Sermons tagged with Connection

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you very much. Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. There you go. Now they can see me on video. Isn't that so much better? If you are joining us online, thank you for doing that. And I would just say gently for those who are joining us online, if you're doing that consistently, there is nothing quite like worshiping together as a family. So if you can get here and worship with us, do that because it's a sweet, sweet time, and it's my favorite part of the week, every week when I get to worship with you guys. We are in the third part of our series called Traits of Grace, and these are kind of five distinctive characteristics that make grace, grace. I am a firm believer, and will wholeheartedly share it with whomever is curious that grace is not, we're not nailing it as a church. Okay. We haven't like figured out how to do church the right way and all the other churches are doing it wrong. Okay. They're, they're worse than us. You guys are the good Christians who've really figured out how to love Jesus well. And the other churches are apostate and we should pray for them. Like we don't believe that. We believe that there are plenty of churches in the city of Raleigh that are doing wonderful jobs, pushing people towards Jesus and making disciples. I would even say that there's got to be plenty of them who are doing better than us. But you guys are here this morning. So we're going to make the best of it together while you think about a better church to go to next week. But there's plenty of great churches doing plenty of great things, and so I think it's important for churches to figure out what is it that makes us us? What has God wired us to do? A few weeks ago, we talked about being kingdom builders, and I kind of left you guys with the question of what is your good work? Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And so we asked, what is your good work? And I think similarly, it's wise for churches to ask, what is our good work? Every church is supposed to make disciples, but how would God have us go about it? How has he uniquely wired and gathered and impassioned us to do it? And as we were having the discussion about what makes grace, grace last fall, we came up as a staff and then as elders with these five traits. So we've talked about the fact that partners at grace are kingdom builders. Then we talked last week about how partners at Grace are conduits of Grace. We stay connected to Jesus and we pour out all the love and all the goodness and all the grace that we receive from Jesus onto others. We are conduits of Grace. And so this week we arrive at the third trait that we feel like we are at Grace. And I realized this morning as I was reviewing and preparing that I didn't put this in your notes anywhere. So I don't know if this is going to be unofficial or something. I hope I haven't done something wrong and now this one doesn't count. But we are people of devotion. That's the third trait of grace. We are people of devotion. And when I say devotion, obviously that can mean multiple things, but it really means what it meant back in 1985. We are people who have devotions. You have heard me say many times, if you've been at grace for any period of time, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, a lot of you can finish this sentence, is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. That is the most important thing, the most important habit that any single one of us can develop at any point in our life. And I believe that to be true, and we hit on that to be true, and we remind you of that all the time, because I also try to remind you that I am not enough. You can't come listen to me talk for 30 minutes a week and know the breadth and the depth of the God that's waiting for you in this text. You can't listen to whatever I choose to pick out and talk about just this little tiny snippet within here and somehow hope to understand the whole book. That's just not how that works. So it takes more than 30 minutes a week. It takes more than just one small group a week, which we'd love to say is an hour a week talking about spiritual things, but really it's about 45 minutes a week talking about whatever the heck and then about 15 minutes of good spiritual conversation. If you're in a small group, you know what I'm talking about. So that's not enough. We've got to spend time in God's Word, and we've got to spend time in God's presence through prayer. So when we thought about what are we at Grace, what do we want partners to be at Grace? We want to be people of devotion. We want to be people who develop that habit. And as we think about it this morning, I don't know about you, but I feel that when God is speaking to us, he often speaks in stereo. When someone will ask me, hey, how do I hear God's voice? How do I know what he's saying to me? How do I discern God's will for my life? I often will say, one of the first things I'll tell him is, God speaks, when he speaks to me, he speaks in stereo. He tells me from this source and this source and this source and this source, and it just kind of continues to come up in my life. And one of the themes that has been coming up for me in my life before the summer, but in particular the summer, you guys gave me the great privilege and rest of not having to preach in the month of July to just kind of settle and work on some other things in the church and allow God to refresh me a little bit. And it was wonderful. And one of the things that I brought out of there and that seems to continue to come up in my sermons that I'm preaching like when I preached on the law a couple weeks ago and I've seen it come through in themes these last couple weeks and then really we're hitting on it again in my Tuesday morning men's Bible study. I have a men's Bible study that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6 30. We meet that early to keep out the riffraff. The only thing the only thing prohibiting you from being there is laziness. So come on and join us. We're not any nicer there either. This is as nice as it gets. But I see this theme in my life and I've seen it in what we're learning at Grace and I thought it worth highlighting this morning, which is simply the beautiful simplicity of abiding. We talked about this last week. We're conduits of grace. And we looked at John 15, where Jesus is speaking to the disciples, particularly four and five. And he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we talked about this idea of all I have to do is stay connected to Christ, and he's going to produce the fruit in my life that I need to produce. I don't have to think about that. I just focus on abiding in Christ. And I think that there is this beautiful simplicity to that. Because we can make Christianity really complicated, can't we? It can be really challenging and difficult. It can be intimidating to look at this Bible, to open it up, to come to service on a Sunday and the pastor says, turn to Malachi. You're like, I've never even heard of that name in my life. I don't know where that is, right? Just to learn just the names of the 66 books, to learn how to find them all, that there's 37 or 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, to learn all, what are all the sins? What are all the things I'm supposed to do? What are all the things I'm not supposed to do? Who are all the people? And how old was Paul? Did he live to be 900? Or is that some other guy? Like it can be a lot. And one of the things that I have a heart for is adults, people who have already gone through life and made a bunch of decisions. And in your 30s, 40s, 50s or later, you decide this is when I want to get serious about my faith and you start trying to learn Bible. And you don't have the background that I've been learning about this since I was old enough to talk. But it can feel like a steep bell curve when you're trying to learn faith and taking it seriously. So I love the beautiful simplicity of really what God asks us to do, which is to simply abide in him. Just simply, you just, just, just focus on Jesus. Just pursue Jesus. Just love others like Jesus loves you. Just do all that. The rest of this stuff, if you focus on abiding in Christ, the rest of this stuff, the rest of Christianity, the rest of life will take care of itself. Just focus on abiding in Christ. And this is, this is an attitude that we see throughout scripture. We're going to look at two other places today where it's pared down and it's made just this simple. One of my favorite pictures of this in the Bible is in the book of Hebrews. In the book of Hebrews, there's Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1, obviously follows. I don't know if you know this. You have to go to seminary to know this, but chapter 12 of Hebrews follows chapter 11 of Hebrews. And in chapter 11 of Hebrews, we have this really famous passage that's called the Hall of Faith, where the author of Hebrews lists out all of these heroes of the faith and the acts that they performed by faith. And then when we get into 12, and I'll read it in just a minute, but when we get into 12, we see it begin, So it's this idea that we're on the playing field of earth as those in heaven who have come before us are now watching us in real time, which I think is a really cool thought. And here's what the author of Hebrews says. He says, Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And it's language, I think, that we can identify with. It's language that inspires. We're kind of like, okay, I'm on the playing field. I'm supposed to run this race. I'm supposed to live my life. I'm supposed to do the things that God wants me to do. How do I do that? Well, I throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. I need to run in such a way that I can do what God wants me to do, that I can be who God wants me to be, and I need to get rid of all the things that don't help me run my race. And this, again, is an idea that is replete throughout Scripture. It shows up again and again and again. Paul tells us that we are to fight the good fight. He says that he fights the good fight. He tells us that in this race, we are to run as the one who's trying to get the prize, that we are supposed to cling to our faith. We are told to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. Jesus