Sermons tagged with Counsel

Good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for being here. This is the seventh part in our series going through the book of John. We're going to continue this series through the week after Easter. So I'm thrilled to see all of you here. Hopefully, as I've been encouraging you every week, you've been reading along with us. I think it's hugely important for you guys to be reading the Gospel of John on your own as you process it and we go through it as a church so that my perspective isn't the only perspective that you're getting on this book. That's why it's such a bummer that I realized yesterday I forgot to update the reading plan and the one that we have out there is not current. So I'm real sorry about that. I had a wedding to do yesterday and then basketball, so I didn't get a chance to do the reading plan. But we'll have that done for you tomorrow. We'll get it out online and we'll have a physical copy for you next week when you get here. If you are following along in the reading plan, just read the next two chapters. We've been going at two chapters a week and you'll be good, okay? But as we've been going through this week, I had a sermon planned out of John 11, looking at the story of Lazarus and the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept, John 11, 35. And I had been looking forward to that sermon. But as I got done last week and looked at the chapters that we had to cover this week, there's a portion, there's something happening in John chapter 13 that I just, I didn't feel right about doing a series in John where we don't cover this. There's been a ton that we've skipped over in the book of John. We didn't even stop on the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16. We haven't talked about that, which again is why we should be going through this on our own. But I just didn't feel like it was right to go through a series in John without focusing on what Jesus says in John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's a seat back in front of you. And then later when I read the passage, it will be up on the screen. And I think we have it in your bulletin. There's really no reason, unless you're illiterate, to not read John chapter 13, 34, and 35 with us, okay? So in this verse, Jesus gives a summation of all of his teaching for the disciples. He's left with just the 11 faithful disciples that are with him, and we'll get to this in a minute, but he's giving them a summation of everything that he's ever taught them. And I find summaries like that to be the most helpful teaching or the most helpful advice, right? We know that good advice summarizes all the other advice and makes it a little bit more memorable. I think something that we can all relate to is many of us in this room have had kids. And we know that when you're about to have a kid, this is the time when you are receiving the most unsolicited advice you have ever received in your life. The only other thing I've ever experienced like it was when I was about to become a pastor. I had been named the senior pastor, and so I had kind of a month to get my affairs in order and then get up here and take over, at the time, Grace Community Church. And so everybody was giving me advice on how to be a senior pastor, including my atheistic uncle, who hadn't been in a church in like 35 or 40 years. I'm literally, I'm golfing with the guy. It's the last time I'm going to hang out with Uncle Dick. And he's in the fairway practicing, and then he like steps off the ball and he goes, Nathan, you know, I've been thinking about you becoming a pastor. And I'm like, what in the world is going on here? He goes, I just had something I wanted to tell you. And I'm thinking like, just like everybody else, come on, let's go. You haven't been in church in 40 years. Let's see what you got. It was okay advice, but I just thought it was hilarious that an atheist cared about advising me on being a senior pastor, right? And when you're a parent, you get all this parenting advice. It doesn't matter if they've had kids before. It just matters that they've read a book or seen something on Facebook. They will tell you what they saw. And sometimes this advice is even contradictory in nature, right? You got the camp over here saying you should use cloth diapers. And I'm like, you're crazy. And then you got this camp saying you should use regular disposable diapers. I'm like, these are my people, right? You got the camp that says when you get home, you do not let that child sleep in the bed with you. You put them in their room on night one or they are going to develop dependency issues. And you're like, holy crud, that sounds really hard. And then you have other people that are like, you let that child sleep in your bed until they are eight if they need to. They are your precious angel, you know? And Jen's reading books the whole time. Jen's my wife, not just some lady who reads books for me. So she's reading books the whole time. And she's getting all this advice. And it's contrary. This book says this thing, and this book says this thing. You're like, well, which person knows more about this? Who knows? Can I speak to their adult children to see if this worked out? You just don't know, and you're getting so much all the time. But one guy, this was super helpful, Kyle Hale, the worship pastor at the church that I was at at the time, I was on staff with him. He came up to me one day. He had three boys under five. So he had earned his dad's stripes, right? And he comes up to me and he goes, hey man, listen, a lot of people telling you a lot of stuff. And I'm like, yep, and here comes your thing. And he goes, listen, just for the first three months, just keep the kid healthy and stay sane. Whatever you have to do. Don't worry about what you're going to do to them. You're not going to do any permanent damage. Just keep the child healthy and stay sane. Try not to yell at Jen. That's it. Just do that. And I thought, this is good advice. I can do this. I don't know about all the other stuff. I don't know about the five S's and all the things, but I can do this. I can just try to take care of them, and I can try to not yell at Jen. This is good. This is actually how I still parent. Just make sure she's good and try not to get mad at Jen. That was good advice. It was a summation of all the other advice, right? It was memorable and easy and executable. And this is what Jesus does for the disciples in John chapter 13. Here's what's happening in John 13. I actually, I feel a little bit badly about the way that we've done this series in that we haven't done a lot to follow the chronology of Jesus through his ministry and through his life. We've dropped in on snippets of what he's taught and things that he did, but we haven't done a good job of following the chronology of Jesus. So here's what's happening in John chapter 13. Jesus has moved through his life. About the age of 30, he goes public with his ministry and begins calling disciples to him. And then they do ministry together through Israel. Israel is a relatively small country. It's really a small country by any measure. And so all over Israel, they're doing ministry and they're following Jesus around and he's teaching them how to do what he does. He's preparing them to hand them the keys to the kingdom. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but why didn't Jesus just come to earth, live perfectly, become an adult, and die for our sins? Why did he dabble for three years with this public ministry? Why was it essential for him to do this in order to die on the cross for our sins? And I think the answer is Jesus knew he was going to have to leave behind his kingdom in the form of the church. And he knew he was going to have to entrust that to people. And so he wanted to invest three years of his life into some young men so that he can hand the church off to them as passing them the keys to the kingdom. So I'm convinced that he spent an extra three years here on planet Earth with us for the main purpose of training the disciples to get them to a place where they were ready to take over his kingdom called the church and propel it into the future, which they absolutely did, or you guys wouldn't be sitting here in a different continent 2,000 years later, right? So that's what Jesus is doing with the disciples. So about age 30, he goes public, he calls the disciples to them, he trains them for three years, and then at the age of 33, he's crucified. And that week leading into the crucifixion is called Holy Week. And we're in the period of Lent that's leading up to Holy Week now. So Palm Sunday, which this year we're going to celebrate on April the 14th, is the day that Jesus goes