed because of the spiritual blessings in our lives. That's what Paul wants to get at right from the start with the Ephesians. In fact, the first three chapters of Ephesians is written in the form of a Jewish blessing, a berakah. So Paul is really intent on them understanding this. And I think it'll be great if we can come away understanding it at least a little deeper today. So let me start with the first few verses. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God to God's holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. I love that. I've always loved that passage. that notion that every spiritual blessing in Christ is mine. But if you'd ask me, what are those spiritual blessings? I said, well, I'm not really sure. You know, joy, peace, love, all those kind of things. But Paul actually spells it out in this hymn of praise, in this song of blessing. And so what I want to do is look at several of those blessings with you. The first is this. It says in verse 4, For he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, God had you in mind. God had always planned for you to be here today. God had always planned for you to name the name of Jesus as his daughter or his son from the foundation of the world. This is incredible spiritual blessing and resource. If you've ever felt rejected, if you ever walked into your home and shut your door and just wanted to bury your head underneath your pillow, and then you looked up at the doorframe of your room and there above the door was written these words, if you could imagine, chosen before the foundation of the world. That's who you are. That's the spiritual blessing that is yours. Chosen. That's a big deal. Have you ever talked to somebody who's been adopted? And anybody in here been adopted? Or has adopted? Have any of you adopted kids? It's a fantastic and wonderful thing. But invariably, if you have been adopted or you have adopted children, at some point, somebody comes up to you and says this insensitive thing. They say to you, but who are your real parents? You know, or if you've adopted someone, they say, oh, you're his adoptive mom, but who's his real mom? Which the answer is, please come a little closer so I can smack you. Now, the answer is, please come a little closer so I can smack you. Now the answer is, I'm her real mom. I'm his real dad. Those are my real parents. They chose me. They spend their lives for me. It was costly for them to change their lives to welcome me in. I've been bought with a price. You hear the echoes of the gospel? It was costly for God to choose you. And yet he did it. And the spiritual blessings go on. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. Holy and blameless. What a spiritual blessing that is, that you are declared and in God's sight, actually holy and blameless. How many times in your life have you been in conflict with people, a spouse or a boss or a coach or somebody in your life or a peer, and they're assigning blame to you for something. And perhaps some of that blame is real and you can own it, but some of it is unjustified and false. And you argue and you go back and forth with him. That doesn't happen with God. You are holy and blameless in his sight. You don't come to him and his throne and stand before him and he begins to list out all the ways he's disappointed in you, all the ways that you have screwed up and messed up. No, he says, come here, my beloved. You just look perfect today. How our souls need that. That spiritual blessing is ours. And still it goes on. For it says, for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will, in love and pleasure, in love and pleasure. Too often we think about God as if he has to do these things, right? Because he's God, he's got to have a system and the world has to operate a certain way and good people need to get their blessings and bad people need to get their curses and all that stuff. But no, the scriptures say that he acts out of love and pleasure. God actually enjoys you. He enjoys his work and what he does. He enjoys us. Pleasure is a big deal. It's a big deal to me. I imagine it's a big deal to you as well. One of the ways it's a big deal to me is I'm a foodie, right? I love like gourmet food. I love great desserts. I love ice cream. And I receive a lot of pleasure in those settings. But I found out several months ago that I had intolerances to wheat, to gluten, and to dairy. I was like, that's pizza. I mean, that's horrible, you know? And it was affecting the ice cream intake and all that. And one day I discovered that Ben and Jerry's has a gluten-free, dairy-free option in Cherry Garcia. I've been eating it like every night. It's awesome. I take great pleasure in it. God, even more, makes such great pleasure and delight in his children, in exercising his will in our lives, in drawing us to him, in teaching us, in filling us filling us and empowering us and pouring out his spirit. God is a being who loves to experience that great pleasure. And it is a great spiritual blessing to us to be on the receiving end of it. And he does this all, it says