Sermons tagged with Believers

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

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, so it's good to see you on this February Sunday, the third Sunday in our Going Home campaign series. Last week, we kind of talked about the biggest question facing grace. I feel like because we have been brought to a place of health, last week I shared that for a long time the mission of grace has been grace. By necessity, we've looked inward and scrambled to get healthy and to get to a place where we weren't just trying to survive, but now we could thrive. And so in that place, believing that we are in a position of health, the question that we are collectively asking is, Father, what would you have us do in health? Say, God, what would you have us do now? We're in a position where we can really do your ministry. I feel like we're moving into a new season as a church. So the question becomes, what would you have us do in this new season? Part of that answer is to pursue a permanent home in the community that we care about so much. That's why we're having the campaign that's going to culminate on March the 1st. We're going to send out pledge cards this week to our partners, to people who call Grace family, and encourage everyone to bring those in or to send those in by March the 1st, and we'll have a celebratory pledge Sunday on that first Sunday in March. I think it's going to be a big celebratory Sunday for us. But that's kind of what we're pushing towards. But in the midst of that, as we ask God, what would you have us do in health? One answer is, one step is to pursue a permanent home. Now's the time to do that. But the bigger answers are the ones that we talked about last week and this week. Last week, I shared that if you asked Jesus, what would you have a healthy church do? I think he would point us to the Great Commission, to Matthew 28. And I shared with you that verse at the end of Matthew 28, as he is going into heaven and he tells the disciples, here are your marching orders. And I think he tells the church in perpetuity, for all church, for all Southern Baptist King James Church, so go ye therefore. Yeah, that's right. Some of y'all understand that. Let me go into the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father. And so what Jesus would have us do as a church is to seek to grow in both depth and breadth, to see us grow deep and wide. And so the Christian word that we use for growing deep is discipleship. We see that model of ministry in the Bible. And so last week, we talked about how is grace going to grow deep? What is discipleship going to look like here? And I don't do this a lot. I don't promote my own sermons, but nor, well, I won't say that aside. I don't promote my own sermons, but if you missed last week, that was kind of the manifesto on discipleship and what we want it to look like. So I would encourage you to give that one a listen or a watch if you like staring at me for 30 minutes on your work computer. Do that too. And so this week, I want to look at how do we want to grow wide. We looked at depth last week. So this week, how do we want to grow wide? And the church term for that is evangelism. How does grace want to handle evangelism? What do we want our ministry of evangelism to look like? And evangelism is simply sharing the gospel. It's an effort to see other people come to know Jesus. We want to win converts to the faith. And so how does grace want to do that? And even as I bring that up, as I seek to talk about that this week, I felt the need to confess to you that I'm not good at this. I'm not good at evangelism. And not in a way where I think like, well, that's okay because there's other things that maybe I feel like I'm stronger at or whatever, so it's okay to be weak over here. No, no, I'm telling you that historically I have not been good at this discipline. It scares me. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't love the idea of going out and sharing my faith with people. We had a guy from another church show up at our door this week, and he is the evangelism minister at one of the churches. And I thought, good for that guy. You could not pay me enough money to go door to door. It scares me. And so if it scares you, if the idea of evangelism, of sharing your faith intimidates you, you have some company. It intimidates me too. Now, I don't think that's an excuse because I think that the Bible calls us all to be evangelists. If you know Jesus, your job, your expectation is to share it with others, is to be a part of other people coming to the faith. That's the only reason he leaves us on earth. I've said this before. Have you ever thought about when you get saved, when you become a believer, why doesn't God just snatch us right to heaven, into eternity forever, where we don't have to experience any of the cruddy stuff that happens here anymore, so that we can stay here and tell other people about Him? Evangelism is the only reason we're still here, right? Romans 10 says, how will people believe unless we tell them? And how will people tell them unless it's preached? And how will it be preached unless people are sent? How beautiful are the feet that carry the good news to the people who need it? There's a biblical imperative for those of us who know Jesus to be involved in the discipline of evangelism, of growing the church in breadth. So we all need to do this. So even though it's intimidating, what I want to do is try to talk about it today in a way that makes it more approachable, in a way that makes it more doable, and hopefully we are inspired to make this a part of our life in an intentional way. To do that, I think it will help us to look at the way that Jesus framed up evangelism in the book of Mark. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. We're going to be looking at Mark chapter 4, starting in verse 3. In Mark 4, Jesus tells a parable. Now this is a little preview. I'm super excited for the next series. In March and April, we're going to be walking through the parables of Jesus, and I'm really excited to jump into those with you. A parable is a short story. It's totally made up to make a point. It's a short story to make a moral point. And Jesus did a lot of teaching in parables, and this is a very rough summation of why, but often we see Jesus preface things or follow parables like he does in Mark with, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. And so he often taught in parables because he was teaching to an audience of multiple motivations. In this one, he's talking to Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day who were closed off to him. He's talking to regular workaday folks, and he's teaching his disciples. And Jesus only wants you to get what he's saying if you really want to. I know that might sound weird, but he wants you to get what he's saying if you really mean it. If you're open to hear it, if you have a teachable spirit, then you're going to understand the parables. If you don't, then you won't. So he teaches in parables for a time while he does his ministry. And this parable is called the parable of the sower. And this is how he frames up evangelism for us. He says this. I'm going to start in verse 3. Verse 8 is going to be up on the screen because that's the one we're going to talk about for a little while. But this is what he says. Listen. So Jesus tells his parables to the general public and to his disciples. And a little while later, Jesus is with the disciples, and they kind of lean in as they often do, and they said, hey, what do you mean? Help us understand that. What do the different soils represent? And so Jesus explained it like this. He said, the sower is one who is spreading the word of God. He says, spreading the word. So when we sow seeds, we're telling people, Jesus loves you. Jesus died for you. God created you in his image. You are his beloved daughter or son. We're telling them truths from the Bible. We're opening up their eyes to the existence of Jesus and his love and care for them. And so that's what the word is. So the sower is spreading the word, telling people about Jesus