Sermons tagged with God

Grace, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. It's a big morning for us. Just to keep the tension going for you guys, I'm not showing you the building until after the sermon. So just relax. Because there's some stuff I want to say to you before we do that. And we get excited about that. If it's your first Sunday here, we as a church have been looking forward to this Sunday for a while. We started a campaign in February of 2020 to raise some money to build a building or to purchase a building to have our own permanent home after 20 years of wandering and wandering from rental to rental. And we were able to get some land, and now we have been developing some plans to put a building on that piece of land, and this is the morning that we're going to show the church what we intend to build. So if it's your first Sunday with us, this is not typical, and I'm going to say some stuff. You're kind of sitting in on a family meeting. So this feels a little bit different than a normal Sunday. And I've actually been talking about this sermon since I got back from sabbatical in July, which is probably a mistake because I think I've overhyped it. I can't possibly deliver on whatever you guys expect me to do this morning. But as I was thinking about what I wanted to share with y'all, it's really not helpful for me to think about it in terms of good or bad, but to think about this morning in terms of helpful and true and authentic. And so where I'd like to start is in that sabbatical. In the month of July, you guys were gracious enough to give me the month to not work and just kind of reflect and recharge and all the things that you'd like to do when you don't have to work. And I've felt, I've carried guilt for that all year and still do. And I'm not sure I'll ever do a sabbatical again because I still just feel bad because most professions don't get those. Most of you had to like keep working while I was in Chicago playing video games. But, but I've also known since being given that time that it would be appropriate at some point to share with you guys, the church, what God impressed upon me during that sabbatical break. And as I processed what it was and realized what it was, because it's not like I was going through sabbatical going, God, what do you have for me? What do you want me to see? What's like the one thing that you want me to take away? I was just, honestly, I was just going through sabbatical, enjoying pursuing God as a not professional Christian, having quiet times that I didn't have to then go and preach about just, just pursuing God for me. And I had a lot of great experiences. I went to churches that I wouldn't normally go to. And, and, and, and God kind of imparted on me a bigger vision for church and church world and Christendom and just how supportive we need to be of one another and how gross it is when we seek to criticize other churches for not doing it the way that we doing it with the way that we do it and that's a whole other thing but when I realized what the main thing was that I carried away from sabbatical I knew that this was the morning that I wanted to share it with you guys. It feels appropriate on NFL kickoff Sunday, the single greatest Sunday of the year every year, to start the sermon with an illustration from Hard Knocks. Hard Knocks is a show, it's an HBO show, and I know that pastors don't normally tell you to go watch shows on HBO on Sunday mornings, but that's not even the worst show I'm going to recommend this morning in this sermon, so get ready. But Hard Knocks is a documentary series. They follow a different NFL team every year through the preseason as they prepare for the regular season. And inevitably, I think this year is a little bit different. They framed this year's up a little bit different, but almost always in the show, they chronicle some rookies. They highlight some rookies that have come to training camp for the first time. They're trying to make their name for themselves in the NFL. And there's always in the show, two kinds of rookies. There's one rookie that sees this as the opportunity of a lifetime, who's hounding the veterans, asking tons of questions, taking diligent notes, coming to meetings early, getting to practice early, doing all the extra things, trying to get in all the extra reps, doing all the little things behind the scenes to be excellent and to make the team. And that rookie always makes the team. And then there's this other kind of rookie who's just kind of coasted on talent his whole life, didn't really have to work that hard in college, and he shows up to the NFL and he's playing. He wants to spend his money. He wants to goof off. He wants to make jokes in meetings. He's not asking the veterans questions. He's not doing the extra little things. He's not coming early and staying late. And I always watch that show and see that rookie with so much frustration because I think to myself, dude, what are you doing? This is the opportunity of a lifetime. If you can't pour yourself out for this, if you can't get pumped up about this, what are you doing? Like, do you know that what people would give to have the chance that you have, and you're just going to fritter it away having fun? Like, this is the time when you push. This is the time when you run. This is the time when you go. What's the matter with you? And I realized over sabbatical that that's me. That I'm the one coasting. I'm not saying I'm coasting on talent because I don't have much. My family likes to joke, me and Jen like to joke, that there's no one on earth with more confidence for less