Sermons tagged with Doubt

It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This feels like a danged reunion after not seeing you guys for three full weeks. Three weeks ago, I showed up and I said, hey church, let's kind of get our button gear about church a little bit. And then God gave us two weeks off just to see if we would really mean it. So here you are. These are the ones. This is great. I have been so thrilled to get to preach to you guys again this week. I'll mention it later, but I got sick in the middle of the week and thought I had COVID. I do not. Three COVID tests later, I'm certain of it. But I had to call Kyle on Thursday and be like, I don't think God wants me to preach in 2022 like at all, because you might have to go this week. But I got lucky. It was just strep. So here I am. Before I dive into it, it's just strep. You take antibiotics, you're good the next day, nobody cares. And what do you want it about a sore throat for? So it's just strep. It's great. Before I dive into that, I wanted to remind you guys after the service today is Discover Grace. It's a class with me, which, who could turn that down, for about an extra hour where I just tell you more about who Grace is, who we are, what makes us tick, why we do the things that we do. If you want to join the church, become a partner, we have partners here, not members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. And we're looking for folks to contribute to what God is doing here as we band together and build God's kingdom through Grace Raleigh. So if you'd like to participate in that, just stay in this room. It'll be immediately following the service, which means if you're here and you're not going to be a part of Discover Grace, get the heck out of here, man. We've got things to do. No, congregate in the lobby or outside if you can stand it, but we're going to try to get started in here so that those folks who participate with kids can get their kids and get them home for lunch. The other thing is that I've been touting now for three weeks. I don't even know if it's worth the wait. It's a special announcement that I have for you guys. Just something I wanted to share with the church. Two years ago, February of 2020, when we were naive babies and didn't know what pandemics were, we did a campaign series called Grace is Going Home. And I kind of put in front of you as the church that at that time for 20 years, now for 22 years, Grace has never had its own permanent home. We were founded in 2000 and have always rented our space and kind of moved from space to space. And we've kind of been a church of wanderers and wonderers, wondering when we would find our home. And we believed in 2020, at the beginning of it, that God was moving us to find and step out in faith and pledge towards a permanent home. And you guys as a church pledged $1.5 million, which I was blown away by. And at no point did I expect that to actually come in, but it was a very nice gesture that we made there at the beginning of the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit and remember the bottom fell out and everything's the worst and nobody knows if we're going to have any money or we're just going to be trading Bitcoin for the rest of our lives. And it was a little perilous there. And so we just made a decision as a notary board, we're not going to mention it. We're not going to ask people for it. We're not going to send out letters and say, hey, here's what you owe. Here's what you pledged. If you could kind of honor that, like we didn't do any of that stuff. We just kind of mentioned it a little bit. And then at the end of years, we would say, hey, if you want to give more, because sometimes people do that at the end of years, you can give towards the campaign. And so the announcement is that as of the end of 2021, the end of December 2021, we have $1.5 million available to us right now to go get whatever land or building we need to get. I never, never thought that was possible. I can remember being in elder meetings and we said, how much should the campaign be? And I said, I think our goal should be 1.25. That felt high. I was expecting about a million to come in because that's what experts say will happen. But I'm the one that has to drive the train on this thing or so I thought like a dummy.'s the Holy Spirit doing all the work, and he didn't really have to do anything except get out of the way. And the elders were like, let's do 1.5. And I'm like, you're stupid. You're dumb. It's easy for you to say that because you don't have to stand up here and ask people for it. Why don't we just do 2 million? Let's see what happens. We should have. We should have done that. But we did 1.5. I never thought it would come in. Then we hit the pandemic. Never thought it would come in. Our campaign is not even supposed to be done until the end of February. We have two more months. Well, one more month on this now. But I told the elders going into the end of 2021, listen, whatever we get at the end of 2021, let's just take that from God. That's what we need. He's going to provide for us what we need to build where and when he wants us to build. And so after 2021, we're done talking about it. We're done asking for it. There's still some pledges out there that are lingering that I'm sure will come in. I have heard, and I know that there are some of you who will give, but you're waiting until we identify the land or the property. That's okay. I understand that. So I expect more to come in to that end once we find where we're going to go. But guys, we're done. We did it. Campaign's over. We got what we need. Now we just wait for God's direction on land and where to go. And that could be a minute, just being honest with you. That probably won't be this year. Okay. We've had a team of good, sharp people, the best people in the church at this particular thing, looking for commercial real estate for us. They have not stopped looking for the duration of the pandemic and all the stuff, all the office buildings and churches and stuff that we thought was going to come available because of the pandemic, that ain't happening. Ain't nothing out there. So we're looking and we'll see, but we're happy to wait until God makes it clear that we're supposed to move. But the thing I'm most proud of about this is this. We did this the right way. We raised this money as a church with, listen to me, no discernible strategy at all. We didn't have a dumb thermometer in the lobby. We didn't send out trinkets in the mail. We didn't keep you guys updated on, hey, we're at third base now. Let's make that final stretch. No, we didn't do any of that dumb crap. We just prayed. And we just believed that God, if this matters to you, you'll make it happen. And guess what? It mattered to him. This place matters to him. I like to say that God likes grace. I don't know why he does. He just does. He likes this place. And he's going to take care of us. And I'm very proud of the course that we charted through it as a church and the way that you guys responded to it. And I will say this too, the course that we charted is not at all a testament to my leadership. It's a testament to the leadership of your elders. Because when we started this journey, I was all about doing it the way the consultants say you need to do it. I was 100% behind sectioning off the givers in the church, me going and meeting with the people who had the highest capacity to give, doing a silent campaign before the campaign, and doing it the professional way that you're supposed to do it. I was all about that. And I took that to the elders, and the elders gave me really strong pushback. That's not right. That's not a good fit for grace. That wouldn't go over well here. I wouldn't do that. And I like, listen, I'll just tell you guys in the elder meeting, sometimes we get a little pointed. We will, um, we will say direct things to one another. And there was some direct things said in those meetings. And I pushed pretty hard. I believe I may have told one of the elders to go frolic in the forest with the animals if that's how they thought we were going to do it. It's possible that I said that. But through the elders' pushback, the Holy Spirit worked in my heart too, and I became convicted that the way we needed to do it is to just let him do his work. And so I am so grateful to our elders for charting the course for grace. That was the right course and the God honoring course. I am proud of our partners for honoring God with your pledges. And I am just overwhelmed with God's goodness to us and how he brought us to accomplish that goal with no strategy in a pandemic when at times there was zero people or 40 people a week even using the building that we're pledging to build. It's pretty cool. So let's pray and thank God for that and then we'll dive into this series. Father, you are so good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for caring about us. Thank you for pursuing us. Thank you for reminding us, God, in myriad ways that you love us, that you care about this place, that what happens at Grace matters to you. God, I just pray that when the right spot becomes available, that you, through your spirit, make it abundantly clear to every person involved that that's exactly where you want us to be. And Lord, I just pray that we would be patient for you to move there just like you moved in this campaign. We trust you with all of our hopes and our dreams and our future, and we pray that what we hope and want for grace is exactly what you hope and want for grace. May your will be done here. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. Our new series is called Colossians. It's creatively titled after the book that we're going to study. If you have a Bible, you can go ahead and open there. It's towards the middle of the New Testament. It's just a short four chapter book. So maybe a little tricky to find, but hopefully you'll find it and read along with it on the reading plan and those things. I'm going to confess something to you about this series because I think it's actually kind of funny and informative for how I kind of arrived at some conclusions this week. But when you plan a, when you plan series, when we plan series as a staff, we kind of, we'll approach a season, the January to Easter or Mother's Day or whatever. And we'll kind of look at that season and we'll think, okay, what are the series that we want to do in here? And there's always one or two that I know I definitely want to do. And so you take the series that you really want to do and you put those where they need to be. And then you kind of see what your time blocks are and what you have space to do otherwise. And so I knew I wanted to start out the beginning of the year with this series called Consumed. And I knew that I wanted to share with you guys what was on my heart about our need for being consumed by church. And then the others were going to be consumed by community and consumed by making disciples. I didn't get a chance to get to that, but we'll get to those topics in the spring. And then we were able to do a response to what does it look like to be consumed by the church. That was on video that we did, I think, last week. So if you haven't seen that, I'd love for you to watch that one. So we knew we wanted to take January. We wanted to do consumed. And then I'm not going to get into too many details about it, but we've got a Lent series coming up that I think is going to be eight total weeks, maybe seven. I'm not quite sure. I forget. But I'm very excited about that and all the things that we're going to be doing. And we've known since Lent of last year that we wanted to really hammer home Lent and focus on that as a church this year. So you can go, everyone's going to be challenged to fast from something. You can go ahead and begin to prayerfully consider what that might be for you if that's something you want to participate in. So I'm very excited about that Lent series. And so we knew where we needed to place that. And that left us with four weeks here in February to do another series. So I'm looking at the staff. I'm like, okay, we got four weeks. We need a series. What do you want to do? So I've been listening in the fall. I was listening to the book of Colossians with John every morning. I'd get him up. I'd feed him his bottle, and I'd turn Colossians on on my Bible app and then just read Colossians to both of us. It's four chapters. We've got four weeks. How's that sound? Everybody's like, yep, sounds great. Colossians is a good book. Cool, let's go. And then we started jokingly referring to this as the filler series, the series in between the two ones that we actually care about. And we would never tell you that because every series is important, but that's how we were joking about