and his love for them. And so sometimes that lands on the pavement, it lands on rocky soil, and the birds come and snatch it up. And Jesus says this is a picture of Satan actually snatching up those seeds before they can take root. And I've said before that we don't talk a lot about Satan here, but when we do, I like to remind you that if we believe the Bible, then we believe that he is real and he is against us. And so sometimes when people hear the gospel, Satan will bring things into their life to snatch that seed away so that it doesn't take root and they don't become believers yet. That's a thing that happens. Other times, it takes root immediately and the plant sprouts up right away. But because the soil isn't good, because it's shallow, because the roots aren't good, as soon as strife comes, as soon as difficulty occurs, as soon as tragedy happens, as soon as something challenges that new faith, it's scorched, it's washed away, it goes away just as quickly as it sprouted up. I've seen this dozens of times in ministry, and you probably have too. There'll be somebody who comes to the church for their first Sunday because of whatever's going on in their life. They're walking through a hard time. Guys just open their eyes up. They're just curious. They have a friend who invited them. Whatever it is, they'll come in, and on their very first Sunday, they sign up for all the stuff, man. They're serving on three teams. They wanna join three small groups. Is there anything else I can do? They're all the way in. They're coming to a meeting right after the service for the thing that they wanna do. And part of me says, that's great. But part of me knows because I've seen it so many times, they're gonna fall away just as quickly as they jumped in. Sometimes the soil just simply isn't ready yet for the gospel. And so we have to watch that and we have to know that and we have to try to tend to it. Other times it says, and this one is really tragic to me, that the seed gets into soil, the plant sprouts up, it's a good plant, but the thorns, it's among thorns, and the thorns choke it out so it doesn't produce seed. Jesus doesn't say it kills the plant, it just says this plant doesn't produce seed. It never does what it's supposed to do. This is the picture of someone who hears the Word of God, accepts the gospel, believes in Jesus, grows up, the plant sprouts, becomes a believer, but because of the concerns of the world, they never do what they're supposed to do. It's entirely possible to know Jesus, for the gospel to take root in your life, but for the concerns of the world to keep you from being effective in what God's asking you to do. For work to crowd out what life is really about. For the pursuit of money or power or possessions to crowd out what life is really supposed to be all about. For the pursuit of pleasure, for a habit or a hang-up that's in your life to choke out like a thorn the gospel that's in your life so that you never produce what you're designed to produce. That's a sad thing to see and to watch. It's one of my biggest fears that I'll be like that. But Jesus said, there's good soil. And when the seed, when God's word lands on good soil, the plant sprouts up and produces 30, 60, or 100 fold, which is another subtle way for Jesus to say the whole point of this exercise is for you to reproduce yourself. The whole point of the gospel being in your life, the whole point of knowing Jesus is to reproduce yourself in the life of others. It's so that other people can know Jesus and the gospel can take root in their lives as well. That's the whole point of it. So that's the parable of the sower and that's what it means. And as I read that parable, there are two questions to me that jump off the page. There's two things as I look at that parable that I immediately want to know the answer to as I'm thinking about it. The first one is, and this is just me being overly practical probably, is how do we share the gospel effectively? In the story, it seems so random that this sower's just throwing out seed willy-nilly. Just whoever can hear the word, however it goes, wherever it lands is fine with me. And I look at that and there's four options and three of them aren't so great. And I look at that and I'm like, there's gotta be a better way. How can I make sure I'm throwing it on the good soil? Because I don't know if you know this about me, this drives my wife Jen nuts, but my biggest pet peeve in life is inefficiency. Anybody that's taking too long to do anything, I lose my mind. Like parking lots are the worst. I hate inefficiency. I will be in an instant bad mood because something's going slower than it should be. And Jen's like, what in the world is wrong with you? And I'll give the eight step explanation about how this thing could go quicker if everybody would just get on the same page with it, right? And it drives her nuts and probably the people around me nuts, but I want to do things efficiently. So I'm not content with the idea of just throwing out seed and just letting the gospel take root wherever it lands. I want to know, how can we do this more effectively? How can we ensure that if we're going to be people who are going to share the gospel with others, who are going to spread the word of God to others, how can we be sure that that effort is going to be as effective as possible? To that end, after watching ministry for a number of years, watching people come to faith for a number of years, hearing stories of people come to faith, and talking to people about how they came to faith, I've come to the conclusion, you guys can try this on if you want to, but I've come to the conclusion that the human heart is best prepared through relationships and circumstances. The human heart becomes the best possible soil. It's best prepared and best work and best prepared for the reception of the gospel through relationships and circumstances. This is incidentally why I think the street preachers are incredibly ineffective. You're going to the ball game and there's that person on the corner and they're holding up the sign and they're yelling stuff at you about Jesus and maybe it's a good message and maybe it's just a threatening one, but it's almost always ineffective. And listen, I do, there is a part of me, I have a respect for those people because they got bigger guts than I do, you know? Good for you for believing so strongly in what you're doing. I think you believe it incorrectly. I think what you're doing is a terrible idea, but I admire your zeal, right? But it's so ineffective because there's neither a relationship nor the right circumstances for the gospel to be received, right? He doesn't have a relationship with any of the people walking by him. They don't know him, and if they do, they're probably not going to act like they do in that setting. And then it's the wrong circumstance, because people are like, bro, I'm just trying to make it to the game. Like, I'm trying to get into this concert, man. Like, it's not the right setting. But I think that relationship and circumstance works the soil to prepare the heart for the gospel. I cut my teeth in ministry doing Young Life, and there was a phrase in Young Life that we used all the time about ministering to students, and it's no different ministering to adults and to our friends. They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. You guys have heard that before. It was true. To walk with somebody, to do life with them, to show them consistently that, hey, I care about you as a person. You're not a target to me. You're not a project to me. You're not a holy tick box to me. You're a person that I love and care about tremendously. And then for them to watch you exude the gospel, do what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians, and it says that we are a procession led by Christ, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. If they're in your life and around you, and because of the relationship they have with you, that fragrance regularly passes by them. Or like Jesus says, that others would see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. There is a quote attributed