tells us that other people should see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. So all throughout Scripture is this simple admonition that we need to live a life worthy of the calling that we've received. We need to run the race. We need to be who God created us to be. We need to determine what are our good works and how do we walk in them. And you can rephrase all of that and we say we need to be good Christians. We need to grow in our faith. We need to move towards Jesus. And we can identify with this. This is, to me, inspiring. It's easy to understand. Yep, I'm running a race and I do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that's so easily entangled. So I got to stop doing those things so I can do the things that God wants me to do. And sometimes, I think more often than not, that's where we stop. I'm going to try really hard at running this race. I'm going to try really hard to be a good Christian. I'm going to try really hard to be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend, a good employee or employer. I'm going to try really hard to be a good citizen. And I'm going to do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we act like the next verse doesn't exist. How are we supposed to do that? By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Even in Hebrews, where it uses this language about running our race, doing better, being good Christians, being who God's created us to be, it tells us, it gives us the answer right there. How do I do that? How do I run my race well? By focusing my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. How do we produce much fruit? By abiding in Christ, by focusing on Jesus. And so I call it the beautiful simplicity of abiding because there's this thing that happens. When I decide that I want to be a better father or a better husband or a better pastor or a better human, there's a lot of growth that needs to happen in all of those areas, except for husband. I'm nailing that one. When I decide I want to be better at those things, I think our tendency is to go, okay, what do I need to do to be a better husband? And we identify things and we run and I'm going to do more of this and less of this. What do I need to do to be a better wife? I'm going to do more of this and less than this. What do I need to do to be a better mom? I'm going to do more of this and less of this. And we try to white knuckle our way to better, right? That's the American way. I want to be better at these things. I'm going to focus on those things. I'm going to come up with a plan, and I'm going to do it. And Christianity says, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that. Just focus on Jesus. Just focus on God. Just focus on abiding in Christ, and I'll take care of the rest of it. So here's how this works practically. I do have a lot of room to grow in being a husband. You know the most effective way for me to be a better husband to Jen? It's to pursue Jesus. It's to wake up tomorrow and say, Jesus, I want to honor you today as I seek to be Jen's husband. How do I honor you in that? How would you have me be a good husband today, Jesus? You want to be a better employee? You want to move up the ranks? You want your career to progress? You can spend a lot of time thinking about the best thing to do and the best person to please and the best way, the best jobs to go for or the best tasks to complete or the right people to make friends with or whatever it is you do to progress in your field. Or you can go to work every day, focus on Christ, and you can say, Jesus, how can I honor you today in my work? How can I honor you today in these meetings? How can I honor you today in these tasks? And then you honor Jesus. And you know what happens? Everything else works out. I was talking in my Bible study group about this idea. Just honor Jesus in what we do. Just pursue Jesus in what we do and let him handle the results. And they said, well, what does that mean practically? I said, for my sermons. My job is to be diligent on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday so that when I stand before you on Sunday, before God on Sunday, I know I've given my best effort. I've honored God in my preparation. I've honored Jesus in my prayer life as I approached sharing this with you guys. And I know that I've done the best that I could in the week that I was given with the time that I was allotted. And I'm honoring Jesus as I give this to you. If I can say that, what happens as a result of the sermon is completely out of my hands. I have nothing to do with that. I don't worry about that. I worry about where my heart is as I prepare, and I'll be the first to confess. Listen, I say that, and that sounds lovely, like how Nate, he's worked diligently on sermons, and he's prayed through them, and he's ready to present them. Yeah, most of the time, sometimes, y'all, I'm winging it, and I sit down, and the very first, y'all are singing, and y'all think things are good, and I sit down, and I'm like, God, I'm so sorry. I dishonored these people. That wasn't worth showering for. I can't believe that I did that to them. So sometimes I don't do it. But on the weeks that I do, then I preach the sermon, and I wash my hands of it. Now it's between you and the Spirit. And somebody in my Bible study said, well, wouldn't that be a great way to approach life? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it would. We should do that with everything. We should do that with how we lead people, with how we love people, with how we be good parents. It's the beautiful simplicity of abiding in Christ. We focus on him, and then he takes care of everything else. And I think that this is a radical message in a culture that wants to try so hard at everything, that wants to have a to-do list for everything, for all the things in life. I'm going to find a way to tackle it, and I'm going to white-knuckle my way to better. And really, the beautiful simplicity of abiding means that we try hard at pursuing Jesus. That's it. That's where we try hard. Christians, you want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where you should put your effort? Put it in pursuing Jesus. And waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. Put it into pursuing Christ and everything else will take care of itself. And there's a lot of ways to pursue Jesus, okay? We do it through worship. We do it, I believe, through godly community and spiritual conversations. We have transparency and vulnerability. We ask good questions. We share pieces of ourselves. We pursue Jesus through his service, through doing his work. Jesus says whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. So we pursue Jesus by helping those who can't help themselves. But I think the primary way that we pursue Jesus is through devotions. One of the primary ways we pursue Jesus is by waking up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. I think it's the fundamental way. I think one of the most frustrating things to me about trying to get in shape and fit into your old mediums. I've got one on underneath this that I have to wear a baggy shirt over it because if I don't, I'll just bring shame on my family. I can't wear this polo in front of other people in public. I used to be able to, there was a time, but when you go to get in shape, you can, you can exercise 30 minutes a day, right? And exercising to me is the easy part. That's, that's, that's the fun thing to do. That's fine. That's good. I can put in a podcast or a book or something like that. That's kind of the easy discipline to gain on. You know what the hard part is? Eating like a rabbit, man. That stinks. Eating salads. That's not fun. I don't like eating right. I just don't. I like eating wrong. Very wrong. But unless you do both, you'll never be in good shape. You won't be in good health. And you can exercise all you want, but until your diet changes, your body really doesn't. And you really don't get that healthy. You can exercise all you want and go to church and do all the things and go to Bible study and have the conversations and serve sometimes and give of yourself and tithe. You can do all the exercise you want, but until your diet changes, your spiritual health won't really either. I believe that our pursuit of Jesus begins here. And that when we do that, when we begin it here, then God handles everything else. This is actually affirmed in the book of Psalms. The very first Psalm, the one that Parker read earlier in the service, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. And then look what happens. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. David says, blessed is the man who doesn't waste his time with frivolous things, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. His delight is in God's word. And on that law, he meditates day and night. How can you meditate on it if you don't know it, if you haven't learned it, if you haven't poured yourself into it? He prays over it. He pursues Jesus in it. And because of that, he's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. And all that he does, he prospers. The man that David is describing in Psalm 1 did not set about to prosper. That's not the point. He set about to know Jesus. He set about to know his God, to know his law, to know his word. And the happy side effect of that was that God blesses him along his way. I want to be careful when I say that. God's blessings look different than what you think blessings might be. So I'm not preaching that if we get up every day and read God's word that we're going to have all the things that we want. That's not how that goes. But what I am saying is if we get up every day and we spend time in God's word and time in prayer, then we will become who God wants us to be. That's the blessing. And I believe that becoming the people that God has created us to be is the place of greatest peace and contentment and happiness that we can find in life. If you've ever had a season where you were moving, you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do, you know there's no greater peace or joy than that. I had lunch with somebody this week, catching up with them after a long time, and he shifted careers and got a new job. And I said, how's it going, man? And he said, God has affirmed over and over and over again that I am doing