in verse 6, to the praise of his glorious grace. Would you say that with me? Ready? To the praise of his glorious grace. Now, what does that mean? To the praise of his glorious grace. You know, the reformers kind of put it this way. They say that God is the creator of all things. And we as a people tend to want to praise things. If we see something excellent or admirable, we praise it. If we see an athlete that's above the other athletes, we praise him. If we see an artist who produces fantastic works of art, we praise them. When we see somebody in the zone, in business or whatever it might be, we praise them. And the reformers say, it is God who made each and every one of them. It is God who empowered each and every one of them. Therefore, he is the one, the source of all that is beautiful, all that is excellent, all that is praiseworthy, and deserves and demands that praise. But it's good for us to give that praise. John Piper puts it this way. The glory of God is what we were made to see and enjoy for all eternity. Nothing else will satisfy our souls. Therefore, if God does not exalt himself for us to admire and enjoy, then he is unloving. That is, he does not give us what we need. And that's really good. I wouldn't argue with John Piper. But I'm something of an artist myself, you know, and I like to think of things from that perspective on the other side of the brain. And I started thinking, what does this look like, this blessing of praise and of giving praise? What's it look like in our lives? Have you ever been part of a standing ovation? I mean, if you've been to a high school play, you've been part of a standing ovation. And the reason is, is because the person's parents are there in the audience and their friends are in the audience. So they all like spontaneous because they're cheering on their friend. And so you stand up and you cheer. But if you've ever been part of an ovation where you don't know the actors or the musicians who are up on that stage, but they perform so fantastically and so beautifully and so powerfully that you don't even think about it. Before you know it, you're standing on your feet, you're applauding, and you know what's going on in that moment? You're in it. You are not a spectator. You are a participant. That's what it is to live for the praise of his glorious grace. It's to be in the moment with God, praising him for how awesome he is, for the sunset and the power of the thunderstorm and for the music and the wonder and the glory of life. That's what he has for you. And what a spiritual blessing that is. If we can just access it, if we can just be in it, be part of the ovation of God. And the blessings go on. To the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the one go on. Now here we get to one of the blessings that probably we would have come up with if we'd have just thought, I'm forgiven. I am forgiven. This is a little bit different than the holy and blameless blessing. Because the word that Paul uses here is not the typical word. The Greek word hamartia refers to the condition of sin for which we have been declared absolutely cleansed, holy, and blameless in God's sight. But the word that Paul uses here is the word paraptoma, which is about the plethora of sins, the acts, the sinful acts that John tells us that we continue to commit as Christians, right? He says, if any of you says I'm without sin, he's a liar and the truth is not within him. And what Paul is telling us here is that we have this ongoing, continuous forgiveness of sins given to us by God, lavished on us through Jesus Christ. But it's more than just a forgiveness. It's a redemption. It's a buying back. It's a changing of our very character and nature. James, in his epistle, writes, confess your sins one to another, that you may be forgiven, that you may be healed. That literally, when we take our habitual sins to the Lord, say, forgive me, forgive me, Lord. He not only forgives you and wipes it away, he transforms you. He begins to heal you and change you and shape you to give you a greater love for that which is good and a greater disdain for that which pulls you away from God's absolute best for you. That's an incredible, incredible spiritual blessing that is ours in Jesus Christ. I want to share one more. These are certainly not the only spiritual blessings, but one more. It says, That last spiritual blessing is that you and I would have knowledge of Him and of his plans for us. We had knowledge of him and of his purpose for our lives. In the Anglican church, most Anglican churches have communion almost every Sunday. And communion is best understood as a mystery. not in the sense that you don't know what's going on, but in the sense that you have been invited into something that apart from the grace of God, you could never comprehend. So when we come to the communion table, where the body and the blood of Christ is held out for us, where we enter into the very life of Jesus, who said, if you eat my body and drink my blood, you have a part in me. He's not talking about some kind of gross, you