this particular series. Even the graphic, Carly sent it to me and I think the graphic looks really good. Carly didn't love it. She was like, here it is. I know this isn't a big deal series. So what do you think? I'm like, that looks great. That's fine with me. I think it looks really, really good. So even to that, we're focused on Lent, right? So this week I dive into research on our filler series. I'm like, okay, God, what do you got for us in Colossians? And I just couldn't help but chuckle, even just 30 minutes into research and reading and praying, at just how very relevant and necessary this book is for us, at how very rich and good I think it's going to be for us. I'm so excited about what I get to preach to you this morning that I'm a little bit emotional about it. I'm afraid I'm going to cry at times that don't make any sense, so I'm going to try to keep it together. But I'm really excited to share with you this message of Colossians. I think Colossians is tucked away in the New Testament and is typically relegated to Bible studies sometimes. And that we don't really study it very often. And we might not even be super familiar with what it is and what its message is. And the more I have gotten into it, the more I thought, gosh, this is going to be so good for grace right now. So God in his goodness, and maybe in those mornings when I randomly landed on Colossians, the Holy Spirit was preparing my heart for the series that he knew he wanted us to do in February that is anything but a filler series. But one of the things that first tipped me off that this would be a good series for Grace right now is the background on the church in Colossae. Paul didn't start this church. Somebody else was running this church. Paul was actually in prison and he got a letter from the person who was running this church. And the letter basically said, hey, Paul, we're doing great. Our folks love God. Our folks are all in. Our folks are full of faith. They're standing up to persecution. Like we've got a really good spirit here. And I thought that feels like grace to me. We're doing a good job. The reaction to, hey, let's be all in was so good and was so encouraging. And it made me so proud in our campaign. It made me so proud. I feel like we're doing pretty good. I feel like we've got a good spirit here. I feel like we've got a good thing going. But the leader of the church told Paul, but they're facing tremendous pressure that I'd like you to speak to. And the pressure was essentially to fold into old ways of legalism or to transition into new ways of liberalism. So there was forces being exerted on them from outside the walls of the church and sometimes from within the walls of the church to recede back into legalistic Judaism, where your spirituality is measured by your ability to follow the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more spotless your life is, the more spiritual you are, the more God loves you. That's how we gain favor with God and respect for man. There's legalism following the rules well. Or this slide to liberalism. Actually, none of those rules really matter. They're not important. Those were never actually meant to be rules. Do whatever you want, no matter what, and God loves and accepts you all the time. Which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism, since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts you all the time, which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts us all the time, but it's doing away with any sort of standards that we need to hold in our life and just embracing every ideology that comes along. And I thought, well, that's pretty similar to grace too. Frankly, that's really similar to any church, particularly in the Southern United States. Every church in the Southern United States right now faces that tension from within and without. There are some people that want to drag us back to legalism, right? My parents grew up in Southern Baptist churches where all the skirts had to be below the knees, where you weren't allowed to be seen at the theater, where you weren't allowed to go dancing or play cards or gamble or any of that stuff. And I don't go dancing, and I don't play cards because those are boring, but I gamble sometimes because that's fun. We don't do that stuff anymore. But every now and again, there's a part of us that wants to go back to that familiar legalism, that we've got to follow the rules better. We have to decide. We have to draw lines in the sand. This is a sin and you can't do that and you can do this. And we want to put up barriers around our behavior and define people's spirituality by how well they follow the rules. That's a comfortable, natural place for the human instinct to go. And if we don't watch it, some of us will always slide towards legalism. In the same way, we're in a culture now that's trying to tell us that none of those rules really matter. All the trains get off at the same station. Everything's really the same. It's you have your faith and we have our faith and yada, yada, yada. We don't really need all those standards. There's a push on the church to let go of some of our tenants so that we can be more acceptable to our culture. And so like the Colossians, we are a church that's doing good, that loves God, that has a heart of faith, but exists under some pressure to go liberal or to go legal. And so Paul writes to encourage the church in Colossians. And in his encouragement to the church in Colossae, I think we can find a lot of encouragement to this church here in Raleigh. And so the question becomes, well, if Paul is writing them to then encourage them in their faith, how does he do it? What does he write to them? What's the first thing he points to, to encourage them in their faith? And I thought about, well, if it were me, if I wanted to encourage our church or any church, or if I'm Paul and I was trying to encourage that church, how would I do it? How would you do it? Would you like me do it strategically? I would probably want to talk to the leader of that church. What's going on? What kind of things are they facing? The legalistic crowd. What kind of rules are they really caring about? The liberal crowd. Where are they coming from? What's their ideology? What are they trying to do? And I would have wanted to directly address those arguments. Like an attorney, let's just break this thing down. Let's address all their arguments. Let's build out a nice rebuttal here so to give them a good foundation to stand on. Let's do this thing strategically, right? Well, Paul didn't do it strategically. Paul did it very simply. And it's so simple and it's so pure and it's so powerful that it convicts me that maybe as a pastor, I don't do this enough for you guys. But Paul didn't choose to encourage them strategically. He didn't choose to figure out where they were and kind of read the tea leaves and try to hit them right where their heart was. He just did it very simply. Paul encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus, plain and simple. He encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus. And when I say this, what I mean is he begins in chapter one, verses one through 14 are really kind of this preamble. He says, hey, you know, I think my God, every time I remember you, I think of you in my prayers. This is what I pray for you. The prayer in Colossians looks very similar to other prayers and the other letters that he's written to the church that are basically, hey, I just want you to know God more than anything else. I want you to know God, grateful for your faith, grateful for your testimony from your church. And then he gets into how he wants to encourage them. And this is what he writes. And this is verses 15 through 23. I'm going to stop a couple of times and talk about some things, but keep your Bibles open. I think this passage is worth reading. It's such a sweeping and stunning portrayal of Jesus. And you know, it's funny that I've come back to this because a few years ago in the spring, we did a series in Hebrews. And I said that Hebrews had the most incredible description of Christ in the Bible. And I preached it to you guys. And I got an email from Brandon Reese right over here, who was in the men's group. And he said, that's a great picture. There's an equal one to it in my mind in Colossians. And so now here we are two years later, and now we're talking about that depiction of Jesus in Colossians. And I want you to read it with me, and we'll kind of digest it together. This is what Paul writes, beginning in verse 15. I'm going to take a break there. I want you to understand what's going on here. What Paul is saying is Jesus was present at creation. He's agreeing with the gospel of John that says, through him all things were made and without him nothing was made. He was present at creation. All of creation hinges upon him. All of his existence now rests upon him. He is saying that all things belong to him, that he is the reconciliation. And if you read this, what you really find is that this is what Paul is saying, that all, everyone who's ever lived has held Christ, whether you realize it or not, as the epicenter of your history and the epicenter of your hope. Which means for every person who has ever lived, all of your understanding of your past hinges on Christ and all of your hope for your future hinges on Christ. That's what that means. Even if you go all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first thing they learn is that God created them. How did he create them? Well, according to Genesis 1 and John 1 and Colossians 1, he created them through his word, Jesus. He created them through his son. So Adam and Eve, with a brief two-day history they had, looked back to the creation of the earth with the hope that it was Jesus who actually did it. Their history hinged upon Jesus. And then when they sinned and they fell and suddenly they need reconciliation and forgiveness, their future hope for that reconciliation and forgiveness without them knowing it hinged upon Jesus. And then over the course of the Old Testament, God begins to shed some light on exactly what that future hope is going to be on the Messiah. And we see whispers in Jeremiah and Isaiah and in the prophets as they kind of shed more light on who this Messiah is going to be and what this hinge of history is going to come to do. And then Jesus shows up in the gospels and he personifies God's goodness and loveliness. And we'll talk about that in a second. And he lives a perfect life and he dies on the cross for our sins. And so all of history to that point culminates in the death of Christ as he fulfills his divine nature to do that for us. And then we move forward into the church era. And now as people who exist in 2022, we look back on the death and the burial and the resurrection of Christ as a hinge of history. All of our history is contingent upon him. And then we look forward to, as we preached in the fall, revelations, when Jesus comes down in Revelation 18 and 19 to come back and rescue his church and to take us back up to heaven with us. He is the hope of our future. So for every person who has ever lived, Jesus is the epicenter of your history and he is the epicenter of your hope. Jesus is the confluence of heaven coming down onto earth and earth experiencing heaven. He is the nexus of the spiritual world meeting the physical world. Jesus sits in the middle of everything. Everything. There is nothing without him. Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we admit it or not, whether we comprehend it or not, Jesus sits at the hinge of all history, of all creation, of all love, of all majesty. And that's the picture that Paul is painting to the church in Colossae and to us is this grandeur of Jesus. And he doesn't stop there. I love this next sentence. I think it's verse 19. For in him, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. We'll pause there again. Much of what I'm about to say comes from this book that Kyle recommended to the staff called Gentle and Lowly. And I can't recommend it to you highly enough if you're a reader. If you're not a reader, become one. It's good. And read Gentle and Lowly. But I love that phrase in verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. What does that mean? This is a clumsy explanation, but it's the best that I can do. I can only try to size it up like this. Do a little mental exercise with me. And just picture in your mind, I don't know how you're gonna do it, just figure it out. Picture in your mind how much you think God loves you. Just how much you think he loves you. And try to wrap your head around that for a second. How much grace do you think God has for you? Wrap your head around that for a second. Grace for your humanity and for who you are and loving you despite of your faults. How much mercy does God have for you? Willingness to look over times you've slighted him or things that you've done. How much compassion does God have for you in your sin and in your hardships? Wrap your head around those things. And then let me tell you this. It's more than that. It's more than that. And now wrap your head around that new reality. But it's more than you can fathom. It's more than that. Wrap your head around that new reality, and guess what? It's more than that. Wrap your head around that reality, and it's more than that, and it keeps going. We cannot comprehend the love and the grace and the mercy and the compassion and the goodness that God holds in his heart for us. It is beyond human comprehension, and I am convinced that the whole Christian life is an exercise in expounding our understanding of how much God loves us and has mercy for us us and then realizing that's not nearly enough to capture how he loves us. And that overwhelming love, that overwhelming goodness, that overwhelming grace and compassion that we cannot fathom is personified, listen to me, is personified in the person of Jesus. That's what it means when it says the fullness of God, all of his grace, all of his mercy, all of his compassion, all of his love was pleased to rest on the person of Christ. And if you want to know how much does God love me, look at Christ crucified and answer the question for yourself. If you want to know how much mercy and compassion does God have on me, look at Jesus weeping with Mary and know that that's the compassion that he has for you. If you want to know how much grace and mercy does he have for me, look at Jesus with the adulterous woman as he defends her from the death penalty and know that that's the compassion that Jesus has for you. If you want to know how much Jesus forgives you, look at him telling Peter to forgive 70 times 7, which is as many times as is necessary, and know that that's God's forgiveness for you. If we want to know how God feels about us and how much he loves us, look at the person of Christ on whom his fullness is pleased to dwell and know that that's how much God loves us, that that's the compassion that he has for us. That that's the grace and the mercy that he offers us. That's what it means when it says that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell on him and then he finishes up this description of Christ in this way. In verse 21, He says, Why did God send the culmination of all history, the fullness of his love and compassion? Why did he send that down here? To get you. To come and get you. To reconcile you back to him so that he can experience eternity with you. Listen to me. Why does Paul choose, when he needs to encourage the Colossians to hang in there, when he needs to encourage them to stay pure in their faith, what does he do? He points them to Jesus in the stunning depiction of Christ. And why does he do that? This is why. Because Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. I don't know if you think about God's love for you in this way, but God loves you. God desires you. God chases after you. God sent his son to win you. And then he left the Holy Spirit to nip at your heels whenever you run from him so that you would turn and accept his embrace. He is coming for you. He desires you. He is yearning for you. He does not sit back and wait for you. He pursues you. So he sent Jesus to come and get you. And he left his spirit to keep the chase going until you finally give in and give up and say, God, I'm yours. Because that's what he longs for. I told you this week I had strep. On Tuesday, I began to feel a little sick, and so I realized with all the COVID junk going on, I should probably mask up in the house and try to stay away from the kids. Wednesday felt like garbage. Thursday was the worst. Literally, I never get sick ever. I've never been as sick as I was on Thursday in my adult life. But by Thursday afternoon, I got some antibiotics, so Friday I was right as rain, baby. It was great. But on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm in the house, and I'm with my kids, but I can't touch them. I'm an affectionate guy. I pick up and scoop up Lily all the time. I pick up and scoop up John all the time. I love holding my babies. And there was one night, I think it was Thursday, Jen was laying with Lily singing her songs and I was standing in Lily's doorway with my mask on just waving at Lily in the bed and she waved back at me and she said, I miss you, Daddy. And I had to go cry in my bedroom. I yearned for them. All I wanted to do is scoop them up. All I wanted to do is pick up John and eat those fat baby cheeks. Is grab Lily when she got home from school and make her tell me about her day. She doesn't do it, so I say, tell me three good things that happened. That's all I wanted to do. All I wanted to do is scoop up my kids, man. And it was like this weird quasi-torture sitting in the house looking at them and not being able to scoop them up. If that's torture for me for three days, knowing good and dang well I'm going to get over this and I'll pick them up again, what must it do to our Father in heaven to watch us and so desperately want to pick us up and to hold us and to cherish us and for us to hold him at arm's length. Because Lily waved back at me and said, I miss you. And I knew that she wanted to hug me as soon as I was able to do it again. How much more would that crush your parent heart if you waved at your kid and they said, I miss you. And they said, if God yearns for me the way that I yearn for my children, if God yearns for you and the people you love the way that you yearn for your children, the way that I yearn for mine, how much must it hurt his fatherly heart in heaven to watch his children run from him, begging them, please just stop running. Please just turn around for a dang second and let me hold on to you. I sent my son to catch you. I left the spirit to keep up the chase. How much must it hurt his father's heart to not be able to hold his babies, to not be able to embrace his children, for us to run from him and to wander off from him. When all he wants is for us to be with him. When all he wants is to hold us. When all he wants is his son or his daughter to talk to him. And tell him about our days. Y'all, God, he yearns for us. It's all over the Bible. Jesus says it like this. He says he leaves the 99 sheep that are safe to go get the one who's lost and wandering. And I think that we make such a mistake about how we view the gospel and the love of God in our life. I think that sometimes we have this attitude that God's like, you know, take it or leave it. I sent my son, he died for you. It's there if you want it. It's yours if you don't want it. You don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. I sent my son. He died for you. It's there. If you want it, it's yours. If you don't want it, you don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. Guys, take it or leave it isn't yearning. Take it or leave it is not what we see in the Bible. Take it or leave it is not what we see pouring out of scriptures and shouting at us through the book of Colossians. What we see in the Bible is a father in heaven who earnestly in his guts yearns for you, who wants you, who loves you. And now for some of us, you've never known that love. You've run from it your whole life. You've never accepted Christianity. There's things about it you can't get your head around. And so you're still running. And I'm begging you that you would let God catch you today. I'm begging you that you would let today be the day that you would embrace your heavenly Father. But there's others of us who have been caught, but after we've been caught, there's been the wandering. And in our wandering, sometimes we feel so badly for what we've done that we think God must be disappointed with us. He can't be yearning for me anymore. And so we keep ourselves at arm's length from God out of a sense of guilt or shame. And to you, I would simply ask, if God came after you when your soul was fundamentally opposed to him, why would he not continue to pursue you when your soul feels actual guilt of your sin? If God chased you down and yearned for you and pursued you before you were his child, then how much more does he still love you now that you're his child? Why would he ever stop loving you? Listen, when God forgave us, when you accepted Christ, he forgave you for all of your sins, past, present, and future. He already knew you were going to go through the season of wandering when he chose to save you. He doesn't love you any less. As a matter of fact, God's, I believe, primary emotion as he looks at you in your sin is not anger, but pity and compassion because of what you're giving up to be away from him when he just wants you close to him. Listen, if you've never known Jesus in your life, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you have doubts and you're not sure about your faith, God yearns for you and will chase you down through those doubts. He's still after you. If you are wandering away, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you're holding on to pet sins that you're not sure you want to give up yet, God is going to chase you through those sins and he will chase you down and the Holy Spirit will nip at your heels until we give in and allow him to embrace us. If you are experiencing incredible victory in your spiritual walk right now, good. God loves you and yearns for you on a deeper level than you can still ever imagine. God loves you and yearns for you deeply. And that's all that the church in Colossae needed to know to be encouraged in their faith. And so my prayer for you this morning is that you will walk out those doors knowing in your guts that God loves you more than you thought he did when you came in here. And as I thought about the best way to finish up the service this week, I was reminded of this song called Reckless Love. Because in that song, there's lines of, there's no walls he won't kick down or lies he won't tear down coming after me. There's all these things that God will do to come after us. But the part about the song I like is that it's called Reckless Love. And when it first came out, there was some kind of dumb arguments about whether or not it was really appropriate to use the word reckless because we didn't want to accuse God of being careless or thoughtless or somehow errant in his love for us. But that word reckless doesn't mean mistaken. The word reckless implies this. When you offer your love to someone, when you expose yourself, you make yourself vulnerable to them and they reject you. That hurts. You take that personally. I don't care who you are. And there's only so many times you can offer your love freely and wholeheartedly to someone and have them reject you before you start to guard yourself against it. And the love you offer isn't as much or it isn't as pure or it isn't as grand. Or even maybe you wall yourself off to it entirely because you just can't stand the pain anymore. We learn self-protection. God's recklessness is that he has no self-protection. God's recklessness is you can reject him as many times as you want to and he will never stop coming after you. It doesn't matter how many times we hurt him, he's gonna continue to come after us to get us, to claim us. And so we should sing and marvel at this reckless love. So I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna sing together, but I would invite you to experience the song however you wanna experience it. If you wanna stand and sing, stand and sing. If you wanna sit and you want the lyrics to wash over you, let them do that. If you wanna kneel at your seat and pray, pray. If you wanna come up here to the front and pray and have me kneel over you and pray with you, I'll do that too. However you wanna experience this song, you experience it that way, but I'm gonna pray, the band's gonna come up, and then we'll finish with that song together. Father, boy, you are good to us. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you pursue us. We thank you that you sent your son as the personification and embodiment of your earnest yearning for us. I simply pray, God, that we would be more certain of your love for us as we leave than we were when we showed up. God, we are your children. We are your sons and your daughters. I pray that we would let you love us like that. May we please quit trying to perform. May we please quit insisting that we get our life in some semblance of order before we come to you. May we please tear down all the roadblocks that exist between you and us and just allow ourselves to feel your overwhelming and reckless love for us. It's in your son's name on whom all of history and hope hinges that we pray. Amen.