exactly what he would have me do, and I have never been happier. It's remarkable how that works. When we walk the path that God has laid out for us, lo and behold, that's where joy is found. I think Psalm 16 tells us something about there being a fullness of joy in the presence of God. And I feel like that's a joy and a peace worth having. So I would also mention to you that nothing worth having is gained by default. Nothing in this life that we have that we really value is gained by default. If you have a good marriage, like a good one, you worked hard at that, Joker. You didn't just fall into that. Unless you're like, if you've been married for like two years, you're like, my marriage is pretty good. We haven't had to work that hard. Okay, forget you. All right. You don't count. Talk to the rest of us in 10 years, rookies. If you have a good marriage, you worked hard at that. You've intentionally spent time together when the kids made it difficult. You've intentionally chosen each other when life tried to prevent it. You've had hard conversations. You've said hard things. You've heard hard things. But you're stronger for it and you have a good marriage and you worked at it. If you have kids who love you, if you have adult kids who love you and want to spend time with you, you worked hard at that. That was not easy. That did not happen by default. If you have a career that you like, that you're proud of, you worked hard at that. That didn't happen by default. If you have good, rich, deep friendships, you've prioritized and valued them over the years. You've made them important. You didn't just default into those. Why would we think that we would default into a good, healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus? We have to work at it. We have to make time for it. So do that. Prioritize it. Make it happen. Find a time when you can spend time in God's Word and spend time in prayer. If you don't know what to read, ask somebody. Start in Proverbs. If you don't know the Bible at all and you want to read it and you don't know what to read, start in Proverbs. You don't have to know anything about anything for Proverbs to make sense. Totally out of context, just start reading it. It's great. Read a gospel, read the book of Mark. It goes very fast and it points you with Jesus very well. Or just pick up and read something you've been curious about, but start doing it. Make it a habit. Be consistent in it. Trust me when I say that there's no greater habit that anyone can develop than that, and do it. Whatever you're currently doing first in the morning isn't as good as this. And if what you're doing first in the morning is sleeping an extra 30 minutes, it's definitely not as good as this. Just hit pause on that other stuff and engage with God first and then go about your day. I do it when I get into the office. I get into the office. I tend to be the first one in the office because I'm the hardest worker on staff. And I have a kid that starts school early and I have to drop her off every day. So I get here early. But the office is quiet and that's when I have my time. That's when I'm able to pray and read God's word and get ready to prayerfully approach my day. Pick a time when you can do it too. Make it happen. Prioritize it. Value it. Last week, I said that we needed to abide in Christ and we're going to talk about how to do that. And I said that when you came back this week, I was going to light some of your faces on fire and really convict you. So here's the convicting thing. What I'm about to say, I'm not saying to you if you're new. If this is the first time you've ever heard a sermon that's imploring you to have a devotional life, then I'm not saying this next thing to you. If it's the second time, maybe the first time you weren't paying attention, or I just did a bad job with it, whatever it was, I'm not talking to you either. But if you've heard this sermon before, I've preached it plenty. Maybe not from this angle, maybe not in this way, but I've preached have devotions. I've preached that a bunch. I've joked around. I'm going to do it one day. I'm just going to walk up here on stage and I'm going to go, hey, good morning, Grace. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate, one of the pastors here. You should read the Bible more. Let's pray. Because that's all you need because you know that I'm right. You know that we need to do this. So if that's you and you still don't have habit, as your pastor, as someone who cares about you, let me just ask you, how many more times will you need this sermon? How many more times? How many more times are you going to sit in this room or a room like this and hear this sermon and go, yeah, Monday, I need to. How many more? Can this one be it? Can this one do it for us? Because there's some people in this room who already do this. They've got a rich, vibrant devotional life, and they've been sitting in here, and they've just been cheering me on. Yes, do it. Please. It's the best. And I want all of you to cheer this sermon on every time you hear it from now on. Next time you hear this sermon, listen, I don't want it to convict you one little bit. I want you to sit in those seats feeling great because you know it's true. And now you're the cheering section because I'm never going to stop preaching this sermon. I'm going to preach it once or twice a year for the rest of my days as long as God gives me a stage to preach on to push people back into God's word and to push people back into prayer. But at Grace, as our partners, when I preach this sermon again, I want you to be the biggest cheerleaders. And I never want it to convict you again. Because I want you to hang in there and develop this habit. And I'll tell you this, okay? Just give you a little pastoral advice. Some of you, gosh, I hope, as a result of this, are going to wake up tomorrow, you're going to read your Bible. And it'll be something that you haven't done in a while. And that's great. You'll set your alarm. You'll make your coffee. You get your vibe all right, exactly where you want to be. This is good. This nice fall weather. This is great. I'm going to have the best quiet time. And you're going to open up your Bible to wherever you've decided to open up your Bible. And maybe, maybe God parts the heavens and the angels sing to you and Shekinah glory shines down directly on your head. Maybe. What's probably going to happen is you're going to get a little something out of it that's encouraging, that speaks to something in your life, or maybe nothing at all. You'll pray. If you're not used to praying, you'll pray for about two and a half minutes. You'll be like, I'm all out. Kind of run out of stuff to pray about. That's okay. And maybe it doesn't feel like the heavens parted and Shekinah glory shone down on your noggin. But I tell you what, if you get up tomorrow and you spend time in God's word and you spend time in prayer, I can promise you this, you'll have a different day than you would have had otherwise. You have a different mindset going into that day than you would have had otherwise. And if you do that several days in a row, I don't know when the heavens are gonna open and words are gonna leap off the page, but I can tell you this, if you do it several days in a row, you're gonna have a different week. And if you can manage by God's goodness and grace to hang in there and string together a couple of weeks like that, three, four weeks, you're going to have a different month. And if you start stringing together months, you're going to have a different life. And that's what we want for you at Grace. That's why we want you to be people of devotion. So let's pray that God gives us the strength of conviction to do that so that we know the only thing we need to try hard at is pursuing Jesus, and he'll take care of the rest. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your word, for the way that you've chosen to reveal yourself to us. I pray that you would give us a heart for it, that you would give us a passion for it, that we would love your word, that we would love this text. God, make it exciting to us as we dive into it. Let us start to piece things together and understand where people go and where they fit and how you're revealed in your word. Let it excite us about you. God, create in us such a hunger for your word that we wake up looking forward to it. Create in us such a hunger for your presence that we desire to pray every day. May we be refreshed in your presence. May we be refreshed by your word. And God, may we become increasingly people of devotion. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that. We have a wonderful apparatus for that to happen after the service today at the Hootenanny, so we hope that everyone will stop by for that. Before I jump into the sermon, I just felt compelled to say this as we sing that last song. I run to the Father, I fall into grace, I'm done with the hiding, and I run again and again and again. I run to the Father. And it was just, it occurred to me that this weekend I had the opportunity to go out and see a good friend of mine. Lives a couple hours away. And I've just, I'm tired, you know. I mean, it's just life. It's nothing in particular. I have two young children and I'm a pastor. And sometimes you just get busy and I was tired and I just needed some time to kind of refresh. And so Jen saw that, and she sent me, and I went. And he's a good friend, and he loves Jesus, and he loves me, and my soul is refreshed for going. And it occurred to me as we sing that song, Run to the Father, that sometimes that means running to his people that he's put in your life so that he can use them to refresh you. So if that helps you in your week, if you feel tired, if you want to run to the Father, if you're done with the hiding, sometimes that's why he puts his children in your life so that you can run to them and he can refresh you through them. So just throwing that out there if that encourages any of you. This week, we're in part two of our series, The Traits of Grace. And I told you guys last week that these five things that we're going through starting last week are the defining characteristics of who we are as grace. So if you've been going to grace for years, these should sound very familiar to you. These should be an articulation of things that you already value, of