Sermons tagged with Future

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this morning. Apparently, what it takes to get Grace excited about church in June is a pandemic that lasts 18 months. Look at this. This is fantastic. We are in the second part of our series called One Hit Wonders, where we're basically, I said last week, we're basically just using this as a vehicle to look at some of the verses in the Bible that are pretty famous, pretty significant verses, ones that we treasure, but maybe a typical series doesn't hit on them, or even a typical Bible study might not arrive at these verses. So it's a time to kind of grab some of the verses and some of the passages out of Scripture that we may not land on in sermons and in Bible studies, but focus on them here in the summer as we come together each week. And so this week, I actually want to talk to you, ironically, about the danger of doing that. I want to talk to you about the danger of One-Hit Wonders, of just seeing a verse that we like. I like the words in this verse. I like what it says. I like what God is telling me. So I'm just going to grab it out of the Bible and I'm going to use it to encourage myself. This is a thing that brings encouragement to me and we kind of cling on to it. If you grew up in church, okay, how many of you, I want to see a show of hands actually. I didn't plan to do this, but I'm just now empirically interested. How many of you have ever heard someone else claim to have or have ever had your own life verse? How many of you have ever heard someone claim to have a life verse? Yes, this is a big time, this is a church thing, okay? If you're like, what in the world is that? You're one of the fortunate ones. But if you know what that is, to have a life verse, this is the verse, this is me. When I see this verse, I feel seen and heard. This is my life verse, okay? This is kind of my theme for life. And so what we do is we'll pull out these individual verses and we'll allow them to mean something of great significance to us. But sometimes when we do that, it can be dangerous. As I talk about this this morning, we're going to look at probably the most famous one of these verses. It's probably the most famous verse in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 29, 11. We're going to look at that verse today, and we're going to talk about why is it dangerous to just pull a single verse out of context. But I would preface it this way. My wife, Jen, she told me that I needed to be kind and gentle as I did this, because she noted that oftentimes I take glee in bursting people's bubbles. She may have cited the fact that every Christmas, I'd like to point out to you that the wise men were nowhere near the manger on Christmas and therefore all your nativity scenes are wrong and dumb. But I'm not allowed to crush this verse with that sort of careless flair. And I actually learned the lesson about this the hard way. Several years ago at my previous church, I was asked to come and give the devotional for the Loganville High School Red Devils baseball team. And you have no reason to know this. If you do know this and you're from North Carolina, you're weird, okay? But the Loganville Red Devils were really, really good at baseball. They won several state tournaments. They had a really good program over there. And their head coach was a guy named Brian Mills. And he went to our church and he asked me to come and give the devotional to the boys as they, because in Loganville, things are different. You can go talk about Jesus in public schools and everyone's just like, cool. That's not how it goes in Wake County. But I went out there, I went out there and I gave them a devotion, right? And they had this kid on their team named Clint Frazier, who at the time was the number one baseball prospect in the country, right? A big old mop of red hair. I never had any interactions with Clint, and this was the only time I ever really did get to interact with him. And I'm going to give a devotional to the team. And at the time, you may remember this, those of you who have been involved in church culture, there was actually an athletic gear, like Under Armour or Nike, like athletic apparel company called Phil 413, Philippians 413. And they would put Philippians 413 on all their stuff. And that's the verse, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, right? And so they're giving it to athletes. You can run that mile through Christ who strengthens you. You're going to hit that jump shot. You're going to hit that home run. You're going to complete that pass, you know, or make that sweet set, volleyball players. You're going to do it through Christ who gives you strength, right? And so they're like claiming this. They're emblazing it on their chest and on their equipment and they're going and God is powering me and I'm going to do good here. But the verse really, it's written by Paul and it comes in this context where Paul has said, I have learned how to be joyful with plenty and I have learned how to be joyful with little in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying, no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in God. I've learned how to find that contentment in him. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And so really, if we wanted to apply it to a baseball team, I explained to them, it would be about being okay with winning or losing, being happy whether you win or whether you lose. And I said, it's not going to make you hit the ball harder. It's not going to make you throw it further. It's not the verse to claim for your playoff run. If you want a verse, and then I went to Proverbs, and it was a verse on hard work and how God honors hard work. So claim this verse and outwork the other teams. But don't claim that verse like it's going to make you a better athlete because it won't. The whole time I'm talking about this, the boys kind of just, they all just have this smirk on their face. They're all just kind of smiling at me, you know? And so when I'm done, I'm like, all right, look, what gives? What did I step in? What's going on? Clint Frazier walks up to me, and he pulls back his sleeve, and he freshly minted Philippians 4.13 tat on his forearm, just right there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I'm so sorry. Clint is now the starting right fielder for the New York Yankees. I'm not making it up. You can look it up. He's there. He's a great ball player and he's still got the tattoo. So apparently I was wrong. It did make him hit the ball further and throw better. I don't know. But that was where I learned to be gentle as you talk about verses that are near and dear to people. And Jeremiah 29 11 is one that is really special to folks and really does give us a sense of hope and a sense of peace. You may know it. If you don't, you can turn your Bible there. If you don't have a Bible with you, it's in the seat back in front of you. But Jeremiah 29, 11 says, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. It's a really great verse. I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. If you're in a place where you feel uncertain, I don't know what's coming next. I need this relationship to work out. I don't know how in the world, in this market, I'm ever going to be able to afford a house. I don't know where the next job is going to come from. I don't know if I can close this deal. I don't know if this thing is going to work out with my kid. I don't know if this relationship is going to pan out. I don't know, God. And then for someone to speak that peace into your life, that God has a plan for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. That's a real hopeful, life-giving verse. And a lot of people claim it for those reasons, and that's great. I actually get to go and do a wedding here in a few weeks for Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, by the way, not just a lady that I refer to in my sermons. I'm going to do a wedding for her cousin, and his bride is a girl named Haley. We were planning out the ceremony a couple of nights ago. And part of Haley's story is she had a brother named David growing up who struggled with addiction and depression. And David ended up taking his own life. And to honor him in the ceremony, she still has a voicemail from him where he reads her that verse. And they want it played in the ceremony. And that's a beautiful thing. Because God does have a plan for David. He does have a plan for Haley. He does have a plan for us. But I also think that it's important to understand what that plan is. And to understand what that verse really means. Because I think there's actually greater comfort waiting on us there than we've given that verse credit for. So I want to talk to you this morning about two dangers of one-hit wonders. Two dangers of grabbing a verse, plucking it out of the Bible, not reading anything around it and going, boom, this is what this means for me and my life. There's two big ways that we get in big trouble when we do that. So the first way and the first danger of just grabbing a verse out of context, when you hear someone grab a verse out of context, when you hear someone quote a verse, when you see something on a meme, when you see something on a t-shirt or whatever it is, we need to read it and look around it. And when we don't do that, we don't fully understand the verse, two really bad things can happen. The first one is we mislead ourselves and others. We just grab a verse out of the Bible and we apply it. It sounds nice. We mislead ourselves and others. And I say ourselves and others because each of us has a circle of influence. Sometimes we repeat what we hear to other people. I said something last week to a friend of mine and he goes, is that true? And I said, you know what? Honestly, I don't know. I heard it years ago and I've been parroting it ever since. I need to do some research on that. I have no idea. I think we do this sometimes. So when we just grab a verse out of context, we run the risk of misleading ourselves and others. I know of a church a few years ago that they were doing a building campaign. They were launching another campus. They were kind of relaunching their main campus. And they kind of grabbed a verse as the theme verse for the year. Look at what God is going to do at this place. And this is what's going to motivate us. And so the pastor was kind of casting vision for what's going to happen in the future. And then they found a nice verse to pair with it because when you're doing church right, that's what you do. You kind of decide what you think God wants you to do, and then you find a verse in the Bible that happens to coincide with the plans that you made. I'm kidding. That's not really a good way to go about applying Bible verses, but churches do this all the time, and so this church did it too, and they landed on this verse, Habakkuk 1.5. And Habakkuk 1.5, when you read it, it's like, oh, shoot. Look at what God's going to do here. There's going to be amazing things done in this place. Look at what Habakkuk 1 Ooh. Ooh, what if we did that at Grace? We're doing a building campaign. What if this home stretch? I said, guys, this is our verse that we are claiming. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. I'm going to do something so amazing you wouldn't even believe it. If I told you what I was going to do you wouldn't believe it. And so the church, they claimed it, they put it on their literature, they piped it out there and everyone's like God's going to do amazing things here. We're not going to believe it. Even if he tells us what he's going to do we wouldn't believe him. And then one day somebody picked up their Bible and they read the rest of the verses. This is Habakkuk 1, 6 and following. Look at what the Lord will do here. He will bring great punishment upon our negligence. It's genuinely funny how opposite that verse is of what they wanted it to be. But it's also really sad. And I don't think that the pastor did this in any way to manipulate. I don't think he did it intentionally in any way. I think it was just lazy. Just kind of ignorant. I think he saw that verse somewhere. It was like, ooh, that's a good campaign verse. And then everybody started claiming it. Thinking that's what Habakkuk 1.5 meant. And it didn't. It meant, God, bring your punishment on us. Bring the Chaldeans and their violent faces. When we just pluck a verse out of context, we run a real risk of misleading ourselves and others. And so we don't want to do that with Jeremiah 29 11. We want to understand this verse in its proper context. And in its proper context, the prophet Jeremiah was writing this letter, the book of Jeremiah, to God's children, to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, the Hebrews, however it is you most easily refer to him, that's who he is writing to. And these people are people who are in captivity in Babylon. Israel, Jerusalem has been laid waste to. It has been conquered. It is left in smoke and ashes. And then Babylon carried away the best and the brightest. So the only people who were left in Israel were the old and the feeble and the young and the useless. Everybody else got taken away, right? And these people have a promise from God. Back in Genesis chapter 12, that God made to their forefather Abraham, where God promised Abraham, I will provide you with land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That's Jesus. That came true. Your descendants will be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. There's a lot of Jewish people now. That came true. And I will give you the land of Canaan, the modern-day nation of Israel. So these people grew up being taught these promises of God that he made to their forefather Abraham, claiming those promises from the sovereign God, and now have watched that land be taken away from them. Now they have watched their best and their brightest be carried off as slaves into Babylon. Now they look at the smoldering ash heap of their once proud country and think, how could this be? How could this have ever happened? It's a discouraged people who think that their God has forgotten them or is somehow incapable of keeping his promises to them. They're spiritually and literally destitute. And to them, Jeremiah speaks these amazing words of comfort. Do you see how those hit a little different for the Hebrew people who have been carried away as slaves to Babylon? Jeremiah tells them, God sees you. He knows you. He has not forgotten about you. He intends to keep his promises to you. Hang in there. Have faith. And see, we take that verse and we apply it to the immediate situation. We take that verse and we say, God has a plan for me. I'm going to get the job. God has a plan for me. This relationship is going to work out. God has a plan for me. I know this thing is going to work. I just walked through this tremendous loss, but I'm comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me. So he's going to restore that. And we take this promise that was made to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament who were destitute and enslaved, and we make it mean that we're going to do better in the job interview or that the relationship's going to work out or that we're going to close that deal or that this stress is going to go away in my life. Which brings me to my next point. The next danger of one-hit wonders is that we cheapen the text. We cheapen the text. Now, I've got to be honest with you. This last week, a buddy of mine made fun of me for using ridiculous words in my sermons. So this So this week, when I wrote these notes, I said, we impoverish the text. But I had his voice in my head, and I changed it to cheapen. So if you just want the authentic experience, you need to change that word cheapen to impoverished in your own notes, okay? And giggle at me for doing that, but I can't. Impoverish is such a better word, but I just, I got insecure about it, so we went with cheapen the text. It cheapens the text. We take what it does mean, and we reduce it to what we need it to mean, and when we do that, we cheapen it, we impoverish it, we make it so much weaker than it should be. To show you this, look with me at what Jeremiah writes after the famous verse, Jeremiah 29 29 11. We pick it up in verse 12. Then you will call, I know the plans I have for you, he says, here are the plans. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Let me tell you what my plans are. My plans are that when you cry out to me, I'm going to hear you. My plans are that when you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. My plans are that, listen to this, my plans are that you would know me. My plans are that I would draw you into a relationship with myself. That's what God says his plans are. The very first thing I know, don't worry. I have a hope and a future. I have plans for you. You know what my plans for you are? He tells them in the following verses, my plans are that you would know me, which I love because this is a theme throughout the Bible. It's all that God has ever wanted, that we would know him. This is when Paul prays in the New Testament, when he writes out greetings to the churches, and he tells them that he prays for them. The most explicit of this is in Ephesians chapter 3, where he says, And then the conclusion of the prayer is that you would know the richness of the depth of the knowledge of Christ and be filled with all the knowledge of God, that you would know him. It's this prayer for us that's echoed throughout the centuries, not just in Jeremiah 29, but we see it before that. We see it in the high priestly prayer that Jesus prays in John chapter 17. We see it at the end of the Bible when he brings us all to him, to know him. The plan that he has for the Hebrew people is the same plan that he has for you, that you would know him. That the creator God would have an intimate relationship with you and that you would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cares about the smallest of details in your life. Scripture teaches us that not even a bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing, and that the very numbers of head, the very hair on your head is numbered. He knows you intimately, and He wants you to know Him that much. So does Jeremiah 29 11 apply to you? You're darn right it does. You're darn right it does, because his plan for them and for you is that you would know him. That's the plan. That the things in your life would be orchestrated to bring you down this path where you would know him and see him as the ultimate good. Are the things going to work out in the temporary? Maybe. I don't know. But if they don't, he's going to orchestrate and weave those things as one giant river that flows to him in eternity so that you might know him. That's what he's doing. I don't know what's going to happen in the temporary, but I do know that the result of them are going to be to funnel you towards God himself. And that's his plan for you, that he would know you. And listen to this cool thing. He says in verse 14, I will restore your fortunes and gather you from the nations and all the places where I've driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm going to bring you back to Israel. I'm going to restore your fortune. I'm going to restore your family. Everything's going to be okay. And that's a great thought, and it's a comforting one for them. But listen to this, and this is why prophecy in the Old Testament is so cool. You know what happens in the last two chapters of the Bible? If you flip to the very end, Revelation 21, 22, you know what happens there? You're gonna, because I'm doing a series in Revelation in the fall. It's gonna be like seven weeks, October, November. Get pumped up. I'm gonna answer every question you've ever had about Revelation with absolute certainty. The last two chapters of the Bible, God creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. And he gathers us to himself. And he restores our families. And he unites us. And he rejuvenates us and he completes his plan. His plan that he enacted when he promised it to Abraham, his plan that he reminded David of in 2 Samuel chapter 7 when he said the Messiah will sit on your throne, his plan that he told Mary about when he sent Jesus and his plan that seemed like it was done when Jesus hung on the cross and then the plan that the victory was won for on Easter when the tomb was empty. The plan that Jesus comes back for in Revelation 18 and 19 as the Lion of Judah, no longer the Lamb of God, when he makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and then he claims his creation back to him, to the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem as we surround the throne of God. That's his plan. And that's what he's enacted for you. And that's what he's done for them. That's the goal. That's what it's all about. And see, when we take Jeremiah 29, 11, and we make it mean this temporary situation is going to work out, we impoverish that text because it has such a greater meaning than that. It carries such greater significance than that. And in light of that, how much cooler is it that Haley gets to play that voicemail from her brother at her wedding because she knows that David knew Jesus. And the plan was murky and it was tough, but he's there waiting on her. And one day she will be restored. And one day they will be reunited. And one day they will see each other again because they each know Jesus because God's plan was to weave their lives back to him in such a way that they could spend eternity with him forever and he spent all of time acting out and initiating that plan for you and for them. When we do the work to understand the verses that mean so much to us, we will always find that there is more richness waiting there to be uncovered. So this morning, understand the dangers of plucking a verse out of context and throwing it on a t-shirt and letting it mean whatever we want it to mean. Because sometimes we mislead ourselves and others, and then even worse, we impoverish the text to such a degree that if we would just put in the time, I think we would be met with the richness and the fullness of God through his word as we are met with it over and over and over again. So listen, if you came in this morning and you love Jeremiah 29 11, take great comfort in Jeremiah 29 11. But take it in knowing that God's plan for you is that you know him. Take it in knowing that, yeah, God has a plan for you. It's to orchestrate everything in your life back to this wonderful tapestry so that you might know him. And I think that that's a pretty good plan. Let's pray. Father, I know that there are people here who are heartened by your eternal plan. But boy, God, if you could just kind of give them a temporary one, that'd be great too. So to those folks, I pray you would give them comfort and peace. For those folks, for all of us, I pray that we would see the things that we walk through in our life in light of eternity. In light of knowing that, yeah, you don't just have plans for us in this life, but God, you have a grand plan that you have been enacting since the dawn of time. And that one day you will restore us and return us all to the place, heaven, from which we have been exiled here. God, your word is amazing. I pray that we would all, every one of us, be more enthralled and awed by your word and that you would create within us a heart to mine it for all it's worth, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

Advent. It means coming. And with that, a longing for something greater. With a year like this one passed, we can't help but look forward with much anticipation. Kids wait impatiently for Christmas morning to arrive. But we've all experienced that ache from waiting. Waiting for the pain to go away, waiting for that next check to arrive, for the broken heart to heal, for this season to pass because it's just too hard, or for the hospice to finally call and say, hurry now, it's time to say goodbye. Hope. From a newborn king, we've heard of how he can pull us together in unity and heal us. He is the wonderful counselor, our mighty God, the Prince of Peace. But we also know that as soon as we leave here, we will step back into our bruised and broken dark world. So we burn these candles week by week and watch them burn to build anticipation, to prepare for the coming of Jesus. The prophet Isaiah warned us about this. He said, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of darkness, a light has dawned. That is our hope. So we light this hope candle because our hope lies in you, Jesus. And so we say, come Lord, we need you to come soon. Because the coming of Jesus changes everything. Just be sure you remain open, you listen, because Jesus will whisper to us, there is always hope. It doesn't matter how dark the dark is, a light can still dawn. Well, good morning, Grace Raleigh. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy football weekend. Maybe it was a shopping weekend instead. And I also say welcome to the season of overeating and stretchy pants. It has officially arrived and we are welcoming it in full all arms. I'm Erin. I am one of the pastors here and I am so excited to be with you guys this morning to kick off our Christmas season. So thank you for joining us and for being here and for sticking around when you saw Nate introduce me. I do appreciate that. It seems like 2020 has left us in a place possibly looking for the comfortable or for that which is familiar. I'm not sure where you are in that, but that's kind of how I felt. And so as a staff, we began to talk about what Christmas at Grace this year could look like. And in our conversations, we said, what would it look like if we took Christmas and kind of stripped away the noise and stripped away the excess stuff and kind of shifted our focus and found that place that was comfortable and that was familiar? And what would it be like if our focus shifted to the Christmas story? And I don't know about you, but I am a sucker for a good story. A book, a cup of tea, a blanket, a couch, and a couple of uninterrupted hours is an absolute gift to me. And I will roll around in it and envelop it like nobody's business. And so, you know, you give me a book and give me the opportunity to dive into the characters, into the richness of who they are, they become kind of one. And so I, here's an example. The entire Harry Potter series, when my kids were smaller, we went from book one to book seven together. And it was a great adventure. And we loved every minute and every time we picked up those books and jumped into Hogwarts and met up with Harry and Hermione and Ron and all of their adventures. And we got to the end of book seven and the author did a phenomenal job of wrapping it all up. And I shut the book and then I looked at the book and went, now what do I do? Like it was this place of mourning because these characters had become people, had become part of our family. And now all of a sudden, I didn't have them anymore. So now what do I do? So as you can see, a good story for me is a gift. And so as we delved into this idea of the Christmas story and coming closer to the Christmas story by looking at Advent. I was beyond excited because Advent brings this place of depth and meaning to the season and it roots us into a story that we're already connected to, the story of the arrival of Jesus. And so for the next four weeks, we get to anticipate this arrival together, and we get to jump into Jesus's story and his arrival and what he fulfills in his arrival. Things like hope and joy and peace and love. We'll also look at how we choose to accept those things during this season. We'll also get the opportunity to look at the Advent wreath. And the Advent wreath has great symbolism. And I invite you to take the opportunity to look at what that symbolism is. Go to Google. Just Google Advent wreath and see what it says. But it's going to talk all about the circles and the different colors of the candles. But I want you to focus on something else as well. Because it doesn't matter if your Advent wreath is a circle. It doesn't matter if it's a straight line. It doesn't matter if your colors of your candles are pretty purples and pinks and whites. They could be white or yellow or green or whatever you happen to have had in your cabinet. What matters is the light that we get to see each time we light one of these candles. Because that light that comes from that candle represents the light of God that crashes to this deep, dark earth in the form of a sweet little baby by the name of Jesus. And so, oh, for the next four weeks, we get to roll around in the richness of this Christmas story, and we get to find places where we can connect deeper to Jesus. And so today, we are going to start with the candle of hope. And I think first I need to make a distinction for you as to a definition of hope. Because biblically, or in the Bible, there are lots of times that the word hope is used. But