reason than me. Oh, by the way, the notes that you have in your bulletin, you can just fold those up and tuck those away. I'm not using those this morning. As I looked at them at the end of this week, they just felt too rigid. And I just want to speak to you guys from the heart. But I realized that that was me. Have you guys ever had a job where once you figured it out, you could do that job to the expectations of the people around you and your boss to the degree that it needed to be done without giving your whole effort. You ever had that job that you could just kind of shift it into autopilot? Do a couple of things and you don't have to give 100% every week because it doesn't require that of you. And you find yourself just kind of coasting in that job. That's me. That's what I realized I've been doing. And I wanted to say that publicly because I wanted to apologize to you publicly for not putting all of myself into this. And I know that you guys are kind and you're nice. And some of you are going to have a heart to tell me afterwards, Nate, you're doing great. We feel like you're giving 100%. Don't be so hard on yourself. You can't give 100% all the time. So to that, thanks. Keep it to yourself. I know me. And I know what I can do. And I haven't been doing it. Over sabbatical, I watch this show. This is the bad one. Called The Bear on Hulu. Bill's seen it. He's seen it. He knows. It's about a chef. I'm not officially recommending it because there's a lot of cuss words and it's rough. It's intense. I came across it a couple of years ago and started to watch it and liked it, but it was a little bit too intense and I let it go. And somewhere in the month of July, a buddy of mine that I really trust said, hey, this might be the best show I've ever watched. And I thought, okay, I'll give it another go. And I watched it in like three days. I was on sabbatical. I didn't have anything else to do. And I know that as a good Christian pastor, that inspiration is supposed to come through the book on prayer that I read or the commentaries that I was studying. But it didn't. It came from a Hulu show called The Bear. And in the second season, I cried every episode. Every episode I watched, I cried. Because what was happening is these people on this show were galvanizing around a purpose, a restaurant, and they were given everything they had. It's what they thought about when they woke up in the morning. It's what they sold themselves out to during the day. It's what they were thinking about when they went to bed at night, and they gave it everything they had, and it showed how just gradually their lives started to change as they pursued this, and they started to become better humans as they rallied around this thing, and I just found it, for whatever reason, I'm shaky now as I'm talking about it, for whatever reason, I found it so very deeply inspirational. And I came out of sabbatical more determined than ever to do my best work. Because if this isn't worth pouring yourself out for, what is? If God's kingdom isn't worth your whole life, then what's worth it? If this isn't the time for me to go, when is? What could be more important than building God's church, than declaring his word, than loving people towards Jesus? What could be higher stakes than that? There's this verse, it's a couple of verses in 2 Timothy. Paul is writing a letter to Timothy, this guy that he trained, and now he's left him as pastor of a church. And he's writing him two letters of advice, 1 and 2 Timothy. And at the end of 2 Timothy in chapter 4, Paul confesses and acknowledges that he's reaching the end of his life. I don't think he was reaching retirement because I don't think retirement was a thing for Paul. I think he knew that he was reaching the end of his usable years. And he writes this to Timothy and it's always to me been one of the most intimidating verses. He's encouraging him in verse 5. He says, the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. And I have in my Bible, I don't know when I wrote this, years ago, just this little note, oh, to say this, to get to the end of my race and say that, that I have been poured out like a drink offering, that I've fought the good fight, that I've kept the faith, and I finished the race. But that's an incredibly intimidating verse, isn't it? When in our lives have we felt like we were poured out like a drink offering? Besides parenthood, which by default forces you to pour yourself out like a drink offering, whether you want to or not, that kid is tipping you over, man. Besides that, what have we done? What experiences do we have? When we look back at something and we say, I poured myself out like a drink offering. I've fought the good fight. I've finished the race. When do we get to say that? And I'm coming out of sabbatical reminded of this verse,izing that there has certainly been more seasons, more weeks than not, where I've not been pouring myself out for grace. Where I've not been the pastor that I believe I'm supposed to be. Because I figured out how to do my job without giving it all that I've got. And I'm telling you guys, I'm sorry, and I'm done with that nonsense. I'm going to pour myself out like a drink offering. I'm going to give this place all I got. Because if I don't, the crap am I waiting on? So here we go. Now, what does that mean? This is an important question. And you'll see in a minute why I've opened up a sermon on the building about myself. Okay, just relax. What does it mean that I intend to try my best? I'm going to preach better sermons? No, because I'll be honest with you, I don't know how to preach