to Francis of Assisi. He did not say this, and it is not the quote, but it still makes a good point. Share the gospel at all times. Use words when necessary. A relationship does this. It allows us into people's lives so they can get to know us and see how we live and see how we love. And it prepares them to trust us when we point them towards the gospel and plant the seeds of the gospel in their life. Now, here's the thing. We have to conduct the relationship in such a way that when we share the gospel with them, it makes sense. That when we share what Jesus does for us, they see that in our lives. That's the responsibility that we carry. As if one day I'm going to tell them I love Jesus and hear all the great things Jesus does for me, then it better not seem contradictory and hypocritical. But a relationship tills the ground so that they're ready to receive the gospel when we share it. The other thing that prepares us for the gospel is circumstances. If you think about what happened in your life that brought you to God, for many of us, it's life milestones. A lot of our stories are, we grew up, had some awareness of church. We were involved in it a little or a lot. But when we got to college, early adulthood, we kind of fell away from it. We deprioritized our faith. Not even really sure if we were Christians during that time. And then we got married and we had kids. And when we had kids, we looked at this baby and we went, oh man, I've got a responsibility here. And so we got back into church. And then when we got back into church because of the circumstance, because of this life event going on, our hearts were ready for the gospel, open to how to be good moms and good dads. And we began to grow spiritually. For a lot of us, that's our story. For a lot of us, we trace our faith back to a catalytic event in our life that made us question spiritual things. Sometimes it's when people hit rock bottom. Sometimes people have struggled so much and have made such a series of poor decisions that have led them to a place in life where they don't know what to do, and they are finally willing to go, you know what, God, my way of calling the shots is not working. I'm gonna start trusting your way. Circumstances. I don't think anything prepares the heart for the gospel better than relationships and circumstances. And here's a great illustration of how those two get married up so very often. I have a good buddy here who goes to the church named Ben. Ben's been at the same company for years. And Ben's kind of known in his work group, you know, in his peers, as he's the Christian guy. He's the one that loves Jesus. And so whenever anybody has a spiritual question, they go to Ben. And he talks to them about Jesus, and he kind of gives them the advice. Or when somebody has an issue going on in their life, often they'll go to Ben and say, what do you think about this? And he'll counsel them, right? I call him a pastor at his workplace. And there was somebody that he was buddies with that was a peer that would ask him these questions over the years, and Ben would give him books. And this guy was a total atheist, did not come from a spiritual background at all, didn't have any idea what he believed, but Ben tilled the ground with the relationship. And one day after years of doing this, the guy's wife got in some legal trouble. And so he came to Ben distraught. This is happening in my life. I don't know what to do. I'm kind of questioning everything. What do you think? I really want to have faith, but I don't know how to approach it. And so Ben gave him books and then they would talk about it. And then he would point them to a podcast and that guy would listen and they would talk back and forth. And months after this happened, the dude came to Ben's office one day and he kind of stuck his head in the office and he said, hey, I just want you to know that over the weekend I accepted Christ. I believe. I'm all in. And it was the kind of all in that now a year later, he and his wife are super involved in a church down south of the city. They do children's ministry down there. They're there every week. They give to the church. They're all in. The gospel took root in their life, and that ground was cultivated through years of relationship and then a circumstance that made them ready to receive the gospel. So I would say this to us. If we want to be people who are evangelists, if we want to share the gospel, see people come to faith, which is one of my big prayers for grace in 2020, that we would see more and more people come to faith this year, then I would encourage you to do it through relationships and be sensitive to circumstances. I think that evangelism is so intimidating because we think I'm going to have to convince somebody to become a believer. I'm going to have to have an answer for all of the rebuttals that they would have. I'm just going to have to approach a perfect stranger and say, hey, where would you go if you were to die today? And all that stuff is really intimidating. But really, I think the best possible evangelism plan, when I first started, somebody at the church said, hey, what's your evangelism plan for grace? And I said, not in a flippant, not in a way that I was joking, I was being serious, make friends. That's my plan. Go make friends. And I think that's still the best plan. Now the question becomes, do you have, those of you who are here who know Jesus and who love him and who want to tell other people about him, do you have friends in your life that are not church people? Do you have friends in your life that don't know him yet? Often in churches, we get in our little holy bubbles, our little holy huddles, and we don't know anybody outside of the faith. So the idea of sharing our faith forces us to go to strangers and have awkward conversations, but it's much more effective if we can have these conversations with people who know that we care about them. Do you have friends that don't know Jesus? That may be your step of obedience today, to start making some of those. The plan for evangelism at Grace is for you guys to go out and make friends on your tennis team, in your PTA groups, in your volunteer groups, in the things that you care about in your neighborhood. Stop and have a conversation when you go to the park. And listen, I'm preaching to myself here because I'm the very first one to just want to go to the park, watch Lily swing, and go back home. But stop and open yourself up to the opportunities around you and start having conversations and cultivating friendships with people. That's how we want to begin to share the gospel. And in those friendships, be sensitive to the circumstances going on in their life so that when they're ready to receive the word of the gospel, you can give it to them. Now, if that's how we're going to evangelize, if that's the best plan to do it, is to go make friends, be sensitive, have intentional conversations with them, and over time share the gospel with them and see them come to faith, which I do think is the most effective way to do it because it's the deepest roots. If that's what we're supposed to do, my question, the other question I ask as I look at this parable is, what's my motivation? Why am I supposed to do this? What should motivate me to share the gospel as much as possible? I think this is an important question because so often the motivator here is because we're supposed to, right? So often the motivator here, hey, you guys should go share the gospel. Why? Because Jesus told you to. And listen, that's enough, right? I mean, that's good enough. Jesus told us to. If you're a believer, you're living a life in submission to Jesus and what he wants for you, so go and do it. That should be enough. But if you're like me, because you ought to isn't very motivational to you. Matter of fact, I tend to hate that reason. Some of the biggest arguments Jen and I get into in our marriage are because she says we're supposed to do a thing, and I say I don't want to do the thing, and says, you're just supposed to do it. And I'm like, I just don't want to. Like Christmas, right? We're going to some gift exchange and