Sermons tagged with Communion

All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us, and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining us for Easter. Everybody looks great in their Easter best. I really do like all the bright colors, and I am of the opinion that Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar. It's the greatest holiday. Christmas acknowledges the arrival of our Savior, but it's Easter that acknowledges and signifies the victory of that Savior, of Him doing what He came to do, And it is right and good to be together in church and celebrate this victory. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. As I was thinking about Easter, I was also thinking about the power of images and how when we see a picture or we see an image or we see a logo, it often carries with it a great amount of emotion for us or at least information from us. There's things that we can see, images that we can see that will immediately conjure up from us stories or nostalgia or emotion or things that we'd like to share or things that make us laugh or whatever. And I think that there is this really remarkable intrinsic power in images. To help you understand my point, I have some for us this morning. Here's a very famous one that all of us have seen before. When we think about images, when you see Mickey Mouse ears, what does it make you think of? It may send you back to your childhood when your dad was wearing short shorts and he took you to Frontier Landing or whatever it is. That's what mine was, mosquitoes and the whole deal and hotlines and everything. And it goes back to my childhood in the 80s. And now more recently, it goes back to taking my daughter Lily. We went earlier this year. We went three years ago. I have great memories there. So when I see those ears, it conjures up with me pages and pages worth of memories that I could share with you. And I'm sure that you do too. Maybe it's just annoyance at Disney World and you don't like that place at all and you wish it would quit showing up in your life. That could be it, but you've got something there with just that image. And there's another, here's another one. Let's look at this one. That's not even a picture, but we all know what that is, right? That's coffee. And when you see that, I don't know where that takes you. It takes me, when I think of coffee, I think of being quiet and being relaxed, often studying, having a book, or just staring out the window in silence. The older I get, the more things I see that make me want to sit somewhere and be still and stare out the window in silence. Maybe it's because I have two young children, but that's what I think of when I see coffee is maybe it takes you to after dinner, to a little dinner and dessert or whatever. But maybe you are a person who has coffee paraphernalia all over your kitchen or your office and coffee is a part of who you are and you feel very seen right now, whatever this image means to you. Speaking of feeling seen, some of you will feel seen with this next one. Yeah, we know what that is. That's the Vince Lombardi trophy. That's the Super Bowl trophy. Now, for some of us, it conjures up memories of great, great success. For others, like me, I'm a Falcons fan, it's great pain that is in that image. For others of you Browns fans, that image means nothing to you. You might not even know what that is. I don't know if you do or not. I probably had to explain it to you. And then lastly, there's this, which is known the world over for excellence, victory, and championships. We can all wholeheartedly agree that Georgia Tech's the greatest at everything. That's such an easy joke because Georgia Tech's the worst. They're the worst at everything. They're the NC State of Georgia. Anyways, whatever the image is, whatever the image is conjures up for us emotions and stories and experiences. And I was learning about the power of visual learning and what images do. And they have this remarkable ability to package and compartmentalize for us knowledge and stories and so much other information that's represented in just that image. And it's funny because God created us that way. He created us to be people who don't learn as well by seeing or by reading or by hearing, but by experiencing and by seeing something and by having an image or an icon that immediately takes our mind to a thing or to a place and immediately begins to unpack all the details that go into that image. And I was thinking about the power of imagery this week because I believe that God designed and created for us an image to last until Jesus comes back to remind us maybe of the most important part of the Bible, which is Easter. It dawned on me that baptism is the image of Easter. The act of baptizing someone is the image of Easter. And so when we had some folks in previous months reach out and say, hey, we think we might be interested in being baptized, I asked them if they would do it on Easter. I mentioned before that the early church would only baptize people on Easter because of the imagery, because of what it meant, because of the symbolism laced into baptism. And so I thought, what better way, what better way to acknowledge Easter than to celebrate Easter than to have baptisms on Easter and talk about the symbolism of those baptisms within, or the symbolism of those baptisms within the act of them themselves. And so as we gather for Easter and we are reminded what it's about, let's also acknowledge that God created for us an image of Easter that we ought to be reminded of as we go throughout our Christian lives and our Christian walk. Baptism is so important, as a matter of fact, that Jesus himself started it. Jesus only started two traditions. The church has a lot of traditions. We're observing Lent right now as a church. I hope