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

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

Thank you, guys. Thank you, band. Thank you, Jordan, for the scripture reading this morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. It's so good to see everybody. You know, normally I've been making a very intentional choice to try not to differentiate between the in-person crowd and the online crowd, because I want folks who are not able to attend in person to feel no guilt or feel like second-class citizens for choosing to watch online, because I understand that's a necessity for a lot of you. But I will make an exception this morning and say that if you are here in person on Time Change Sunday, showered and attractive in appearance, you are a better Christian than the people who are at home watching. That's just how it goes. And I want you to know that. That's an encouragement to you from your pastor. This is week two of our series called Greater as we move through the book of Hebrews together. And it's called Greater because the author of Hebrews approaches the book through a lens of comparisons, of four main comparisons. Last week was a comparison to angels. We didn't get there. I don't regret it. You can read it in the Bible yourself. I think where we ended last week was more necessary and effective for the church. And this week we arrive at this comparison with Moses. And because of the way I'm wired, once I finish one sermon, I immediately begin to think about the next one because it's just, that's the life of the pastor. It's coming up in a week. You better get it together, pal. You got this many days to do the next one and do your thing. And so normally I finish prepping a sermon on a Wednesday or a Thursday, which means Thursday afternoon of last week, my mind immediately starts to work on this sermon that I'm giving you this week. And I know that it's on Moses. So I'm working out in my head this comparison to try to help us understand how important Moses was to the Hebrews in this culture. You'll remember that the letter of Hebrews was written to Hellenistic Jews who had converted to Christianity. So remember, a Hellenistic Jew is a Jewish person who grew up practicing Judaism or the Jewish faith, and then at some point or another converted to Christianity. And they're called Hellenistic Jews because they live outside of Israel. They grew up in a Greek context while being practicing Jews and then converted to the faith. And it's important that we also remember from last week that the recipients of this letter were undergoing persecution from without and within, from the Roman Empire violently persecuting them for declaring their faith, and from within, from their own Jewish communities that were trying to lull them and lure them back into a Jewish faith to walk away from this new radical Christian faith that they were claiming. So as we approach chapter 2, he makes a comparison that we're going to read in a second of Jesus to Moses and makes the point that Jesus is greater than Moses. And to help a 21st century American church understand the weight of this comparison. I was working on an illustration in my head that had to do with the framers of the Constitution and the original document of the United States and trying to figure out which founding father is Moses most like, which I've landed on George Washington, even though that is a perilous stance, I understand. But this is where I am. So I'm working all this out in preparation for the sermon. And then I sit down on Tuesday and really start to get into the text to figure out how I'm going to marry all the pieces together. And I read through chapters 3 and 4. And I realize the comparison that the author of Hebrews makes of Jesus to Moses is an important one, and we will look at it. But it's really a jumping off point to another comparison that he makes of the people of Hebrews to the ancient Hebrews in the desert. And that comparison actually allows us to apply this text to our lives today and is going to give us today a plea and an encouragement about our faith that I hope will inspire us and help us walk out the door more determined than ever to continue to walk in our Christian faith. And what I found in these chapters is actually this beautiful message of encouragement that I hope inspires you this morning. But to get there, we need to start where the author starts at the beginning of chapter 3 and look at the comparison that he makes between Jesus and Moses. And then I think what we'll do is we'll find something unexpected in the following text. Look with me in Hebrews chapter 3, verses 3 through 6. If you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. We're going to be all over chapter 3 and a little to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son, and we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope. So let me explain what's happening in these verses as he begins this comparison to Moses. He brings up Moses because, again, the audience is trying to be lured back into their old faith, into their heritage. And the author of that faith is presumed by the Jewish people to be Moses. He's the founding father of their faith. You can make a good argument for Abraham, but Moses is the one that wrote the first five books of the Bible. The first five books of the Bible are called the books of Moses, the books of the law that were authored by him. He's the George Washington. To a Hebrew person, Moses is what George Washington is to an American, like the founding father. This is the guy. That's how we understand him. We still look back on him. He was one of the framers of the Constitution. He helped with all that stuff. And like Thomas Jefferson, he's like a combo platter there. But that's the reverence that they had for him times like 10. He's the framer of everything that they believe. They would have said that Moses was the framer of the religion that they practiced. And what the author of Hebrews is saying is, no, no, no, no, no. He didn't frame this house. He didn't start that religion that they're trying to lure you back into. He didn't write those rules himself. That came from God. God built that house. He gets the honor from that. And the house isn't even the laws that you follow. The house is you. The house is the church. We are the kingdom of God and the body of Christ. The house persists now, 2,000 years later on a whole different continent. That's the house. And Moses wasn't the builder of the house. It's actually kind of shocking that he would say this. He's a servant in the house. But the beautiful part is, if Moses could be there in the audience hearing this read aloud, because that's what they would do with these letters, is they would, the pastor, the equivalent of the pastor would stand up and read the letter to them. And if Moses were in the audience hearing that letter, he would go, amen, I'm just a servant, you guys make too big of a deal out of me. I was just doing what God asked me to do. Jesus is the one that we should focus on. And so he sets their expectations from the very beginning by saying, it's not Moses that we should focus on. It's Christ. Christ is the framer of the house. You are the house. And Moses is no different than you. He's a servant within the house. We're cut from the same cloth. Peter tells us that you and Abraham, you and all the heroes of our faith are hewn from the same quarry by God. We all have the stuff in us of Moses. There was nothing special about Moses. Moses murdered a dude, went and hid out in the wilderness for 40 years, and then was called by a bush that wouldn't stop being on fire. And he argued with God five times until God finally says, just go do it, man. It says the wrath of the Lord was kindled against Moses, so then he went, okay? He stepped into the role that God asked him to play, but there's nothing fundamentally different about Moses than you. He was just obedient. He was a servant in the house. And this is what the author of Hebrews is setting up. But after he sets this up, he pretty much leaves the topic of Moses. It's kind of dumbfounding if you think about it. You think you're about to enter into this discourse about Moses. I've got this whole thing in my head about, okay, yeah, good. Let's dive into this Moses thing more. And I'm trying to figure out why does it matter to the American church, to the 21st century church, that Jesus is greater than Moses? Because listen, you all know that's not a new thing for you. You're not having a problem about which one to prioritize like they were. But then as you read the rest of the chapter, the comparison of Jesus to Moses is really not his focus in these next two chapters. He really jumps to another comparison that encourages them in a unique way and I think encourages us today. And so what we see is that Hebrews 3 and 4 are designed to be an encouragement by comparison. And not by comparison of Jesus to Moses, but by a comparison of generation to generation. He's not really going to belabor the point about Jesus being superior to Moses and all the ramifications of that. He jumps right from Moses into talking about the perils that were faced by the generation of Moses and the perils that are being faced by the Hebrews in this generation that he's writing to now. And I think that if we pay attention, then we can be encouraged in the same way the Hebrew audience was encouraged. He jumps right into this discourse that's summed up at the end of chapter 3. Chapter 3, verse 16 through chapter 4, the first verse. Chapter 4, 1. When we look at this verse, this is a good summary of what's going on in these two chapters. And I'm going to read it, and there's a good chance that a lot of us won't really know what any of it means. But then I'm going to explain it for several minutes because I really want us to understand what's going on here. In the time of Moses, you guys are probably familiar. If you go all the way back, second book of the Bible, you can read through the story of Moses. It is one of the most prolific stories in the Bible. If you've never read it, I would highly encourage you to do it. At my house, we have gotten into the habit of telling Lily a Bible story almost every night before bed. Before you go, oh man, that's impressive. We just started it like three weeks ago, okay? Because I realized I am way behind the eight ball in teaching the Bible to my own kids, so we need to get this started. And we started into the story of Moses, and I told it to her in like six parts, and she loves it. And it's really hard to tell the story of Moses to a five-year-old dodging, dancing through, like there is the inconvenient part about God killing the firstborn of all the Egyptian people. Probably not going to cover that with a five-year-old yet. So you kind of pick the parts that you can share, but we've walked through the story of Moses and she's compelled by it and I think you would be too. So if you never read it, you need to do it. And in the story of Moses, what we find is that after his time in the desert, God tells him, calls him through the burning bush, go back to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. The Hebrew people had lived as slaves in Egypt for 400 years, generation after generation of slaves. They never knew what it was to be free. And so Moses takes his brother Aaron, goes back to Pharaoh, insists that Pharaoh lets his people go. Pharaoh refuses. Then we have the 10 plagues that culminate in Passover that we still celebrate to this day. And Pharaoh lets the people go. The armies of Egypt who are in pursuit of the people perish in the Red Sea. And now they are in the desert and they're wandering through the desert for 40 years. And they're wandering through the desert until God feels like it is time for them to enter into the promised