it can actually have two meanings. And the first one is, I hope that you get to feeling better. Or I hope that it doesn't rain today because guess what? On our calendar, we have three soccer games that we need to go watch outside. Or it could be also this hope that your kids right now, as the TV comes on and all the commercials roll through, or the catalog that comes in the mail and they start flipping through it and it's like, oh, I hope I get that this year. I hope that's underneath my Christmas tree. That hope is a wish. There's not a whole lot of, there's no guarantee of any kind of fulfillment. It's just a wish. But the second kind of hope is a hope that gets in us and it travels with us into these places of darkness, into these places of pain, into places of longing and waiting. And it becomes for us a place, a definition given that I hooked onto and can't get rid of. This is it. This hope is a confident expectation in something good in the future. Let me repeat that one. This hope is a confident expectation that something good is going to be in the future. So here's your distinction. You have the one hope that has no guarantee of fulfillment and is basically a wish. But then you have this second hope, this hope that says I can stand confident in the expectation that something good is in my future, that a good ending is possible. This is the hope that Jesus fulfills in his arrival 2,000 years ago. So as with every story, every good story, there's always a beginning, a middle, and an end. And for those of you that are writers, I understand I just simplified that to absolutely nothingness, but don't come at me. It's just the best way for me. So beginning, middle, and end, and then sometimes we need a little extra beginning. We need a little background in order to understand the beginning of the story. And so that's where we're going to start this morning as we continue this conversation of hope, is that we're going to give you a little background. And I'm going to start with the people, or God's chosen people, the Israelites. We're picking up in the back of the Old Testament. These are God's chosen people who at this point in time are living a pretty incomplete story. They have had judges around that have given them things that they need to do and ways that they can stay connected to God. And they've listened to the judges and then they've ignored the judges and they've gone about and done their own thing, and it's this cycle, and it keeps going. They keep walking further away from God, and then they'll come back, and then they walk away again. God has given them earthly king after earthly king, and then again, they're still walking away and not happy. Their kingdom is now divided, and in this I would say that the beginning of the end of the people of Israel is at hand. But this is where God begins the Christmas story. He takes this moment to actually breathe hope into the places of darkness for these weary people. And he does it through a group of people that are called the prophets. The prophet Isaiah was spoken of actually in the video earlier, and he states, the people who walk in darkness have seen a great light, and who dwell in the land of deep darkness, on them light has shone. There's that light again that we talked about, the light of God coming into the darkness. He then goes on and talks of the birth of his government and of peace Lord of hosts will do this. Oh, the words that must have rung in the ears of these weary people. It had to have been a balm to their souls. Because guess what? He just told them that their king was coming. Their true king is coming. And with him, he's bringing all of those things that they are hoping for. Things like restoration, things like peace and prosperity. He just gave them the confident expectation that something good was coming in the future. And oh, what it had to have felt like to them to have a place of hope now in their hearts, holding on to the fact that their true king, the Messiah, was coming. Now, I don't know about you, but I noticed as I read that, that Isaiah didn't mention the timeline for when this king would arrive. And I imagine he did that on purpose, but he didn't. He just said he's coming. And so the people of Israel walked into a period of waiting. And they began to wait. And wait. And wait some more. Because you see what happened is during this period, they went from being the people of Israel to divided kingdoms, to being in exile, to being scattered, and to having God go silent. And when I state that he goes silent, this isn't the kind of silent treatment that you might get when you and your spouses have had a small argument and everybody gets really quiet and you walk to your separate corners and there's no speaking in the house for maybe a couple hours or possibly a day or two. And it's just quiet, right? Well, no, no, no. This quiet, God went silent for 400 years. So that was the major silent treatment if I've ever heard of one. But just completely quiet. And so they began to continue, well, they continued to wait. But then in the middle of this waiting, God speaks again. But this time, he speaks through an angel by the name of Gabriel. And this is, in my paraphrase, how it all went about. Is that God sends the angel of Gabriel to the city of Nazareth, very specifically to a young woman by the name of Mary. And he comes to this sweet girl and says to her, you're going to have a baby. And in the process, you're going to name this baby Jesus. And he is going to be great. And he will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and his kingdom. There will be no end. The words in Mary's ears at that point. Did you hear Isaiah? She heard the words of the prophet spoken to her. It was a king. It was a king the angel told her his name was to be Jesus, she knew immediately because Jesus means Jehovah saves or the Lord's salvation. This was the Messiah. This was the promise of the confident expectation of something good in the future being fulfilled. He is coming. Remember the hope that I promised you 400 years ago? I'm delivering on that promise, and it's coming in this sweet little package of a baby, and his name is Jesus. And of course, true to his word, nine months later, the angels get to take over the heavens and to sing loudly of the announcement of Jesus and the fact that Christ the Savior has been born to hold on to. That in our places of difficulty, in our places of pain and weariness and waiting, that God is going to come to us. And he's also able to come to those places where maybe, just maybe, we've stopped believing in a good ending being possible. And I think that we actually have those places where we believe that a good ending is not possible anymore because we have somehow misplaced our hope. A.W. Tozer writes of misplaced hope as this, that misplaced hope or hope that has no guarantee of fulfillment is a false friend that comforts us for a little while with all kinds of flattery, but then leaves us to our enemies. So leaves us to our enemies. Have you all ever been there? I want to invite you into a story now to kind of give you a taste of misplaced hope. Many of you know my daughter Zoe. And for those of you that don't, Zoe is funny and she is sweet and she is kind. She is very quick-witted. She's a great friend. She loves coffee. She loves Jesus, and she loves country music. So I don't think we need to describe her any further than that. She has just finished her first semester as an intended nursing major at East Carolina University. In the middle of a pandemic, she's moved a couple of times over the course of the last couple of months, but she has completed it very successfully. Now, if you had told me a couple of years ago that that statement about my daughter was true, I would have questioned your judgment. Seriously, I would have. Because you see, Zoe suffers from, or Zoe, I shouldn't say that, Zoe has anxiety. And a few years ago, her anxiety had control of her. Somewhere towards the beginning of her high school career, we began to notice in Zoe that she made excuses as to not connect with friends. Friday night football games came. She might go for a little while, but she was home very quickly. Or she'd get invited to go someplace, and if she said yes, she was there a short time and then again came home. If not, in a lot of cases, she just said no. She was not exactly happy. And so as we sat back and kind of watched all this, we're scratching our head but then saying to ourselves, oh, well, wait a second. It's just high school. She's a freshman. She's a sophomore. It's hard. It's just hard. We also began to see some of this happen in youth group as well, where she's very connected and grace students and mission trips would come along and we'd have all this buildup, and then let's just say it took an awful lot to get Zoe onto the bus in order to go wherever it was that her group was going. And mind you, her dad went every year as well as one of the student leaders. And so we just kept watching. And in this process, though, I kept justifying all of these behaviors and saying it just is because she's a teenager. I went to what I would call my Pollyanna place, thinking it was all going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. She's going to grow out of this, and it's going to be good. It is. It's going to be good. Well, as you can guess, my it's going to be good didn't change our reality at all. Zoe's path continued to go just where it was. And our situation never changed. So I decided that if the situation hasn't going to change there, that maybe I needed to do something different. And so I did. And this time, for those of you that know me, this is me in a nutshell, but I'm going to fix it. I'm going to help somehow. And we're going to make change here. And so I went into that mode of I hit Google and I hit books. I don't know what I'm going to help somehow, and we're going to make change here. And so I went into that mode of I hit Google and I hit books. I don't know what I'm looking for at this point, but I'm trying to find something that is an answer. And I started talking to people around me, and it was just what can I do? What kind of checklist do I have? How can I fix this? How can I help my daughter? And the thing is in all of this, the one really good thing that possibly came out of this moment was the fact that somebody said to us, hey, maybe Zoe should see a counselor. And so I went to her and I said, hey, girl, what do you think about this? She's like, sure. And so she goes, y'all, this was good. It was great. Because guess what? When she got to the counselor, there was a connection with their counselor. All was great. And we had a diagnosis. We knew what was going on. And guess what that means? If I know what's going on, because I can now fix it. Because I know what I'm battling against, right? So she was diagnosed with anxiety. And we started that whole process of giving her the tools that she needed in her toolbox on how to deal with her anxiety and what it looked like. And guess what? It worked. And lo and behold, she's reengaging with her friends. She's out on a Friday night. The world is great. Her smile has returned. And I sit back and I'm like, yes, we've got this and all is great. So let's now fast forward to Zoe's, the beginning of Zoe's senior year of high school. Where Zoe went to high school, one of the things that they do at the beginning of the senior year is a large trip. They take the entire senior class to New York City for four days of crazy fun with your friends, seeing New York, and doing all of the things. Now, I will tell you, one of the things that went through my head as we started into the beginning of the senior year, this is the thought. The thought was, if we can get Zoe on the bus to go to New York City, we have won. We have officially beaten the enemy, and we have wrangled anxiety, and we've won. Now, I spoke that to no one. It's just in the back of my head. And so as we walk into the preparations for New York, all is fabulous. And Zoe is excited. And we're doing the things that you have to do before a trip like this, especially if you're the parent of a girl. You know, you've got to have the right outfits for the different activities. We had to do all that. Had to get the right roommates. Had to do all of the things. And everything was so positive. She was so excited. And here we go. And so the night before the trip, Zoe's upstairs in her room packing. And I decide to go up and help because, of course, you know, I can help pack, right? So I go up the stairs. I open up the door. Zoe's in the middle of her floor, and there's clothes all around her, and a suitcase is open, and I'm like, I'm here to help, and she turns around, and she looks at me, and she has tears streaming down her face. And she says, Mama, I can't do this. I can't go tomorrow. And at that moment, my heart broke for her, for us, for this situation. And I collapsed onto the floor with her, and I grabbed hold of my girl, and I cried with her, and I told her how much I loved her, and that I had her, and that we would do this together. And at that moment, everything that I had went from, we got this, we've won, to, oh my heavens, now what? Hope to hopeless. Now what do we do? And my head's spinning and the questions are running around in my head. Even places like, is she going to be able to go to college next year? Like I can't even get her on. We can't get onto a bus to go to New York for four days. How is it that we're going to get to college next year? Like, the brain starts to spin off of the rails, basically. And then after this process, I began this process with God. We had lots of very interesting conversations. Things like, why? Why my girl? And the big question of, hey God, where are you in all of this? And you all, I'm so thankful that we serve such a loving and faithful father. Because he looked at me and he said, hey Aaron, I'm here. I've always been here. And I've been walking with you and your girl through this. But guess what? You, mama, you need to let go of your control. You, mama, need to invite me in and let me give real hope to this situation. And the real hope that Paul speaks of, he speaks of it in his letter to the Romans. And this is what it says. It says, not only that, but we rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Y'all, this real hope that is sourced and supplied by God himself, it does not put us to shame. It does not tell us that we aren't good enough. It does not tell us that we can't do it. It does not tell us that we are failures. No, no, no. It's just the opposite. And so we grabbed onto this real hope for our situation. We began believing in that good future and in that good ending for Zoe. The one thing I need to clarify here, though, is that believing in the good future and believing in the good ending wasn't saying that I was believing that she was going to be cured. What it was was for me, it was a change of posture. It was a moment that I said, no longer is it about me. It's now all about you, God. It was a moment of surrender where I said, and I knew in my heart of hearts that God loves my child more than I do, and that he had her, and he had a good future planned for her. And I needed to let go of what I felt was Zoe's story. And I needed to key into the story that God was writing in her. And so maybe this was now that ECU isn't where she's going to go. Maybe she's going to go to Wake Tech for a couple of years so she gets some security and she gets some confidence. And then she'll go off to ECU to finish her nursing degree. Or maybe she's supposed to be at Campbell where her brother is in a place that's familiar and a place that feels comfortable and secure. Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, like all of a sudden, when I let go of what I felt her story needed to be and let God write her story, the maybes became huge possibilities that anything could happen if he writes her story. And I release control. And so through all of this story and through this place of surrender and this place of saying, hey God, you've got this. I have learned a few things. The first one is that misplaced hope trusts in me, whereas real hope trusts in God. So when my hope was misplaced, it was all about what Aaron could do to fix Zoe's situation, not what God could do. We had to trust in him and who he says he was and the promises that he's given that he was never going to forsake her, that he loves her, and that he has this confident expectation in a good ending. I also learned that misplaced hope leaves you so weary, but real hope sustains. The constant trials and guilt and sleepless nights that we had in trying to figure out what was going on and worrying about the situation left us so very tired, just exhausted, but that real hope gives us what we need to move on, to be sustained. And we know now that Zoe still has struggles, and it's okay though, because she has him to hold on to in those struggles. And lastly, I learned that misplaced hope leaves you feeling hopeless. But that true, that real hope knows the end of the story. And so with Zoe's story, yes, Zoe has anxiety, but anxiety doesn't have her. It does not define who she is. It's just there. And in August of this year, she packed up her little car and she drove to Greenville and she has not looked back. And yes, as a mama, I will tell you there are times that I kind of wish maybe she would look back and say, hey, mom, I'm coming home. But you know what? It's those moments, though, too, that I can hold on to and say, hey, God, thank you. Thank you that you provided us with this confident expectation in a good future for our girl. Thank you that she's in Greenville. Thank you that she's thriving. And so I have to also say that I am so very proud of my girl. What she's walked through has not been easy. And I'm just over the moon proud. And it is a true joy to watch where she is now and to hold on to that expectation of the cool things that she's going to do in the future. So in light of all that we as a group have been through in 2020, I know in years before we could say, you know, everybody could say they've had issues with a year here or there or otherwise. But 2020, I think, has left us all feeling a bit weary. And I look back at the Jewish people who were in their place of weariness and in their place of waiting 2,000 years ago. And I wonder if that's not us now. We're all weary. We're all waiting. Waiting for a vaccine. Waiting for maybe it's something to happen good in our financial situation. Maybe it's waiting to be able to go visit loved ones again. We're waiting. We're weary. Just like the Jewish people were 2,000 years ago. And my prayer for all of us is that we get to experience the same thrill of hope that they experienced at Jesus' arrival. I want us to be that weary world that rejoices this year as we hear about the arrival of our coming King. And so, what would it take for us, Grace Raleigh, to experience that thrill of hope? What would it take for us to shift our focus and our hope from hope in us to hope in him and him alone. Will y'all pray with me? Lord, thank you. We are so beyond grateful that you loved us enough to send your son into the middle of our places of darkness and our places of weariness and our places of waiting. You love us so much that you want us to experience that thrill of hope. You want us to hold on and grab hold of this confident expectation that a good ending is possible. And we're so grateful for that. We're so, so grateful. And so, Lord, I just ask that you wrap our beautiful Grace Raleigh family in your arms and that you allow us for the next four weeks to anticipate together the arrival of your son and all that he fulfills as he comes. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your son's mighty name that we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. I'm just so excited about this morning. I met somebody before the service started, and they said it's their first time at Grace. They've been hearing about Grace for a little while. They thought they'd check it out, and I said, well, you picked both the best and the worst Sunday to try this. This is the fifth part of the campaign series that we've been doing, and the first Sunday in February, I came out and I said, hey, we've decided that it's time to pursue a permanent home for grace. And here are the reasons why we want to do that. And then we spent the rest of the series saying, the question that we are collectively asking now as a church body is, Father, what would you have us do in health? What would you have us do as a healthy church? And we said that that was to grow deep by making disciples and to grow wide by reaching other people and evangelizing. And so we took two different weeks and said, what's Grace's plan for those things? And then last week, one of our elders and partners, Doug Bergeson, did a phenomenal job of framing up generosity and stewardship. He did such a good job last week that as I was preparing this week, I thought, this is no good. Like, I'm not going to fall down. I don't have any theatrics. I'm not going to be as funny. Now, I was intimidated this week preparing to preach at my own church. He did such a good job. I was so grateful for that. And so this week, as we sit on Pledge Sunday, and at the end of this service, we're going to celebrate and worship together, and I'm calling it worship because that's what it is, and we're going to make pledges together. That's been the invitation over the last five weeks, is as a church family, let's consider and pray how we want to be involved in the campaign moving forward. And so we're going to make our pledges together. And as we do that, in part we're pledging to a home, to a building of some sort, to roots in the community that we own that belong to us, and that's important. But I really feel like we're pledging to this place. We're pledging to grace. We're pledging to what we hope grace will be. We're pledging to the future of grace. And so in that vein, I've had conversations with leaders in the church, with staff and elders, and I've said, when you dream about grace, what do you dream of? When you think about the future, what do you want? And for me, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I want church to look like, what a church should look like. If you were to ask me in private conversation, Nate, what are your goals for grace? What do you want grace to be? As you think about leading it, what do you want for grace? I would say to you, I just want to do it right. I want to be there for like 30 more years, and when I get to the end, I want to look back, and I want to be able to smile and say, we did it right. We did it the way that we felt we were supposed to do it. But the question becomes, well, what does right look like? And so as I thought about this and tried to distill down probably 20 years in ministry, I've thought about this question, what does a church that's healthy, what should it look like? And different churches should take on different tasks and different roles. Each church has a different DNA. So this is not a prescription for what every church should be. This is what I feel like grace can be. And so this morning, I've got seven statements on the bulletin there. And they're prefaced with, we want grace too. And when I say we, I believe that this is a reflection of not just me, but the partners and the staff and the leaders and the core of grace. So as you pledge, this is what you're pledging to. As we commit, this is what we're committing to. As we hope and dream, these are the things that we hope and dream about. So these are the seven things. Incidentally, seven is the number of completion in Scripture, so I couldn't add any more. I had to reduce them down to seven. These are the seven things that we want for grace. So the first one right out of the gate, these are in no particular order except the first one and the last one. The first one is there because these are drums that I beat all the time. The first thing that we want for grace is to relentlessly foster an affection for God and His Word. I want this to be a church that relentlessly fosters an affection for God and His Word. And I'm starting out with this, and I use that word relentless because it's important to me. I'm starting out this way because this is how I start with couples who are about to get married. One of the things that I get to do from time to time is counsel with couples who are about to get married, and it's one of the great privileges I'm afforded in my role. It's such an exciting thing to walk through that season of life with people. And on the very first night, I always say, hey, listen, this is my best marriage advice. I'm not saying it's good marriage advice. It's just the best that I have. So you probably have better advice than this. But I say, this is my best marriage advice. If you will be relentlessly committed to two things, you're going to be fine. There's no way I can prepare you for everything that we're going to encounter in marriage. But if you'll do these two things, you're going to be okay. If you'll be relentlessly committed to communication and to pursuing Jesus, you're going to be all right. That's what I tell these married couples, because I believe I can't prepare them for everything, but if they will communicate about everything, so often when we end up in counseling, when our marriage feels broken, it's because somewhere along the way, communication broke down. But then part of that has to be supplemented with the pursuit of Jesus. And so I tell these couples, if you'll be relentlessly committed to talking and to pursuing Jesus, then whatever you encounter, you'll be okay. And I feel the same way about these two directives for a church. If we will be relentless in our pursuit of God and our affection for his word, Everything else, we don't even need the rest of the list. You guys will be good. You guys will be walking with the Lord. And this is a reflection of Paul's prayer. I've preached on this prayer two separate times. So I felt like we had to start here. The prayer in Ephesians chapter three. If you want to look it up, it's in verses 14 through 19. I'm not going to pull out my Bible and read it to you, but that's where the prayer is. And it's a similar prayer that he prays for all the churches, that Paul prays for all the churches that he's planted in Colossae and Philippi and Thessalonica and Ephesus. He does, he prays in Galatia, he prays this prayer. And the prayer is essentially that you would know God, that you along with all the saints would know the height and the breadth and the depth of the love of God that surpasses knowledge, that you would be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul's prayer for the churches is that no matter what you would love God, no matter what happens in your life, whether it's triumph or tragedy, that those things would conspire so that you would know God more. That's what Paul prays and that's our prayer. And I've preached that two different times, that that's my prayer for grace. And so I had to lead with our goal. And what we want is that we would know God. And in knowing God, that we would be fostered by an affection for his word. You've heard me say a half a dozen, probably two dozen times from this stage, that the greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life is to spend time every day in God's word and time in prayer. It's the best possible habit anybody can have. And if there's nothing else that we do, I want to foster an affection for God and his word. That's why when I preach and I tell you stories from scripture, I try to make them come alive for you. I try to help you be there so that they're not just descriptions of what's going on, but that you see yourself in those stories. That's why I try to compel you to go back and read it on your own. I want you to fall in love with God's word too. I want you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of God's word and realize that it's not for people who went to seminary, it's just for people who love God's word. So as I think about grace, we wanna foster an affection affection for God and his word. We want to do that relentlessly, constantly pointing to God. The next two things that we want grace to be or we want for grace are things that were in place when I got here, and we want to simply continue them. We want grace to maintain generational diversity. I think this is hugely important, and it's a distinctive of grace. In 2017, the church was about one-third the size that it is now, maybe even a little less than that. And it was mostly people in their 50s and 60s. And those people in their 50s and 60s said, we want to hire a younger pastor. Which, all joking aside, it's going to sound like I'm making a joke. I'm not. This is not self-deprecating to get you to laugh. This is true. It takes some humility and some guts to hire a guy that's younger than you and invite them in to come and lead. That's an