that that's been a spiritually nourishing season for you, and I hope that the Lord has spoken to you and moved in your heart and drawn you closer to him. I hope that observing Lent this year has been spiritually beneficial for you. And many churches have many different traditions. Some of you, you're here with friends or you're here with family and your church has different traditions that our church isn't observing this morning. And either I'm sorry for that or you're welcome. I'm not sure how you feel about the traditions that you're not currently experiencing. But the church has a ton of traditions. But only two of them were started by Jesus. The first is communion. Communion celebrates the Last Supper and the breaking of bread and Jesus dying on the cross, which is encapsulated by the image behind me. But the other tradition that he started was baptism. When he left, when he went back up to heaven, his final instructions to the disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and great deal to God. And I would argue that it matters a great deal to God because the very act of it, the very image of it is itself a symbol of Easter, which is the greatest victory that is ever won. And this isn't just my idea. I didn't just conjure this up reading scriptures and piecing things together. This comes from Paul himself. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Romans. And in that letter, it says this in chapter 6, beginning in verse 3. So Paul says, in our regular rhythm of faith to remind us of the miraculous victory of Easter. And he walks us through it. And in a few minutes, we're going to have the opportunity to baptize in this service two of our kids, and then in the next service, two of our adults. And I'm very excited about that. And when we do it, when we baptize them, we're going to put them under the water. And when they go under the water, that is a picture of the death of Christ. They are buried with him in death, Paul writes. And so that takes us back, it should take us back to that Friday when Jesus hung on the cross, when hope was lost, when the disciples scattered, when Mary was brokenhearted, when no one knew what to do. And it takes us to the Saturday in that poignant moment before they come back out of the water. It takes us to that sacred Saturday where hope was lost and confusion reigned and disappointment ruled the day. And they didn't know what to do. And they didn't know what to do about their Savior. And they didn't know if he was going to come back. They didn't know what was coming on Sunday. So Saturday they just sat in their sadness and in their depression. And in that moment when they disappear and you can't see them, right before they come back up, that's Friday and Saturday in the baptism imagery in the Easter story. But the story doesn't end there. It doesn't end on that sacred Saturday. It ends on Sunday when Mary goes to the tomb to look for Jesus. And it's that passage that Jordan read to us a little bit earlier in the service. And in that passage, it has to me what is the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. When Mary goes and she's looking for Jesus and the tomb is empty and there's an angel there who looks at her and he says, what are you doing? Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen. He's not here, Mary. You're not gonna find him. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, that's the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Because without that sentence, without that sentence, nothing else matters. Do you understand? Nothing else in all of Christendom, nothing else in life matters without that sentence. When we have Christmas, we have the arrival of the Savior. That's good. We should celebrate that. That's hopeful. And that's a fulfilled promise that people clung to for thousands of years. But on Easter at the empty tomb, when Jesus conquered sin and death, that is the greatest victory ever won. That is the greatest sentence in the Bible. And if that sentence isn't true, then everything else fades and nothing else matters. All of Christendom and all religion and all faith is just babbling morality without that sentence, without the reality of the resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb where he conquers sin and death finally. And so when we see the baptized person spring up out of those waters, that's the moment that they're capturing. They're capturing the empty tomb. And it says that they are raised to walk in newness of life. And it reminds us of the victory that Jesus won that day. It reminds us of why this is the greatest holiday. It reminds us of the import of that sentence because in that empty tomb, in resurrecting, in raising to walk again in newness of life, Jesus accomplished for us victory over death and victory over sin. Jesus made it true that old prophecy, oh death, where is your sting? I'm reminded of this old gospel song that's ripped out of the scriptures that says, oh sin, where are your shackles? Oh death, where is your sting? Hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold our king. And when we baptize someone and we pull them out of the water, that's where the moment goes. It's to someone springing forward in newness of life. It's to victory over death. Do you realize, do you realize that this, one of the reasons that this is the greatest day on the Christian calendar is that this is the day that conquered death. This is the day that gives us hope. This is the day that we celebrate, that we cling to, that we hope for, so that when we watch someone we love slowly drift into eternity and eventually we say goodbye to them, because of Easter, we say goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever. Because of Easter, we can hold their hand and we can pray with them and