know, literal, physical thing. What he's talking about is spiritually, when we come to communion, we are inwardly reminded to the depths of our being that we belong, that we are his, that he knows us, and we know him. That our lives matter. That they have meaning and purpose. What a blessing. What a blessing to be known in that way. How do you access all of that? That's the big question, right? How do you make it yours for sure? Now, probably many are tempted to say, well, you know, you're a pastor and it's pastor's job to kind of be intimate with this stuff, to know it and to dwell on it. And that's true. And it actually is one of the blessings of being a pastor. But several months ago, I resigned from being pastor. And, you know, kind of held on to God through that. But as that holding on and holding on and holding on wore off, I began to start looking at, all right, Lord, what's next? And that's a hard place to be in, to not know. You have to say, Lord, what would you have me do? Where would you have me go? How am I going to, in the future, provide material blessings for my wife, for my family? And so I've experienced, I think, what many of us experience is those anxieties about those things. And during this time, I would love to say I have just been just the picture of what a Christian ought to be. But it's not true. Times I have been anxious and impatient and short with my wife and lacking faith and all those things. But what I have found is that when I sit back down and take a deep breath and begin to rehearse the blessings I have in Christ, who I am, who he is, the kind of provider he is, the opportunity to trust him, to know him, that he then transforms my attitude toward the material world, toward possessions, toward situations, toward all those things. And I'm not unique. It's true for all of you as well. So what do you do? How do you appropriate it? I believe Paul has that in mind. What I want to do is close out by reading the last several verses of this chapter, because what they are is they're a prayer at this point. Paul in verse 17, prays this of them. And I want to tell you, he's praying it of you as well. I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people and his incomparably great power for us who believe. I'm telling you, that is what Nate is praying for you guys over and over and over again. That is how you receive it, is by just reaching up into the heavenly realms where the Holy Spirit, where Jesus himself is interceding for you and say, yes, Lord, I receive it. All the wisdom, all the power, all the grace, all the blessing you want to give. That power is the same as the mighty strength which God exerted when he raised Christ from the dead, seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present, but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything and every one of you in every way. Your job is just to receive it. Let me close today with a blessing that you might receive and you might receive all that God has for you in Jesus Christ. May the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and give you peace and be gracious unto you. May the Lord give you the fullness of the knowledge of Him through His Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, and through the power of his Holy Spirit to the praise of his glorious grace. Amen. Thank you.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. Before I jump into the sermon, I wanted to pray for a couple of our Grace partners. Most of us don't know this, but there's a couple that are in their 30s named Matthew and Brianna Brown, and they have been in the process of adoption for probably the better part of a year, I would say, if not longer than that. And they actually flew to Columbia in South America this morning to pick up three teenagers that they're adopting from Columbia, which is amazing. This is our primary way to grow at Grace, is to just go get children and then bring them here. So we're very grateful for that. But really and truly, I want to first of all just celebrate their faithfulness to do that and God's goodness in granting them these children. And then also just pray for them as they're there and as they come back and we surround them as a church family. So stop and pray with me and then I'll jump right into the sermon. Father, we are so grateful for you and the way that you love us. We are grateful that you have adopted us into your family, that you give us this picture. God, thank you so much for what you've placed on the heart of Matthew and Brianna. We pray that you would calm their nerves, that you would give them wisdom as they meet their new children, that you would give those children wisdom and grace as they meet their new parents. God, we can't imagine all the thoughts and feelings and emotions swirling around, but we know that this is a family that you have built and constructed with your will. And so we just ask for your blessing on them. We ask for a safe, good, beneficial trip. We ask for good assimilation as they arrive in the States. And God, we ask for special insight as a church, for ways to love them and show those kids that they are welcome here and they are a part of our family. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen. One of my favorite things about the Bible is that it's not just 66 individual books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament. It's not just a string of 66 individual books that exist independently from one another, like a history book or something, but rather the Bible is a tapestry of stories woven to present to us one big overarching story. And one of my favorite parts about that tapestry and learning more about it as a pastor is to look at the things in the Old Testament that are pictures or signposts that point us to the New Testament and more specifically point us to Jesus. If you spent any time in church, you know of some of these signposts and perhaps the most popular one, the one that's the most well-known, that we're most aware of, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, or this is your first time in a church in a long time, or maybe ever, you would probably recognize the term Passover. It's still a holiday that the Jewish faith celebrates. It's still something that we acknowledge on a regular basis as believers. And to me, it's one of the more clear signposts or pictures in the Old Testament that points to an event in the New Testament that points very clearly to Jesus. And Passover is the fourth feast that we're looking at in our series as we go through all the feasts and festivals that were in the Old Testament calendar that God prescribed in the book of Leviticus, chapter 23. This is the fourth one. We've got two more to go. And for this morning, I did want us to kind of catch up on Passover and know what it is, but then I want us to ask a really important question about Passover and what brought it about. So just so we're on the same page and we understand what Passover is, it's actually the tenth plague that God inflicted on the Egyptian people. The situation is God's people, his chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, have existed in the nation of Egypt as slaves for 400 years. It's all that they know. It's generation after generation. They are a people. They are a people of slaves. And so in Exodus chapter 3, God grabs one of the guys that he's chosen to use, a guy named Moses, and he appears to him in a burning bush. And he says, Moses, I want you to go to Egypt and I want you to free my people. Which is a pretty tall order, because he would lead a nation of slaves against the most powerful nation in the world. Egypt was the worldwide superpower at the time, so it felt like a pretty hopeless errand. But he says, I want you to go free my people. To help you do that, I'm going to inflict plagues on the Egyptians. Moses didn't know that at the time, but over time it became apparent that that was God's plan. And so Moses goes to Pharaoh and he says, you need to let God's people go. And Pharaoh says, you're ridiculous. I don't think so. This is a loose paraphrase of a conversation in Exodus. And then God starts to inflict the plagues on the Egyptian people. The waters turn to blood. There's a swarm of locusts. There's gnats. The day has turned to night. The livestock dies. There's boils. There's other plagues that are inflicted on the Egyptian people to soften Pharaoh's heart. And a couple of times he says, you guys got to get out of here. We're tired of these plagues. And then he changes his mind. He says, nope, you got to stay here. Just kidding, you can't go. So they keep them as slaves. The tenth plague becomes known as the Passover. This was the one that finally softened Pharaoh enough to get him to let the people of Israel go. And Passover, what God told Moses to do is to go to Pharaoh and tell Pharaoh, tonight the angel of death is going to pass over all the nation of Egypt. And that angel is going to claim the firstborn of every family, even of the livestock. And God tells Moses that if you want protection from this angel that's going to come as the final plague, that what you need to do is you need to go find a lamb. Sacrifice the lamb and then take the blood of the lamb and paint it on your doorposts, on the top and on the sides. And when the angel passes over Egypt, if that blood is on your doorframe of your house, then he will pass over you and the death that was supposed to happen in your house will not occur because I will accept the death of the lamb that died in their place. And so that's what happens that night. The angel of death passes over the nation of Egypt and the families that didn't have the blood on their doorframe lost their firstborn. And it said that the cry in Egypt that night was great. And the next morning, in his sorrow at losing his own son, Pharaoh tells Moses, get out of here. Go. And Moses gets all the people. They take some gold and some jewelry from their Egyptian slave masters, and they go out into the desert, and they begin to search for the promised land. And that's the story of God's rescue of his people out of slavery. He does it through the series of the ten plagues