opportunity that people my age don't often get. That's a trust that's placed that's not easily placed. And so I've been humbled by that task, and I'm grateful for that. And in doing that, they said, we want to get younger as a church, and we have. And we've grown in our 20s and our 30s and our 40s demographics. And so we are a church that is uniquely generationally diverse, and it is to our great value that it is. One of my favorite things that I get to do in the church is lead that Tuesday morning men's group. It meets at 6 a.m. here in the church. If you want to come, we're meeting this week. Come on. Also, you have to be a guy. And in that group, we have people who are in their mid-20s and people who are in their 60s and everybody in between. And I think it's incredible that the guys in their 20s and in their 30s can say, hey, we're dealing with this with our four-year-old. I'm thinking about this in my career. What do you guys think? And then the older guys can give wisdom to the younger guys. I think it's incredible that the older guys can catch a glimpse of the enthusiasm and the faith and the questions that the younger guys are willing to ask. I think it's a phenomenal setting. It's one of my favorite things that we do. And Timothy talks about this. I preached on this passage a while back, that we should treat younger men as brothers and sons, and older men as fathers, and older women as mothers, and younger women as daughters and sisters, that the church is designed to be a family. We live in a culture where there is tension between generations. We have phrases like, okay, boomer, that frankly are stupid. Because it's a way that millennials dismiss older people for being antiquated or out of touch, and we devalue the wisdom of the previous generation. And then we have older people who make fun of millennials for all the silly things that they like. And they may be silly, but you like silly things too. Quit being a jerk. We don't need to do those things. It's not healthy. It's not good. Older people need to value the enthusiasm and the fresh ideas of the younger generation and view them as sons and daughters in this family of faith. And the younger generation almost said, we, I don't want to lump myself in and call myself young. I have a lot of gray now. We need to look to the generations that preceded us and value their wisdom and understand that their perspective, even when we don't understand it, is hard earned. So we want to embrace all generations. I don't want anybody to feel left behind. I don't want anybody to feel like they're not cared for. Because if we do this well, then our children who are growing up in the church will see other people like them when they get into their college years and their 20s and their 30s. And then we can do this miraculous generational ministry where we can see families walking together. I get to look out sometimes and see three generations of family sitting in the audience. And I love that. But we only get to keep that if we're a church that maintains our generational diversity. It's a distinctive of grace, and we want to be careful to maintain it moving forward. The next thing that I saw when I got here, and this is so important to me, is that at Grace, we want to be defined by courageous honesty and generous grace. We want to be defined by courageous honesty and generous grace. And here's why I'm saying it this way. A big value in our culture now is authenticity, honesty, transparency, someone who's authentic, someone who's real, however you want to phrase it, that's what we want. That's what we want in our friends. There's actually research out that says churches are wise to knock it off with the smoke and light show and just keep the overheads on the whole time because that feels more real and authentic and less like you're trying to entertain me, which I'm about that life. We want transparency and authenticity everywhere. We want it in our churches. We want it in our businesses. We want it in our politics. We want it in our friends. We want it in our relationships. That's what we want. We crave this authenticity. But the more I thought about it, the more I didn't think it was helpful to put up there on the screen that we want to be authentic, that we want to be real, because everybody does, so who cares? But these are the things that it requires to create an environment of authenticity. Scripture tells us that we're to bear one another's burdens, that we're to walk with one another, that we're to rejoice with those who rejoice and we're to mourn with those who mourn. Those require an environment of authenticity. And authenticity can't come out unless there is courageous honesty. There has to be courageous honesty in our small groups, in our conversations, frankly, from stage with what I'm willing to share about myself and admit to you. We have to be courageous and be able to say to one another, I'm broken and I don't work. We need to be able to say to one another, have the courage to go, I don't have this figured out. I don't understand this part of scripture. I stink at this part of being a Christian. We need to have the courage to be able to say those things because those require actual vulnerability. And I get frustrated with fake vulnerability. When people confess things that seem like a big deal, but they're no longer dealing with them or they no longer matter. Someone says, I used to be an alcoholic 10 years ago. Okay, it doesn't require much vulnerability to say that. Tell me you're an alcoholic right now. That's vulnerable. Tell me, I used to be terrible at reading the Bible, but I've kind of figured it out. But yeah, I've walked through that season too. All right, that's not very vulnerable. Tell me right now you haven't read the Bible in months. That's vulnerability. It's when we risk something by sharing it. So authenticity requires courageous honesty. But if that courageous honesty isn't met with generous grace, it's the last time that's going to happen. If I'm supposed to bear your burden, but I judge you for carrying it, I can't bear it with you. If I'm asking you to share with me, we're told to confess our sins to one another. And if you confess your sins to me and then I make you feel bad for your sins, you're not going to do that again. Put yourself in a small group. But somebody has some courageous honesty and they share something that makes them vulnerable to that group. And they're met with condemnation or apathy, when's the next time they're going to actually be courageous and share something or not? So we need to be defined by both courageous honesty, but understand that we facilitate and cultivate that honesty and authenticity by offering generous grace, by looking at the burden people are carrying and saying, yeah, man, if I were under that, I would need help too. That's how we continue to be authentic. And frankly, I'm not trying to make it about me, but that's how I get to continue to be myself. That's how we get to continue to be ourselves is only by courageous honesty and generous grace. We have to continue to offer that to one another. We want grace to be a safe harbor for the unchurched, the de-churched, and the over-churched. We want it to be a safe place for the unchurched, the de-churched, and the over-churched. If you ask anybody who's a part of any church and you say, what do you want for your church? Eventually, and it came up a bunch of times in the conversations I had, eventually they'll say, we want to reach the lost. We want to reach the unchurched. And that's absolutely true. Two weeks ago, I did a whole sermon on evangelism, on what our plan is to reach people with Jesus who don't yet know Jesus. So that is a directive in Scripture, and it is near and dear to our heart. And so we don't want to neglect that. We absolutely want to be a safe place for the unchurched where you know you can invite your friend who doesn't know Jesus and thinks church is weird, and you can bring them here, and maybe they'll go, that wasn't so weird. We want to be that place where they can see Jesus. But the other thing I know, in our culture, where we're at geographically, where we're at historically, there are a lot of people in Raleigh who have been hurt by church. There are a lot of folks that are carrying scars that were given to them by the churches that they went to. For some of you, that's your story. We've probably, all of us in one way or another, been burned by church before. And to this, Jesus says, come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And it was to virtually the same culture. It was to a religious culture. And what he was saying to them is, if religion has hurt you and scarred you and worn you down and made you feel like you're not good enough and made you feel like you can't carry the weight, then come to me and I will give you rest. I'll be a safe place for you. We want to be a safe harbor for the unchurched, for the de-churched, and for the over-churched. So that when someone who's been hurt by church in the past comes here, they experience a service with grace. They experience community at grace. They experience one of our big nights out or something like that, and they take a deep breath and they go, this place feels safe. This place feels real. I feel like I can heal here. I feel like I can trust myself to this place. I want to be a place where we heal faith, where we restore the belief that church can be done right, where people are made to feel welcome and loved and offer generous grace when they offer courageous truth. We want to do that right. We want grace to be a place of flourishing faith, whether discovered, reignited, or sustained. It's easy when someone first comes to Christ, when their faith is discovered. It's a really great time. That's an enthusiastic time. That's a time in life when everyone experiences faith like Kyle gives the announcements. It's just like out of a shotgun, here we go. And that's fun and that enthusiasm is wonderful. And for reignited faith, for people who wandered away from the faith and then have come back to it and their faith has been reignited and been restored and they move from cultural Christian, from just passive Christian to culturally conservative to like actually on fire for Jesus. Then they're on fire for a little while, but we want faith to be sustained as well. We want flourishing faith at all ends of the spiritual spectrum. That's actually one of the things I pray for most for you. One of the things that I do semi-regularly is I come into this space when there's nobody else here, and I just sit in the seats and I pray. I did it this morning. And when I sit in the seats, I've been your pastor long enough, I know where you sit, man. So when I sit in the seat over there, I know in my head in the first service and the second service who normally sits there, and I pray for you by name. And I move through the auditorium, and man, this is a good place. We have good families here. I love y'all. As I did it this morning, and I rattled off names of sitting sections and just everybody that sits in that section. I couldn't believe that I get to be the pastor of people who love God and love one another so well. And when I pray for you, I pray a lot of things, but mostly I pray that your faith will be ignited. Mostly I pray that Jesus will get a hold of you and that we'll see radical change in your life and that we wouldn't be a church full of people who are cultural Christians who come to church because that's what we're used to doing and we're checking it off a box. But we come here because we're excited about Jesus and who he is and how he loves us. And we're excited about spurring one another on in that walk. So we want to be a place of flourishing faith. We want to be known in the community for our generosity and for our commitment to community. I just want, if I'm honest, I just want grace to be known. Most of the time when I'm out in public and I meet somebody and they say, what are you doing? I say, oh, I'm a pastor. They say, what's your church? I'm like, it's Grace Raleigh. Oh yeah, where's that? I'm like, well, it's behind the Panera on Capitol next to the fish store. You may have heard of it. And I'm like, no, I don't know. And I'm like, well, we used to be Grace Community Church. And then sometimes we're like, oh yeah, okay. And that's it. Listen, I'm not here to make our name great. I don't really care about that, but I want us to be a church that's known in the community because we serve it so well. We partner with Fox Road because they have the most kids, I think in the state, it's either in the state or in the city, who are on lunch plan, who get free lunch by the government because they're below the poverty line. And that's why we're doing the food drive. I want to partner with more schools. I want to do more things. We give 10% of our budget to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. I want to see that grow. I don't know if we can do it, but I want to do it. I want us to be defined and known in the community by our generosity and by our commitment to community, our commitment to one another, our commitment to the places that we live, our involvement in our various circles of influence out in the community. Different churches are known for different things. I don't want us to be known at being really good at a particular ministry over another ministry. I don't want us to be known for our pastor. I want us to be known for our people, that we're generous, that we're committed to one another and that we're committed to the people around us. So we want a reputation in our community to be. This last one is one that I love so much. It means so much to me. I want Grace to be a place where people see Jesus because we listen for and participate in his sweeter song. Now, every church would say that we want people to walk in and see Jesus here, and that's true of us too. And I believe that Jesus tells us that this is what we should do. He tells us that we should let our good deeds be seen before others, that our, let our light shine before others, that they may see our good deeds, and so glorify our Father who is in heaven, that they will see us, and as a result of how we act and how we love, that they will glorify our God, that we will almost passively evangelize. That Paul says, and I said this a couple weeks ago, that we are a processional led by Christ, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. People should see Jesus. They should feel Jesus when they come in this