we can know with certainty that they really are going to a better place and that they are waiting for us there. Because of Easter, death has no sting. What hurts about death is missing someone for a little while. What hurts about death is not having them in your life, is not being able to pick up the phone and call them like you used to. But what hurts about death is not the finality of it because Jesus took that away when he raised up out of that tomb. And we celebrate that victory when we raise someone up out of the water. That Easter is the greatest victory of all time. And it gives us incredible amounts of hope. And it takes away the fear of the one thing of which we are all the most fearful, which is what happens when we die. And because of Easter, because Jesus died on the cross, because he was buried, because he rose again and was raised to walk in that newness of life. We know that one day we will go to the marriage supper of the Lamb. We know that one day we will be in heaven with Jesus for all of eternity. We know that one day we will see those that we loved again. We know that one day we will be united with our Savior and we can set down the burdens of hope and faith because Jesus will be right there in front of us because of Easter. And not only in that moment where Jesus sprung out of the tomb, where we come up out of the water, not only is there victory over death, but there's victory over sin as well. Sin has no shackles on us anymore. So not only is there hope for the future, for what will happen one day, but there is hope for right now because scripture teaches us that when we are a new creation, that we come up out of the waters to walk in newness of life, that what that newness of life means is we are no longer shackled to the sins that we carried before we knew Jesus. I preached a couple of weeks ago about repentance, and what I said is that after Jesus, after the Holy Spirit, after we know him, after we become Christians, then repentance is possible. Before that, scripture tells us that we are slaves to sin, that we have no choice but to sin. But with the miracle of Easter, it doesn't just give us hope for the future. It gives us hope for the right now, that the sins and the things in our life that we don't want there anymore can actually be defeated. And we find that hope in Jesus. Easter reminds us of that hope. And it reminds us that we're not chained to the sins that we once carried anymore. So not only does Easter point us towards a future hope, but Easter points us to a present hope, victory over death and sin, future and present. And so, in a few minutes, as we do the baptisms, let's see in these baptisms the picture of Easter. When they go under, let's take ourselves to the Friday and to the Saturday and to the waiting and to the confusion. And let's know that that's just God putting to death your old self. And when we see a raising to walk and newness of life, that that is the victory of hope for all of eternity. That is the victory that Jesus has already won and he's going to come and claim again someday. But as you move through life, as you go through Easter, as you attend other services, as you go to other churches, and some of you back to your own churches, my hope for you is that whenever you see a baptism, that it will carry you right back to Easter, right back to this day, right back to the victory that Jesus won for you and for me, and that it will fill you with a hope, not only for the future, but for the present as well. And let's see baptism for what it is, a picture, an image of Easter itself, of the greatest victory ever won and the greatest day on the Christian calendar. Let's pray and then we're going to baptize some people. Father, thank you so much for the miracle of Easter. Thank you for what it is, for what it represents. God, I pray that as we think of Easter and we think of the images that surround it, that it wouldn't just be bunnies and eggs and pastels and baskets and flowers and all the rest, but that the first thing we would see is your victory. The first thing we would see is how you love us. How you sent your son to die for us and how he resurrected on the third day. God, may we be moved with each baptism that we see with the power and the efficacy of Easter and all that today represents. I pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

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

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week, Joseph's story reached its incredible conclusion in an emotional reunion with his brothers. Now we reflect on everything that happened in Joseph's life and all we have discussed in previous weeks. We will marvel at the sweeping and stunning sovereignty of God as we ask together what it means for us today to continue to believe that He has a plan. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. If we haven't gotten the chance to meet, I'd love to meet you afterwards between the service and the meeting that I have to go to, but I'd still love to meet you afterwards. If you're watching online, thank you for doing that. If you're catching up during the week, we are grateful that you are doing that as well. This is the last part of our series in Joseph, going through the life of Joseph, and I hope that you guys have enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed kind of diving into the story and getting to preach it every week. I love the stories of the Old Testament. I love trying to help them come to life and taking time to go through them and see that there's really so much there for us to learn from that points to things that are relevant to us today. Just for my own curiosity, by show of hands, those of you who have heard most of these sermons and been in here or watched online for most of these sermons