better sermons. Okay, if y'all got tips, give them to me. But I don't know how to preach better sermons than I already preach. So I'm not going to tell you I'm going to preach better sermons. I can't do that. I'm actually trying as hard as I can on most sermons. It's all the other stuff that you don't see that I need to step up to the plate on. And so what I've committed to, and I pulled staff together and I told them this coming out of sabbatical, what I've committed to is that every spare minute that I have, that I could fritter away on something else, or I could go home and just not do as many hours of work that day. All the spare minutes that I have in my work week are going to go towards two things. Reading on behalf of the church, learning, and just being a learner and a reader, because when I read, it makes me better. I'm not going to get into all that. But the other thing is writing. I need to write. And there's a lot that I need to write. My first goal was to get three weeks ahead on sermons. I am. So if I preach a sermon and I look lost in the middle of it. It's because I wrote it three weeks ago. And I've not thought about it since. So sermons actually might get worse. I don't know. But what I really need to write is stuff that I'm thinking about. I kind of think about it as the discipleship pathway materials. Right now at Grace, if someone comes to the door and they're a new believer or non-believer, but they come into faith and like, how do I grow spiritually? Our answer is get in a small group. What are we doing in the small group? Whatever the small group leader wants to do. We're doing 1 Samuel this semester in my small group. Great. How do I grow spiritually? We just, you know, we just hope it happens. Just go to small group, get into some good relationships, come on Sunday, we'll preach the Bible, we'll sing together, and God's going to grow you. And God in his goodness has grown us. He's grown a lot of people at Grace. He's worked in that sanctification process. Sanctification has become more like Jesus in character. But that's no longer an acceptable answer to me. This conviction started last fall, and I won't get into all the things that led to it, but it was an unexpected trip where I made two unexpected friends, and one of the unexpected friends spoke for Ministry Partner Sunday, Ru Sin. And through my relationship with him, I've really seen and been inspired that the next thing that grace needs to do, the next stage of the growth at grace is to develop all the things that need to happen behind the scenes. So that church on Sunday is just something that we do where we gather together, but the real church is taking place all throughout the week. And so what we need at grace is a discipleship pathway. What we need is materials, Bible studies, sometimes curated books, sometimes curated studies that other people have done. Sometimes it will be things that I've written. Sometimes it will be things that people in the church have written. But what we need is a pathway, is materials to put in people's hands, directions to encourage people who come to grace, direction to encourage you so that everybody who walks through those doors within about three or five years of coming here, even if they didn't know anything about the faith walking into grace, three to five years down the road, we've given them everything that they need so that they can be someone who is spiritually mature enough to be an elder of the church. Now, I'm not saying that every one of you in this room should be an elder. But what I'm saying is I want a church full of people who are capable of it if God calls on them to do it, who are spiritually ready and spiritually mature and ready to get there. And my part in that is to quit hoping that spiritual growth happens organically and to start writing out a pathway for us to begin to pursue Jesus together with all that we've got. And here's why I think that this is really important work for me to do. Here's why I think it's the most important work for me to do. And I would even say, if my sermons do get worse, but I'm writing this stuff faithfully, and I'm going to send the staff what I'm writing every week, they're going to see and they're going to know. I'm being held accountable for this. I would say that actually serves the church better. Now, I'm going to try to not preach worse, but, you know, we'll see what happens. I think it's so important that I do that now because of what lays ahead for us. In a few more minutes, I'm going to show you the building that we think God wants us to build. And when we get there, we're going to get bigger. I've heard people say, not to me, because people don't say things like this to the pastor, but they say it to you, and then you tell me what they said. That you've had friends come here, and they'll be like, place is cool, like the vibe, like the church, music's good, preaching is acceptable, and we'd like to go there, but your facilities stink. I'd rather not get stuck behind a pole. Our location is not good. They'd rather not walk outside and sometimes in the rain to get their children past the aquarium store. And I've seen young families come in for the first time. And they'll go in that hallway when all the young families are here at once. And they're holding their two-year-old and they're looking at the zoo of two-year-olds in the room. And the tears and the three of them that want to break out. Sometimes it looks like they're prisoners of wars back there. They're like holding the bars and there's tears streaming down their face. Please anyone just get me out of here. These