into Jerusalem. It's called the triumphal entry. He enters as a king. But this sets in motion a series of events that by Friday has him crucified. We call that Good Friday. And then Easter is when he resurrects on Sunday. So he is in the middle of Holy Week here. It is the end of his life. He's sitting around one night with the disciples. If you were here the first week, we know, you know, that Jesus has just looked at Judas who had betrayed him and said, the thing that you are about to do, go and do it quickly. So Judas has left. He's at the end of his ministry with the 11 faithful disciples who he will hand the keys to the kingdom to and entrust them with the church. And he looks at them and he says, I have a new commandment for you, which is an interesting thing. Because the Bible says that Jesus had that all authority on heaven and on earth had been given to him. He had come down from heaven as God. He was God in the flesh. He could have added all the rules that he wanted to. He could have been given out commandments left and right. He could have done anything that he wanted. He could have made any rules that he wanted. And he waits three years to do it. And right before, like a couple of days before he's going to go be arrested and die for us, he says, oh, by the way, I have a new commandment for you, in verse 33, he calls them little children. Come to me, little children. Jesus doesn't play the little children card a lot. That's like maximum God card, right? Because they're peers. He's a dude, they're dudes. But in this one, he says, little children, listen to me. So this is like, hey, pay attention. Jesus is playing the God card here. He doesn't do this a lot. What's he about to teach? He says, I have a new commandment for you. So we should be leaning in. This is the one rule that Jesus makes. He could have made any rule his whole life. He's made one, and it's going to be this, and it's going to be a summation of all his teachings. So Christians, church, we should lean into this. If you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, you should be very interested in this new commandment that sums up everything that Jesus ever taught and did and said. Non-believers, if you're here and you're considering faith, you should be very interested in this because in this one commandment is the whole of the faith that you are considering. This is a hugely important, crucial passage. And this is what Jesus says to them that night before he prepares to go to heaven. He says this in verse 34. He leans in and he says, little children, disciples, church, for the rest of time, I'm going to give you, I have a new commandment for you. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. This is how the whole world will identify you from this moment on. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. Now, if you've been paying attention in the book of John, you should have some questions. How is this a summation of everything that Jesus teaches, and how is it different than things that he's taught in the past? Because at the beginning of the Gospels, in the beginning of Matthew, and at different places in John, he tells us that we are to, what, love our neighbor as ourselves, right? We know this commandment. This isn't new. This doesn't feel different. We know that we're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. In fact, it was commonly known then. Then there's a story where Jesus is talking to a lawyer, a young man who's been studying the law, which incidentally is the Bible, and he asked the lawyer, what do you think are the greatest commandments? And the lawyer says, love your God with all your heart, your soul, and your mind, amen, and love your neighbor as yourself. This was a commonly accepted teaching. So how is this different than this commonly accepted teaching? There's another theme that runs through John of what Jesus teaches. Over and over again, he continues to come back to this idea that it's our job to believe in him. We looked a couple weeks ago when people asked him, what do we do to inherit eternal life? How do we labor for eternity? He says, believe in the one that the Father has sent. When he prays, after he resurrects Lazarus, Lazarus is a friend of his who dies. Jesus shows up at the grave. He brings him back to life, and he prays, and he says, Father, I knew you were going to do this. I did this so that they would believe that I am who I say I am, so that they would believe in the one that you have sent. So over and over, we see this theme in John that Jesus admonishes us to believe in him as the Son of God. And if we see those themes, it's already commonly accepted practice and commonly accepted teaching that we should love our neighbor as ourself, and we know that we should love God as well, and that it's our job to believe in God. How is this a summation of those things that Jesus has taught us? Well, we start when we understand this. When you look at the command to love your neighbor as yourself, do you understand that you are the standard of love in that scenario? That when the admonishment, when the instruction is, love your neighbor like you love yourself. And to love somebody for all intents and purposes is simply to want what's best for them and to act in a way that would bring that about. We love somebody, so we want what's best for them, and we act in a way that would bring that about in their life. That's what we do. And so when we love somebody as we love ourselves, then we are the standard of love in their life. So however we love ourselves is how we ought to love other people. And that's a problem because we are imperfect and we love ourselves imperfectly. There have been seasons of my life where I did not do a good job at loving myself. And if I were to love you like I love myself, then I would probably owe you an apology, right? There are seasons of your life where you love yourself imperfectly. You're not taking care of yourself very well. You're not making the best decisions for yourself. You're not bringing about the best things in your life. And so if you started to love other people like you loved yourself, if we're honest, that's a pretty low bar. When we say that we should love our neighbor as we love ourself, that sets the bar at us. And you'll notice that Jesus says this at the beginning of his ministry, before the disciples have watched him relentlessly love everyone around him. But at the end of his ministry, when they've watched him for three years, graciously and patiently and givingly and sacrificially love everyone around him all the time, Jesus raises the bar on this command. And he says, it's no longer good enough for you to love other people as you love yourself. No, no, you need to love them as I have loved you. You need to go and love other people as you've seen me love them. And when that's the commandment, do you understand that Jesus is now the bar on that love? Before we set the standard, go love others as you love yourself. That's our standard. And he says, no, no, no. I want you to raise it to my standard. Go and love other people as I have loved you. He says this to the disciples who have watched him over the years. Bring sight back to the blind. Make people who can't walk be able to walk again. Love on people who are found in the middle of sin. Restore people who the world would condemn. Argue with the Pharisees. Teach the multitudes. Perform countless miracles. Sit patiently with them. They've watched all of this. And Jesus says, as you have seen me love on you and minister to you, I want you to love one another that way. He sets the bar at himself, not us. But the question then becomes, if I am to love other people as Jesus loved me, how is it that Jesus loves me? And how does that fulfill the instruction that we should believe in Jesus and love God? How can this possibly be a summation of everything that he's taught? And to answer that question, we need to look at the way that Jesus loves. Now, I'm going to give you kind of three categories or ways that Jesus loves us. I would encourage you in your small groups this week as you discuss this, you guys can probably think of more ways or more categories of ways that Jesus loves us. But here are my three this morning. There are three ways, main ways, I think that Jesus loves us. I think Jesus loves us sacrificially, he loves us restoratively, and he loves us recklessly. Sacrificially, restoratively, and recklessly, I think, are ways that Jesus loves us. Sacrificially is obvious, right? If you were to ask anybody, believer, non-believer, anybody who has a cursory knowledge of Scripture at all, how does Jesus love us? One of the answers would be sacrificially. He died for us, so he sacrificed, he gave of