place, when they are around grace people, they should say Jesus was there. But the bigger question is, how do we get that done? And I think we get that done by listening, by being a people who listen for the sweeter song that Jesus is playing us. And in listening for it, we play it along as well. And here's what I mean. In Greek mythology, there's this hero named Odysseus. Odysseus, he was clever. He wasn't stronger or more athletic than everyone, but he was clever than people. I like Odysseus. And he thought his way through things. And they were sailing home. I think he was from Ithaca, but I wouldn't, you know, bet money on it. I mean, I would bet five bucks for fun, but they're going towards Ithaca, going home. And on the way home, they had to pass the island to the sirens. And the sirens on that island, they were these women that sang this song that was so beautiful that once a sailor heard it, he could not help but divert his boat to that island. It drew them in. And it would draw them in so deeply that they would shipwreck into the island of the Sirens and they would waste their life there and they were never seen from or heard from again. And Odysseus knew that they had to make it past the island. And so he brought with him, because he's clever, beeswax. And he told his men as they approached the island, I want you to put this beeswax in your ear so that when we pass the island of the sirens, you're unable to hear their song. And so the men agreed and they put the beeswax in their ear and they couldn't hear anything. And as they were doing that, he said, but I'm not gonna do that. I want to be able to hear the song of the sirens. So I'm gonna lash, I want you to lash me to the mast, tie me to the mast. And no matter what I say or do or scream at you or threaten you with, do not go there. And they said, okay, deal. So they go past the island of the sirens and Odysseus is lashed to the mast. And the men can't hear a thing and Odysseus begins to hear the song of the sirens. And it is so compelling. And it is so beautiful. He wants to go there so badly. And he is yelling and kicking and thrashing and threatening, but the men can't hear him. And he wants to go over there so bad. He doesn't want to go home anymore. He wants to go over there. What's over there is better than home. That's where I want to go. But he can't because he's lashed to the mast and his men sail him home. And so often I feel like that's the picture of spirituality that we have. That's a picture of faith that is painted. That we're trying to stay on the straight and narrow. We're trying to do the right thing. We're trying to go home. We're trying to follow God. But there's an island over there and it's got some temptations for us. And man, I really want to go there. And what's happening there is a lot better than what's going on here. And that looks way more fun, but I know I'm supposed to go this way. So we do things and we lash ourselves to the mast and we be the good soldiers. And even though I don't really want to go there, I really want to go there. I know that this is the way I'm supposed to go. So whatever I say, whatever I do, we put accountability in our life and we get other people and we go, gosh, I don't want to do that. I really want to do that, but I'm a good soldier and I'm lashed to the mass and this is the way I'm going to go. And if we do it for long enough, then we can get home and be good Christians. But there's somebody else who had to sail by the island, Jason and the Argonauts. And when Jason and the Argonauts went by the island, he didn't give any beeswax to anybody. He just let the song start. And when they got in range of the song and all the men's attention began to be diverted, he called on a guy named Orpheus, who was a legendary player of the lyre. And he said, Orpheus, will you play your lyre for us on deck? And Orpheus began to play the lyre. And the song was so beautiful and so compelling and so lovely that the men on the boat no longer cared about the song and the sirens because Odysseus was playing them a sweeter song. And he played that song for them all the way home. That's the version of spirituality that I want to live out. I believe that Jesus plays for us a sweeter song. I believe that when Jesus says that he came to offer us life and offer us life to the full, that he meant it. I believe that God wants what's best for us all the time, and that if God is asking us to do something, and it seems like it would be more fun to do that, it seems like it would be better to do that, I think that I would be happier if I would go over there and not go the way that God wants me to go. I want to be people who believe and listen for the sweeter song that Jesus is playing us that's going to bring us home. I want us to be people who listen for and believe that God really does want what's best for us. And if we'll just listen for it, if we'll just think about it, that we'll know that guilt shouldn't compel us and a sense of odd shouldn't compel us and that we don't need to be a church full of good soldiers who are lashed to the mast, and even though their heart is really over there, they're going to go there anyway. No. I don't want to be a church full of good soldiers. I want to be a church full of people who are in love with Jesus because of the sweeter song that he is playing for us. The sweeter song of fidelity in marriage and the love that's shared when we make wise choices. The sweeter song of discipline in our life and the joy this experience is a result of that discipline. The sweeter song of the habit of waking up and spending time in His Word and the wisdom that we gain is a benefit of that discipline. I never want to compel us with guilt. I never want to compel us with ought. I always want to look at what God is asking us to do as we preach and we teach in our student ministry and our children's ministry and our small groups, our individual conversations. And let's be people that don't look for because we said so, but let's be people who look for in Scripture and in the motivation and in the very heart of God. And no, He wouldn't ask me to do this if it weren't what's best for me. So why is this what's best for me? And let's listen for that sweeter song. And as we listen for it, we begin to participate in it. And then when people come around a community that's listening for that sweeter song of Jesus, and we're playing it too, that's how they see Jesus in us. And then before you know it, they start to sing along as well. That's the kind of church that I want to be. That's where I want us to go. So in a few minutes, we're going to hand in our pledges. We're going to worship together as we do that. And when you pledge, if you do, that's what you're pledging to, to be that kind of church and to see where it goes. I believe that the best days of grace are ahead. I believe that some of the people who will be the most influential folks who come into grace are folks that we haven't even met yet. I think God's going to write a really great story with us. So let's pray, and then we'll worship together. Father, we sure do love you. We sure are grateful that you love us. Thank you for caring about this place. Thank you for putting your hand on it. Thank you for gently convicting and guiding and loving us. God, we pray for big things today. Pray for big things today in the pledge and in what happens and in the future that you write for grace, but we pray for bigger things than that. Pray for flourishing faith and strengthened families and a church that continues to pursue after you. May you foster in us relentless affection for you and for your word. May we constantly listen for your sweeter song. Make us that kind of place, God. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Before I launch into the sermon, I did want to say this on Hootenanny Sunday. A couple of weeks ago, it was in the middle of the week, and we were going into the first full Sunday in September when we were going to go back to two services as a church. And, you know, Jen and I were having a conversation, Jen's my wife, and I said, hey, you know, this Sunday we go back to two services because for the summer we were at one. It was our summer schedule and everybody was at church together. And she goes, yeah, I know, two services. Are you excited? And I said, not really. I don't really want to go to two services. And she goes, yeah, I'm not either. She goes, why don't you want to go to two services? And I said, well, I just really like everybody being together. I like everybody going to church together, having service together. I like being able to see everybody all at the same time. Like, it's one big family, and I really kind of like that. But, you know, it's full. So we either decide to keep it all to ourselves, or we open up to two services, and we invite other people into what God's doing here and what we think is special. And so that's what we've done. And so we're all in this together. But I point that out because in a few minutes, we're going to leave from here. We're going to go outside and celebrate and have our hootenanny, have a big party. And hopefully everyone is together in one place and we get to be a big family of faith after this. So even though we have two services, we want to try to continue to intentionally put things in our calendar and in the life of the church where we can all come together as one and get to see everybody that we love and care about, and then other people who we don't love or care about. This morning, we're getting into the third part of our series called Feasts. In the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus chapter 26, God gives us six festivals that, or gives the Hebrew people six festivals that he wants them to observe for the rest of their history. What's going on is they've been led out of slavery. They're living in the desert around Egypt. They are trying to figure out life. They're starting a society and a culture. And God says, as you do this, here's some laws. Here's some ways that you can relate to me. Here's where I want you to go. Here's your leader, Moses. Here's all this provision. But I also want you to celebrate these things, these six things throughout the year. Sometimes it's a week. Sometimes it's a day, but these are the six holidays or festivals that I want you to have. And what we've said since week one is a holiday is important and vital because what it does for us is amidst the craziness of life, the stress of life, the distractions of life, all the things that we get caught up in and give our days to, what a holiday does is it stops and slows us down and focuses us in on something that we say is important. So I think it's really interesting and worthwhile to go, well, what are the six things that God wanted his people to slow down and focus on for a day or for a period of time? So this week we arrive at a festival that has a lot of names. It can be the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Tents, the Feast of Booths. The Hebrew name for it is Sukkot. So any of those will do. We'll call it the Feast of Tents, but it does have a lot of names. And what they would do, it was the most festive holiday of the year for the Hebrew people. This was the big, this was the big, fun, joy-filled one. This is the one that makes me think of Christmas because it was just, it was just about celebrating. And so what they would do for this holiday, the reason it was called the Feast of Tents is that they would all, every family in Israel would set up a tent at their house that they would live in. So it would be in the front yard or on the porch. If they were urban, it would be up on the roof and they would live in this tent as much as the weather would permit. They would sleep and have meals out there if they could. And they decorated them with different kinds of fruits that meant different things and different kinds of branches that meant different things. And I read that they were very brightly colored and it was very festive. It kind of reminded me of our Christmas season, right? Where decorations go up around the neighborhood. And I would be even willing to bet that there was a sort of like competition culture with the different tents. Like, oh, Phil's got the big lights this year. Like you do with Christmas, like he's pulled out the inflatable, like Santa, we got to step up our game over here. We look like a bunch of chumps. So I bet that the different tents for the different families looked pretty good and that they made little additions and that it was a big family thing. So it was a festive holiday. It was a festive time of year in Israel. And it was always positioned at the end of harvest season. The crops in Israel, the big ones were olives and grapes, and those are harvested in the fall. And so they've been praying to their God. They've been praying to God that he'll bring about a fruit and bring about a good harvest, that the fields would be okay, that everything would go well, that they'd be injury-free, they'd be able to reap their harvest and whatever it was. And a lot of effort had gone into this, and now the Lord had provided. There was provision there. And so they wanted to stop and celebrate and acknowledge that provision. How often do we pray for something, implore God for something, ask Him for something, and then get it, and then just move on with our lives without ever stopping to acknowledge that He's the one that gave it to us. And so that's what they were doing, is they're pausing after harvest season and saying, God, you are good. You have provided for us yet again. And they did that by living in these tents for a week as a tip of the hat, as an acknowledgement to their ancestors who had to live in the tents in the desert. It's a reference back to the time when they had escaped out of Egypt. They were slaves in Egypt. Moses led them away. And then for 40 years, between three and 500,000 of Abraham's descendants, the Hebrew people, lived in the desert. And so they were a nomadic people. They had a tent and they would set it up. Their family would stay there. In the center of the camp was the tabernacle, which was God's big tent that was the forefather of the shadow of the temple. It would become the temple later. It was the model of the temple in the middle of their camp. And then there was God's big tent, and then they would set up theirs all around it. And then when God decided it was time to move, everybody would pack up stuff and move until God told them to set down camp