things that you're already passionate about, of characteristics that you already see displayed in the church and in the partners of the church. And I told you last week that the elders were so animated by this and the staff was so excited by these things that we are going to make these a regular part of the church. We're going to bring these back all the time and make sure that our series are hitting on them and that we have them displayed in the lobby of the new space that we're going to be building and all of those things. So I've been excited to go through this with you guys. That's intense. You're not missing it. Whoever that is is not missing calls. I'll tell you that. You are reachable. You're on top of it. So these are articulations of who we already are. They're not a new direction for us. So if you're a longtime Grace partner, these should feel very familiar and affirming and give you the direction to run in as a partner. If you're newer to Grace, then you've picked the perfect time to start coming to Grace so that you can learn exactly what we're all about and decide if that's what you're about as well. So this week, we arrive at our second characteristic that I'll get to in a few minutes. And this characteristic is really based on something that I sensed in my interview process with the church back in 2017. And it's something that people pick up on all the time about Grace and Grace folks. One of my favorite things to do in my job is I get to go out and grab lunch or a beer or a coffee or whatever with people who are newer to the church. I get to know them. I get to know their story. I get to ask, how'd you end up at Grace? What brought you here? And all of those things. And it's a really, truly fun part of my job. So I would say if you're new to grace and this is your place, you're going here and we haven't gotten a chance to have a face-to-face yet and hang out, I would love to do that if you would reach out to me. Because sometimes I don't know how to reach out to you. So if you want to reach out to me and do that, I would love to do that. But without fail, in those conversations, when I hear their story and I say, so what brought you to grace? Like, how'd you find us? And then why are you staying? What keeps you here? Without fail, one of the answers that I hear literally almost every time is, Grace is just real. Grace is authentic. They're just real people there. Nobody's putting on airs. Nobody's walking around the church like they're holier than everyone else, right? Because you're not. Like, we're just a real authentic place. We're a real authentic group of people. And I think that works out really well for us because that's like the buzzword right now, right? That's what everybody wants to be. Everybody wants to be real. Everybody wants to be authentic. Everybody wants to be trustworthy and transparent and all the things because we live in a society where we've seen everybody debunked and everybody's messed up and everybody's got secrets and everybody's got something to be ashamed of. And so we don't believe any more than anybody's holier than thou. And at Grace, we don't either. We believe that we're all messed up. And people notice that. And they like that. And they say, yeah, it just feels real. It feels honest. It feels authentic. And then what they'll usually say to me, and I know this feels like me patting my own back. I'm really not. What they'll usually say to me is, you know, you're real as a pastor, like you're authentic in who you are, and that's trickled down to the church that you lead. And I'll always correct them and say, no, no, no, like I am real as a pastor. And what that means to me is I will never, ever, ever speak down to you. I will never be the pastor that says, I've figured out spiritual life and how to be holy, and I'm here to help you get on my level. I will never, ever do that. I'll do that for you, but I will never do that for others. I will never speak down to us as a congregation. I will always speak to, I will always share in conviction when it's time for that. I always share an insight when it's time for that. And nobody here will do that either. But I always tell them, it's not me that made grace authentic. It's not me that made grace gracious. When I was in my interview process, I specifically looked for a church where I could be the same person I was Wednesday and Friday night as I am on Sunday morning. I did not want to have to be any different or pretend that I was anything different. I did not want to be at a church where there's pressure put on the pastor to be the moral exemplar, the most spiritual, right-walking person in the room. I didn't want that because I knew I couldn't be that. And Grace hired that intentionally. I went to a church that was already real. I didn't create a culture of authenticity here. I was attracted to the culture of authenticity that already existed. Which, by the way, there's a couple people walking around with some gray Grace Riley shirts on. Those are the OG shirts. All right, that's the first Hootenanny shirt. So those are the people who were authentic to me when I got here, and all I've done is participate in a culture of authenticity and acceptance and grace that already existed. So the real question becomes this morning, because as we were putting up our traits on the whiteboard as a staff, and we were brainstorming, what are the traits of grace. One of the first things that went up there is authentic, real. That's who we are. We don't put on airs. And so I wasn't just going to say that authenticity was a trait of grace because that felt insufficient, right? That feels cheap to just write that down. Yeah, everybody writes that down. I was more interested in what's the secret sauce there? What was it about the people of grace long before I got here and half the people in the room got here that made this place a place that's authentic and humble and real? Really, the question we're asking this morning is, what is the source of grace's grace, right? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us loving and accepting of all the people who come in? What makes us feel like nobody thinks we're better than anybody else? And as I thought about that, I started writing things down. And I wrote down this little stanza. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's a poem. Maybe it's a benediction. It's something that I think I might bring up over like repeatedly and read to us again. And it's in your notes. If you have notes today, if you're watching online, you can download those at the bottom of our live page and they might still be attached to the Gracevine. I don't know what we do. But you should have access to those. And on your notes is this paragraph or whatever it is, this benediction that I wrote out. But if you were to ask me, what is the source of Grace's grace? I would say it's this. At Grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed because of the Spirit, and all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace and goodness in our life. We understand, each one of us, when we walk in this room, we have an acute awareness that we are guilty of breaking harmony with the Father. We are guilty of making wrong choices. We are guilty of sin. We are broken. We are broken humans. And we are deeply flawed. Every one of us that I know at Grace walks around with an acute awareness that we do not have it all together. There's not a single person in here who I think would claim to have it all together. We know that we don't. We know that we're screw-ups. And here's the thing. If you're new to Grace, I just want to go ahead and relieve you of this tension so you don't feel like you have to put on airs either. We know you're a screw-up too, okay? We know that you got stuff that you don't want anybody in this room to know about. We know that. If it's not now, it's in the past. We know that. We all have that. We're all broken. We've all failed. We're all deeply flawed. That's part of life. That's part of humanity. It's part of who we are. And yet, what we know is that we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. That we are guilty and yet forgiven. That we are broken, but we are restored. Because our good Father did that for us. Because he sent his Son to wipe those things away. We are blemished and yet we are righteous and clothed in the righteousness of Christ. And we know that all the goodness in us is because of the Father. Because when I look at grace, I see a lot of good. I see a lot of good people and good faces. I see a lot of people that I have watched be servants over the years. I see a lot of kindness and a lot of grace. I see a lot of love. When people who I know visit on Sunday morning, they say, man, you really have a loving congregation. I said, yeah, we do. We have sweet people. I see a lot of goodness here. But I know that you know that you're only good because the Father has made you so. You're not good because you did it yourself. You're not good because you're somehow better. You don't serve well and love well and offer grace because you're somehow superior to other people. No, you're good because God made you good. You're good because God imparted on you goodness. You're good because you know and you understand as a partner of grace that your righteous deeds are as filthy rags without Christ. That there is nothing good in you until you meet God. And so though there is goodness here, and though there is sweetness here, and though there is mature belief here, none of us are under the impression that that is for any reason than because God the Father loves us and makes us so. You know, grace, that you are righteous because of the Son. You know that when God looks at you, if you believe that, if you're a Christian, which is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You know that if you believe that, that you are now clothed in the righteousness of Christ. And so when God looks at us, he sees his children, that he can't wait to welcome into heaven and sit at his banquet table for the marriage supper of the Lamb. He can't wait for that. And he looks at you and he sees righteousness, but it's not because you've white-knuckled your way into God's favor. It's because Jesus simply loves you, and Jesus died for you. And so we know at grace, yes, we are righteous. It had nothing to do with me. And so when