capped off by what's called now the Passover because the angel of death was passing over Egypt and would pass over your home if you had the blood of the lamb on your doorpost. And it's a very clear picture of Jesus in the New Testament. Very clear picture. When Jesus arrives on the scene, he's introduced by a man named John the Baptist. And John the Baptist, when he sees Jesus of Nazareth walking towards him, says, Behold, the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. Jesus was the spotless Lamb. And just like in the Old Testament, the lamb died so that your home didn't have to experience death. In the New Testament, the lamb dies so that we don't have to experience death. In the Old Testament, the lamb dies at Passover so that God says, there's no penalty required here. You guys are right with me. Just like that in the New Testament, Jesus dies, the Lamb of God, and God looks at that death and he says, that's good. There's no penalty required here because the Lamb has died on your behalf. It is a one-to-one picture that points us to the miracle of Jesus in the New Testament. The Lamb makes us right with God in the Old Testament, and then the Lamb makes us right with God in the New Testament. Passover is a picture of salvation. And now most of you here, this was really my challenge this week, you're church people. You know what Passover is. You could have just done this part so far. And so I thought, I wonder, what are the important questions to ask around Passover that can help us now as we reflect on that festival? And the question occurred to me, what was it that brought about the Passover? What was it that the people of Israel did that got God, enacted God, spurred God, was a catalytic event for God to say, now is when I want to enact my grand plan of rescue? Really what I want to ask is, what was their role in their rescue? What part did they have to play? What did they do? If we were to ask the question today, we would say, what's our role in our salvation? What do I have to do to be saved? We've all asked this question before. Before you were a believer, or now if you're not yet a believer, you would wonder, what do I need to do to be saved? What's required of me? What's my role in my rescue? Some of us wonder if we did it right, if we prayed the prayer right, or if we really meant it, or if we really obey enough. We don't really know if we did everything right, and we wonder still, what's my role in my rescue? What's my role in my salvation? What's our role in our rescue? What do I need to do to be saved? What's my role in my salvation? It's all the same question. And I remember when I was 17 years old, I was at a summer camp called Look Up Lodge. I've mentioned it before. And the camp director was a man named Greg Boone. And he asked the same question, but he just asked it this way. He came out and he asked all the students. There's about 300 kids at the camp that year. And he asked us, what do you have to do to be right with God? What do I have to do to be right with God? And it's one of these questions that somebody asks it and you know that you don't know the answer and that to give an answer, you're just going to get made fun of. Like my dad loves these kinds of questions. My dad asked me one time, son, and I was, I mean, I graduated from seminary. I had reason to believe that I could answer this question. He looks at me and he goes, son, what's the Bible about? And I'm like, geez, I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's about God. Like, that feels like a good answer. And he goes, no, it's about missions. Great, great dad, whatever. You're ridiculous. He's going to listen to this. I still, dad, I still think you're ridiculous. So it's one of those questions. He says, what can we do to be right with God? And we all know that we're not going to get it right, but there are those of us for whom the glory of the correct answer is too irresistible, right? If I get this right, if I somehow unlock the code and I'm the one that's correct, then I will get all the esteem of all of my peers and everyone here is going to know I'm the smartest one. So we have to try. A lot of kids had the sense to not try, but some kids did try. And I don't remember how exactly it went, but I do remember it well enough to know that it went something like this. Someone would raise their hand and offer an answer, and they would say, well, you have to pray a prayer. And Greg would say, well, that's fine. Is it possible to pray a prayer that you don't mean? Is it possible to just say words that aren't sincere? A person would sit back down defeated. Yeah, it is. It's not prayer. There's no magic words to make ourselves right. We know that. Somebody else would say, well, you have to be committed. And I remember thinking like, that sounds pretty good. That's convincing. You have to be committed. And Greg says, okay, how committed do you have to be? They're like, like all the way committed? And they go, yeah, and sat back down because they knew they weren't all the way committed. They were a terrible Christian. And