again. Then they'd set down camp again and they'd live in this tent. And they did that for 40 years. And so celebrating this feast is an acknowledgement of what their ancestors did in the desert. It reminded them where they came from. It reminded them of God's provision in the desert. And then it celebrated God's provision in the harvest. That was the point of the festival. And it's a good thing to acknowledge it ties together very well because this time spent in the desert was really some of the most visible time of provision in all of history from the Lord. God provided for his people in incredible ways. I've already mentioned to you that there was between three and five,000 people in the desert, right? So they leave Egypt. They don't have discernible skills. They don't know how to grow stuff yet on their own in their own fields. They're out in the desert. They can't do it there. There's not enough grass to feed all of their flocks. There's a real logistics issue going on. How are we going to feed all these people? How are we going to make sure they have enough to drink? How are we going to keep their flocks alive? And so what God does to provide for his people is every day when they would walk out, there was a substance on the ground that was a lot like bread that they called manna. And you guys know this. A lot of you guys know this. A lot of you guys know that the word manna literally means, what is it? What's that? But every day they would walk out and on the desert floor waiting for them was their provision for the day, was their manna. It's the food and the sustenance that they needed for both them and their flocks. It was the way that God provided for them in the desert. It's this remarkable provision. And God in his grace, even when they complained about it and said, we'd really like something different. Are there more options on the menu up there, God? He said, okay, for a little while, we'll give you some quail. And so they had quail. I mean, how great would that be to wake up every day, walk outside, grab the food for the day, not have to go grocery shopping, run to Harris Teeter, wherever it is you go, not have to worry about buying it. Just walk outside and grab it and walk inside, and there you go, and you're done. And then maybe you could be like, well, God, tomorrow, I'd like a couple more. It's a big day. We've got some people coming over. Like, whatever it is, but you could go outside and you could get it. And then, because they're in the desert and they don't know where to go, God guides them. We're told that by day, God was a pillar of cloud and that by night, he was a pillar of fire. And he was telling his people, walk towards me, follow me, and I'll take you where you need to go. It's the world's very first GPS system. I don't know if you realize that. And then he would also provide for them water. They're bound to get thirsty. And one time Moses strikes a rock and water comes out of the rock and gives everybody there something to drink. God provided for his people at that time in remarkable ways. And you would think, based on all the daily provision happening in the desert, you would think that these people were particularly grateful people. You would think that they would be characterized by gratitude. You would think that they would marvel every day at the fact that God has provided for us yet again. Every day I walk outside, every day my food is there. Where are we going to go today? I don't know. Well, there's the cloud. Let's walk that way. It seems a little bit like retiring and moving into an all-inclusive resort. Like you just wake up every day and there's the food that you need and we're going to look at the clouds today. Like that's what you're going to do. It sounds like a pretty great gig. You would think that they would be people who are incredibly grateful for God. When they are thirsty and they cry out, hit that rock and here comes water. When they don't understand how to relate to their God, well, let me take your leader up on a mountain and give him some laws, and I'm going to give you some parameters around this so you don't have to figure it out on your own. Let me give you a way that you can make yourself right with me, a sacrificial system. Let me provide that for you. You would think the generation that saw what happened at the Red outmanned for. It was like, you know, App State and UNC yesterday, and like the underdog would win all the time. They watched this provision throughout their entire life, so you would think that they would be characterized by a gratitude. But really what we see when we read the Old Testament, when we read the first five books of the Bible, when we learn about the people in the desert, is amidst all this provision, everything that God was doing for them daily, these remarkable things, He healed them of bites of snakes just in an instant. Rather than being characterized by gratitude, they were characterized by grumbling. What we see is in the desert, God's people were characterized by grumbling rather than gratitude. They were characterized by complaining. We see it in Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 and Numbers 14, all throughout the Old Testament where we read about the life of the people in the desert. They complained and they grumbled. The reason God gave them quail that one time is because they complained that they were tired of manna. They were tired of the taste of their free food that they didn't have to work for. At one point, do you know that they actually had the gall to go to Moses, God's representative, and say, we were better off as slaves in Egypt. Why have you brought us out here? Are you kidding me? What a bunch of spoiled brats. In the face of God's provision, we wish that we were still slaves. This is the worst. Another time when Moses was off talking to God going, what are we going to do with these people? They all got together and took all the jewelry that they stole from the Egyptians so that they could have some wealth, which God told them to do anyways, and then melted it down, fashioned it together into a calf, thinking maybe this golden calf can provide for us better than our God does. They're characterized by grumbling, and it blows me away in the midst of all this provision, of all these regular daily miracles by God, that they would still complain. And what I realized about them, the reason that this was happening is because they were so focused on what they wanted God to do that they forgot what he had done. The people in the desert, those folks, they were so focused on what they wanted God to do. We need better food. We need a place to live. I'm tired of living in this tent. The desert is getting old. I'd love to set up a shop of some sort. This is miserable. God, we are better off as slaves. They were so focused on what they wanted God to do, on what they were waiting for, on what they were praying for, on what they were anticipating and hoping for, that in the midst of that looking forward, they forgot to acknowledge what God was doing right in front of them. And when I think about that, I realize that maybe they were spoiled brats, but that I'm the same way. We get so locked in on what we want in the future that we forget what God has provided in the present. I think about the last three and a half years that I had at the previous church that I was at outside of Atlanta. And I was talking with Jen about this time, and we look back on it now, and we wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but now as I look back, I realize that we just really weren't happy. I mean, we were happy with each other, I assume. I don't know if she was unhappy with me or not. She's never told me. But we just weren't happy in life. There's a lot of things we wanted that we didn't have. It was a hard season. I think most pointedly, we really wanted a family. We wanted a child. And for whatever reason, we just weren't having kids at the time. We just couldn't get pregnant. It was just a struggle for us. And it was especially hard when all of our friends at church, everybody around us started having kids. Everybody our age started having kids. And then that got really hard because all we could think about is this thing that we want. And then to make it even worse, it wasn't just the people who are our age, but we both, I was a student pastor for a long time. She's taught school. And some of the kids that we used to know and lead and pour into, now they're growing up and they're having families. And we're just going, God, are you kidding me? It's like they're having kids on accident. We can't have one on purpose. It was a hard season. Not only that, but Jen was a school teacher at a private school, and I was a youth pastor, so I don't think that affluent is a word that I would choose to describe us at the time. But we had friends, we had peers, and they all had more lucrative jobs than I did. And they started buying houses that were bigger than ours and going on vacations that were better than us. They'd go to Ireland, we'd go to Gatlinburg, you know? And then some of them built houses all in the same community and we're friends with everybody and we want to go and be a part of that. We wish we could live out there. That's not the life that God's chosen for us, and it kind of made us unhappy, and sometimes we drive out there in our station wagon like Cousin Eddie, like, hey, guys, what are you doing over here? Can we eat your food and drink your things? It was tough. Jen had a job that she liked, a teacher, and she moved to a part-time job. That was fine. She wasn't necessarily unhappy there, but she wasn't fulfilled in that job like she was. But she did that to prepare for us to have a kid that never came or that wasn't coming at the time. I was really unhappy in my job. I was unhappy with my role at the church. I wanted to do more. I couldn't understand why I was so limited in what I was able to do there. And I was chomping at the bit with God, like, give me more, give me more opportunity. And I would even pray, like, can I do something else? Can I look somewhere else? And I just felt like he would go, no, why don't you just chill out for a second, be quiet, hang in there. And when I think about that time, I realize that we weren't super happy with life. We wanted a lot of things that we didn't have. And we couldn't understand a lot of the situations that we were in. And if you were to really ask us, we probably would have said something to the effect of, you know, we don't really deserve to be walking through all of these things. At least I would have. Jen wouldn't have. She's a better person than me. But now as I look back on that time, as we look back on that time, I'm embarrassed about my attitude during that season. Because what I saw as God not providing, he was preparing. When I look back on that season and I asked Jen, and we talked about this this week, I said, when you think about that season, what are you now grateful for? What were we missing there? What did we not acknowledge during that season when we were grumbling? What were we ungrateful for? And the first thing out of her mouth was the first thing that I thought. She said, you know, that season to me is marked by a real sweet time of friendship. And it was. During that season of our life, God provided us with some really good friends. They're our sweatpants friends, you know? The ones that you don't have to dress up for. The ones that you can like leave stuff on the counter. You don't have to clean up. They can just come over. They were those kinds of friends. In fact, I remember one of the things we used to do all the time. Once a month, we would get in the car, we would drive an hour and a half, and we would go to this place that had all-you-can-eat crab legs, and we would eat an unhealthy amount of crab legs. I ate so many crab legs, I got tired of the juice jippering onto my jeans that I used to eat in wristbands, you know? And like, these are the friends that you can do this with. I would text them at like nine o'clock or 9.30 at night when we were really, you know, going at it hard, 9.30 at night. And I would text them like, hey, fro-yo? Just one word to eight people. Fro-yo with a question mark. And I don't know if the frozen yogurt wave hit Raleigh as hard as it hit Gwinnett County, where I was from outside of Atlanta, but you would go to these places and there would be all of these different flavors of frozen yogurt. And then there would be this bar and you could get all the flavors you want. You put it in your own cup and then you put all the toppings on it that you want. And then at the end, it was beautiful. They didn't have like a price. You just weighed it, right? You just put it on the scale and they charge you per ounce. And what I realized very quickly is there's a cap on how much they'll charge you. So once you hit the cap, man, just go nuts. Just get it all on there. And it's frozen yogurt, so it's good for you. You don't have to feel bad about it. So I would text them at like 9 or 9.30 at night, hey, fro-yo? And within 15 or 20 minutes, eight of us are sitting out in a parking lot, talking, laughing, sharing stories, catching up, sitting in the back of a truck, sitting in chairs. Guys are talking over here, girls are talking over there. And I just think, as I think about that time now, it's like, man, what sweet time of community that was. What freedom we had that we weren't grateful for then. And they're our vacation friends now. God formed some good, what we believe to be lifelong friendships during that season. We waited for Lily. Which to us, our hearts are full with her. She's our three-year-old daughter. We love her. What I saw as a lack of God's provision and opportunity at Greystone at the time was really a provision of Him preparing me and preparing us for what was next. Sometimes I got the tasks that other people didn't want. I was kind of the catch-all on staff, like, oh, we got to go visit so-and-so, we got to go do this wedding, we got to go do this thing, and all of that fell to me. And I can remember at times resenting it because it felt like I was just kind of a catch-all. Now, guess what I am at Grace? All that stuff. God was preparing me. He was giving me an opportunity to find my voice because one day I was going to have to do this every week. He knew that. He was preparing Jen in different ways. I missed all that at the time because all I did every day is wake up thinking about what I wanted and how I was going to bring it