everyone's doing a $30 gift card. And I'm like, why don't we all just keep our own $30 and spend it on what we want rather than I give you $30 at a place that you don't like and then I'll get $30 at a place that I don't like. It's dumb. And she goes, Nate, you ruin everything. I'm like, I know, but I'm right. I don't want to. And she sighs and she goes, and I said, why do we have to do this? And she sighs and she goes, because it's just what people do. You're supposed to. And I always push against it. There's never a motivator for me. Now in Christianity, Jesus is the Lord of our life because he said so is a good reason. But I think that there's even a better one. I think there's a better motivator that should inspire us to go be evangelists. The best motivation to evangelize is excitement about what Jesus is doing. The best motivation to evangelize is excitement about what Jesus is doing. And here's why I think this. Here's one of the things I learned at Grace. That first year at Grace, when I first got here, I didn't want you guys to invite anybody to church. People would be like, hey, hope it's good this weekend and we're inviting our friends, and I would think to myself, it's not gonna be. I wish you'd give us some time. I wish you'd just chill out a little bit. I'm glad you're excited, but this is still kind of a dumpster fire, so let's just chill out. We were lucky in that first year if my mic worked the whole time. I'll never forget that first Christmas Eve service. It was cutting in and out so bad that I shut it out and yelled at you. It wasn't good yet. I was scrambling to try to get all the pieces in place so that when you would invite your friends, I felt like we were giving them something that we could be proud of that would really serve them. We were trying to get other areas of the church set up. We were trying to lay the foundation for our small groups. We simply weren't ready for people. But you guys kept inviting them. Do you know why you did that? Because you were excited about what's happening here. You were excited about grace. And even though I never asked you to invite anybody, even though I would have preferred you just wait and give me a second. People kept inviting their friends. And what it taught me was the simple truth that we tell our friends what we're excited about. We tell our friends what we're excited about. If we're pumped up about something, we tell the people in our life about it. It's as simple as that. And because of that, what I know is that everyone is an evangelist for something. All of you are evangelizing something. All of you are spreading the good news about something. And here's how I know that's true. Take a look at this picture. This is my buddy Keith Cathcart in Mexico with somebody that's become a dear friend to his family that we call Chewy. Every year, Chewky, every year when we go down there, he's not my good friend, he's Keith's good friend. Every year when we go down there, Keith takes him more Steelers gear. And every year when I go down there, there are more Mexicans wearing Steelers gear. There's other churches that give t-shirts, you see those every now and again, but you see a bunch of guys working in Steelers gear the week that Keith is there, and I call him the Steelers evangelist. He's spreading the good news of the Steelers all over the place. And all kidding aside, he's excited about the Steelers. So he tells people about them, and he's evangelizing them. We're all evangelists for something. It might be the Netflix show. It might be the podcast. It might be the book. It might be the diet that you're on. It might be the job that you got. It might be your kids. We're all evangelizing something because we're all excited about something. So I think if we want to be effective evangelists, then we need to be excited about what Jesus is doing in our lives. As a matter of fact, I think the most effective way to evangelize is to have the mindset of, man, I am so blown away by what Jesus is doing in my life that I want you to experience this too. I am so excited, I am so impressed, I am so grateful that Jesus is a part of my life that I want you to experience this as well. That's the motivator to share Jesus. And when you're excited about him, this is why new converts share their faith the most, because they're the most excited. So I think for some of us, what we need is to pray a sincere prayer and say, God, make me excited. Excite me about what excites you. Find something to be excited about. If you're in a small group, to me, there's so much to be excited about. In the young couple small group that I'm in, we get to watch people come in. This last week, we had a couple come in. It was their second time in small group. Even though they kind of grew up around church, this is the first time they've been in a small group ever. And she's sharing something with the group and she starts crying. And I made fun of her and I said, typically we like to wait four groups before we cry, but you know, go ahead. She starts crying with what she's sharing. And then after she's done, her husband says, man, I'm so glad that we found a place where my wife can share things like that. And on the outside, I go, oh, that's so good. And on the inside, I'm like, yes! Like my pastoral heart is going crazy. That's exciting. I want other people to be a part of that. So I want to tell people and invite people to what's going on there. Sometimes the excitement is getting to watch what happens with other people. Sometimes the excitement is what's happening with you. But I think excitement about what Jesus is doing is the best motivator to evangelize. So that's what we do. We go and we make friends with people who don't yet know Jesus, and then we tell them about the things that are exciting to us in hopes that they come to Jesus. It's a simple plan of evangelism. That's how we want to do it. And you'll notice, nowhere in this that I tell you, go and make disciples and bring them to grace so that they sit in seats. That's not the point. But I will say this, you can let us help you. The community here, the camaraderie here, is the best thing we got going for us. Bring other, see? Bring other people. Was that Cindy? Bring other people here and expose them to the love and the friendships that are happening here. Can I tell you that that's why we do Big Night Out? We do Big Night Out now twice a year. Grace's Big Night Out. We go hang out. The other two times have been at Compass Rose. We've got one coming up March 27th. Mark your calendars. Be in town. It's going to be the best one yet. I'm super excited about it. I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag of what it is, but oh man, it's going to be good. We do those with no agenda other than to hang out and to give you easy invites. An easy way to reach out to your friends who don't know Jesus yet and say, hey, come hang out with me and my church at Compass Rose. Because maybe it would feel awkward to invite them to church. Maybe the soil isn't ready for that invite yet, but maybe they'll come hang out with us and they'll see the way that we do community. They'll see the way that we love one another. Let us help you in that same way. Grace, let's evangelize as a team. When somebody brings in a friend, let's be kind to them. Those of us who have been here for a long time, let's be cognizant in the lobby to not just talk with the people that we know at length every week. Let's have our heads on swivels and look around. And if there's folks that we haven't met yet, let's go meet them. Let's evangelize as a group. Let us help you. And really, that's all we're trying to do at Grace. We're trying to do things on Sunday morning and in our small groups and in our various ministries that are so exciting to you that you think to yourself, man, I am so grateful for what's happening for me and my faith and my family at Grace that I want it to happen for other people too. And then we go out, we plant the seeds and friendships that we've cultivated. We're sensitive to circumstances going on in their life. And we watch people come to Christ and we grow in your personal ministries in 30, 