himself for us. But it's not just that he died on the cross for us. That's the biggest of sacrifices. But we see him time and again in the gospels give of his time and give of his energy and give of his attention and give of his patience. We see him constantly choosing other people over himself. He even chose homelessness. He has foxes have holds and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. He just wandered around loving on other people, not being concerned with himself. So if we're going to love like Jesus, we need to love sacrificially, which means that we need to give of our time and our effort and our energy and our resources in his name and for him. And this happens a lot. We have people over there who are watching kids so that young families can sit in here and go to church in peace. And some of these families just need to sleep right now. I'm not even mad at them for not paying attention because they just need rest because it's hard to be a parent sometimes, right? So we have people who are giving of their time on a Sunday morning and loving on them so that they can be in here. We have people who are teaching the kids in there, loving on them, giving of their time. We have servants all over the church who are loving well through sacrificing. I see that happening a lot in Grace. Once a month, we do this incredible thing when we go to Pender County that was impacted by the floods. And Florence came in, the hurricane came in, there was floods, and we're good, and everything's settled, everybody's got power. Except out there, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of homes that have been impacted by the floods that are unlivable. Insurance can't help them out, and these people have no options. And so Grace actually sends a team of people down once a month to go and help restore these people and restore their lives and fix their homes. And so the men and women who do that on a monthly basis are going and loving sacrificially. They are giving up a Saturday to be down there, which is a big deal, particularly in NCAA tournament time, to give up these Saturdays. Incidentally, the trip this month got canceled and got moved to this upcoming Saturday. So if that's a way you'd like to love sacrificially, you can sign up for that online or indicate it on your communication card, and that's fine. And so there are all these ways to go out and to love others outside of our homes and to kind of step into the lives of others and love sacrificially, show up for the food drive and love the people, the kids who might not be able to eat over spring break. That's good. But to me, the surest test to know if we're really loving others sacrificially is whether or not we're doing that in our home. It's easy to go out in fits and starts and to kind of drop in and make an appearance and love here and then retreat back to those who know us best and be selfish and need our space and our time and our TV and all the stuff, right? That's easy to do. It's easy to step out and love for a couple of hours and then step back into our shell. I learned this lesson when I was in high school. I was 17 or 18 years old and I had just gone off to summer camp, right? A place called Look Up Lodge in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. And it made a huge impact on me. I had grown up in the church, grown up, I think, as a Christian. But this was the time, this was the week where I really, really got it. Something switched for me, and I understood Christianity in a way that I never had. And so I'm on fire for Jesus, right? I'm like the classic mountaintop experience kid coming back from camp. Like I am, I am so fired up. I'm ready to charge hell with a water pistol. And it doesn't have to be one of those pump kinds. It can just be like the single action. Like I'm still in, bring it on Satan. I'm coming for you. Like I am ready. And I'm, my hair is on fire for Jesus Jesus. I come back and I'm telling my parents who raised me in the church and who love God and who love me, are super involved with the church. I'm telling them all the things that I'm going to do. I've made all these commitments. I'm going to do all the things. I'm going to start all the Bible studies. I'm going to lead all the things. I'm going to teach the little kids. You've never seen a Christian like me, Dad. I'm going to change the world. Dad says, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom. I'm like, man, you really cut the legs out from under a guy. And at the time, I thought he was kind of a jerk for saying that. Maybe he still is. But the point that he made is right. That's great. That's wonderful that you've had this mountaintop experience. That's wonderful that you love Jesus. Be nice to your mom and love your sister. It's easy to run out and fake it and sacrifice for others. It's hardest with the people that we know best. That's why we're meanest to the people that we love the most. That's why we have the shortest fuse with them. That's why we sometimes fail to offer the grace to others, the grace inside our home that we offer outside our home. If we want to love sacrificially, then it looks like, for me, this is something that I struggle with, when I come home sometimes, I know we make jokes about pastors and our job, and it is stressful looking at Facebook and golfing a lot, but there are times when I do come home and I am stressed. I've had a lot of meetings and a lot of things, and we've made decisions, and I've had to work hard, and the last thing in the world I want to do is sit on a chair that is too small for me and make Play-Doh donuts. I don't want to do that. I want to sit on a couch that is too big for me and eat donuts. That's what I want to do. But if I love Lily and I love Jen, then I'll come home and I'll sit down and I'll play. And I'll give Jen the space she needs to do the things she needs to do because she hasn't had that space all day and I'll engage with my daughter. If we love our family, we'll come home and we'll sacrifice for them. If we love the people around us, then we will consider their needs before they have to consider their own. I think sacrificial love shows up first in the people that we know best. Jesus also loves us restoratively. He seeks to restore us. There are so many examples of this. A couple weeks ago, Kyle did a great job preaching about the woman at the well, who at that time had had five husbands and was living with the sixth man who she was not yet married to, which by any account throughout all of history is generally referred to as scandalous, right? And Jesus doesn't bring it up. He just mentioned it as if it's true, but he doesn't seek to condemn her about it. He's far more concerned about restoring her and letting her know about who he is and the promises that he makes and her need for him. In the book of John, there's a story that some versions include where there's a woman who's brought to him in adultery in the city streets. And the Pharisees, the religious leaders say, should we stone her? And he has this impossible question to answer. And he does this thing where he makes everybody, he convinces everybody to go away by riding in the dirt. And once everyone is gone, he looks at the woman and he says, is there anyone left to condemn you? And she says, no, Lord. And he says, and neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. He's not there to condemn her. He's not there to convince her, hey, you know adultery is wrong and you really shouldn't do it. You know that the thing that you were doing was shameful and that I don't like it. And that when you do that, you trample on my love. Like I'm here to die for you because you do stuff like that. Could you maybe knock it off? He doesn't say that. He says, neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. We've extended this series a week so that I can preach to you about the restoration of Peter after he messes up. Peter messes up big time. And Jesus comes to him and he has every right to get onto him and condemn him and he doesn't. He simply restores him. What we see in the ministry of Jesus over and over and over again is that he is far more concerned with restoring you than condemning you. And in the church, when we look at other people, it gets so easy to identify that as sin. Is that person sinning? Is that person doing something that's wrong? Look at what they're doing in their life. Doesn't that count as sin? And Jesus says, yeah, maybe, but how about we love them first? He doesn't let them off the hook. He says, go and sin no more. Go and don't do this thing anymore. But first, he says, neither do I condemn you. He's always, always, always more interested in restoring than condemning, in restoration than condemnation. And if