then somebody else says, you have to obey. You have to submit yourself to God and be humble and obey. And I remember thinking, oh, shoot. They might have it on this one. And to us, I think that that would make sense. If you were to ask us, what do we have to do to be right with God? What's our role in our rescue? We might say obey, especially in an Old Testament context. Those of us who know our Bible know that in the Old Testament, your spirituality, in some ways, it was very easy for it to drift towards measuring your spirituality on your ability to follow the rules. In the Old Testament, God gives the Ten Commandments. He gives the laws, 600 and something laws. It's like 630. There's 300 and something thou shouts and 200 and something thou shalt nots. And if you follow those and you do it just right, then God will love you and he'll approve of you and he'll bless you and he'll give you all the things that you ever wanted because you were obedient. And that feels right. It kind of makes sense. I obey God, I follow his rules, I honor him, I'll appease him, and then he'll like me and he'll give me all the things that I need. That's probably our role in our salvation, to obey. The problem with that answer, if we look at it for Passover, what was their role in their rescue? It couldn't have been obedience because the law didn't exist. Moses has yet to bring the Ten Commandments down the mountain. They have yet to write the book of Leviticus with all the 600 laws. They don't have any clear laws to follow. They did turn around and paint the blood on the doorframe, but that was just for that one plague. That wasn't what enacted their whole rescue. So the answer in the Old Testament really couldn't have been obedience. And listen, we know in our own lives, experientially, that obedience is not how we bridge the gap between us and God. Come on, church people. We've tried that, haven't we? Haven't you tried? Isn't it exhausting to try to obey your way to God's approval? If I have just the right attitude and I don't lash out at people and I can control my anger and the terrible thoughts that I think I just mutter under my breath and I don't give voice to them, or if I can ever become super, super nice and just never think those thoughts at all, if I'll watch my language, if I'll give to the church like I'm supposed to, if I'll serve where I'm supposed to, if I'll suffer the way that I should suffer and I don't have the fun that they have and I won't laugh at the jokes that they do and I won't watch the shows that they do and I will be very, very disciplined and we'll just white knuckle our lives to God's approval. Isn't that exhausting? Doesn't that wear you out? And haven't you found that at every effort to obey our way into God's favor is futile? And what's more sinister than that is we always fail. We inevitably fail. Do you understand that in the Old Testament, God gave us the rules to show us that we can't follow them so that we would conclude that we have a need for him? And so when we think that we can obey our way towards God's approval, and we try really hard to do all the things, to dot all the I's and cross all the T's and be the person that God wants us to be, and we fail, we assume that we don't have his approval. That our Father's in heaven looking down at us disappointed. And I think that if you get nothing else today, especially if you're someone who's been a believer for a long time, if you don't hear anything else I say, maybe this morning can be the time when you finally, finally, finally let go of the idea of winning God's approval and admiration through obedience. We cannot perform our way into God's favor. And can I confess something to you? I'm 38 years old. I really do believe that I came to know the Lord at the age of four. And that I've been rescued for 34 years. I still cannot figure out how to quit trying to win God's approval through my behavior and through what I do and through how I perform. I still can't figure out how to just know that God loves me and to exist outside of this performance-based economy. Who knows, maybe if I preach hard enough today, I'll finally get it too. So if you haven't figured it out yet, you've got at least me as company. But it's not obedience. That's not the answer. That's not our role in our rescue, obeying our way to God's favor. And so it was at this point in the night that I thought, I think I've got it. I think I'm ready. I'm ready to crack the code. So I speak up and I said, Greg, you've got to love God. You've got to love him. And I felt like I was on good biblical standing for this because Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. How about them apples, Greg? So he says that's a good answer. How much do you have to love God? Like what percentage? Like 100? He goes, yeah. Do you love God 100%? No. And I sat back down. And all 300 heads turned to me aghast. How could you not love God 100%? And I just remember thinking, you shut up, you hypocrites. Like, you don't either. You're judging me. That's not loving. So it was a... But that wasn't the answer either. And that night, after everyone finally gave up, Greg offers us the answer, and he says, nothing. There's nothing you can do. But as I reflect on Scripture and what my life has taught me and a passage that I see in Exodus chapter 2, I don't think that's the answer either. I don't think it's nothing. I think that they did something, and I think we see the something that they did in Exodus chapter 2, verses 23 through 25. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Exodus is the second book of the Bible. And at the end of this chapter, it kind of bridges the gap. Before this, the author of Exodus is setting up what's going on, just what's happening in the culture. And basically what he's told us is there's people, the Hebrew people are slaves. They've been slaves for 400 years, but there's this boy named Moses who was born and he was adopted into Pharaoh's home and he grew up learning to lead. But then God put him in the desert for 40 years because he murdered some people and he needed to be prepared for the leadership. And then God is about to call him in chapter three. But right before God calls Moses to rescue his people for his part in rescuing his people. We see what the people did that I think is because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel, and God knew. These people were slaves. They had been for 400 years. Can you imagine what it would have been like to be a civilization of slaves? To look your children in the eye when you have them and know that their life is not going to be any better than your miserable life. To know as fathers and mothers, there's nothing I can do to bring about a change for you. To feel that impotent and powerless. Can you imagine how anonymous the people of Israel must have felt? There's no nations around them that are going to swoop in and overthrow Egypt and free them. That's not on the geopolitical agenda. No one's going to pick a fight with Egypt. Most nations probably don't even know that they're there. They're totally unseen and totally unknown. They're completely impotent and helpless. And I think based on the beginning of this passage, it says, during those many days, the king of Egypt died. I think that they were hoping, this Pharaoh stinks. He treats us really poorly. Maybe if we can hold out long enough, he'll die and the next one will be nicer. But the Bible tells us that the next one was worse. And I happen to believe that this is when they gave up their last strand of hope. And in this hopelessness, in this isolation, in this feeling of impotence, the people of Israel cry out to God. They groaned in their slavery. And I think that there's a quality to this cry. I think there's essential qualities to this cry. I think that this was an earnest, admissive cry. Earnest in the idea that God, this is broken. This is not supposed to work like this. We're your people and life shouldn't feel like this. This is not how it's supposed to go, God. You didn't design it this way. Life feels broken. And I think that we felt that before too. God, this is not how this is supposed to go. This feels broken. This doesn't feel right. God, I'm not happy. God, we are miserable. God, we are hopeless. So there's this earnest, honest cry that this is broken. And then there's this admission, and we can't fix it ourselves. The next Pharaoh isn't going to fix it. Some other country's not going to come in and fix it. We're not going to rise up in rebellion and overtake and overthrow. We don't have any options, God. We cannot fix this. We are totally and completely reliant on your favor and your mercy. God, help us. It's an earnest admission. God, this is broken, and we are impotent to fix it. And when they let out this earnest cry of admission, what does God do? I love these three words. It says he remembers them, he saw them, and he knew. God doesn't forget things. It's not as though when they cried out that God was in heaven preoccupied with dealing with something with the angels and went, oh my goodness, man, 400 years goes by so quick. I am so sorry that I left you guys in Egypt. He doesn't forget. It's a way to say that this is when God acknowledged them. He saw and he knew. He didn't just then see. That's not a present tense. It had always seen and he had always known. And that know there is an intimate know. It's an intimate word. It's a word of empathy. Not only did he know what they were going through, but he had personally felt what they were going through. And it tells me that our God never forgets us. He doesn't forget that we exist and we are never at any point unseen, no matter how isolated we feel, no matter how hopeless we might feel, he sees us and he knows. That's why he's called El Roy, the God who sees. Do you know the power of being seen? Of being known? Have you ever been walking through something in your life that was incredibly difficult and had someone come alongside you and say, hey, I've been through that before. I know it's tough. Let me tell you what I learned from that experience. You know how life-giving that is? Have you felt the power of being seen