60, and 100 fold. So in the spirit of last week's sermon, I would ask you this week, what's your next step of obedience in terms of evangelism? Is it to go make some friends that don't know Jesus? Is it to simply pray an earnest prayer and say, Father, would you excite me about what's happening here in your church? Would you excite me about what your son is doing in my life? Is it to intentionally reach out to people and start extending those invites? I think everybody has a next step of obedience in terms of evangelism, and I would encourage you to identify yours and think about how you can begin to take it. And let's make this a church that's really good at inviting and then trust them when you bring them here that this is a team sport, that we evangelize together with the community that we have. All right, let's pray, and then you'll be dismissed. Father, thanks so much for this morning. Thank you for giving us a place where we can come in and slow down and focus on you. God, I pray that you would inspire us to share your word and your good news. Make us evangelists, God. Father, I pray that we would see people come to faith this year, that we would see conversions happen, that we would hear stories and repeat them of people who were far from you and over time came to know you and walk with you and grow in you. Give us courage to be the evangelist that you call us to be. Give us the words when we don't know them. Give us the insight when we lack it. Give us the sensitivity when we don't feel it. And help us be effective in the ministry of sharing our faith. It's in your son's name we pray these things. 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.

I hope that you guys are getting excited about the holidays as they are coming up. I know that we are decorated at my house and we've got big plans here at Grace. I'm really excited about the Christmas series that we have coming up and all the things that we have planned for you in December. So I hope that you and your family will be a part of that. I'm very excited for our December series. This week we are in the fifth chapter of Ephesians. Technically the fifth chapter, but the fourth and fifth chapter, you'll see why in a minute as we move through this letter from Paul to the churches surrounding the city of Ephesus. As we jump into this week, I wanted to start at a book that was written a few years ago. There's a guy named Charles Duhigg that wrote a book called The Power of Habit. If you're a reader, you've probably heard of it, and you may have even read it, and you know that it's a good, interesting book where he says a lot of things about the habits that are in our life, how we can harness them for good. I really enjoyed the book. I didn't implement any of the things that he told me to, but I acknowledged them as very good ideas that seem wise. One of the things that he noted that he presents was the idea of what he calls a keystone habit. He says a keystone habit is a habit that you can adopt that if you will just focus on this one small change in your life, that it's going to manifest itself in other areas of your life. That kind of one habit can be get disciplined in other areas. It'll have almost a trickle-down effect if you pursue it as a foundational habit. And he says the best example of this, of a keystone habit, is exercise. In his research, he found that people who exercised regularly were people who tended to be more disciplined in what they ate. They were better at managing their time throughout the day and focusing on home and focusing on work, maintaining a better work-life balance. They were overall more disciplined people because the discipline of exercising on a regular basis kind of spilled into other areas of their life. And I really identified with this because like a lot of you, I've had seasons in my life where I have been regularly exercising. Clearly, I'm not in the middle of one of those seasons now, but I've had them before. And I've noticed that when I'm in those seasons, I am more disciplined in general, that that habit kind of spills over into others. And so as I encountered this idea, of course, because of the way that I'm wired, I thought, I wonder if this has spiritual applications. I wonder if this can help me in my walk. The way that we're phrasing the question this morning, you have it there on your notes, says, I wonder if there is a habit that can change the way that we obey. I wonder if there's one single habit, if there's a keystone habit, if there's one small thing that we could do, that if we'll just focus on this, that what happens as a result of that habit will manifest itself in other places in our spiritual life, and it will change the way that we obey. This morning, I want to propose to you that I think that there is one. I think that there is a keystone habit given to us in the text in the middle of Ephesians chapter 5 that we can kind of latch onto and seek to implement in our life. But to properly appreciate what it says in the middle of chapter 5, we have to really appreciate what's going on in the book of Ephesians. And what's happening in the book of Ephesians is you can really kind of divide it right in half. The first three chapters of Ephesians are establishing the idea that we are saved, that we have the gospel. Chapter 3 is the mystery of the gospel. Paul prays that we would know Christ more deeply. We spent time a couple weeks ago on that beautiful prayer beginning in verse 14, going through 19 of chapter 3. In chapter 2, we're given the most succinct yet complete explanation of salvation that I think there is in the Bible in Ephesians 2, 8, and 9. Then we're told in verse 10 of that same chapter that we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. We have purpose for our life. So he spends the first three chapters invested in this idea that like, hey, we are believers now and the gospel is for everyone. So now that you have the gospel, now that you have faith, the back half of the book is committed to answering a question that we all have. It's a question that we've all asked, whether you're a believer or a non-believer, it's a question that you've asked about the Christian faith. And that question simply is, it's a common question that we've all asked, how should I live? How should I live? You might ask it like this, in light of the fact that I'm saved, in light of the fact that I know Jesus, that I call God my Father and Jesus my Savior, what does God expect of me? Because we approach the text with this question, but there's a lot of stuff in here. It's confusing, at times intimidating, at times it seems impossible, and sometimes it feels contradictory. I'm supposed to do this in this situation and this in this situation, and I don't know how to tell the difference between the two. And so we always come back to this question, how should I live? I think if you're not a believer this morning, but you're here at church, you're kicking the tires, you're trying to figure out faith and how you feel about spiritual things, I think one of the questions you would be asking is, if I do become a believer, how do I live? What's expected of me? What am I supposed to do? To be a believer is to wonder, am I doing this right? How should I live? I think we would all like to get a little bit better or maybe a lot a bit better at obeying God. How should I live? I think that's the common question that we ask after we realize that we are believers. And so Paul dedicates the back half of Ephesians to answering this question. Ephesians 4, 5, and 6 are Paul's answer to this question. I truly believe that if Paul were here this morning and you could ask him, hey man, I'm a believer, how should I live? Like, what should I do? If we could ask this common question to Paul, I honestly believe he would say, well, it's funny that you asked. I actually addressed that in chapters four and five of the book of Ephesians. So let's look. And as I was studying, you might be wondering, why are we in chapter four if we're supposed to be in chapter five this week? As I was studying last week, I realized I was going through chapter four and I'm just, I always open up the Bible when we're going through a book like this and I kind of go, okay, God, what do you want us to know? There's so many things that we could highlight. What's the thing that you want us to know? And so as I was praying through chapter four, studying chapter four, I realized that four and five really go together. That from 417 to 521 is really one big long thought that I'm thinking of as the conclusion discourse. He's been building to this question, how should we live? And he even opens that question in chapter 4. Chapter 4 starts out with a verse that tells us that you should live a life worthy of the calling that you have received. So the question becomes, how do I do that? And beginning in chapter 4, verse 17, he answers that question. So I want you to do this. I want everybody in the room, if you'll do me the favor, of going ahead and opening your Bible. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Grab it and let's go through it. Open to Ephesians chapter 4. If you don't know where Ephesians is, just wait until the person next to you opens their Bible to it and then then take it, all right? They're going to love you and be gracious, and they'll get another Bible, and they'll open it there. So that will be fun. But open to Ephesians chapter 4, beginning in verse 17. 417 through 521 is one long continual thought, one long discourse, and we're going to be interacting with the text today to see how does Paul answer this question of how should I live? How does he back up what he says at the beginning of 4, that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? What's his answer to this question of how we should live? And I want to propose to you this morning that there's two answers, one in chapter 4 and one in chapter 5. The first answer that he gives us in chapter 4 is by walking in our new identity. That's the first answer that we see in chapter 4 of Ephesians. How should we live? We should live by walking in our new identity, and here's how I know that's true. We're going to put up on the screen verse 22, but I'm actually going to start reading in verse 17 so we can understand what's happening in verses 22 through 24. Paul writes this, now this I say and testify in the Lord. Oh, I will also say just by way of, I don't know, being nice that if you have a blue Bible, that's NIV. I'm reading out of the ESV. It's not going to word for word match up, but you'll be able to follow along. Verse 17, now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. All right, it's worth some clarification here. When he's saying that you must no longer walk, the you there is the church, anyone who calls himself a believer. And when he says Gentiles, that's his way of saying outsiders, people who don't yet have faith. So it's basically, you shouldn't walk like people who don't know Jesus because you do know Jesus. That's what he's saying. So when we see the word Gentiles, just think people who don't know Jesus yet. Verse 18, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and they have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But this is not the way you learned in Christ. All right, let's pause right there. He says, you must not think and act like the Gentiles do. You must not think and act like someone who doesn't know Jesus. And then he gives us the characteristics, some of the defining characteristics of people who don't know Jesus. And it's a pretty rough list. He says some harsh things about people who don't know Jesus. And so I want to be very clear that people who don't know Jesus are not worse people than people who do know Jesus, okay? The people in your life that you know that are not yet believers, we're not calling them bad people. Paul's not calling them bad people. And I don't want anybody in this room thinking that you're somehow better than the people outside of this room who are still in their sweatpants because we're not. We're all broken and we're all bad at this, okay? So we're not calling ourselves better than them. The difference is people who don't know Jesus are blind to their sin. They're sinning, they're acting outside the will of God, and they don't know that they are. And when they're acting outside of God's will and they don't see their sin, they perpetuate that sin, their consciences get seared to that sin, and eventually they end up encouraging that sin. That's the pattern. And it's not because they're bad or a different kind of person than you. It's simply because they are living in the dark and they do not yet see their sin. And what he is saying is, that's not how you live. That's not you. If you know Jesus, you've seen your sin, you acknowledge Jesus for who he is, you realize your need for him and how he cleanses you of your sin, and so you were taught a different way. Assuming that you have heard, I'm in 21, about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self. This is where we're getting our answer to walk in our new identity. To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So he presents this idea, don't walk like you used to when you didn't know Jesus, walk like you do know Jesus. He actually talks about this in a lot of his letters, the idea of an old self and a new self. In Romans chapter 6 and 7, he talks about it at length, and he actually, Paul paints for us the picture of baptism, the video that we watched of Jim being baptized. In that baptism, what Paul says in Romans 6 and 7 is that when we are baptized, we are buried with Christ in death. Our former self, our old self who didn't know Jesus, who was blind to sin, is buried with Jesus in the burial and then raised to walk, come out of death into life, raised to walk into newness of life. The very act of baptism is an acknowledgement that the former self is gone and the new self is here. And so if we are going to live life as Christians, then we should walk in our new identity. Romans 8 tells us that our identity is adopted sons and daughters of the king. We're told that we are loved as much as we can ever be loved, that we no longer have to perform or clamor or stretch or claw to get anyone to affirm us, to get anyone to love us, to make ourselves good for anyone, because God fills us with affirmation, tells us that we are good, tells us that we are loved, and then invites us to operate out of that love as we serve as a conduit of his love to the people in the world. We walk in this new identity. In our new identity, Romans tells us that we are no longer a slave to sin. Before we know Jesus, we have no choice but to do evil things because we're blind to them and we don't see them as evil. But as believers, we now have a choice. We're separated from that. And then to help us walk in this new identity, he gives us some behaviors that we should embrace and some behaviors that we should avoid to kind of say, this is what a new life is going to look like. And so he says this on down through the chapter, picking up in verse 25. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with his neighbor. 