we are going to love other people like Jesus loves us, then when we approach others, we should always be primarily concerned with their restoration to spiritual health, not condemning them and defining what they're doing. We restore people. We do not condemn. That's the Lord's job. And Jesus loves us recklessly. Now, I like this one because we're going to sing a song after the sermon called Reckless Love. I think it's called Reckless Love. I never know song titles. It should be called Reckless Love. And it's about the reckless love of God. And it was a popular song in Christian circles. But we had some debates and some discussions about it as a staff because part of the concern was that it was erroneous to call God's love reckless because reckless kind of infers that there's mistakes made, that it's just like reckless abandon, that there might be some mess up or some error to his love or some misjudgments within his love, but it's good and it's fine and we like God's love and so that's okay. So that maybe it was almost theologically inaccurate. But after we talked about it some more, we decided to go ahead and sing the song. And I'll confess to you that the first time I ever even looked at the lyrics of the song was when we were singing it on Sunday morning because I'm really bad about keeping current with worship songs. We do a playlist on Spotify with the songs that Grace Raleigh does, and that's my worship. That's what I listen to. And if it's not on there, I don't listen to it. So I had not heard this song before. And as we're going through it on Sunday and I'm looking at the lyrics and it talks about how he leaves the 99 and he comes after us and he always chases us and he always pursues us and there's no wall that he won't kick down and there's no mountain that he won't climb to come after us. What I realize about the recklessness of God is that it's talking about this emotional recklessness where he has no regard for how much we hurt him. He is always going to pursue us. That's the recklessness of God. It doesn't matter how many times someone rejects him. It doesn't matter how many times someone makes him a promise and says, God, I'm never going to do the thing again. And then they turn around and they do the thing. It doesn't matter how many times we betray God or we walk away from him or we break his heart or we break his rules or we hurt his spirit, he is always going to forgive us and he is always going to pursue us. It doesn't matter how many times he extends a hand to us and we knock the hand away and we say, I'm not interested. He is still going to extend the hand again. He recklessly pursues us. This is the picture that he lays out in the Old Testament when he has a prophet named Hosea marry a prostitute named Gomer. He says, I want you to go and I want you to take Gomer as your wife. She doesn't deserve you. I want you to go marry her anyway. So Hosea, in obedience, does it, marries her. Inevitably, she cheats on him, goes back to her old life, and God speaks to Hosea again and he says, go back and get her and marry her again, regardless of the toll that it takes on you. That's the reckless love of God. Because there is something very human and very natural to this idea that once our heart has been broken, once someone's turned us down enough times, once someone has disappointed us enough times, once someone has required our forgiveness more than a few times, there's a very natural human thing to do to recoil and to withdraw our love from them and to not pursue them as hard and to not go after them as hard because it's hurt us so many times in the past. And so we recoil out of this sense of self-protection and we build up walls and we don't let other people in because we've been hurt so many times, and we've been damaged so many times that we don't want to experience that again, so we learn to protect ourselves from the possibility of other people hurting us. And God's reckless love says, I don't care how many times you hurt me, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna pursue you. That's the recklessness of God. And if we want to love like Jesus, then we love recklessly. This is how Jesus is able to tell Peter how many times to forgive people, right? Peter goes to Jesus and he says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone when they wronged me? When someone wrongs me, when they disappoint me, when they let me down, when they break my heart, when I thought I could count on them and they show me that I can't and it really, really hurts, how many times should I forgive them? Up to seven times seven. As many times as it takes, you forgive them until they do it right. You forgive them as many times as you have to. You recklessly pursue them with your love. That's what it means to love like Jesus loved. We love sacrificially, we love restoratively, and we love recklessly. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about how to love in that way, what becomes very apparent is we are not able to do that. We are not able in and of ourselves to love in those ways, to love perfectly sacrificially, to always empathize and love with restoration in mind. We are not able to love recklessly. We do not possess the ability to do that. And this is how it fulfills Jesus' teaching that we ought also to believe in him. Because what we understand is it is impossible to love others like Jesus loved us without Jesus's possession of and power in our hearts. You see, unless we believe in Jesus and he has taken up residency in our heart and has possession of our heart and his power is working in our hearts to change our ways and our desires to his and our ability to love to His. Unless He's doing that, unless we've loved God enough to believe Him and place our faith in Christ, there is no possible way we can be obedient to the command to love one another as Christ has loved us. So in this, we come full circle in seeing that it is really a summation of everything that Jesus has taught. It raises the bar on the commandment to love our neighbor as ourself. It fulfills the commandment to love God and fulfills the commandment to believe in the one that he has sent because it's impossible to do it without believing in Jesus. And in that way, it's a summation of everything that Jesus ever taught. Simply go and love. Andy Stanley says it this way. He's a pastor in Atlanta. He says, when you don't know what to say or do, just love others as God through Christ loves you. That's what we do. We love other people sacrificially. We love them restoratively. We love them recklessly. And then Jesus says, this is how the world will know that you are my disciples. This is how I want the world to look at you and know that you belong to me. This is what I want to be your defining and distinguishing characteristic. This should be the way the world identifies you to look at the way you love one another and you love others. That's what I want to define you. And this is something that I think the church gets messed up sometimes. He does not say that the world will know that you are my disciples by what you stand against, by how you define sin, by who you choose to condemn, by what you stand up and rally against in Washington. That's not how we are going to be defined. We're not going to be defined and identified by the world by our good doctrine or dogma or theology. We aren't made known to the world by winning a Bible knowledge trivia contest. We're not made known. The world will not know that we are his disciples by how well we know this book. Now, all of that flows out of our love for him, but it is not our definitive thing. It is not our distinguishing characteristic. Our distinguishing characteristic is who and how well we love. That's what Jesus wants to define us. All the other things are important, but if we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we believe. If we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we're against. If we fail to love others first, then nobody cares how well we serve. We are first to love others sacrificially, distortively, and recklessly. And this is how we will be defined. This is how the world will know that we are his disciples. What would it look like for you to be known in that way? What would it look like for the people around you to say whatever it is they want to say about you, but at the end of the day, that person loves people well? What would it look like to love people so different and in a way that was so other that when people saw you doing it, they were drawn to your God because there must be something else going on here. Nobody could possibly love others that well. Nobody could possibly sacrifice that much. Nobody could possibly mean it. You know how when you meet