people are terrible. They're hitting me. Like it looks rough. And I've watched young families like reluctantly hand their child into that room. And I've thought like good luck next week when you try that other church because you ain't coming back here. Our facilities are sometimes a barrier between four people who would consider grace. And I understand that. And on one hand, we could say like, well, you know, they're not committed enough. And yeah, they're not. That's the whole point. Frankly, I think if you won't go to a church because of the facilities, that's silly and you need to grow up. But that's what church does. We grow people up in Christ. And so maybe that's part of the maturation process that needs to happen with folks. When we get into a new building, that barrier is down. When we get there, there's going to be people in the community that see us building it and they're going to want to come kick the tires. There's going to be old grace folks, some OG grace people who came over from St. Andrews and helped plant in 2000. They're going to hear about it. They're going to want to come see it. You're going to invite your friends because you're going to want them to see it. And we're going to have more people coming here than we ever had, at least for a little bit. And when that happens, I want to be ready. I want to have systems in place. I've said since the day, I said in my interview that I believe in the role of pastor as shepherd. And every person who walks through those doors is a soul that we need to be shepherds and stewards of. And I want to be good stewards of those souls. And if we don't have a plan in place to grow people through small groups and through relationships and through Bible studies and through educational materials and through access to information and through encouraging in their next step and by loving them closer to Jesus, if we don't have an intentional way to do that, then we're not being as good of stewards of those souls as we can be. And so I want to be ready. I'm reminded of the scene in Matthew chapter 4. I believe it's in verses 20 through 22, where Jesus is calling the disciples. And he goes and he finds James and John, the sons of Zebedee, and he finds them mending the nets. And I've always loved the imagery of that. Of the idea that before these men are going to be sent out to do a great work, they're mending the nets, getting ready for their catch. Now they think they're going to catch fish, and Jesus says they're going to go catch men. They're going to be fishers of men, but they're mending the nets. They're getting ready for the work that God has had them to do. There's another place in Scripture where Paul writes a church, and he says, I've been wanting to come to you. I think it's Ephesus. I've been wanting to come to you, but I have to stay here right now, for the Lord has opened a wide door for a great work. That building is opening for us a wide door for a great work, and I want us to be ready. I want us to be discipled up. I want us to be trained. I want us to be ready to lead the Bible studies. I want our families ready to accept the new families. I want the kids over there in that room to know what it is to be kind and generous and gracious when new children show up and to integrate them. I want our small groups to be ready and open for other people to come in as we take on their spiritual growth and their spiritual development. I want us to be ready. We need to mend the nets so that we are ready for the great work that God has for us. Now, here's my biggest fear with starting this campaign and looking to build a building. My biggest fear is that as a church, we start to think that the greatest thing we can do is build something. And in one way, we're right. But we're wrong if we think it's building a building. The most important thing we can do is build disciples. The most important thing we can do is build people who love Jesus, who know him, who follow him, who passionately pursue him and love others. And if we never get a building, we're still going to do that as hard as we can every week. I'm committed to it. And if we think that building a building is the most important thing that we can do as a church in this season of church, then what we're going to do is we're going to spend the next however long it takes, however long it takes to raise the money we need to raise. We need to raise $2 million to build that building. So however long it takes to raise $2 million, if we think that's the most important thing that we can do, we're going to sit in here week in and week out just kind of waiting for the one day and skipping over what's happening right now. It's not about one day. Church doesn't start when we build what I'm about to show you. Church has been going on for 2,000 years. It'll keep going on and it needs to happen every week here. We need to build ourselves up. We need to be ready. We need to grow in our faith. The most important thing that can happen in the church is that we build disciples, and we can do that right now as we mend our nets and get ready for this great work. But the great work doesn't just start when we get there. The great work starts right now as we galvanize around growing ourselves into disciples and really more pointedly, allowing God to grow us as we get out of his way and allow him to pour us out like a drink offering and we learn what that feels like. So I'm going to do my work behind the, to prepare the lattice to direct the growth that the Spirit is going to bring. And this is where this applies to you too. Here's my challenge to you over this time and