and known? So when they cry out, this earnest, admissive cry, it says, God remembered them, he saw them, and he knew them. And then, the very next chapter, he calls Moses and enacts his grand plan of rescue. But if you were to ask me, for the people of Israel, what was their role in their rescue? I would tell you it was to come to a place where they let out an earnest, admissive cry to God. God, this is broken, and we can't fix it. So for you, what's your role in your rescue? What's your role in your salvation? If you're here this morning and you don't know Jesus, what do I do to be saved? You let out an earnest and admissive cry to the Father, Father, this is broken and I'm impotent to fix it. Father, life was not supposed to feel this way. I have all the things that I want. I have the job that I want. I have the house that I want. I have the family that I want. I have the toys that I want. And I still feel empty. I still don't like the quiet. I still don't like the silence. I'm still uncomfortable with my own thoughts. I'm still not at peace. Father, I need you because I thought that this was going to make me happy and it hasn't. Father, I have all the kids that I want and I'm still not happy. Father, I have everything in my life that I want and it's still not doing it. God, I had that and I lost it and then I reached for this other thing and I thought that that would be the thing that made me feel okay, that made me feel at peace, that made me feel happy and it's not. It's just another lurch at empty. God, I need you because this is broken and I don't know how to fix it. That's what salvation is. What's our role in our rescue to salvation? It's an earnest cry to the Father. What's our role and our rescue from sin? Many of us here, we're believers. We know we're believers. We don't doubt that, but man, there is just sin in our life that we cannot kick. We have things that are growing in the shadows that we are terrified are going to tear us down. We have attitudes that we can't get over. We don't like the way we act when we're angry, but we still have a temper. What's our role in our rescue for sin? It's the same thing. To make an earnest cry to God, God, I'm broken. I don't know how to fix myself. I've tried everything I know how to try to get better at this, to not sin in this way anymore, to not let you down. I've tried everything that I possibly can, and I don't know what else to do. And I think God says, good, because I love you anyways, whether you do this or not. And I'm ready to rescue you if you'll make space for me. What do we do? What's our role in victory over sin? It's an earnest cry to the Father, God, this is broken and I am impotent to fix it. It's the same for spiritual success. What do we do to raise kids who love the Lord? What do we do to have a healthy, vibrant marriage so that when people look at it, they go, man, that is a picture of how Jesus loves his church, which is what the Bible tells us our marriage is supposed to be. How do we live up to that picture? How do we obey Paul and live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? How do we obey the author of Hebrews and run the race that is set before us by throwing off every sin and weight that so easily entangles? How do we do all of that that feels so impossible? We cry out to the Lord, God, I'm broken and I'm impotent to fix it. I need you. I think that this is the cry for salvation. And I think it is the cry for a believer every day. Every day that you wake up and this isn't what we say to the Lord, Lord, I'm broken today and I need you today and I'm impotent to execute your will today. Every day we wake up and we think that we're going to step into it and do it ourselves, that our role and our rescue is our performance, we're going to hurt that day. So this morning, I want to invite you to the same thing that I believe Passover invites us to, to make an earnest cry to the Father. Maybe for the first time if we don't know him. Father, I'm broken and I'm impotent to fix myself. I need your rescue. I'm going to pray and then the band is going to come. They're going to lead us in one more song. And I want you, as we sing together, make that your cry to the Father. In this song, we'll sing the lyrics, Our Hearts Cry Out. Let's honor Passover today and make a collective cry to the Father. God, we need you. We're broken without you. And it says in Exodus that when his people cried out to him that God saw them. And as we cry out in a few minutes, I want you to know that the God who saw all of his children still sees his child. Let's cry out to him together. Let's pray. God, you are good. You are a good father. Even for those of us who didn't have good dads, you are a good father. God, if there's anything in us that's still holding on to a pride of success or of performance or of being good enough, help us to let that go. Help us be like your children in Israel who cry out to you earnestly and admissively that we are broken and that we need you. God, we feel your rescue rushing into impossible situations even today. In Jesus' name, amen.