somebody who's super nice and super gracious and they're very kind to everyone, you think to yourself, they're faking it. You think to yourself, what do they look like when they're down? What if you never were? What if you weren't faking it? Because that love was fueled by Jesus and you loved everybody just as hard as he did. What if this was the distinguishing and defining characteristics of our homes? What if when someone entered into your home and spent some time with you and your family, when they left and they got in the car and whatever else they said about your home, I really like her napkins or those curtains or that's what cozy farmhouse looks like and that's what I want to do. Like whatever else they said about your home, the one thing that they took away was, man, those people love each other well. Man, I felt loved in that house. What if your kids growing up in your house, the one thing they'll say about mom and dad is, listen, they did some crazy stuff and there's some crazy, I got to knock off of me here in adulthood, but man, they love me well. And when I brought friends over, they loved them too. What if that's what was said about your house? That they showed the love of Christ there? What if that's what's said about the church? That when people come to Grace Raleigh, they walk away, and whatever else they experienced here, sermon was okay, music was great, announcements were outstanding. Whatever else they experienced here, they walk away and they go, those people love well. Those people loved me. And I'll brag on you a little bit because I don't think we're too terribly bad at this. Last week we had a guy here, we're getting our website redone. He's our web developer, a guy named Hugh. And Hugh is here. I invited him to just see the church and kind of learn more about us. And so he came in, and he came in after the first service, stayed in the lobby, came to the second service, and then I talked to him afterwards. And I just said, hey, you know, thanks for coming, whatever. And he said, dude, I love this place. I said, really? He says, yeah, these are the friendliest people I've ever met in my life. And he wasn't kidding. He said, they were so nice. He lives on the other side of Cary, like 40 minutes away. He said, if I lived closer, my family would start coming here next week. This place is incredible. So good on you if you were a part of that. I think this is one of the things we do well, but I think we can do it better. What if we were a church where no matter what other people experienced, they walked away and they said, those are some of the friendliest people I've ever met. What if that were everyone's experience? What if when you brought a visitor here, you brought friends or family here, they walked away and they said, that place loves well. It starts in the individual, it goes into the home, and then it comes here. And if we could be a church that loves other people well, that's what we become known for, that's the kind of church I want to be a part of. And you're here, I know, because that's the kind of church you want to be a part of too. But it begins with us. It begins with us pursuing Jesus and asking him and praying, help me to love other people as you have loved me. And what I love about this teaching is Jesus knows he's about to leave the disciples on earth. He's been a physical presence there. He has been the representative of the Godhead there. But he is about to leave and they're going to be the ones who carry the torch. And what better way as the torchbearers of Christ to represent him to the rest of the world than to go and be the embodiment of love to them as Jesus was. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We love you imperfectly. We love you inconsistently. We love you often half-heartedly. Often, God, we love you forgetfully. God, please continue to work in our hearts to draw us near you that we may love you more. And that out of that love, we might love other people more. Give us the grace and the patience to love sacrificially, God. Give us the sympathy and empathy and insight to love restoratively and give us the strength and the faith to love recklessly. God, may we, may our homes, may this place be known and identified for how well we offer your love to others. It's in your son's name I pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here for part six of our series in John. We've been in John for a while and we'll continue to be in John until the week after Easter. I'm really excited about this series. I hope I've been encouraging you guys to grab a reading plan on the information table as you leave. There's only two tables out there. One of them has coffee on them and the other one doesn't. So I trust you to figure out which is which. And on that table, there is the reading plan so that you can be reading along through the gospel of John with us. Because I've been saying the whole time, it's not good to only get my perspective on John and on Jesus through John. You need to put your own head and your own heart and your own emotions into it so that you can process Jesus on your own and then supplement it with this and what you're talking about, hopefully, in your small groups. We've been going through John because John was, for all intents and purposes, one of Jesus' closest friends and offers us a unique perspective of Jesus. This week, we arrive at my favorite verse in the Bible. Now, some of you have already gotten on to me this morning because you say I have a lot of favorite verses. Because like every other week, I'll put in the grace find. This is one of my favorite passages. I'm super excited. And now I'm starting to get a hard time. Like all of the passages are my favorite passages. But shame on you for being mad at your pastor for loving the Bible. I expect more of you, Grace. But no, that's my bad. I'm the boy who cried favorite. But this really is my favorite. I love this verse. It's hanging up in my house. I believe that when we understand this verse, when we choose to believe it, it really changes everything. And this is one that I weave into just about every sermon that I do. I love this passage. To understand this verse, I want to come at it from a different angle and share with you a conversation that my wife Jen and I had last week. Last week, we were talking about something, and she lovingly and fairly pointed out that maybe there's a chance that I have a little bit of an authority issue. It's possible that I don't care for authority or being told what to do. There's a chance of that. And I push back on that a little bit. I say, I don't have an issue with authority. I just have an issue with unreasonable and dumb authority. I mean, that seems fair. If you're telling me to do something that doesn't make sense, I'm not going to do that thing. If your authority was given to you by something that I don't recognize, like, say, putting a stop sign in a shopping center parking lot, I don't recognize that authority. I'm not going to stop. I don't care. That's on you, Kroger, right? That's not my authority. So I don't have a problem with authority. I just have a problem with unreasonable authority, right? And there's plenty of examples of this, but I think back to Snotnose High School, Nate, in Mrs. Parks' ninth grade algebra class. Now, Mrs. Parks is a wonderful lady. She's incredibly sweet. She still teaches high school math at Killian Hill Christian School in Lilburn, Georgia, where I went. It was a small private school. I graduated with 26 other people. I don't like to brag a lot, but I did graduate 24th in my class, so higher than most of you probably. That's actually true. My parents' greatest frustration in life is my academic career, but joke's on them. I'm living the dream. Who cares? She taught me in high school all four years. She teaches everybody all four years, and I can remember a conversation in ninth grade that went something like this. It's not exactly how it went, but it went a lot like this. I took a test, and in that test, there's some simple algebra problems. Like, I don't know, X plus three equals five. And I just write down on my paper, two. X equals two, that's pretty easy. You know, any more brain busters? And so then I hand in my test. I get it back, and she's taking points off that question. So she says, if anybody has any questions, you can come talk to me at my desk. And I'm like, I got a question for you, buddy. I need to see this. So I go up to Mrs. Parks. I'm like, hey, I don't understand. I got this question right, but you took points off of my test. What gives? And she said, well, you didn't show your work. I need you to show the steps. And I'm like, why? I got the question right. I don't need the steps. Your steps are