other people come to grace, you can be righteous too, and it doesn't have to have anything to do with you. At grace, I know people who are wise. We have wisdom here. I'm very grateful for it. As we went through the process of buying the land, I was so relieved, and you ought to be too, that I had nothing to do with those decisions. We had professionals in the room who were seeing us through that, who were very kind to me and kept asking along the way, Nate, we think we ought to do this. Are you okay with this? Why are you asking me? All right, your vote is my vote. I don't know. I'm not going to tell you no. I'm going to do what you think we should do. We had wisdom in the room. When we meet as elders, there's wisdom there. When I interact with the staff, they have wisdom there in their ministries. When I interact with you, I see wisdom. But we know that we're not wise on our own accord. We're wise as a result of the Holy Spirit working in our life. We're wise as a result of the Holy Spirit sanctifying us and drawing us near to Him and drawing us near to Christ and imparting that wisdom and giving us those experiences that we need so that we can lead the church well. We know that if there is any wisdom here, it is not us or our own attributes. It is the Spirit working in us and through us that makes us wise. So we know that we are guilty and we know that we are fallen and we know that we are broken and yet restored. And we know that anything good in us is from God the Father and anything righteous in us is from God the Son and anything wise in us is from God the Spirit. And we walk in that humility. And all of that is grace. Grace is simply getting something that you do not deserve. So all of those things, the restoration and the forgiveness and the wisdom and the goodness and the righteousness are things that we do not deserve. But God lavishes on to us because he loves us. I am reminded of John 1 16, one of my favorite verses that says, from his goodness, we have all received grace upon grace. And it's just this picture, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. It's just this full, this picture of God being full of love and full of grace and full of goodness and full of mercy. And that spills out onto his children and it fills us up. And then as grace, as a church, we are filled up and we pour out that grace and that goodness and that love on the people around us. That's what gives grace its grace is the fullness of God and being gleeful recipients of the grace that he freely offers. And here's the thing, being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. Did you follow that? Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. This is what I think of when I think of the personality of grace almost more than anything else. We know who we are. We know we're not big deals. We know we're all just bundles of insecurities trying to make our way through life and find Jesus as we do it. We know that. We know that God pours his grace onto us. We are gleeful recipients of that grace, and as such, we happily and gleefully give it out to whoever we come in contact with. This is why the second trait of grace is that we are conduits of grace. Last week, we said we are kingdom builders. This week, we are conduits of grace. And I really do think that's the perfect word, conduit. It turns out in our little logos here, it's difficult to illustrate. So that's the cross. We just kind of, we punted collectively on that one, but the rest of them are great. We are conduits of grace. A conduit is something that is attached to a source and transfers what's in that source to another source. If you look it up, it can be a person or an organization that serves as a pathway for the attributes of another entity to another entity. And that's what we are. We stay plugged into the source. We are gleeful recipients of God's grace and goodness. And we pour that out on the people around us and the people who walk through these doors and the communities in which we exist and the circles that we walk in. We pour out God's grace and goodness onto others. That's what we do. That's our job. That's why we are conduits of grace. It doesn't stop with us. It flows into others. That's why it's poured into us to begin with. Jesus actually talks about this. In the verses that Caroline read so well earlier in the service, John 15, beginning unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. With grace, we abide in Christ. We stay connected to Jesus. Think of the branch, of a branch on an apple tree. As long as that branch is connected to the trunk, every season, whenever apple season is, I don't know, every season that it's apple season, that branch is going to produce fruit. Every season that it's not connected to the trunk, it's not going to produce fruit. That's just how it goes. When it's connected to the tree, it cannot help but produce fruit. Likewise, Christians, when we are connected to Jesus, when we are abiding in him, when we are walking with him, when we are connected to Jesus, we cannot help but bear fruit. So there's a couple ideas that we should talk about there. First, what does it mean to bear fruit? I had somebody ask me this week, is that the fruit of the Spirit that we find in Galatians? And I think that's just two separate passages using fruit, but it's not necessarily the same fruit. In Galatians, it's talking about the personal fruit of our character that we bear and the people that we become when we walk with Jesus. But in John 15, I think what he's saying is it's ministerial fruit. It's growth. It's pouring into others. It's seeing other people grow closer to Jesus as a result of our influence in their life. The language that we would put around it at Grace is, abide in me and I in you, and you will build much of my kingdom. That's what it means. It means producing that fruit. And I love how these traits do tie in together. And so when we abide in Christ, we walk with Christ, we pour that love, that grace, that goodness, that philanthropy out on other people and other organizations, and they flourish too. And that is the fruit that we bear. And so you also ask, what does it mean to abide in Christ? How do I do that? We're going to talk about that next week when I talk about being people of devotion. And if you heard me say that, and in your church Christian brain, you went, oh, devotion, yeah, got it. I know that sermon. Then I would just say to you, you're exactly who I'm preaching to next week. So come, and I might light your face on fire. That's what next week's going to be. I'm just telling you right now, I'm going to get after you next week, okay? So come on. And I don't do that a lot, but as I was preparing it this week, I thought, yeah, I think this is time. So I'm just giving you the heads up. Maybe next week is the time for waffles and pancakes. I don't know. At the house watching online. Anyways. Yeah, he's getting worked up. I'm going to turn this down. But when we abide in Christ, we remain attached to the trunk. We remain connected to him. We pour his grace and love out onto others. We cannot help but do it. An easy way to think about that, I got the perfect illustration this week as I was hanging out with the family. We were in our bonus room upstairs that we use as a playroom, and Jen had recently vacuumed the playroom, and because of that, the cord was laying on the ground in the middle of the room. Because Jen does this thing where she vacuums. I don't think she's wound a cord in her entire life. That's my job. Her job, vacuum. My job, put up the cord. So I had not done, in your defense, I had not done my job yet. I hadn't done what I was responsible for, and that's on me. So we're sitting there playing, and Lily's kind of like on the floor, and she reaches and she touches the cord of the vacuum and kind of jerks back. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I didn't want to get electrified instead of electrocuted, which is great. We have a thing. I don't know if this is probably terrible parenting. When our kids say words incorrectly, we don't tell them. We just love it. We just, for years, anything that happened before today, whether it was three years ago or yesterday was last day in our house. And we, I know, I know, I know we miss those days. So we're not going to correct it. She didn't want to get electrified. And I said, oh baby, you don't, you don't have to worry about that. See that cord's not plugged in. It doesn't have any power. There's no juice in that. That cord is limp and useless and dead. And as I was explaining to her why she didn't have anything to fear, I was like, oh, this is great. This is perfect for Sunday because that's what it looks like to abide in Christ and not. That's what it looks like to be connected to Christ and not. That cord can sit there as a conduit of the electricity that's going to run the appliance. But until it's plugged into the source, it's not doing anything. Nothing's happening there. It's got to be plugged into the source for it to be effective in what it needs to do. Similarly, if we just get an extension cord and plug it into the source and it's not connected to anything on the other end, nothing happens. It's a glad recipient of the power coming from the source. It's a glad recipient of grace, but it is not yet a conduit because it hasn't transferred the contents anywhere else. It just sits there. And I think a lot of us sometimes, if I'm being honest, can fall into the habit of simply being extension cords. We're plugged in. We're doing our church thing, but we're not pouring out to anybody. We're not connected to any people on the other side of that producing fruit there. And so I think as a believer, and more pointedly as a partner of grace, we think of ourselves as conduits plugged into the source and plugged into the people so that we can be a glad conduit of grace that is freely given that we transfer to others, of love that is freely given that is transferred to others, of goodness and of mercy that is freely given to us that we can transfer on to others. Which is why we say this all the time around here. It's why we do everything we do. It's our mission statement. The five traits are basically an unpacking of this. What we say every week at Grace is that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. We are conduits. We stay plugged into