and seen the bumper videos, how many of you have picked up on the fact that it changes every week, that there's different words being said every week? Not very many of you. Some of you are like, wait, what? Yeah, we rewrite them every week to catch you up with the story. And we were joking as a staff, wondering if anybody knew that we were actually doing that. And my bet was no, and I was mostly right. So there we have it. We're not doing that for you ever again. We're just going to make the same bumper videos. And you're just going to have to be stuck with them. So sorry. As we finish this week, I'll remind you that last week, we really, we reached the end of the story, right? We reached the end of the narrative. We had moved all the way through, and Joseph was finally reunited with his brothers. His father was told that Joseph was alive. Jacob was told that Joseph was alive, and he was going to go down and meet him. And he looked, and he said, when he saw all the workings of God, he said, it is enough. And we kind of talked about the profundity of that phrase and everything behind it. And so the whole time that we've been moving through, I've been saying, this is really one big long seven week sermon. And so this is the part of that long sermon where we reflect on all the things that we just learned and saw. And it just occurred to me, I'm going to have to take my watch off. The Falcons are about to start playing, which means my friends are going to be texting like crazy. It just went off and something happened in the game already. This is actually why I had this installed. I'm watching the game as I preach there this morning. That's not true. And that joke was given to me by Kyle before the service. So thank you, Kyle. It worked great. Everybody seemed to love it. Yeah, it was very good. It's very good. Part seven. This is the part where we watch and reflect on all that we've learned. And we ask, what does this mean for us? What's the overarching point of the story of Joseph? Not just what do we see when we drill down into the individual details, but as we move through the whole story, what is it that we learn and how does that impact us? And that, to me, what we learn from the entire story of Joseph is probably my favorite thing about the story. As it was said in the intro video there, that this is the most sweeping and stunning depiction of the sovereignty of God, I think, that we find in the Bible outside of Jesus himself. And so I want us to see the story of Joseph the way that I look at it and see it now. To help us do that, we first look at this summary verse from Joseph. This is in Genesis chapter 50. The family has moved down. Pharaoh has given them the land of Goshen. That's where they're living. And Jacob's life is coming to an end. Their dad is about to die. The brother's father is about to die. And the brothers kind of start to murmur and realize, hmm, dad's about to pass away. And when he does, the gig may be up. Joseph may still be mad at us. He may still be harboring some anger against us. So there's a chance that once dad dies, he's going to let Benjamin stay alive and he's going to kill us for revenge. And Joseph catches wind of this thought. So he calls the brothers to him and to ally their fears, to help them just relax and know that he has nothing sinister planned. Joseph says this in Genesis chapter 50, verse 20 to his brothers. And this is a great summary verse that many of us have probably heard before. He says this, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. Now, many of you probably heard that verse before. You meant it for evil, but you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. But I think put in its proper context, in this big narrative of the life of Joseph, to know exactly what his brothers did, that Joseph had those dreams and the brothers did exactly the exact opposite of those dreams and sold him into slavery and they meant it for evil. But Joseph, now presumably 20 years later, knows that that was God working and that God meant it for good. So for Joseph to say that, what does he mean? How does he know that God meant it for good? How does he see God's plan come to fruition? What are the layers behind God meaning it for good? And all of the implications of the story of Joseph and what kind of plan and for whom was God weaving it exactly? And so to do that and to think through really all the repercussions of the plan that God had for Joseph throughout his life and the story that we just looked at, I want you guys to think about something with me. This is going to be handy for me to use as we go throughout the sermon today to kind of refer back to this. But I don't want you guys to take out your phones because then you might just stay there and I'll get real discouraged. But think about looking at your map on your phone or on your computer. You pull up Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever it is you use, and you zoom in on one particular property. Maybe it's your property. That's all you can see on the screen is just your house. And then imagine pinching it or zooming back or whatever it is and pulling back, and now you can see most of the city. You can see where your property sits in relation to the rest of the city. You can see the streets that surround your community, the different shops and restaurants and different things and schools that are in your community, and you kind of realize that your house exists within the broader context of this community, and then zoom way out until you can see the whole country. And realize that this one house exists in this community, which exists within this country. And you could zoom in on any different portion of the country and find your own community, find a different community. And then within those