for dummies. I don't need them. And she says, well, I need you to show your steps because in future tests, if you get a question wrong, but you do the work right, I can give you partial credit. And then all my immature 15-year-old bluster, I said, well, I tell you what, how about I just write down the right answer and you give me full credit? What do you think about that? And she kind of did the thing that you guys are doing right now, like, oh my gosh, what's the matter with this kid? And she did it. She was gracious and she was like, all right, that's how you want to do this thing. And when I did it right in my head, she gave me full credit. The problem was geometry. Geometry, I can no longer do it in my head. And all of us, some of us are good at math, but there always comes a point in which we can no longer do it in our head. We have to follow the steps. And I didn't know how to do the steps because I had rejected them and thought that they were dumb, and I didn't follow them. And so I ended up failing geometry because I didn't know how to do the steps. Turns out she was right, and guess what? I was wrong. I have plenty of stories like that in my life where an authority has said something, and I said, I'm not going to do it your way. I'm going to do it the other way, like the stop sign in my neighborhood. Or like I've gotten counsel for something from somebody who probably knew more about that thing than I did, but I said, you know what? I'm going to trust my wisdom more on this one than your wisdom. I'm going to do my own thing. And there are some of you here who can totally identify with me. When I say, I don't really care for authority to be told what to do, you're like, me neither, buddy. And there are some of you who just judged me, and that's fine. I can handle that. Some of you who are a lot like my wife, Jen, my sweet wife, Jen, who, she follows authority, there's security in rules and structure and that's fine. And you tell me what to do and I'll do it. And some of you are absolutely like that and you're hugely uncomfortable operating outside of authority. But what I want us to see is that I, the problem that I have is the problem that we all have, because at some point in your life, even those of you who love and respect authority and appreciate the structure that it brings you and feel safe within that structure, all of us at some point have broken the rules and rejected authority. All of us. If you haven't, then you're sinless and you should be the pastor of the church. I'd be excited to learn from you. We've all, at some point or another, rejected authority, gone our own way, done what we thought we needed to do. We've all, at some point, said, your rules don't make the most sense right here. I'm not going to do those rules. Or your counsel, the advice that you're giving me is a counsel that I reject. I don't care for it. Even though you probably know more about it than I do, I'm going to reject that counsel and do what I think is best in this situation. And I want us to see that when we do that, that implicit in our rejection of authority or counsel is an admission that we think we know better. You see, we've all done this. We've all rejected authority in our life at different times for different reasons. And we've all rejected counsel in our life at different times for different reasons. And that's all well and good because sometimes all authority shouldn't be followed. But when we do that, when we reject authority or counsel, there is an admission in that that we believe our way is better, right? To take it to the next level. A lot of times when that authority is a moral authority, when that counsel is moral counsel, a lot of times when we reject moral authority or moral counsel, we do it in favor of a pursuit of our own happiness. We believe that we're experiencing a happy, joyful life and that the thing that we want to pursue is actually outside of that authority that is being levied over us. And so we push off the authority that would have us act in a certain way in favor of pursuing our own happiness because we don't believe that submission to that authority will bring about our happiness. I said it like this. We reject authority when we do not believe submission will lead to happiness. You see this? When you're a kid, your parents tell you to do something and and you reject that authority, because we're not going to have more fun if I follow that authority. This is actually going to lead to greater happiness if I reject that authority and do what I want. I think back to when I was about 17 years old. My dad, mom and dad said, forget it with the curfew. Just tell us if you're going to be home that night, and let us know when you get wherever you're going. But no curfew. You do what you like. But here's the thing. My dad always said this. Nothing good happens after midnight. Son, go do what you want. But listen, nothing good happens after midnight. And I thought, that is a stupid idea. All the best things happen after midnight, right? All the fun stuff happens after midnight. That's when you get the best stories, right? So he says you need to, yeah, she knows. What are you doing over there, five-year-old? That's great. That's right, baby. He says you need to stay, you need to be in, you need to be safe, you need to make wise choices. And I think that's not going to lead to my happiness. That's not going to lead to fun. I'm going to choose this over here. And so I reject, I believe that submission to that authority will prevent me from being happy. And so I'm going to pursue it over here in rebellion of that authority, right? And here's the thing. Those two ideas that to reject authority or counsel is to say implicitly that we believe that we know better, and to reject moral authority and moral counsel is to say that I don't believe my happiness can be pursued in submission to that, so I believe that my happiness is best pursued in rebellion to that authority. It's through this grid that all of us, in one way or another, view God. You see? If you think about it from a non-Christian's perspective, and if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, I am thrilled that you're here. I'm thrilled that you're dipping your toe in the water to see if we're actually a bunch of weirdies or if maybe we're kind of like you and just trying to figure out life. I appreciate the fact that you're here and that you're exploring. That's wonderful. But for those of us who know people who aren't believers, or if perhaps you are not a believer, I think one of the things we could agree upon is, if you live in the South, first of all, you've been exposed to the gospel. You've heard about the Bible. You've heard about Jesus. You've probably sat in a church service. There's not many people wandering around our culture who haven't at least been presented the story of Jesus, right? And so it's been an active decision to keep Jesus at arm's length. And people do this for different reasons. But a lot of the reasons can be boiled down to a simple rejection of authority. I'm not interested in submitting to that authority in my life right now. Because people who are not believers tend to believe that to become a Christian means I'm going to have to stop doing some things that I really enjoy doing and I'm going to have to start doing some stuff that I really don't want to do. Right? If we think about ourselves and our journey and coming to a place where we submitted to God and said, yeah, I'll live my life under the authority of God's word. If we think of some of the people we know who may be on the fence about it, I would be willing to bet that a big contention that they have is to be a Christian, to live under the authority of God's word means to stop doing some things that bring me joy and to start doing some things that I don't think will bring me joy. So what we see is they're choosing their pursuit of their own happiness over what God's happiness will be for them, right? They think they know a better way than God does, and so no thanks. But here's the thing, even as believers, we continue to do this. We have these pockets of exceptions that we make for ourselves in our life. If you're here this morning and you're a believer, then most of you would say that you live your life under the authority of this word, that if God's word says something, that you try to acquiesce to that, you try to live in submission to it. And yeah, we mess up from time to time. Nobody's perfect, but I do try to live my life under the authority of God. But here's the thing, even as believers, we all have pockets and we all have places where we don't really submit to God's word. We're over here, we're submitted to God's authority and we're pursuing his