land. You've probably heard that phrase, the promised land. We throw it around in pop culture meaning different things in different places. But it really means the land that was promised to the descendants of Abraham. Back in Genesis 12, God makes three promises to Abraham. One of them is land. Your people will inherit this land on which you are standing, which is the land of Canaan, modern day Israel. And so they are working their way back to the promised land. And the way that it's phrased in Hebrews chapters three and four, the author talks about entering into that land as entering into rest. Because it's this idea of when it was Abraham and his family, they were nomads. They didn't set up permanent camp. They didn't have civilization to set up camp in Israel then. And eventually they had to move down to Egypt because of famine. And then in Egypt they lived as slaves. And now they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years, unpacking their stuff, setting up their tent, doing life for a couple of days, and then packing everything back up and moving down the road. Can you imagine trying to do that with elderly people and with children and how difficult that way of life would be? So 400 years of being slaves, 40 years of living in the desert, these people were not a people who knew what rest was. And so he says you're going to enter into rest because now you can finally, you can cross over the Jordan River, you can go into the promised land, you can build a permanent home, all the women can nest and do the things. I'm sure there was ancient Hebrew Kirklands where you could go buy all the clutter that you wanted and put it on your shelf, and now my house looks great. And they wanted to do this, and the men could go outside and work in the yard and all the stuff. Now we can set up camp, and we can do life, and we can just rest. And that's good. But all of that, while it was literally going on for the Hebrew people at the time of Moses, they were wandering through the desert, and there were struggles in the desert, and they were anticipating entering rest, entering into the promised land, and when they got there, they could finally rest. All that was literally true, but it's also one big, long metaphor for your salvation. The time in Egypt under slavery is when we are slaves to sin. It's a part of our life when we don't know Jesus. When we don't know who it is, we have no choice but to sin. Romans at length, in Romans, Paul tells us about how we are slaves to sin. We have no choice but to do evil, even when we want to do good. And then once we come to know Jesus, we're freed. We skip like a calf loosed from its stall, says Malachi. We're free to walk in the freedom of Jesus and to follow him. But in that freedom, we're in the desert. We're in life. We're going to face trials and struggles. We just talked about that in Ecclesiastes. But if we persevere, we will enter into the promised land. We will enter into God's rest. If you were here or paying attention in January, you'll remember that we did a whole week on Sabbath and what it means. And that this Sabbath rest is really a picture and a reminder of the eternity that waits on us after death, this eternal rest that we enter into with God. And I even in that sermon referred to Hebrews 3 and 4 and talked about the rest that this author describes. And so it's important to understand as we think about that story of Moses, they were intentionally taken through those seasons to mimic the seasons of your life, your time before Christ, and your time with Christ in this life in the desert when we're still not in eternity yet, and then entering into God's rest in eternity, spending eternity in heaven with God in the promised land. It's a metaphor for you and me. Do you understand? And it's important to understand that because one of the things that happened in the desert was that people would groan and complain. They were fed every day by manna. They would wake up in the morning and manna had fallen from the sky and that's what they ate. And the word manna literally in Hebrew means, what is it? We don't know what it is. It's just this nutrition brick that sits on the ground and everybody eats it. And as I was telling this story to Lily, she said, what's manna? I said, it's just a thing. Like we don't really know what it is. And she was like, I would get tired of that. I would want God to give me other food, like chicken nuggets and goldfish. That's what I want. And I thought, well, that's what the Hebrew people wanted too. They got ticked. God gave them quail and it made them sick. It's a whole different story. We didn't get into it. But they started to grumble, as would be natural. They were really thirsty sometimes. And they weren't being led to water. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night and they're just hoping that maybe tomorrow is the day that we get to the oasis of the river and we can finally drink some more and we can fill our vats again. Maybe that's when that will happen. We're sick and tired of man and there's all these struggles of living out in the desert and if you put yourself in that life, you can understand very quickly why people would complain about that. But in their complaining, they began to betray God. In their complaining, they began to say things like, Moses, take us back to Egypt. We would rather be slaves than live in the desert with you because at least there we had access to water every day. At least there I could cook, like, I don't know, a radish. Like, at least we had options back in Egypt. This stinks. One time they got so fed up with life in the desert that while Moses was away, they pulled all the gold that they had stolen from the Egyptian people and melted it down and fashioned it into a golden calf because they thought maybe this God will take better care of us in the desert than our current God. And they began to betray the very God that brought them out of slavery. And so this is what the author of Hebrews is referring to. When he talks about the people in the desert that failed because of unbelief, what happened was because they didn't believe, because they grumbled, Moses' generation that were the chief grumblers passed away. That's why God kept them in the desert for 40 years because he was waiting for that generation to go away so that the following faithful generation would be the one that would enter into the promised land. Those who grumbled and fell away and cursed God and built the golden calf and walked away in disbelief, those who walked away from their faith in the desert, they didn't enter into God's promised land. They never entered into God's rest. And so he's using that to encourage the Hebrew people in the first century A. Because they know the story very well. They know what happened in the desert. They don't need the robust explanation of these tight verses. Because they know good and well what happened to those people. They know what the author of Hebrews is referring to. And remember that they're facing persecution. They're facing violence and threats. If you proclaim Christ, they could take your life. They could arrest you. They could throw you in jail. They could harm your family. It was a really perilous time to be a believer. Their culture is ostracizing them and trying to woo them back to their old way of life, to what they would consider their heritage. You had to really, really want it to be a Christian. And you get the sense that there were some people within these churches to whom the letter was written that were falling away. You get the sense that these churches were going through a season of contraction, not expansion. You get the sense that it would have been really, really easy to just kind of quietly walk away from the faith and embrace an old way of life. And remember I told you last week that Hebrews is written to compel a persecuted church to persevere in their faith. And so in these chapters, he's trying to convince them to persevere by saying, remember the generation that came before you. Remember the story of your forefathers in the desert and how the ones who fell away, the ones who walked away from their faith, never entered into the promised land, never entered into God's rest. Well, now the same is at stake for you. Stay true to the faith, Hebrews. Don't walk away from the faith. Don't give in to persecution. Don't give in to ostracization. Don't give in to isolation. Stay true to the faith because there is a rest waiting for you. There is an eternity waiting for you. And he warns them at the end. He's imploring them and pleading with them. Hang in there. Don't give up on your faith. Don't walk away from God. I know it's hard. Stand firm in your faith. Look what happened in the previous generations. Don't you want to be the people who entered into the promised land instead of the people who perished in the desert, never experiencing God's rest. Hang in there. And I think that that's a remarkable message for us. The thing I love about that point, about what the author is doing here in chapters 3 and 4, is that it doesn't just apply to them. It doesn't just apply to this generation of believers. It applies to every generation of believers. This message echoes throughout the millennia since it was first preached to hang in there, to persevere in our faith. It applies to us as well. As a matter of fact, the biggest thing I take out of these passages is that your faith will never face a storm a previous generation hasn't weathered. Your faith, as you walk through this life, as you in a sense wander through the desert waiting for your turn to enter into the promised land, to enter into God's rest, your faith will not face a trial that a previous generation has not weathered. It is not unique to you. Consider the ones who came before you who persevered. If you have a godly parent or a grandparent, you stand on their shoulders, you watch them persevere. Do you think that their faith was always easy to them? Do you think that the spiritual heroes that you have in your life, that they didn't at some point in their life have a crisis of faith where they felt like walking away? I think now, as much as ever, there are those of us in our church. I mean, with the size church that we are, which is totally uncertain to me right now, there has to be people who feel like they're on the brink of just giving up on their faith. There has to be some of you here or watching or listening later in the week where 2020 has been really hard on your faith. I know that I had my own crisis of faith this year. I didn't realize it at the time, but when we had to go dark and only pre-record messages, and there was no people in the room when I would preach. At first, it wasn't that big of a deal to me because in my previous context at my old church, we used to pre-record our messages for our other campuses on Thursday every week anyways. We couldn't live stream. That was in the early times of live stream, and we just couldn't do it. And so it wasn't a big deal to me to come record a message in a room. That was fine. But it came to begin to feel like a performance instead of a spiritual exercise. And what I realized is when there's people in the room, when I get to look you in the eye, when I get to see head nods, when I get to sometimes see tears, when I know that the things that are connecting with me are also connecting with you, I feel like a pastor. I feel like I'm helping. I feel like I show up on Sunday morning, and maybe this isn't for everybody, and maybe everybody doesn't walk out of here going, man, Nate pitched a fastball today. Maybe you walk out going, that was terrible. That was the worst one he's ever done. But maybe for somebody else, it connected in such a way that was incredibly spiritually encouraging. And that's so much fun for me. That's