communities, you can find your own house or another individual house. So it's kind of the same idea that's working on three levels, right? At the home, and then at the community level, and then at the country level. And I bring that up because I think it's helpful to think of Joseph's story as a home within a community, within a country. I think there are layered truths to the story of Joseph and layered evidences of God's plan. And here's what I mean. When we read the story of Joseph, we've said all along, he has a plan, he has a plan, he has a plan. Each one of the voiceovers that we wrote for the videos ended with the phrase, he has a plan. He has a plan. Each one of the voiceovers that we wrote for the videos ended with the phrase, he has a plan. Each week we leave ourselves in a place where Joseph has to choose to continue to cling to the belief that God has a plan. And so this week, I want us to see the multifaceted levels of that plan. So the first one is God has a plan for his child. What do we see when we look at the story of Joseph? We see that God has a plan for his child. God has a plan for Joseph as an individual. God gave him those dreams when he was young. He said, your brothers and your mom and your dad are going to bow down to you one day. God knew that in his arrogance, he was going to go tell his brothers. He knew that in that arrogance, he was going to get thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. And God knew that he needed to plant Joseph for Joseph's own sake, that he needed to be associated with Pharaoh. But if you go back through the whole story, there's no way to get a nomad from Canaan into the court of Pharaoh in Egypt. So how's he going to do that? So God enacts a plan. And part of that plan is to let Joseph be a snot-nosed brat so that his brothers don't like him. And then they throw him into the pit. And they're going to kill him. But Reuben whispers, maybe let's not do this. Maybe let's just sell him into slavery. I don't know this or not. This is total conjecture. But what do you think are the chances that the Holy Spirit whispered into the ear of Reuben, hey, why don't you sell him into slavery instead? What do you think are the chances that God was present in that moment to change the mind of his brothers to what he needed them to do? His chances are pretty good, personally. He sells them into slavery, the exact opposite of the dreams that he was given. How could this possibly be the case? He's been promised that this is going to happen. He's been promised, he's claiming the promises of his great-grandfather Abraham that were passed down through his grandfather Isaac, through his father Jacob, and now bestowed onto him as the firstborn son of his beloved wife. Joseph is going to live out all of these things, except now he's in the back of an ox cart on the way to Egypt, and it feels like none of those things are going to come true. But God was working in the details of that plan. God sent him down there. He gets down there. He's still got to get him associated with Pharaoh. How's he going to do that? Well, he gets bought by Potiphar, a royal servant. So that when Potiphar's wife would eventually accuse Joseph of sexual harassment falsely, and he gets falsely imprisoned, he doesn't end up in the general population prison. No, he ends up in the royal prison with royal prisoners who are associated with Pharaoh this whole time. Even though it doesn't look like that the dreams are going to come true, even though it doesn't seem like God is with Joseph this whole time, God is working his plan and his child. He interacts with the cupbearer. The cupbearer goes to Pharaoh two years after that interaction. He's swept up into Pharaoh's court. He's put where he needs to be. He's got the preparation that he needs. He's had time to age and mature. He's got experience and leadership already when he rises to prominence in jail and when he rose to prominence at Potiphar's house. And now he's ready to step into his role as the secretary of agriculture for the most powerful nation in the world. Number two in command right behind Pharaoh. He's done this before. He's interpreted the dreams before. He was ready for his moment. And this whole time, God has been working his plan. Do you see? To get Joseph into that place. That was his plan for his child. And throughout the whole plan, there was plenty of circumstances where Joseph could look around and say, God, this plan ain't working, man. The things that are happening in my life are not what I expected based on the plan that you gave me. So we just had to trust that God had one. And so we see this whole time that God has a plan for his child. And we talked about when he rose to prominence last week, I said, the story could end here. When he's in charge, he's got his sons. He names them Manasseh and Ephraim. And it means the Lord has provided it for me in my time of trial. Like that story could have been done there. It's good. It's done. But the story is about more than God's child because God has a plan for his children. Joseph is the house. He's the child. But if you zoom out, you see that God has a plan for his children, for his community, for his people. God has a plan for Joseph's family. Last week, we saw in the verses, we saw in the passage a couple of verses where Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and he says, don't worry, I'm not angry at you. You intended this for evil, but what you think you're the one who sent me here, it wasn't you, it was God. And he sent me here to preserve many lives. And so what we also see, this kind of pulled back layer of the story, is that God wasn't just preserving the life of Joseph to get him where he needed him to be, but he needed Joseph to be there because he needed to protect his children. He needed