Christ and we pour, we let his grace and goodness and love and mercy flow through us and we pour it into the lives of the people that we are connected to. And when you come to grace, we want to connect you to others so that they can be a part of that and you can be a part of that. This is really the beautiful simplicity of the Christian life, this idea of abiding in Christ, of being conduits and remaining plugged in. Because when you really pay attention to the Christian faith, which can seem intimidating if you're new. I have somebody in my men's Bible study who grew up Catholic. And I would never presume that this is true of all people who grew up Catholic, but he said for him and his experience with Catholicism, he'd had no encounter, very little encounters with the Bible. And so this is all new to him, and he feels like he's playing catch-up in his 60s. It can be very intimidating to try to learn Christianity mid-flight. And God knows this, and he makes it simple for us. He says, hey, listen, you want to know what I want you to do? Just abide in me. You know what my job is as a pastor? It's not necessarily to tell you all the details of all the things. It's to push you there. It's to push you to the cross. Every week to push you to Jesus. That is our singular, I don't know if you know this, that's our singular goal for a Sunday morning service. You know how we determine if it was good or not? Were they pushed a little bit closer to Jesus when they left than they were when they got here? Do we push them a little bit closer to God? Did we encourage them towards the Father? Was worship sweet and ushered them into the presence of the Father in such a way that made them feel a closeness with Him that maybe they hadn't felt in their week just yet? Was the sermon something that was good or convicting or encouraging or enlightening in some way that pushes us closer to Jesus? All we're trying to do is move the needle a little bit every week that you would get closer to Jesus, that you would abide in him more, that you would be plugged into him more, that you would sense his grace and his mercy and his goodness and your love and your life just a little bit more. So that in that growing and in that closeness, you would offer those things to others. And as I thought about the fact that we are a church that is authentic, we are real people here. It occurred to me that this really is a spiritual thing. Because if you were to, in your mind right now, think of the person in your life who you picture as the most spiritual person you know, one or two people, whoever that is, the person in your life that's closer to God than anybody else you know, I would bet you my paycheck that that person is one of the most gracious people you know. I would bet you my paycheck that whoever you're thinking of is one of the kindest, the gentlest, most gracious, accepting, loving people that you know. Because I think the more we receive Jesus' goodness and forgiveness and affection in our life, the easier it is to pour that out onto other people. So grace, we are conduits of grace. And to finish up, I would remind you of why, and then we'll pray. We are conduits of God's grace because we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. And we acknowledge that anything good here is you. We acknowledge that anything righteous here is you. Anything wise here is you. Father, may you create in each of us an increasing desire to be plugged into your son, to abide in him, to walk with him, that we might bear fruit, that we might be conduits of the goodness and grace that we receive from him and pour it out onto others. Would you create in us and in this church an attractive, appealing Christianity? One that I dare say is different than the one portrayed in culture. A Christianity that is not condemned but one that welcomes. Would you create in us a faith and a devotion to you that others want when they see it? That when others come into and out of our lives, they see our good works and so then glorify our Father who is in heaven. Make us your conduits as we go throughout our lives and our days and our weeks. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. This week, Daniel in the lion's den. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grace. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here, and I'm so excited. I'm so thrilled once again to be able to be up here preaching in the book of Daniel. As I always do, I spend time, I read through or I listen to different sermons on the topic I'm going to talk about. I'll read, you know, parts of books, whatever. Whatever I can do to get a good solid wisdom and understanding of what's going on. And as I found one sermon, I took specific note of something that I thought was pretty cool. And the reason why I'm going to do it up there at the front is it's not directly about Daniel 6, but I think it does an awesome job of reminding us of what we talked about last week, while then connecting it to where we're going to go today with Daniel and the lion's den. John Piper started out his sermon in Daniel, referring to Daniel's name and talking about that in Hebrew, his name in Hebrew means essentially, God is my judge. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, not only because, hey, that's a great name. You know, if you're thinking, if you're having a baby, Daniel, God is my judge. Perfect. But it's pretty cool because when you look at the book of Daniel, as you sift through the stories we talked about last week, and when you get into this week and what we're talking about this week, what we see is, I mean, there's not a more aptly named character that I know of in the Bible, right? This is a guy, Piper puts it this way. He says that God is my judge, this name that has been given to Daniel, that this almost becomes like a creed or like a motto of how and where he lives his life. He says this comes out of the way that he ate. We think back to Daniel 1. Daniel comes over as a young, exiled man from Judah, and he says, hey, I'm not going to eat the food that you're giving me because I feel like that will be defiling myself and defiling my God, and I'm not going to do that. He stands in his faith. He says, hey, what matters is what God thinks about this, because God is my judge. And then he says, it comes out in the way that he interprets dreams. We go to Daniel 2, which we talked about as well. Not only Daniel 2, but Daniel's, both Daniel 4 and 5, which we're not going to talk about today, but in essence, Daniel goes to different kings and he interprets their dreams. And the way he interprets the dreams is, one, through the providence of God. We know it's his connection and his commitment to God that allows him the wisdom to interpret the dreams these kings are having. And the interpretations are all about, hey, basically, hey, you're the king for right now. The Lord has allowed you to have the power that you have, but the Lord is in sole control of that power. The Lord has every bit of power, and you're just a pawn in his system. And we see that played out in different ways. We see him bring people into power. We see him take power away. We see him give power back to kings. And we see him ultimately put people to death for disobeying and dishonoring him. He says, God is my judge, influences the way he writes the book. As we go through these first six chapters of Daniel, Daniel clearly chooses and picks to write about these six significant events because this is where he sees that God is most glorified. And so this is what he chooses to write about. And then as we transition into Daniel 6 and Daniel in the lion's den, we see that it comes out in the way that he prayed. And so we open up to page number 880, whoever wants to roll with us, but we open up to Daniel 6. And we open up to Daniel and the Lion's Den, which at its core is just one of your classic workplace disputes. You're in the office and your boss decides that he's going to elevate, he's going to promote someone to be now over you, and you don't think he should be there, or you don't think she should be there. You're not thrilled about the promotion that your boss made, and so, like you do, you go to your other people that you work with who also don't think that that person should have gotten that promotion, and you devise a scheme. And you devise a scheme that basically allows the boss to be tricked into throwing that person who got the promotion into a den of lions. We know it. It's the age-old story. But ultimately, I guess for those of us who maybe have not experienced this or maybe will find a couple different things that maybe these guys tried to do. Let's still go through it together. We jump in on Daniel 6, and basically, as these chapters have gone, we have seen how devoted and how committed to God Daniel has been throughout his life. God is my judge. That's Daniel. That is how he lives his life. And through that, the Lord has moved in Daniel, not only to provide him wisdom, but also because of his commitment, we see that his character is such that he is found completely and wholly trustworthy to every one of the kings that he serves under. And so as that continues to happen, what we know is that his character and his integrity come and is rooted in his commitment and his faith to God. But that doesn't really matter to the king. All that matters to the king is this man is trustworthy and I know I can continue to elevate him and he's going to continue to remain faithful to him. And we know that that comes from God, but ultimately, it just works out for Daniel. And so here we are in Daniel 6. Daniel is now on his third king. We talked about Nebuchadnezzar last week. In the middle of that, there is a pretty wild and awesome story about King Belshazzar. But King Belshazzar has died, Darius has taken over, and what Darius has recognized and realized, once more, like every other king, Daniel can be trusted, and I am going to trust him with much. There are 120 satraps, it says. There's basically, satraps are these people who are over different regions within the empire. And then above those satraps, there's three people that their goal and their role is to govern and to lead the people that are the different satraps. So they're the leaders of the leaders in essence. Well, Daniel was one of those three, and Darius has decided, Daniel is my guy. I'm going