so nourishing to me. And so in the week when I'm prepping and when I'm searching and when I'm praying, it's so helpful to me to know that when I get up and preach, it's going to be a spiritual exercise. If I've seemed more emotional since we've come back and began to gather again, that's why. Because when I just record onto a camera on Thursday or show up on Sunday with no one in the room, it just becomes a performance. And it was sucking me dry of anything spiritual that I had. And I don't say that for your sympathy. I say it so that you know I can offer you mine. So that if you've walked through a crisis of faith this year, that you know that you have company. The isolation that we felt this year, it would be really easy to fall away from faith. Matter of fact, my biggest fear in preaching this is that the people who need it most have already wandered off and are not going to hear it. And I would just say, if this is the first message you're listening to in a long time, this is why, pal. I'm glad you're here. I have spent a lot of time this year concerned about the people of our church beginning to drift away from God because the regularity of schedule hasn't been there that continues to draw us back into him. The meeting every week I think is powerful and effective. That's why we're told in Hebrews not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. There's an efficacy to that that I don't think we all the time understand on a head level. It's more of a soul thing. And the ease with which we could just simply drift away. Stop watching on Sunday and no one will know. Stop paying attention to small group because we're not meeting in person and we can't go anyways. Just how easy it would be to drift away from faith this last year has made me think that these chapters should resonate with us more deeply than maybe they ever have. And maybe some of us have walked through grief. Grief is always this big crucible of faith. I'm inclined to believe that faith isn't really mature and hardened and steadfast until it's walked through some sort of grief that makes you question the foundation of it. But then when we come through the other side of that strong, that's good, but some of us find ourselves in the middle of questioning. Some of us have doubts that we just continually push away and we never confront out of fear. And those work to weaken our faith. And you may be thinking, Nate, listen, man, yeah, sure, there's temptations to fall away from faith, but gosh, it's kind of difficult to compare us to those generations. Like, we're not wandering through the desert eating nutrition bricks every day, and we're not facing death and persecution for coming here on a Sunday morning. So take it easy on comparing us to that generation, and that's fair. But I actually think that all of us face a testing of our faith that those people never had to encounter. And I would actually argue with you that atrophy may be the biggest test of our faith. I think the atrophy of our faith may be the actual biggest test of our faith. I've been talking with some folks recently about sometimes I develop theories on life that are not really worth public consumption. But for the sake of an illustration, I'll share this one. I have this theory that our ability to handle stress and manage tasks atrophies as we get older and life doesn't require us to do as many things. So I think that if we go through life and we don't have daily demands on our schedule, we don't have problems that we have to solve, there's not stress that sits on us, that eventually what happens is our ability to manage tasks and to manage having full days and our ability to manage stress actually atrophies. So that when you get older, and I'm sorry, I'm going to get blowback from the generation that is my parents' age and older. I'm sorry. But what I've noticed is that sometimes you'll ask folks like, what are you doing Wednesday? And they're like, well, I was a kid. It's a busy day. I'm like, oh yeah, what are you doing? And they're like, well, you know, I gotta take my friend to the doctor at two. Okay, and then what? They're like, well, I'll probably just pack it in after that. All right, yeah, no, that's, get some good sleep on Tuesday, you know. And I think to them it feels full, but it's because for a long time they haven't had to have the fullness of schedule that I think, I would argue that when you have little kids and when you have kids in middle school, life demands a lot of you. Your capacity to handle stress and tasks is as high as it's going to get. But if you don't flex that muscle, it goes into atrophy so that taking a friend to the doctor at 2 o'clock feels busy. And that's fine. But it happens. I think our faith works the same way. I think when we're not forced to exercise our faith, it begins to atrophy. So that little tasks, little things that require little amounts of faith feel like these huge hills of godliness that we have to climb. Their life, the life of the people in these chapters, they required faith. Those people wandering through the desert, they don't make it through the day without faith. God literally lands food on their front yard every day. That requires faith to be hungry at night and believe that it's going to be there when I wake up in the morning. They're literally, they're formed in the desert. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night. They have to trust that that pillar is actually God and is actually taking them where they wanted to go. At one point or another, there was snakes in the camp and if they would bite you, you would die. And the only way to not die was to look at a cross with bronze serpents on it and know that that was God's blessing to you. You had to look at that cross in faith. It's the only way to heal you from death. Every day of their lives required their faith. Some of them got tired of that exercise and walked away. For the Hebrew people, every day of their lives required that faith. God, I am going to go walk in your presence today. I'm going to go proclaim your name today, and I'm trusting you to protect me and to protect my family. And if you don't, I trust that's okay too. It required faith. It is entirely possible to be a good Christian and yet have a life that requires very little faith. Parents, you want your kids to be Christians. And here's the good news. Statistically speaking, kids that grow up in a Christian home with a mom and a dad who both love Jesus, they're going to love Jesus too. The statistics are on your side that that child will accept Christ as their Savior. And that's a good thing. That's the most effective plan for evangelism that's ever existed. I love that truth. But I would also argue that because that's true, it doesn't really take a lot of faith on our part, a lot of hitting our knees and pleading with God to reach the hearts of our children and to enliven them to him. Because if we just bring them to church and put them around other people who love Jesus, they're probably going to get on board too. Raising good kids doesn't require a lot of faith. But if you want to release adults into the world, unleash disciples of Jesus who will impact their community and draw others to faith like a magnet and go and spend the rest of their lives making disciples. If you want to release eternity changers into the wild, then you better hit your knees. You better pray over that because that task is too big for you. We need to live lives that require faith of us. We need to set goals for our children that aren't easily attained by just coming to church every week, but by requiring us, by compelling us to get on our knees and pray for them and pour over them during the week while they sleep in their beds. Let's go into their rooms and let's get on our knees and let's plead with God to make them exactly who he created them to be and let's plead that they're better than us and that we don't get in the way. That takes faith. You want to go to work? Be a good worker. Be a good employee, employer. Have a good influence on the people around you. That's great. You don't really need faith to do that. You can figure that out all on your own. We know how to play the game and say the right things and not cuss when we're not supposed to and not get mad when we want to be mad. We know how to do that. You want to be a pastor and evangelist in your workplace? You want the people who work around you to come to know Jesus because they see him shining through you? You want that person that when you started that job who is very far from God, who is a militant atheist, you want them to come to faith? You better do more than just show up and be nice. You better hit your knees and pray for them. Grace, listen, American Christians have this unique privilege of living lives that look like good Christianity that really require very little soul-searching faith of us. And I'm deathly afraid that because of that, our faiths have atrophied to a place where one task, where one little thing seems like a mountain climb of faith. I would implore you this morning, not just to persevere in your faith, but to choose to live lives that require it. To dream God-sized dreams about, not about things that you will accomplish, but about people that you can impact, about things that you see happen in the lives of those around you. Let's begin to live lives that require faith. Anybody can lead a small group by just showing up and having a discussion and being nice. It doesn't require any faith. But what about if you decide that you want to disciple these people and see them have vibrant spiritual lives and vibrant marriages and see them disciple their children and see them radically reprioritize your lives? Then we need to pray. Let's choose to live lives that require faith of us. The other encouragement that he gives is the one that we actually started with today that Jordan read for us. It's the lone encouragement he gives in the chapter or piece of advice he gives in the chapter. He basically says, hey, hang in there. Stick with it. Don't fall away like the people in the desert. Be like the people who entered into the promised land. Persevere in your faith. He givesverance is virtually impossible without community. Perseverance is virtually impossible without community. And I just included that word virtually there because I was scared to say totally impossible without community, but that's really what I think. And I love it. Brothers and sisters, encourage one another in your faith today as long as it is called today. Every day, encourage the people around you. You may be listening to this sermon and think, Nate, you know, listen, I know other people are faltering in their faith. I've certainly moved through those seasons in my life, but I feel good right now. Me and God, like I'm walking with God and there's things I need to improve on, but like my faith is strong and that's great. Use that faith to encourage the people around you every day as long as it's called today. If you're struggling in your faith, if it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, then I did. I'm just kidding. If it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, if you feel weak in your faith, then draw on the strength of others. Look at other people who might be weak and say, listen, we don't have this all figured out, but let's encourage each other. There's practical ways to encourage each other. I don't want to get caught up in doing that because you're smart adults and you can figure that out. But I will say that one of the things that I'm in the practice of doing when I'm really focused on God and when I'm pursuing Him well is in my quiet times and in my prayers, He will always bring people to my mind. Oftentimes it's folks I haven't thought about in a number of months or a year or more. And I try to be obedient to sit down and to text them or to sit down and write them an email and just let them know I'm thinking about them and I'm praying for them. And you'd be surprised the number of times I get an email back that says, man, I can't believe the Lord put you on my heart this morning. This is what I'm dealing with. So I would leave you today with two encouragements. Let the message from Hebrews 3 and 4 echo down through the millennia to you and hang in there with your faith. Persevere. Don't walk away. Face your doubts. Face your fears. Face your grief. Persevere in your faith. One of the ways we can do that is to live lives that require it. The other way that we do that is to encourage those around us to live out their faith today as long as it is called today. This is something I think that grace is so good at. Let's lean on our community and use our community not just to make people feel welcome, not just to make people feel loved, but let us use and leverage our community to encourage one another in our faith. Let's infuse our friendships with spiritual encouragement. And let's be obedient and inspired, obedient to and inspired by the message of Hebrews 3 and 4. My prayer for you this week is that if any of you are on the brink of walking away, if any of you have been struggling in your faith, that this would be a week that encourages you to hang in there. And that the people around you would come around you even without you saying anything to them and they would encourage you in your faith today as long as it's called today. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for you. We are grateful for how big you are. We are grateful for how much you love us, for how much you strengthen us. God, I pray that we would see the shoulders that we stand on, the generations that come before us and the storms that they have weathered, that we would be heartened by that and that we would stand firm in our faith lest we fall away. God, for those of us for whom our faith is in atrophy, which is such an easy thing now, would you help us and show us how to choose lives that require faith? That force us to lean on you, knowing that if you don't come through, we will fall. God, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We know that it is in him that we can hope, that that is the hope that will not put us to shame, that that is the faith that we can have. I pray that if anyone doesn't know who he is, that they would today. For those of us who do know God but are tempted to walk away, would you help us to stand firm, pick us up by attending angels and draw our souls near to you even as we sing here in a minute. It's in your son's name that we pray these things. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's so good to get to spend some time with you in this way. I'm really hopeful that we can be together again in person, but for now, caution is winning the day, and so we'll get to enjoy church in our different living rooms wherever we are. This is the last part in our series called James, where we're going through the book of James, and we're going to land today in what I believe to be is a very hopeful passage on prayer. I think that this is a really encouraging and empowering passage, and my hope is that by the time I'm done, that you'll feel empowered by prayer as well, and you'll be inspired to cling to prayer and to persevere in prayer. As we approach this topic, I'm reminded of Memorial Day 2017. 2017 is the year that I got to come to Grace and become the senior pastor. And some of y'all know this story, so if you do, bear with me. But maybe it can be a little reminder. And for those who don't know, when I got to Grace in April of 2017, things weren't great. Financially, we were really struggling. We were in debt. We didn't really have a way to go into more debt. We didn't have any more lines of credit to tap on. And so it was a little bit dire. And my goal was simply to just make it, to make it through the summer, to make it into the fall, to see if we could get a little bit of momentum going. And I'll never forget, we were headed into Memorial Day weekend, the last weekend in May. The person handling the finances at the time told me, Nate, we're in trouble. We're going to be behind on some bills in May. We're already behind on giving. We need giving to be really good this weekend. And I asked what the number needed to be, and they said we need $15,000 this weekend. $15,000 was more than we had brought in any single week in 2017. We were bringing in like $8,500 or $9,000 a week. So $15,000 was, that was pie in the sky. That wasn't going to happen. And on top of that, it was Memorial Day weekend. And you may not know this about church world, but one of the things that pastors are aware of is Memorial Day weekend, that service is the lowest attended service and the lowest giving service of the year, every year in every church in the history of America. That's just how it went. And so not only do we need more giving than we've had in any single week for the whole year, but we needed a Memorial Day weekend, which feels impossible. So the finance person told me that in the middle of the week, and honestly, I didn't tell anybody. I just knelt and I prayed. I said, God, we need something here. We need a miracle. This church can't go into debt. I'm not ready to move back to Georgia yet. I just got here. We need you to show up this weekend, God. And so we had the services, and I went into the office on Monday, and usually Tuesday or Wednesday, I get a little financial update, and so I'm just hitting refresh on my email browser, just waiting for the news to come in. And I think it was Wednesday morning, the news came in. I see that I got the email from the finance guy. I break out in the cold sweats, and I click on it, and I immediately just lost my mind. $28,000 came in Memorial Day weekend 2017. I couldn't believe it. It wasn't $15,000. It wasn't just a little bit shy of that. It was $28,000. That was the biggest single weekend giving in all of 2017. I couldn't believe it. I was floored. And God made it apparent that he answers prayers. He made it apparent that day to me, Nate, my hand is on grace. My hand is on you. I answer prayer. I hear you. I've been moved by prayer. And here you go. Here's your answer to prayer. And so that stands out in my memory as a time when prayer buoyed my faith. When prayer bolstered my faith. When I prayed fervently for something in the quietness of my own heart and in his word. And I hope that you have stories like that too. I hope that there are times in your life that you can remember where you prayed fervently for something and God answered. God delivered. He gave you what it was that you needed. He reconciled that relationship. He healed that person. He brought that thing back. He saw you through that circumstance. I hope that if you're a believer that we all have instances and times that we remember God answering our prayers. Because instances like that, like Memorial Day for me, like whatever it is that you think of when you think of answered prayer, instances like that help us believe in passages like this. If you have a Bible at home, I want you to look at James chapter 5. I'm going to pick it up in verse 13. This is what James writes about prayer. You know, when I was a kid and I encountered that verse, I encountered it in the King James Version, and it said, Other translations say that the prayer of a righteous person is powerful in its working. And I used to think, well, yeah, sure, like the prayers of righteous people, of those people that we write about in the Bible, of those pastors that are really good people, like the righteous people, as I'm thinking about this as a kid when I encountered the verse, those are the people who have effective prayers. But here's the deal. If you're a Christian, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, you're righteous. You're as righteous as you're ever going to get. Because Scripture teaches us that when God looks at you, he sees you clothed in the righteousness of Christ. Therefore, your affectionate and fervent prayers are powerful in their working. They availeth much. Christians, I want you to know based on this passage, your prayers work. When you're grieving, go to God in prayer. When you're joyful, praise him in prayer. When someone is sick, pray over them. When a situation is bad, pray over it. Your prayers work. They are powerful in their working. They work to much avail. And sometimes we have stories in our life that remind us that this passage is true. But here's the flip side of this passage. Here's the thing that I wish that someone would have told me somewhere along the way. I wish growing up, I would have heard a pastor talk about this passage in the way that I'm about to talk about it. I wish that somewhere in my formative years, back when I knew what it was like to have a pastor, that one of them, and maybe they did and I just didn't pick up on it, but I wish that one of them would have talked about the fact that sometimes this passage actually makes us doubt our faith. Sometimes passages like this make us actually not believe the Word of God, make us wonder if God really does keep His promises. And I had to learn this lesson the hard way. I had to encounter this question the hard way. But I think if I'm being honest, that when we read passages like this, that sometimes we tend to doubt it. And that makes us doubt the truth of Scripture. When this slapped me in the face, and I wish that someone had walked me through this before it happened, was in the spring of 2010. From 2007 to 2010, I taught Bible at a school called Covenant Christian Academy. And there was a kid in the class that I was a sponsor for named Alex Williams. And Alex was a great kid. He was just a charming guy. He had this winning smile. He would do anything for you. Super nice guy. I loved Alex, and I love Alex to this day. And Alex got a lot of those traits from his dad, Ron. And during high school, during his high school years, Ron contracted cancer. I forget which kind. And we watched Ron slowly deteriorate. Alex was an athlete, and Ron was always on the sidelines, whether it was football or basketball, cheering. He was the loudest voice there. You could always hear him. He was boisterous and loud, and it was really fun to have Ron around. But the cancer began to eat away at him until in his senior year, Ron would attend in a wheelchair. And I can remember the spring of Alex's senior year, we prayed over Ron. Fathers and coaches that were involved in that school who were elders in that church, according to the passage here, came together, I'll never forget it, in my classroom at Covenant. And Ron sat in the middle of us and somebody even brought oil to anoint him which is something that some denominations still observe. And we poured it over his head and we placed our hands on Ron and we prayed, we prayed a prayer of faith that Ron would be healed. And then weeks later, Ron died. And I remember thinking, how can this be true and our prayer not be answered? God, you said that if we would do these things, if we would gather and we would anoint his head with oil and we would pray, God, you said that he would be healed. You said that he would be raised up. And he's dead. God, you didn't keep your promise. And I'd be willing to bet that you have that story too. I'd be willing to bet that for most of us believers, we can point to a time in our life where we prayed fervently for something in accordance to God's will. We asked in his name. There was two or three gathered there and we asked in his name. And he promises to give us what we asked for. We prayed for healing that didn't come. We prayed for more years that weren't granted. And it makes me want to ask, what do we do when it