to protect his people. He needed to protect the offspring of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Because we learned in week one, God made promises to Jacob and God's commitment to his promises are not contingent upon our behavior. Remember? And so God made a promise to Abraham that you're going to have the land of Canaan. You're going to have so many descendants, it's going to be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. And you're going to have one descendant that's going to come and bless the whole earth. That's the plan. And so God keeps his promise to Abraham. He gives him a son, Isaac. He keeps his promise to Abraham through Isaac, giving him a son. He keeps his promise to Jacob by showing him favor until Jacob finally realizes you've been wrestling against God your whole life. Just relax and enjoy God's favor. Joseph figures out to enjoy God's favor, even when it doesn't make any sense. And he looks around and the plan doesn't make any sense. He's just hanging in there and trusting that God has a plan. And now God's put him in this place where he can provide for everybody. And the whole time he's not just doing it to provide for Joseph. God is doing it, I think, because he knows the descendants of Abraham will not survive a seven-year drought in the land of Canaan. They can't do it. When the brothers came asking for grain the second time, they were in year two of the famine. Now this is conjecture. I don't know this for sure. But when are they going to run out of money to feed a small clan of people? When are they going to start? How many more trips to Egypt can the brothers make before they have to start choosing who gets grain when they get home and who doesn't? They have no idea the famine is going to last seven years. They've probably got a year or two left before they've got to start asking some really hard questions questions because if there's nothing growing on the ground, then there's nothing that their flocks can eat. And if there's nothing that their flocks can eat, then they have no way to make money. And if they have no way to make money and there's nothing on the ground and they have no flocks left for them to eat, then what are they going to do but perish? So God, to protect his children, not his child, his children, takes one of his children and places him in a place where he can, according to Joseph, preserve many lives. And so in the story is God keeping his promise to Abraham and preserving the promise to the community, preserving the promise to his children to keep them where he needs them to be. They are brought down, put in one of the most fertile places in Egypt, the land of Goshen, and they are told to live there and flourish there. So when we pull back from just Joseph, we realize that God was working a plan for his children this whole time too, for all of Joseph's family. The brothers had no idea that they were part of this plan, but they were. They were just pawns in what God was doing. Then you pull back even further at the kingdom view, and you realize that God has a plan for his kingdom. What he's working in the life of Joseph, those individual details and the ebbs and flows that we've followed over the last several weeks, he's not just working for Joseph's benefit. He's not just working for his children's benefit. He's working for his kingdom's benefit. We're in Genesis 50 this morning. When you flip the page to Exodus chapter one, what do you learn? You learn that 400 years after Joseph had passed away and Pharaoh had forgotten about them, Moses is on the scene. That's how the stories are linked together. And by the time Moses comes on the scene in Exodus chapter 1, theologians believe that there was between 500,000 and 600,000 Hebrew people living in Egypt as slaves. I have to believe that for some reason, God didn't believe that this family from Abraham was going to make it in the land of Canaan on their own. He had to believe that there was no way they were going to grow to what they needed to be to be able to conquer the land of Canaan and possess the kingdom that he had promised them that they would possess. So what does he do? He takes his children down to the most powerful nation in the world and he incubates them for 400 years where they can grow and develop culture and develop a faith and develop a way that they interact with their God so that when Moses comes on the scene, who by the way, another stunning view of God's sovereignty, God plucks Moses out of Hebrew slavery and puts him in the palace of Pharaoh where he gets the best education in the world. He's exposed to leadership his whole life. He grows up, he's haughty, he goes out into the wilderness and gets humbled, and then he's called in Exodus 3 and 4 back to Pharaoh from the burning bush to go lead his people out into Canaan because now they are finally ready to go live where I want them to live. None of that happens if Joseph isn't sold into slavery when he's 17 years old. None of that happens if Potiphar's wife doesn't falsely accuse him. None of that happens if Joseph doesn't get chosen to go interpret the dream for Pharaoh. None of that happens if Joseph isn't placed as second in command to help preserve the line and bring them down and incubate them. God is planning things on such a bigger scale than Joseph would ever acknowledge or imagine. And so we go from the house to the city to the nation where God's really enacting his plan. We've been saying this whole time, he has a plan, he has a plan, he has a plan. And we've been spending most of our time focused on his plan for Joseph and what it means for him. But as we finish the story, we need to peel back and say, what does it mean for God's children? And then we pull back even more and say, what does it mean for God's kingdom? What is