to continue to promote him. I'm going to continue to elevate him to prominence. He decides basically to say, hey, Daniel, I'm going to elevate you above those three, and you are now going to be basically my number two. You are going to govern all of my governors, and the only person that you bow down to, or the only person that you serve, and that you're not over and above, is myself. Well, like we just talked about, not everyone really liked that. There's a lot of satraps who are like, wait, what? What's this? This guy, this random exile from Judah who doesn't believe or look like, who doesn't like serve or bow down to any of our gods, now we have to bow down to him? That's not how I'm rolling. And so he does what we would, they do what we would all do in a similar scenario, and they start to devise a scheme. And I love the way that they devise their scheme because they go about looking into his personal life. And they're like, all right, well, time to become private investigators. We got to figure out the way that this man falls short. What can we hang him up on? What in his character can we find that's flawed that we can bring to the king to where the king will have to relieve him of these duties that we don't want him to have. And it's pretty cool what we see. We see, as they say in Daniel 6, I don't think this one's on the screen because I didn't put it up there. At this, the administrator and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his contact of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, we will never find any basis for charges against this man, Daniel, unless it has something to do with the law of God. So here we have these two sides of the same argument. We've got the king who recognizes and realizes that Daniel's faith and Daniel's commitment to God allows him to be completely trustworthy and completely good, and I can put whatever I want on him, and I know he's not going to turn around and stab me in the back. We recognize that he has character on this side. And then what these people who hate Daniel now realize is, oh, he is kind of exactly what the king is looking for. He is kind of exactly why the king is elevating him is for this very reason, that we can't find any fault to him. All of us know that's because of his commitment to God, man. He has godly character because he has remained committed to God throughout these 50 years or however long he has been in this kingdom. And so then they say, well, great. I know what we can get him on. His faith and commitment to God. If that's the backbone behind everything, what we know to be true is that this guy does not miss his times to pray. This guy is so committed to God that every single day he goes up to his room, he takes up to this window and he prays every day. He prays, he praises God, all this stuff. That's how we're gonna, that's how we going to set it up. And just real quick, imagine someone tries to take you down. They look into every single part of your life, and the only thing they know they can hang you up on is that you're too committed to God. That's pretty sweet. That's, I mean, oh, to have that much faith and that much character in our life. But nonetheless, they go to the king. Because how can you get the king to do something? You remind the king of how great and how powerful he is. They go to the king and they say, King Darius, you are so great. And because you are so great, you have to, you need to make a decree. Make a decree that no one can worship or bow down to any God or pray to any God or any person except you for 30 days. You deserve that kind of praise because you're awesome. And King's like, yeah, I am awesome. You are 100% right. We need this to happen. And so he makes a decree and he writes it into law. Not only that you have to do it, but he also writes in the consequence that if you don't do it, if you bow down and you worship or praise any other God or any other person, that you are to be thrown into the lion's den and executed. They got him now. And so comes one of my favorite written verses in all of the Bible. So let's read this one together. So comes verse 10 when our buddy Daniel finds out what just happened. Now, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home in his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Perfect. Let's go to the window where people can see us. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to any God in this 30 days, you'll be killed. You will be ripped apart by lions. And Daniel says, what should I do about this? I got to go pray to my God about this. And it's incredible. It's awesome. I love that it's, and why I say I love the way that it's written is because it seems instantaneous, right? It's like, oh shoot, this is bad. I got to go pray about this, which is great because it is exactly what he just read that he wasn't allowed to do. But all that Daniel knows is that regardless of circumstance, that what he must remain connected to is his God. And so he goes and two to three times a day, he prays to God and he gives thanks to his God. And then the kicker, just as he had always done. He doesn't start doing it. He doesn't do like Michael Scott does in the office where Pam finds out that he's dating her mom and he's like, oh, I'm going to date her even harder now. It's not like he's like, oh, I'm going to pray so much harder now. King, you're not even going to believe it. He doesn't change anything. He just remains connected daily to his God, spending time in prayer. Does he know that it is still defiant? Yeah. But it's not worth it to give it up for him because it's the most important thing in his life. And it has grounded him through every part of his life and it has brought him this far and he has faith that it's going to continue to bring him through. And so they got him. They go to the king. They say, king, please remind me, didn't you write this into law that people could only bow to you and praise you during this 30 days? And before they mentioned Daniel, who he loves, and he's about to elevate to prominence, even greater prominence, he says, yes, it's been written into law. I can't take it back. There's no way. It is law. That's what law stands for. And they said, well, do you remember that one exile from Judah? I think his name's Daniel. And like, by the way, how disrespectful is that? Like, hey, you know the guy who's maybe closest to you of anyone in this kingdom, the guy you're about to elevate to the number two, I'm going to refer to him as just this exile that like back like 50 some odd years ago was exiled to this place. It'd be like me like referring to Nate, our pastor, and being like, hey, you guys know Nate, right? The one that graduated from Toccoa Falls College? Like, you guys all know him as the pastor. We all know this guy, but it's like, I don't need to bring up some random fact from like 30 years ago. I don't know if it was 30 years ago. I just know he's older than I am. So he's older than I am, so it is what it is. But as disrespectful and as weird as it is, what we recognize and what we realize is their ultimate problem with Daniel is his race and his values. And I think even more than that, it frustrates them that clearly he's right about something. They're frustrated that he only worships this one God, but they're even more frustrated that for some reason his commitment to this God has allowed his character to be what it is. And Darius is upset about this. He's hurt, he's frustrated because he realizes, oh, I've been tricked. I've been had. And so we roll to verse 16. So the king gave the order and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion's den. The king said to Daniel, may your God whom you serve continuously rescue you. He has to do it. He has to throw him in. I love that part at the end where it's clear that these people all know his commitment to God. And King Darius is kind of open to the fact that, hey, may this God that you serve so continuously, may he come through. I would love, I would love for you to be right about this. They cover it, so Daniel can't get out. King goes home. Can't sleep. He doesn't have any entertainment brought into him. He doesn't watch any TV, I guess, is what that means. He doesn't? Daniel answered, O king, live forever. My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt do it? This God that you serve and this God that I know you believe was protecting you, did he protect you? And Daniel's like, yeah, of course he did, man. So he's brought out. King says, get Daniel out of here. We threw him in. Lions weren't interested because the angels shut their mouths. In his fury, he throws all of the remaining satraps that tricked him into the same lion's den and they were killed, which is a pretty grisly detail in the story, but it is a detail nonetheless. And then we come to the culmination, starting in verse 25. It says, in his land, and he dec. He performs signs and wonders in the heaven and on the earth. He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions. He witnesses the glory of the God and not only does it change his life, but he makes a decree so that every single person in his entire nation can know how big, how great, how eternal, and how awesome this God is. Praise be to God for that. The synopsis of Daniel that we talked about at the beginning of last week was this, that the Lord is in complete control of everything. Praise be to this God that has, that certainly that saved Daniel, but saved Daniel for the purpose of bringing this glory to the king and to all of the people so that they will know forever the glory of God, that they can witness and understand how great he is, how powerful he is, and how good he is. That is just awesome. That is a great story. That is a story that probably most of us know and most of us have read and gone through because this is a heroic story. But even though and while it's a heroic story, I think while we certainly place God where he needs to be is like look at this God who wants to make sure that not only his people, but all people recognize and see and understand his power and his glory. I do think that sometimes we misinterpret and we misrepresent who Daniel is in this story. Because so many incredible heroic things happen, we forget and we miss that Daniel doesn't really do any big, significant, heroic action in this. Like next week, we're going to be