26, be angry and do not sin, which is really hard. I don't know about you, but that's not really how my anger works. Like when I get angry about something, that's not generally the time when I'm making the most rational choices. But what he's saying is there's a way to get angry. And the other thing about anger is you usually don't deserve it. You usually don't have a right to that anger. You think you have a right to that anger because you're being, in my case, a selfish jerk. You usually don't even have a right to that anger. But it is possible to get angry about the right things. And when we're walking in our new identity, we're angry and we do not sin. No more stealing. You guys, in your new life, you can't do that anymore. And then he goes, let no corrupting of stuff. As I read this stuff this week and I realized, okay, I'm supposed to walk in my new identity. What does it mean to walk in my new identity? What are the things that are going to characterize me beginning in verse 25? And I read through that list. I kind of got done reading it and thought like, well, gosh, I don't know if I should be a pastor. I'm not very good at those things. Those are really hard. Those are really challenging things. I mean, to read through that list, man, I do a lot of stuff I'm not supposed to do, and I don't do a lot of stuff I am supposed to do. That's challenging. But Paul doesn't stop there. He gives us the next way that we're supposed to live, because there's two answers. There's one in four, and there's one in five. The first answer is that we should walk in our new identity. And then he gives us a list of behaviors that we should embrace or avoid because of our new identity. And then at the beginning of chapter five, he gives us the second answer. How should you live? You should be imitators of Christ, is what he says at the beginning of chapter five. Be imitators of Christ. Just however Jesus would act, you act like that too. Look at what he says. Therefore, chapter 5, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Then, just to add some detail, this is what somebody who is imitating Christ looks like, but all sexual immorality and just all impurity in general or covetousness must not be named among you as is proper among the saints. So he says, okay, how should we live? Walk in your new identity. Once you're walking in your new identity, be an imitator of Christ. And so I was thinking this week, what does it mean to be an imitator of Christ? What did Jesus do? How did Jesus love us? Well, Jesus offers us a sacrificial love. Constantly putting others first and himself second, he offers us a sacrificial love. He condescended, he gave up his heavenly form, came down to earth, lived a perfect life on our behalf, we need to love others sacrificially, and we need to forgive others faultlessly, and forever, by the way. And if you want more details on what it means to live as an imitator of Jesus, just keep reading chapter 5, and you'll see more behaviors there that you should embrace and others that you should avoid. And listen, it's entirely possible to get bogged down in these different behaviors and a very worthwhile study. If you know your Bible well, you know that Ephesians five is chock full of things that are tough for a pastor to preach through. I even got texts and emails this week like, hey bro, you doing Ephesians 5? What are you gonna do? Somebody said, somebody emailed me and they said, Ephesians 5 this week, I'm really looking forward to what you have to say about it. And I thought, please don't email me that. I don't need that kind of pressure in my life. And while it's absolutely worthwhile to drill down into these different behaviors and into these different stances, I didn't want us to miss the forest for the trees. The trees and the minutia are worth examining, but if we only have one week to look at Ephesians 5, I don't want us to miss the overall point that Paul is trying to make, which is to answer the question, how do we live? And we answer that question by saying, walk in your new identity and then be imitators of Jesus. Offer other people sacrificial love and faultless forgiveness forever. And here's a list of behaviors that can help you live that way. So at this point, I think we should arrive at our common response. We ask the question, how should I live? Paul answers that question by saying, walk in your new identity, not your former self, walk in your new self, and then imitate Jesus as you live. And I think that we all have a common response. If you're thinking along with me at all, this has to be what you've concluded too. How in the world do I do that? How do I do that? That's a tough list, man. That's hard. Like, I'm not, listen, I'm telling you as a pastor, as your pastor, for most of you, I'm not good at this list. I violate something on this list. I want to say weekly and be nice to myself, but that's probably daily. That's a hard list, man. That feels impossible. And we can treat it lightly and say, surely God doesn't expect me to do that. I mean, He knows that I can't be perfect. In another place in Scripture, Paul tells us, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And I think we're tempted to read this and go, there's no way I can do that. But I don't think the Bible lets us off that hook. I don't think it makes that space for us to just kind of partly try. I think this is the standard, to walk in our new identity and to be imitators of Jesus. And the great part is this, getting better at these things, to more regularly walk in our new identity, to more regularly be imitators of Jesus, that is a process. It's a lifelong process. I hope that in 2019, you're a better imitator of Jesus than you were in 2018. And I hope in 2025 that you're a better imitator of Jesus then than you are than you're going to be in 2020. I think it's a progressive thing. This progressive growth towards becoming more like Christ is actually called sanctification. It's a biblical word that Paul uses, and it means the process of becoming more like God in character, which is to be better at imitating Jesus. So this is a process that we move through in our, through our whole life. And I think our goal should be that every week we're a little bit better at it than we were last week and be sensitive to the spirit and what we need to do to be better imitators of Christ and to walk more confidently in our new identity. But as we try to answer that question, how do I do this? That's a tall order, man. That's a big task. How am I gonna do that? I think that this is where the keystone habit comes back into play. I think this is where having a keystone habit, if I'm trying to get my life healthy, what's this one thing that I could focus on that might have some spillover into all the other areas of my life that I want to kind of fix or allow God to move in and repair? What's one keystone habit? What's one thing that I could focus on that might help me start nailing some of this other stuff down? I think our keystone habit is our first step. Our first step in this process is to lean into what I'm going to propose to you is our keystone habit that we find at the end of the passage in verse 21. So Paul writes this passage. He writes what I'm kind of calling the conclusive discourse on answering the question, how should we live? He says, walk in your new identity, be an imitator of Jesus. Here's some behaviors to help you know what it is to live that way that you should either embrace or avoid. And then as he caps it off, he says, finally, do these things. And he lands the plane at a really peculiar place, I think. He lands the plane in this verse, in verse 21, because after 21, there's a transition. After 21, he transitions and he starts to give us specifics of how to live. He says, this is how you should organize your home life and your marriage and your work life. And then this is how you should arm yourself for the spiritual life that is a battle. There's a transition after 21. So at 21, he's concluding a thought and this is how he concludes it. Pick it up in verse 15. He says, And then here we have it. Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. He lands the plane on submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. And I want to propose to you that our keystone habit as we seek to be imitators of Jesus and we seek to walk in our new identity is simply chosen submission. I think the common conclusion of our question, how should I live? How do I do that? I think the common conclusion that we have this morning is chosen submission. And that word submission simply means to submit to somebody is to say that when our wills clash, I'll choose yours. When you have a different will than I do for a certain situation, I will submit to you by choosing your will. I at this church am submitted to the board of elders. The elders might not feel that way sometimes, but I promise you that's technically the case. I'm submitted to the board of elders, which means if I go to the elders and I say, hey, I think we should do this thing, and they go, we do not think you should do that thing, then their will is different than my will, so I choose theirs and I submit to it. That's what submission is. And I want to propose to you that this is a keystone habit that unlocks how we can obey in all of those other areas. I think this is the one habit that can change the way that we obey. And we don't just see it here. At another place, we're told to outdo one another in honor, to honor other people more than ourselves, to outdo one another in honor. At another place, we're told to consider others better than ourselves. So this is not just a one-time principle in the Bible. It's something that's woven throughout the New Testament. Jesus says that the greatest among us must be the least, that the greatest comes to serve. So there's this constant idea in Scripture of considering others before we consider ourselves. And the reason I think that this is a keystone habit to unlock obedience in the rest of our life is this. Go back through four and five. Look at the behaviors that are listed there. Look at the behaviors that are listed in chapter 5, the ones that we should avoid. Sexual immorality and covetousness and all impurity. And ask, would it be easier to avoid those behaviors if I lived every day submitted to the people around me? Would it be easier to avoid sexual immorality if I considered other people's needs more important than mine? Would it be easier to avoid coveting things, wanting things for myself, if I considered other people's needs more important than mine, if I were mutually and had chosen to submit to the people around me? Blaise Pascal had great insight on this passage. He was a French philosopher, and I wondered why sexual immorality and covetousness are paired up together in chapter 5. And he says it's because they fall under the umbrella of lust. Lust is to want things for ourself. And he says that lust tethers us to ourselves. It makes us relentless me monsters. And so the antithesis of sexual immorality, the antithesis of covetousness is selflessness. The antithesis of this is mutual submission. We said earlier that we should be angry, but we should not sin. And I kind of presented to you the idea that there's some things that are okay to be angry about, good, righteous anger, and that's a good thing. And then there's other anger that just results in our selfishness or just reveals our selfishness. Is it going to be easier to become angry about the right things if we live our life mutually submitted to other people? At the end of chapter four, we're told to be kind one to another, be tenderhearted, gentle with one another. If you get up every day living your life for the people around you, is it going to be easier to be kind to them, to be tenderhearted towards them? Pick any of the behaviors in four or five, any of the things that we're supposed to embrace and any of the things that we're supposed to avoid. And for the ones that we're supposed to avoid, ask, would it be more natural? Would it be easier to avoid these behaviors if I were living a life of chosen submission to the people around me? And then look at the behaviors that we're supposed to embrace and ask yourself, would it be easier to embrace these behaviors, to incorporate those behaviors in my life if I were living a life of submission to the people around me? I think it's a keystone habit. I think if you're here this morning and you feel like you're in a spiritual rut, you feel like 2019 has been a little tough. I'm not growing like I should. I wish that I were closer to God. I wish that I could get some traction in my spiritual life. My quiet times have been a little bit difficult or maybe even non-existent. I wish I were closer to the Father. Can I just suggest to you implementing this keystone habit in your life? Can I just suggest to you waking up tomorrow and saying, I'm going to do my best to consider the needs of others as more important than mine. I'm going to do my best to have chosen submission to the people around me and that when our wills clash as best as I can, I'm going to choose theirs. Can I gently suggest to you that if you feel spiritually stagnant, that maybe, maybe, maybe it's because you've been living tethered to yourself and we should live for others. And if we'll do that, the rest of these behaviors will naturally flow out of a heart that now belongs to God and is in tune with Him. Can you imagine the beauty of a church that's mutually submitted to one another? It would be an oasis in the community that it would be the only place on earth that didn't have a caste system. Do you understand that? If we came in mutually submitted to one another, it wouldn't matter how much money you make. It wouldn't matter how old or young you are. It wouldn't matter where you got your education. It wouldn't matter what degrees you had. It wouldn't matter what you've accomplished. It wouldn't matter how charismatic you are or are not. It wouldn't matter how attractive you are or are not. It wouldn't matter how capable you were or you are or are not. All that would matter was that we showed up and we loved one another because we were told to in Ephesians to consider others better than ourselves and to live a life of chosen submission out of reverence for Christ. This is impossible if we don't know Jesus. We cannot just decide to do this and fuel the submission ourselves. We have to have the love of Christ flowing through us so that we can be conduits of that love to others. But if we'll acknowledge that Jesus died for us, that Jesus offers us sacrificial love and faultless forgiveness forever. And he submitted to me when he didn't have to. And out of reverence for him and who he is and how much he loves me and how I love him in return, I'm going to choose to submit to the people around me. We say that our mission is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. How in the world could we be more effective at that than if we simply chose to submit to the people around us and considered what they needed more important than what we needed? How contagious would that be when people would come and be with us on a Sunday morning? How wonderful a testimony would that community be to people who see all the wrong things going on with Christianity and in the media world to come in here into an oasis of submission where they see a fresh version of how Christ's people love one another. How beautiful would that be? How contagious would your faith be if you carried the submission back into your workplace and back into your circle of friends and simply considered other people as more important than you and simply chose this submission as a keystone habit that would unlock our ability to obey God throughout the rest of our life. I pray that we'll do that this morning. I pray that grace would be a church that's defined by obedience to this verse. And I pray that you would choose to be obedient to that. That you would submit to the people around you in your life even this week and experience the power of this chosen submission and watch as it unlocks your ability and God's ability to work in your life as we seek to walk in our new identity and be better imitators of him. Let's pray. God, we love you. You love us for reasons that we genuinely don't understand. God, I'm so grateful that church can be a place where we can just admit that we don't have it together, where we can admit that we're not good at things, where we can admit that we constantly fall short of who you ask us to be, and where we can be met with your grace and your love and your affirmation that that's okay. And you pick us back up and you send us back out. Lord, if there are people here who are far from you, I pray that you would draw them in. If there are people here who are caught up in sin, I pray that you would just bring your gentle, healing conviction. If there are people here in situations that feel impossible, God, would you show them a light? Would you remind them that you make new paths, that you make streams in the desert? God, would we not shy away from the enormous task that it is to be a Christian? Would we not excuse away what you call us to? Simply have the faith and the courage to try to be a little bit better today than we were yesterday. Help us experience the power of choosing to submit to one another, Lord, out of reverence for you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.