it that he's doing on this huge eternal scale that he's enacting through the life of Joseph? And suddenly we begin to see God's sovereignty woven all throughout the story, understanding that he's in every detail, that he's allowing and disallowing all the different things to bring about the future that he once brought about. And the great part of Joseph's story and seeing God's plan on that scale is realizing that if God has a plan for Joseph, that he has a plan for us. If God had a plan for his children then, then he has a plan for his children now. If God had a plan for his kingdom then, he has a plan for his kingdom now and still. And as Christians, and this is the great part, this is the part that I want us to sink into. As Christians, we have to understand that we are still in the land between, right in the middle of God's plan. We slowed down and we looked at one phrase that Doug did such a fantastic job with, the fact that Joseph had to wait in prison for two years and that land between promise and fulfillment and the already and the not yet. And God, I know that you told me that this would be true, but it's not true yet. And so I wait on you. If you are a Christian, that is where you are. And the promise that Jesus died on the cross for you and that one day he's gonna come back and get you. That's where we find ourselves, in that land between, in that land between promise and fulfillment. All Christians live there. And we cling to the truth and to the promise that God still has a plan. And his plan, by the way, is, was, and will always be Jesus. That's his plan. That's what we cling to. As a matter of fact, what I would tell you is that the story of Joseph ultimately points us to Jesus. It's the whole reason that it's there. I've just been waiting for six weeks to build it up so that we could point ourselves collectively to Jesus because he's God's plan. He was God's plan here in Genesis 50. He's God's plan in Matthew chapter one. He's God's plan in Revelation 19. Jesus is God's plan. And that's what we sit in the middle of. God's plan from the very beginning was to send a Messiah through the line of Abraham. We go all the way back to Genesis chapter 12. We get out of what's called the prehistoric narrative to kind of set up the story. Genesis 1 through 11 basically set up the story for us to focus on Abraham and hear the promises that God gives Abraham. And the promises are land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. All the way back in Genesis chapter 12, God knew what the plan was. And the plan was to establish a nation, establish a faith, let them come to the realization again and again and again that they desperately needed a king, they desperately needed a savior. The plan was to send Jesus in the flesh to live amongst us, to stay here for 33 years, to be crucified, to raise himself from the dead on the third day, conquering death and sin for all time and giving us a hope that we can cling to that Romans tells us will not put us to shame. That was the plan. And then one day, he's going to come back. And when he comes back, he's going to have righteous and true on his thigh, and he's going to take us home with him. That's the plan. It's always been the plan. It's what we cling to. And so right now, in this life, for a little while, Paul tells us, we will endure hardship. And right now, in this life, we're going to look around sometimes, like Joseph did on his way down to Egypt and go, God, this doesn't feel like the plan. None of my circumstances make any sense to me with what I thought I was promised. There's going to be times when, like Joseph, we're falsely accused and we're thrown in whatever version of prison awaits us. There's going to be times when we feel like God promised us something or that something's supposed to go our way and instead we're going to languish for two years waiting for that thing to happen. There's going to be times when the plan doesn't seem like it's going how it's supposed to go. And in those moments when the plan doesn't seem to be making much sense to us, it would help us to not be so focused on our own house and to take a step back and say, God, what are you working in the community around me right now? How is what I'm walking through affecting the children, your children that I'm around? How is it affecting my church? How is it affecting my community? What's the bigger thing going on here? And this is what I mean. Many of you guys know that part of mine and Jen's story is that we struggled for a long time to get pregnant. And then when we finally did, we lost our first child. We had a miscarriage. And at the time, here, looking at my house, God, how could you let this happen to us? We serve you, we love you, we do good things, we don't have secret sins. There's a bunch of people who are way worse than us and they're just like slipping and having children. We can't have any. That's not fair, God. But then I pull back and I look at the community. And what God knew that I didn't is that I was going to be the pastor for a lot of people who struggle with infertility. And he knew that it was going to make me a much better pastor to be able to mourn with them and hope with them and pray with them. He knew that Jen was going to have the opportunity to comfort a lot of women along the way. And so it was a hard part of our plan, but I think it was absolutely a part of God's plan. On another level, I believe that one of the reasons that it took us so long to have children, and now I'm going to be in retirement when John graduates from college. I believe that one of the reasons that it took us so long and that we are older parents with younger kids is because I think that he knew where we were going to be and what we were going to do. And he wanted us to have children of a certain