talking about, who are we talking about next week? Samson. Thanks, Nate. Thanks, Toccoa Falls alum, Nate. Next week, we're talking about Samson. When the Lord's strength is in Samson, that dude's taking out armies on his own. That's not the same thing that Daniel does here. He doesn't start an uprising. He doesn't storm into the king's quarters and demand that he reverses the law or says the Lord is going to strike you down if you, whatever. He just stays committed to spending time with God, trusting fully that his commitment and his relationship with God will put him in places where he can make God's glory seen. And that's what happens, right? In the beginning, we see that he's being elevated to prominence because of his character and because of his integrity, his trustworthiness. We know very clearly that that comes from his connection and his relationship with God. He has godly character. He can't be brought down by these people because of his character that comes from his commitment to God. And when his faith is put to the test, because he was already committed to his God, nothing was going to change. And when the Lord finally did put Daniel front and center, Daniel comfortably knew and recognized the Lord has me here because he is going to glorify himself through me. A lot of big and incredible things happened, but the only role that Daniel played was simply staying connected and growing in his relationship with his father. And if I'm right about that, if I'm right, if I'm correct in my assumption, or if you listen to this story, if you read for yourself and you agree with me that, yeah, this is kind of weird. I've always considered Daniel in the lines in that Daniel's kind of the hero of it, but he's not really doing heroic things. He's just living a life connected to God. He just daily connects to God through prayer and through praise. then what I'd argue with you is that a faith like Daniel's is waiting for us, is waiting for you and waiting for me, on the other side of consistent discipline in our personal relationship with God. Because the other thing I find noteworthy that I think we forget, because we kind of lump in biblical characters as these men and women whose lives are completely and consistently committed solely to God. Now, this is true of Daniel, but he's not like Paul where he's traveling to churches and reading scripture and making sure he understands scripture and understands Christ well enough to be able to send it out to the nations. This is a guy who's in politics. This is a guy who's in politics in a land where no one believes what he believes. And so his connection to God is his personal connection to God. Now, do people recognize and know it? Yeah. That's why the people know that they could make him fall because, hey, he's going to stay committed to God. The king, this God that you consistently are committed to, did he save you? They know that he's characterized by his faith, but he doesn't go into work as a minister and spend eight hours a day reading scripture and praying. This is about people who go into work and live for God because they're committed to him in their spare and quiet moments. Daniel three times day, spends time in prayer. I imagine he wakes up, he starts his day off with prayer. He goes during lunch and spends time in prayer. Before he goes to bed, he prays. I don't know. But the point is not that his entire life, every second of every day is dedicated to prayer, dedicated to reading scripture. The point is that his consistent daily time, just spending some time with God, allowing the Lord to work in his heart, just in the spare time that he has, creating some time during the day to spend time with prayer, that that saturates everything else in his life. I think it's the same with us. I think all of us would agree that the things that we care about and the things that we pretty consistently do, it kind of shapes the things that we do. Like, this is a silly example, but bear with me. I'm a big Frisbee guy. I like Frisbee. I like playing Ultimate Frisbee. I was watching ultimate frisbee all weekend. And so while I'm preparing for my sermons, I'm throwing the frisbee up and down the hallway over there. But sometimes I'm not allowed to do frisbee. Sometimes I have to stand in Aaron's office and talk ministry with Aaron back here. And as Aaron can attest to you, when I talk to her, I throw a lot of backhands. I throw a lot of flicks. I throw in the occasional hammer. I do it all the time. It's dumb. It's silly. But it's because, like, even though I'm not actively doing this thing, it's still on my mind, right? And it's still, like, literally body want to like do it and play it and throw it. When I drive around, when I see trees in a line, I'm like, there's a disc golf hole. It's not actually a disc golf hole, but that's what I see. You know, I mean, some of you in here maybe were skateboarders. And when some people see stairs, like, oh, that would be sick to ollie off of. I was always one of those, hey, skating is cool, and I'm bad at it. So I was like, that would be a sick thing for other people to skate. We recognize and we see things through the lenses of what we care about and what we consistently do. How many of us in here are or have been married or have kids? You can raise your hand. Yeah, nice. Congratulations. Now, I might be wrong about this. I'm only engaged. But I'll be married one day, and I think that this will be true. Raise your hand again if your marriage, your relationship with your wife or your husband, your relationship to your kids, the love that you experience from these relationships, if they impact not only the times that you're spending with them, but they impact the way that you live every part of your life. Yeah, man. Because the thing that we care about and the things that we spend time doing, and when we get to experience this love that makes us better and changes our heart, that doesn't only change our heart, and that doesn't only impact the way that we live just when we're doing those things. But it's our consistent connection to those things that continue to allow us to live out that love that we experience with and from our wife, from our kids, from our husbands. And the same is so, so, so true in our faith. As we daily spend time in the Word, daily spend time reading Scripture, just when we wake up, we read some Scripture, We spend time praying. Or maybe before we go into a meeting, we stay a quick prayer. When we consistently come and we meet together on Sunday mornings, when you meet with your small group and you grow and you build each other up, when those things happen, it saturates every other part of our life. Like Daniel, our character grows. Our integrity is deeper and deeper rooted in the things of God, and people see and people notice. I think a lot of times we view faith and we want God to do these huge, incredible things in our life and we want Him to use us to glorify Him. And ultimately, I think what the Lord calls us to do is stay rooted and connected in Him. And when that's the case, nothing else can happen except for him being glorified in us. And that's why Jesus gives this call and why Jesus charges us in John 15. This one's going to be up on the screen. We're going to read verses 4 through 5 and verse 8 together. I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is to my Father's glory that you may bear fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. When we are in Christ, we are connected to Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. And if we want to produce fruit, all it takes is being connected to the vine. And we let the vine be what the vine is. Someone who produces fruit and elevates the glory of God. And that's our goal. Our goal is to remain connected to Christ. Always. And ultimately, our goal is to be someone who's defined as Daniel is defined, not only by name, but by the way he lives, but someone who is defined by God is my judge. I will stay connected. I will remain in him. And he, through me, will produce fruit. And he, through me, will glorify himself and do incredible things. It's not just for the biblical heroes. It's for every single one of us. We all, as we give our hearts to Christ, as we all believe in his lordship and in his sacrifice to us and his resurrection for us, that connects us to the vine. And when we continue to remain connected, when we continue to grow closer and closer as we continue to grow in him, grow closer to God, recognize and understand and realize his love more and more, then so too do we produce fruit and we show that love and we serve people the way that we've been loved and the way that we've been served through Christ. To close, I found, I was reading this book. It's by Andrew Murray called Abiding in Christ. I had a hard time actually with this sermon for a while because I was so excited about so many things. Like I kept pulling at things and being like, oh, I love this, and I love this, and I love this. And ultimately, on Thursday, as I was preparing, I ended up just reading like five chapters of this book called Abiding in Christ. I think I say that mostly to say, like, you should read it. But this book called Abiding in Christ is a book that is solely written connecting us and trying to help us fully and rightly and completely understand those verses in John 15 of what it means to abide in Christ, what it means to remain in Christ, what it means that God is divine and that we are the branches, what it means that through God we are able to produce fruit. And in that book, he writes a prayer that I really liked. And so if you would, please bow with me and we're going to pray. And I'm going to read this prayer that he wrote because I think it's really beautiful. heartedly surrender to abide in you alone brings a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. May all of us who have begun to taste the sweetness of this life yield ourselves to be witnesses of the grace and power of our Lord to keep us united in him. And may we seek by word and walk to win others to follow him, to follow you wholly. It is only in such fruit bearing that our own abiding can be maintained. Lord, let us produce fruit solely by just being connected to you every day. We love you. Amen.

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. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.