happiness and the good life that he has for us here. But over here, what we believe is I'm going to hold on to these sins and these things because I really do believe that my happiness will be found here more than it will be found with God. And so we hang on to these things. An easy example of this is the biblical admonishment that we should confess our sins to one another. Scripture teaches over and over again in the Old Testament and in the New Testament that we should confess our sins to loving brothers and sisters, that we should take the dark things that are in our life and shed light on them. Because when we put them in the light and we allow God's people, God's children who love us and who love Jesus to see what's happening in the dark recesses of our life and of our heart that to do that sheds light on a sin and will destroy that sin and break that foothold that is in our life. We know this to be true. If you've been a Christian for any time, you've heard that teaching. But here's the thing. Most Christians I know are really bad at that. When's the last time, I'm being honest, those of you who have been walking with the Lord for a long time, when's the last time you had an egregious sin in your life that was eating your lunch and that you sat down and endured the shame and told somebody who loved you and who loved Jesus, hey man, this is kicking my tail? When's the last time you did that? When's the last time someone did that to you? When was the last time someone called you to coffee or called you on the phone and said, hey, I just need your help with this. This is going on in my life and I don't want it to be a part of my life anymore. For most of us, that hasn't happened in a long time because even though God's word teaches it, we don't like to do it. Why don't we like to do it? Because to do that would cause shame. There would be potential ramifications in our marriages, in our finances, in our standing, perhaps in our careers. It would cost us a lot to have to confess the thing that's going on in our life that we don't want to admit to. And so what we do is, instead of submitting to God's authority and confessing that to somebody who loves us, who can help walk us through it, is we convince ourselves that I'm going to handle this on my own. I tell you what, God, I have a better way. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to get over this sin on my own, and then I'll never need to confess it to anyone. No one will ever need to know about this part of my life and my heart. And then I'll move past it, and it'll just be a thing that used to exist. Sound familiar? And we know that God's word says that we need to confess, but we go, no, I have a better way. If I do that, that will make me unhappy. I will lose things that are sources of joy, so I'm going to pursue my happiness here. We all do this with God. And it's to this mindset, to those of us who may not be believers who hold Christ at arm's length because we believe that to follow him would cost us a quality of life that we're not willing to give up, or those of us who are following Jesus but we hold him at arm's length in certain areas of our life because we don't want to give up that portion of our life because we don't think that it will really make us happier if we follow him. We think that we're living the best life possible now because we trust our judgment more than we trust his. It's to that mindset that Jesus speaks in John chapter 10. In John chapter 10, if you have a Bible, you can open there. He uses another one of these great I am statements, these big statements that he says throughout the gospel of John that makes it unique from the other gospels. The other gospels, we have parables. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have parables, stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. We don't have any of those in John. In John, we have I am statements. A couple weeks ago, Kyle preached about him being the living, he says, I am the living water. Last week, we looked at him saying he is the bread of life. This week, he says he is the good shepherd. And the picture here with the good shepherd, and Jesus often paints himself as the good shepherd, is that he is the shepherd of the flock. The flock is us, his church, his children. And the idea with sheep is they're pretty helpless without their shepherd. They're not going to find their way to food. They're not going to find their way to water. They're not going to find their way to flourishing without their shepherd guiding them. They're going to be totally defenseless against predators without their shepherd there to protect them. And so Jesus sets himself up as our shepherd who is there to guide us, to lead us into good water, to lead us into good pastures, and to protect us. And in this verse, he talks about being the gate for the sheep. In town, when you're a shepherd in town, when you're at your house or your farm or whatever it is, there's like a big structure. There's wood and a structure and a swinging gate and hinges and the whole deal, and he can lock the sheep in there and everybody's good. But out on the hillside in the country, a little bit away from the town where the sheep might be grazing, if you need to stay overnight, the shepherd has to make kind of a makeshift pen. He has to set up rocks and sticks and things like that to keep the sheep hemmed in. And then because he doesn't carry a gate with hinges in his pocket, he's got to make a gate. And so what the shepherd will do out in the hillside is he will sleep in front of the opening of the gate, of the pen, and serve as the physical personification of the gate so that nothing can get to his sheep unless it comes through him. And then he talks about this idea of a thief that might try to get into the gate in any other way by jumping in or coming into the pen by any way that isn't him. Okay? And so that's kind of the context for this verse that has become my favorite verse. John 10, 10, Jesus says this, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly. The thief is Satan. He is the enemy. We're going to talk about him in a second. But Jesus says, listen, to a room full of people who we at different points in our life for different reasons have all rejected the authority of Jesus in our life at one time or another. To a room full of people who have all at different points chosen our own version of happiness and our own judgment over his to pursue what we think is going to be the best life possible for us. To a room full of people who have done that, Jesus says, I am the gate. I am the good shepherd. And if it comes into your life through me, then the promise is you will have life and have it abundantly. Other translations say have it to the full. The original language, the word there means to have a super abundance of a thing. Jesus tells you, those of us who doubt his authority, who choose our own version of happiness over his version of happiness, he tells us, I promise you that standard is working to bring about the greatest possible happiness and joy and fulfillment for you. If it's counsel from my word or from someone who loves me and loves my word and they're speaking this into your life, I promise you that counsel, even if it's counterintuitive, will be working to bring about for you the greatest possible life that you can have in this life and the next. Jesus promises us that anything that comes from him is working to bring about your greatest happiness. And then he says, but the thief, which is anything that gets to you that isn't through me, is working to steal and to kill and to destroy your life. And we understand that that thief is Satan. And we don't talk a lot about Satan here. We don't talk a lot about the devil. And actually, it's such a big part of the scripture. He's addressed so much that I really do believe at some point or another, we're gonna do a whole series on the devil. I'll wear a double-breasted suit every Sunday and a handkerchief and I'll dab my forehead a lot and yell at you, okay? It'd be great. We need to address him. He's a big part of Scripture, but for the purposes of this morning, what we need to know is Satan is real, he is effective, and he is against you. And Jesus says, anything that gets into your life that is not from me is from him. And it is working to steal and to kill and to destroy your life. And many of us know that this is true experient the thief can derail our life, can steal our life from us, there's easy examples of this. We immediately think of the egregious sins, right? We think of maybe an addiction. Maybe there was somebody who had a surgery, the surgery of the recovery of which required some pain medication. And so they began to take that medication