age so that they would make friends with children of that age so that we would have friends of a certain age so that he could build a community with us and for us. I think it all works. Now, do I pretend to know where God is interjecting himself and diverting our plan towards a particular path that we might not see the end of and when it just really is coincidental and then God's working within those circumstances to bring about his goodness and our joy. No, I don't know how to tell you the difference between those things and when they're happening. But I know that God has a plan. And I know that sometimes we have a hard time seeing it because we're so focused here that we can't pull back to here and see what's going on in our community. And then when that still doesn't make any sense, we pull back to the eternal view. And we trust that God still has a plan. That one day Jesus is going to come back. And he's going to restore creation to itself. This is what Romans 8 tells us, that all of creation groans with the beginnings of birth pains for the return of the king, that creation groans, that when someone gets cancer, that's creation groaning. When abuse happens, when divorce happens, when we lose a loved one too early, when things happen that don't make sense, when we see a school shooting, that's creation groaning. That's our very nature saying, God, this isn't how it's supposed to be. And God is in heaven and he says, I know. And I'm coming. And until I do, just trust me. Trust that I have a plan. This trust is the fundamental Christian trust. That even when things don't make sense, even when we don't understand them, even when we can't explain our faith, we still choose it. Because we trust that our hope will not be put to shame and we trust that Jesus is going to do what he said he would do. That trust in Jesus is the fundamental Christian trust. And what we know and what's amazing about our Jesus is that at every level of the plan he is working. He's working in his child. He is working in his children. He is working in his kingdom. He's working in his child and that he's near us. In John 11, it says that Jesus weeps with us. He's working for his children. In Romans 8, where it says that Jesus is the high priest, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. And it says that again in the Hebrews. He's working for his children and then he's working for his kingdom when he's waiting for God to say, yeah, now's the time. And he comes back and he gets us. And he delivers us into that sweet moment in Revelation 21 where it says that God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping, no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. That's the plan to get us to that moment. And your job is to take as many people as you can with you as you go to that moment. And your job is even when I don't, I look around and I'm on an ox cart on my way to be a slave and none of this makes sense. It's to still hold fast and hold firm and hold true and steady to Jesus, trusting that Jesus is God's plan. And if I just cling to this, even when I don't understand it, that one day it'll all make sense to me. That when we get to heaven, we'll look around at everything and we'll go, yeah, this was a good plan. And we'll be very glad that we clung to it. That's the story of Joseph. The story of Joseph points us to that plan. I hope that you'll go back and read it. That you'll read it again thinking about the layers and see different details that you didn't see before. I hope that you'll never think of Joseph the same way you did before we started this series seven weeks ago. And here's the really fun part about where we end this series talking about God still having a plan and that we sit in the middle of it and we are awaiting the fulfillment of that plan. You know the very next thing we're talking about? The end of the plan. Revelation starts next week, where we skip to the last chapter of the book, and we find out how it ends so we don't have to be so stressed about the middle part. And it's just pretty cool to me how even as I sit up here and I say every week, God has a plan, God has a plan, God has a plan, that I believe his plan was to weave these two stories of Joseph and then the account of Revelation together to prepare our hearts for what we're going to begin to dive into next week. I hope that you'll come back for that. I'm very excited to share Revelation with you guys and for us to walk through that as a church. And as we finish up this story, I hope that you'll never, ever read Joseph the same way again. And then I'm going to pray. I'm going to pray and we're going to have communion. And I'm excited about doing communion together with you guys in light of what we just covered. And I'll tell you why in a second. Let's pray. Father, you have a plan. You have a plan for your child, for your children, for your kingdom. We are grateful to sit in the middle of that. God, if there is anyone here who does not have the hope of that plan, who does not have the hope of a coming Savior to rescue them, would they place their hope in you just this morning? Would they cling to that hope and never let go? God, for those of us who look around and feel like maybe our circumstances don't really line up with our expectations, would you give us the strength and the faith and the courage to cling to you and to cling to your plan and to trust it? God, I pray for our church family as we go throughout our weeks. I pray that you would draw us near to you, that we would hear your spirit speaking to us, that we would feel moved and directed and guided by you, that we would have a heightened sensitivity to your timing and to your plan and be grateful that we are a part of it. Help us to be more obedient followers of you. In Jesus' name, amen.