seems like this passage isn't true? What do we do when it seems like this isn't true, when it seems like this can't be trusted, when it seems like these are just the words of James that make us feel good but aren't really a truth that we can anchor ourselves in? What do we do when it feels like this passage isn't true? And again, I wish that someone would have talked about this with me. Because I think the thing that you do is you go back to the passage and you read it again. You go back to God's Word and you ask, what did I miss? What did I presume that I didn't see the first time? And so when we read it again, here's what we find. It says, What we notice here is that there's a future tense. He will be healed. He will be raised up when we pray the prayer of faith. But there's no sense of the timeline of this. There's no sense of when it's going to happen. And here's the reality with Ron. Ron was healed. He wasn't healed in the temporal. He was healed in the eternal. Ron was raised up by God. He wasn't raised up in the temporal. He was raised up in the eternal. And so the reality is that he will heal us. He will raise us up. He does answer those prayers. And it took me a minute to figure that out. We were praying fervently, God, heal Ron. And he did. He just chose to heal him for eternity rather than heal him for a few years. God, raise him up. He did. He raised him up into heaven where he's no longer sick, where he lives in a utopia, where he walks with his Savior and he waits for his children. The truth of it is that Ron was healed, that Ron was lifted up. And this is a concept that even my four-year-old gets. My four-year-old Lily somehow understands this. A few weeks ago, we were back home visiting Jen's family. And if you've been following along in church, you know that Jen's dad isn't doing very well. And truthfully, he looks pretty sick. And after Lily spent some time with him, just Lily and I were in the car, we were driving somewhere, I think to pick up breakfast or something, and she said, Daddy, how come Pawpaw's not getting better? He's sick, but he's not getting better. How come he's not getting better? And I said, well, sweetheart, there's kind of two kinds of being sick. There's the kind of sick where it just lasts for a little bit and then you get better, like a cold. And then there's the kind of sick where you just get sick and you stay sick and you don't get better. And she said, okay. I said, does that make sense? She said, uh-huh, yes, Daddy. And then she thought about it for a second, and she said, but when Pawpaw dies, he won't be sick anymore. And I looked in the rearview mirror, like, where did this four-year-old get this? I said, that's right, sweetheart. He won't. And she goes, yeah, because he'll be in heaven with Jesus. And you don't get sick in heaven. And I said, yeah, that's true. And she goes, and then one day when I die, I'll get to see him again too, and neither of us will be sick. Right. That's it. And I think that if she can get it and comfort her own four-year-old self about her pawpaw who's going to pass away soon, and she knows that he's going to be better when he gets there, that we're praying fervently for his healing, and the reality of it is God's going to heal him. He's either going to heal him for a little bit or he's going to heal him for forever. And she knows that. And she's already looking forward to the forever healing because that's the bigger answer to prayer. When you pray in faith, when there's faith in God, when the prayer is based on a faith in God that was won by Jesus, then we know that we have eternal life and God will heal us. In order to understand this passage and how it's not contradictory with some of our experiences, we need to understand that we pray in the temporal, but God answers in the eternal. We pray our prayers in the temporal, in the here and now, with the blinders on of just these weeks or just these months or years. We pray urgently for the here and now, and God answers in the eternal. He sees all of time. And I don't think we grasp just how big of a deal eternity is. The Bible tells us that our life is like a mist or a vapor. Paul went through the worst of sufferings, and he says, though we endure these sufferings for a little while. James tells us at the beginning of his book that when you endure trials, consider them pure joy. They're not that bad. How can they say this? Because their eyes are on eternity. They're praying eternal prayers. James can say he will be lifted up because when you pray in faith, they will be lifted up, either for a little while or for forever, but they will be lifted up and they will be healed. We pray in the temporal, but God answers in the eternal. And what that means is sometimes God doesn't answer in the time frame that we want. God doesn't heal the relationship or fix the problem or bring about the answer to the question in the time frame that we would choose. Sometimes we have to wait. We're told to be patient in waiting for God because he doesn't hurry. And sometimes it's answered in eternity. And sometimes it's answered in our life. It's just answered later and in a way that we don't anticipate. I have a friend back home named Jenny. When she was growing up, she was Jenny Payne. Now she's Jenny Smith. And when Jenny was a little girl, she had two older brothers, and her mom was pregnant. And she prayed fervently as a little girl. She wanted a sister named Jessica. And she prayed really hard for this sister named Jessica. And then the birth of her sibling came about, and it's a boy named Jimmy. God doesn't answer prayer. He doesn't keep his promises. Her four-year-old heart is broken. But as she gets older, her faith matures, and she kind of understands, and she accepts that blow. And then one day, her brother starts dating somebody in their 20s, and they start to get really serious. And they end up getting married, and Jenny loves this girl. And Jenny, in her own language, said this girl is like a sister to her, and her name is Jessica. You want to tell me God didn't answer prayer? You want to tell me God didn't hear that four-year-old Jenny praying for a sister named Jessica, and that he didn't answer it? It just wasn't the way that she expected. But God listens. He hears and he answers. We just have to wait. We just need to be patient. We just need to trust him even in the midst of hurting and suffering when it feels like everything is destitute and messed up and this couldn't possibly be picked up and arranged in such a way that glorifies you, God. Even in the midst of that, we need to be patient and understand that God hears, and he's listening, and he's answering prayers. It just isn't in our timetable because we pray in the temporal, and he answers in the eternal. Maybe that's why he precedes this passage on prayer with the passage imploring us to be patient. I don't think it's a mistake that the two are married up there in chapter 5. Look at what he says in verse 7 of chapter 5. He says, Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it until it receives the early and the late rains. Just be patient on the Lord, like a farmer watching the field. If you watch it every day, God, please bring me crops today. God, please bring me crops today. It's going to seem like they're never going to come, but if you'll just be patient and wait for the late and the early rains, like a farmer, God shows up. He'll answer in due time. And then down in verse 11, he says this, James warns us. I'm about to talk about prayer. I'm about to tell you to pray. There's going to be some times when it feels like God isn't answering prayer. So be patient. Be patient like the farmer is patient. And be considered blessed. Remember that those who wait, those who persevere should be considered blessed. And then he brings up Job. It's interesting to me that he would bring up Job as an example there. For those unfamiliar with Job, he is one of the classic figures in the Old Testament. There's a whole book dedicated to his story. He was the most righteous man on earth, and Satan asked permission to tempt him and to tear him away from God. And God said that Satan could do that. And in the course of that, he took away everything that Job held dear. He lost his children. He lost the people that worked for him. He lost his livestock. He lost his wealth. It was so bad for Job that his wife's advice to him was to curse God and die. But he didn't. He held on steadfast to the Lord. And in the end of the story, what we see is that because of his continued faith, because of his perseverance, because he clung to prayer and he continued to believe that God kept his promises, that God restored everything that Job had lost and he built him back up. And I think it's so interesting because if there's ever been anybody who lived that would have had cause to not believe this passage that says when we pray they will be healed and they will be lifted up. If there's anyone who's ever had the right to not believe this passage and say God's not telling the truth, it's Job. Yet he didn't. He was patient and he persevered in his prayers and he clung to God and he believed in the power of, and he clung to God, and he believed in the power of prayer, and he believed in a God that kept his promises. Grace. We can anchor ourselves in prayer. We can anchor ourselves in God's Word. We can trust these pages. We can trust these promises because we serve a God who keeps his promises. And listen, I know that it doesn't feel like that this year to some of us. I know this year feels hard. It feels heavy. It feels like we might not get out of it. We are facing difficulty after difficulty. Candidly, in my family right now, it is hard. And sometimes it doesn't seem like these verses are true, but I'm telling you they are. And we can anchor ourselves in them, and we can trust in them, and we can believe in the power and the efficacy of prayer of those who are righteous. And we can believe that God is listening, and we can believe that God is answering. And if we'll only be patient, and if we'll only persevere, we will be blessed in that perseverance. So grace. Pray. Don't lose heart. Don't give up hope. Don't stop praying. Believe that if you're a Christian, that you're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that your prayers are powerful and effective and they're working. Believe that they bring about healing. Believe that people will be risen up. Go to him when you are hurting. Go to him in joy. And let's continue, no matter what, no matter how bleak things might seem sometimes, to be a people of prayer who choose to believe in the power of it and choose to believe in a God who keeps his promises. Let's pray together. Father, we know that you are good to us. We know that you love us. We know that you look out for us. We thank you that you see things in eternity, that you see past the temporal. God, we thank you that you are orchestrating things in our lives to bring about our pleasure and your glory without us even knowing or understanding. God, I thank you for the gift of hindsight where we look back on seasons of our life that we didn't understand in the moment, but now we see you working. I pray that we would have that in increasing measure. God, for those who feel weak and burdened and maybe even beaten down, may we persist in prayer. Give them strength to be patient and to cling to it and to believe. For those who have been bold in their prayers and are seeing them answered, God, we are so grateful. I pray that they would become ever more bold. And God, I pray for grace. I pray that we would be a church that prays, that we would be a church that believes, and that we would be a church who knows because you tell us that our prayers are powerful and effective. It's in your son's name we pray all these things. Amen.