and they liked the way that made them feel. There was more of it than they needed, and we fast forward two, three years down the road, and they've developed an addiction, and that's how Satan steals our lives. I have a dear, dear friend whose wife developed one of these, and it has wrecked their life. He has had portions of his life stolen from him from a sin that isn't even his. We've seen this work in our lives and in the lives of others, right? Sometimes it's a secret sin. It's an affair or an issue or a private thing that we have going on that we won't confess, that we won't let other people know about. And Proverbs tells us that we can't hold hot coals against our chest and not be burned. And sometimes, eventually, that secret sin will fester up and manifest itself and do damage in our life that is irreparable, and Satan will have successfully stolen that portion of our life from us from some egregious secret thing or from some addiction. But for most of us, that is not how Satan is going to steal our life. The Bible says he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking who he may devour. And for some of us, that's how he picks us off. But for many of us, most of us, I think Satan's most pernicious tactic is to simply distract us, to keep us focused on all sorts of things as we go through life that aren't from God, that ultimately don't matter. I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with people in their 50s and 60s who have poured their life into their career and been very successful into that career, in that career, only to find that they don't have the relationship with their children or their spouse that they would really like because Satan distracted them for so many years and they poured their life into a thing that ultimately doesn't matter very much. We pour ourselves into hobbies that don't matter. We get really good at a thing that has no eternal value And most of that is a masking mechanism because we're not happy with what our home life looks like. And what we really need to do is work on that. But it's easier to be distracted by these other shiny things that are going off in our life. And so we pursue those. We pursue the house that we want. We pursue the family that we want. We pursue all these things that at the end of the day might not matter very much, but Satan has successfully distracted us with things going on in our world and in our culture that don't matter for eternity, and he steals your life from you. Some of you walked in here today, and you are in the middle of having your life stolen. And for you, I hope if nothing else happens as a result of this this morning, that you will recognize that that's taking place. And you'll put your foot on the ground and you'll say, no more. I'm not going to allow my life to be stolen from me in this way. But what I want us to trust is that if it comes from Jesus, even if it's counterintuitive, that it is working to bring about our greatest happiness. There's plenty of examples of how this works. I think of marriage, right? Most of us in the room are married, and if you're married, what do you want? You want your marriage to be vibrant and happy and fulfilling and loving and filled with joy. That's what you want. The problem is not very many of us or not most of us would use those words to describe our marriages because marriage is hard, and to get to that place, it takes a lot of work, and sometimes it's easier to just fulfill the needs of marriage outside of that marriage because that takes a lot less work, right? Sometimes when we're not having our needs met within a marriage, we go outside the marriage to another person or a thing or a hobby or a group of people or some sort of masking activity from what we're lacking in our home. And what Scripture teaches us is that our greatest happiness is found in our marriage. If you are married right now, I'm not talking about in the past, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad. If you are married right now, I can tell you it is God's will that you would be happy and flourishing in that marriage. It is God's will that you would remain married. I know that to be the case. And so what God really wants us to do, even though sometimes when marriage gets hard, it looks like it would be easier to just go outside the marriage and have our needs met in different ways and keep everything intact. The better thing to do, the harder thing to do, is to lean harder into our marriage and do the hard work that it takes to bring vibrancy there because that is the path through which our greatest happiness and fulfillment will be found. That's what Jesus promises. Another easy one is the confession. When we don't confess, we don't do it because we're afraid of the shame that it's going to bring us. And so we try to work on this thing privately, and it never gets any better. And we never experience the grace of other people loving us without judgment and without shame and seeking to build us up. And so we never obey God and confess our sins to one another, and that thing festers. Instead, if we would just do the difficult thing and shed light on the dark places, we would watch the love of God and the grace of God through His children rush into our life and heal us of this thing that's been eating our lunch forever. Right? Example after example of things that seem counterintuitive, if we follow the authority of Christ, it can't possibly make me happy. It can't possibly make me happy to give away a minimum of 10% of my money. That does not seem very smart. But God promises us that if we do that, if we'll be generous people, that we will experience life as conduits of his generosity and experience the joy that comes from that. Jesus promises us in John 10.10 that even when it doesn't make any sense, if it gets into your life from him, then it is working to bring about the greatest life you could possibly imagine.10? Do you believe John 10.10? Do you believe that Jesus is telling the truth? Do you believe that Jesus cares deeply about your joy and your happiness and the quality of your life now? And do you believe if he does care about that, that he alone knows how to bring about your greatest joy? Do you believe that? Because if you do, if you believe it, then our whole life changes. There's never a reason to sin again. There's never a reason to throw off his authority again, because we know that we trust that God is working to bring about our happiness. When we get to those crossroads in life, where it would be far easier to just do the easy thing, the simple thing, to do the thing that is a rejection of God's authority, or it would be difficult to choose God's authority. When we get to those crossroads, if we believe John 10.10, it will be easier to choose Jesus' authority than our own because we know we can trust him with our happiness and with our joy. If we believe John 10.10, here's the thing, there's no reason to ever sin again when we really think that it's true. And when we really think that we can trust it, it changes everything. So here's how we want to finish. I would love for you to think through, where is God trying to bring me joy? Where am I allowing my life to be stolen from me? What lies am I believing in pursuing happiness outside of God's will that will never make me happy? Where am I allowing my life to be stolen from me? And what would it look like if I actually chose submission to God, glad and happy obedience, and pursued the happiness that he promises me through everything that enters into my life through him as it works to bring about our greatest joy and the greatest life possible, a super abundance of the thing. This week, as you go throughout your days and you hit those crossroads where you realize it's a choice between my authority and my version of good and Jesus' authority and his version of good, whose will you choose? And really, the question as you leave this morning is, who do you trust with your life and with your happiness? Yourself or Jesus? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your son who loved us so well, who was so patient with us, who was so gracious with us, who is our good shepherd, who always leads us to the good places. God, I pray that we would trust him with our lives, that we would trust him in submission to you, that we wouldn't be, frankly, so arrogant as to choose our own way, but that we would submit to the founder and perfecter of our faith, to the author of the universe, that we would trust that you have our best interest at heart and you know exactly how to bring that about. Father, let us trust you more. Let us choose your judgment and your authority over our own. Let us believe what your son says in John 10.10. In Jesus' name, amen.