about and wake up thinking about praying for it and asking God for it and then being unsatisfied when I didn't have it. And I missed everything that he was providing all along the way. And I think that this is why we have the Feast of Tents. It's God's way of encouraging us, of making us stop and focus on what He has provided, on helping us to remember what He has done for us. I think that you guys are probably not dissimilar to me in that way. I would be willing to bet that just about everybody in this room has already thought about something that they want in the future today. I bet we've already thought about something that we don't have now that we want, something that we're asking God for that we hope he provides. I would be willing to bet, I almost asked you guys to raise your hands just to out everybody. I wonder how many couples in here, how many married couples within the last month, one of you has looked at the other one and said, you think it's time for a new kitchen? There's some hands. You think it's time for a new kitchen? Should we sell? Buy a new house? We'll redo the bathroom. I need heated floors. My toesies are cold. How many of us in the last couple of weeks have hoped for a new job? For a new opportunity? Instead of unhappy in this relationship, I hope that it gets fixed. How many of us have had our thought life and our prayer life dominated by something that someone we love is going through? Whether it's a struggle or an illness or a diagnosis. How much of our energy goes towards things that we want to be different in the future? How much of us are so focused, or how many of us are so focused on something that's happening with our kids and just hoping that we can get on the other side of this with them? What is life going to look like on the other side of this thing? What's life going to look like in a month, a year from now? What would life look like if I could have a better job that gave me purpose? What would life look like if we could get out of this financial situation? And I think all of us, as we came in today, as we arrived at church, all of us have things in our life with which we are unsatisfied, and we are very likely appealing to God to fix those things and change those things and bring those things about. And listen, that's not bad. We're told that we have not because we ask not. We're told that we should bring our cares to God. We are told that we should go to him in prayer. It's not bad to hope for good things, and it's not bad to appeal to God for good things. But when that's all we ever do is want the next thing, then we perpetually forget to focus on the thing that we have. When all we want is future provision, then we forget today's provision. And when we do that, this isn't my idea. I got this from some guy in a TED Talk. When we do that, when we are constantly focused on what's next, then we fundamentally eliminate happiness in our life. We fundamentally eliminate joy because we never give ourselves a chance to enjoy what's happening in our life right now because we're always wanting the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that that's why God installed the Feast of Tenths in the calendar of His people because the Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where we don't think about what we want and we choose gratitude for what we have. The Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where just for a day, just for a couple of hours, we stop thinking about the things that we want. We stop thinking about the things that we're hoping for. We stop thinking about the things that maybe have been dominating our thought life or our prayer life for months or weeks or years, and we just stop and we say, for today, I'm not going to focus on what I want. I'm going to be grateful for what I have. And I want to invite us into that celebration today. I want to invite you into that celebration today. It's a very human, normal, fine thing to want different things in the future. It's a very human and all right thing to not be happy with the way that something might be right now and to ask that God might change that, to be concerned about very serious things. But if that's all we ever do, then we miss out on all the provision that God has given us right now. So today I want to invite you into that, just for today. Can you commit to not thinking about something that I want tomorrow? I'm not going to think about that. I'm not going to think about what I hope breaks my way. I'm not even for today, God's heard my prayers. He knows what's on my heart. For today, I'm not even going to pray for that thing. I'm just going to think about what he's given me today. And if I were to ask you, what would you tell me? If I were to ask you, what do you have to celebrate today? As a matter of fact, I don't know if you've given me homework authority in your life. I don't know if I have that. But if you have, if I can give you homework, I would make this the assignment. At some point today, have this conversation with somebody. Talk with somebody else who heard this sermon and say, what do you have to celebrate today? What has God provided for you? What has our good, good Father who knows how to give good and perfect gifts, what has He given you today? If I could ask you, what would you tell me? Do you have people in your life who love you? Do you have someone that you know loves you, who's rooting for you? Who wants the best for you? What a blessing that is. Are you in a sweet season of friendships with people? Do you have sweet memories of someone? When you think about who they are, what they said, you could smile right now. Do you have somebody in your life that if you called them, they would actually answer? And if you said, hey, I need, that it wouldn't matter what followed after that because they would do it for you. Do you have those people in your life? Do you have memories of a good family? Do you have a loved one? Do you have moms and dads that you can call up right now? If you don't, do you have fond memories of them? Do you have a job that you enjoy, and if you don't love it, it at least gives you the opportunity to live towards another purpose? It at least pays your bills? Do you have a job that you're grateful for? Do you have a house that you like, even if the kitchen stinks? Do you have a car that gets you where you need to go? Do you have plans today? People that you're going to see? Games that you're going to watch? Relaxing that needs to happen? Do you have those things? And God's provided so much for us in so many ways. And I'm convinced that like the people in the desert, we continually focus so much on what we want that we forget to be grateful for what we have. And this, I think, is the simple wisdom of David in Psalm 118. Many of you guys know this psalm. You might not know that you know it, but Psalm 118, 24, you say, if you grew up in church, you probably sang it. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. I think that's the wisdom. We have today. This is our reality. Right now, today, we have the things we hope for in the future. Some of them will happen. Some of them won't. But right now, we have today. And what are we grateful for today? Today is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. And as I looked into the passage, what I realized is Psalm 118 has a lot of verses. This is the day the Lord has made all rejoicing and glad in it. That's verse 24. The 23 verses preceding that verse are David listing out all the things that God had done for him. You've handed me victory when I did not think I could have it. You've provided for me people to love. You came through in this way and in this way and in this way. And all of the provisions of God in the past lead him to this conclusion that this is also a day that you have made, and I'll rejoice in you. And then he caps it off. He doesn't stop there with verse 24. It ends in verse 29 when it says, Oh, give thanks to if we'll stop and slow down and be grateful for what we do have, that it will engender in us, rather than grumbling, it will engender in us this gratitude that will compel us to a love and appreciation of God. Not only is today the day that He's made, but let us rejoice and be glad for the love of God endures forever. If today is good and he's the author of it, then he's the author of tomorrow too. And I know that when I get there, I can praise him for the provision that he's made in my life. And so the feast of tents is joyful because it's a day where we stop, we refuse to think about what we want, and we focus on what we have. And as we go out in a minute and we celebrate together, the hootenanny, the party for grace, it's appropriate that we stop and acknowledge all that God has done here at Grace. Because I think a lot about the future of Grace. I think a lot about where God wants to take us and what we might do. We've got some plans coming up that I think people are going to be excited about, but that's all down the road. I know our elders think about it. I know our staff and our partners think about what's the future of grace, where are we going, and what's that going to look like. But on the hootenanny, on this party, we stop and we slow down for a festival that's positioned at the end of the harvest season, and we say, God, we are so grateful for what you've done here. And so for me, I don't just celebrate what God has done in my life, but I want to invite you as church partners and church family to celebrate what God is doing in this place. Because I don't know if you thought about it, but it's pretty remarkable. When I got here two and a half years ago, we were in debt. We didn't have any money. And we owed this church down the street. I was looking at everything that we owed and trying to figure out how can I wiggle out of this. And I looked at this church down the street, World Overcomers, right next door. And we owed them $17,000 because of an agreement that we made about some space. And I emailed them. I didn't have any pride or dignity. I was too young for that. So I emailed them. I said, hey, listen, we owe you $17,000. We cannot pay it. If we try to pay it now, like, we will not exist as a church. Can we please defer this to the end of the year? Or maybe you'll just say, like, don't worry about it. And they said, we love God. We love His church. We believe in the sameness of purpose. And if it will help you, don't pay it. Don't worry about it. It's remarkable. $17,000 gift that allows us to continue to exist as a church. And that's what we needed. If we didn't get that from World Overcomers, we would not have survived. I don't think we needed that gift. Since getting $17,000 given to us so that we could function as an organization, do you know that we have given away since then over $125,000 to other people? The organizations outside of Grace, more than six-fold what we were given. We've had the opportunity to do that. That's God's goodness here. When I got here, I looked at the student ministry and I said, oh gosh, it's really top-heavy. We've got a bunch of upperclassmen who didn't care anything about me or what's happening at Grace. They're going to graduate, and then there's this dearth of people following. There's like nobody there. We've got like a year and a half to figure this out because we have families in elementary school, and when their kids start to age into this, they're going to bolt if we don't have a student ministry set up, and this place is going to implode in a year and a half, and that's like all I thought about and prayed about. These past two weeks, we've had more kids on Sunday night than we've had in years. Over 40 kids back-to-back weeks. It's remarkable what God is doing here, his provision. I asked Kyle, how's student ministry going? Expecting him to say like it's tough, and I was going to try to pick him up, and he was like, it's great. We have kids coming out of the woodwork. I don't know where they're coming from. I love it. This is so much fun. I said, really? He goes, yeah. I've got a bunch of middle school kids. He said, they're actually coming up to him going, is it okay if we invite our friends to this? Is this just for us, or can other people come? He's like, yes, invite friends. It's amazing. When Jen and I visited, we went home, and we said, this is a great church. She goes, I don't know who we're going to be friends with. There's like nobody there our age. They all look like they're kind of our parents' age. What are we going to do about this? And I said, I think this is where the Lord wants us to go. Preschool age kids and families is the fastest growing segment of grace right now. God's providing. We're multi-generational in a really fun way. Erin has more kids on her roster right now than she's ever had, and she's been here for six or seven years. Guys, God's doing amazing things here. He's blessing us in remarkable ways. And I don't want us to be so focused on what's in the future for grace that we don't stop and say, man, God, thank you. Thanks for everything that you've done here. So the hootenanny, that's what we celebrate. Everything that God is doing. And not just the numbers and how that's all going, but each one of those is a story. Each one of those is a family. Each one of those is a marriage solidified as friendships formed, as people walking alongside other friends and fighting for them in their walk with the Lord. So each one of those things matters to God, and he continues to provide for us here. So in a minute, we're going to go celebrate. We're going to go outside. We're going to have a great time, and I want us to do that. It's incredibly appropriate. God created good times and joy. He did. And as we do that, let's all promise each other we're not going to think about what we want next. We're going to be grateful for what we have right now. And let's celebrate God's goodness and provision in our lives together. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We love you so very much. We thank you for all the ways that you've provided for us, all the things that you've given us. God, some of us here have some really compelling reasons to be anxious about tomorrow, to be focused on the future. But God, you know those reasons, and you're in those situations. Give us the peace of mind today to slow down and simply be grateful for what you've given us. And let that assure us that you'll take care of us moving forward. Thank you so much for the opportunity to celebrate you and all that you've done today. In Jesus' name, amen.