kind of what could feel like the land between now and when we build. Is to not think of it that way. Think of this as time to prepare ourselves and to get our butts in gear too. Here's the challenge to you guys. I don't know if any of you have a background in karate. I have thought about this illustration for years. It's been something that rattles around in my mind, and I wish that I had a better one. I don't. This one makes my point better than anything else I can think of, so we're going with karate this morning. I don't know if any of you have a background in karate. I do not because I have friends, but if you do have a background in karate, then you know that there's a belt system, right? Like the first belt you get when you go do karate is you get a white belt, I think. You get the white belt, and that means like you're in the door, you're part of the dojo. I think that's a thing. You get the little thing that you wear, and you're in. You're a karate guy or a girl. Good for you. And then you start to learn skills, and you get like another belt. I don't know, a yellow belt, and then maybe a purple one, and then a blue one, and then I think there's a brown one, and I think there's a brown one. I actually researched this. There's a brown one with a black stripe. It's pretty fancy. That's real close to black belt. And then you get to be black belt, right? And I think some people, I don't know what the matriculation rate is for karate and the belts. I don't know where everybody stops. But not everybody becomes a black belt, right? Because black belts are bad jokers. I remember in elementary school that there was a rumor going around our school. Like I heard this old wives tale. Maybe it's true. I don't know. But I heard somebody said that whenever you achieved black belt, you had to register your hands with the federal government as deadly weapons, which is hilarious. And I went ahead and took care of it when I was younger so that I wouldn't have to mess with it later on in life. But black belts are like, man, they're the top. They're the best. But that's not for everybody. Some people get the blue belt, and they're like, that was fun. I'm going to try soccer now. I'm just going to go on to the next thing. And they don't keep progressing. They're not a yellow belt. They learned some skills. They did some stuff. Now they're a blue belt. And I'm good. I want to go do something else. I'm comfortable with my current level of karate skill. I see how I chopped like that. This is a layered sermon. The church, this one, all of them, church has a lot of blue belt Christians. Church has a lot of folks who got their white belt. They're new. They're in. Got the suit. Ready to go. And then they started learning a couple of things. Started attending church regularly, making that a priority. Prioritizing church and their schedules with their kids. Started making small group important. Maybe even started to give and tithe. Small groups, Bible studies. Maybe they even actually read spiritual books like on their own without anyone asking them to. And they're moving up the ranks. They get to about blue belt and they're like, you know what, I'm pretty good. Pretty good. I don't look like I did before I became a Christian. I've made some progress, doing some good things. Got some good habits. Got some good skills. And I see some black belts. Those men and women, those are some serious Christians. Those are like missionaries. Those people have degrees. They went to seminary. They got doctorates. They are serious about their faith. Like at my church, Nate, we got Nate. He's not even a black belt. Like he's definitely brown, maybe with a black star. Probably not. Black belts are serious Christians. And I'm comfortable. I got other things I want to do. I want to go try soccer now. A lot of us are cruising through our spiritual life, comfortable with who we are and where we're at. And every now and again, God will poke us and kind of tell us something that we need to work on. And maybe we even begrudgingly go, okay, all right. And we give in to that conviction. But we're not sold out for our faith. We're not giving it everything we have. We're not pouring ourselves out like a drink offering. We're going to get to the end of the race and we're going to be like, well, I finished it. I wasn't really trying to win. And here's the problem with blue belt, middle of the road, comfortable Christianity. The Bible makes absolutely no space for that. There is not one single inch of space in the Bible's description of a life of faith that makes room for one day in the middle road. There's actually a verse that haunts me, and it should haunt you too. Revelation 3.16, he convicts a whole church. Jesus says he convicts a whole church, and he says, the one thing with you is you are lukewarm. You're neither hot nor cold. You're sitting on the fence. You're right in the middle. You're comfortable Christianity. You're on cruise. And because you were lukewarm, I will vomit you out of my mouth. God makes no space for comfortable Christianity. He makes no space for people who are not all the way sold out. Listen, look, just a couple of the verses that I thought about that make this point. Jesus says himself, he's preaching, and his mother and brother show up, and they need him. They're worried about him because he's kind of making a name for himself, and they feel like he's embarrassing himself. And they tell him, hey, your mother and your brother are waiting for you. And he says something to the effect of, if you do not hate your mother and your brother compared to me, then you are not prepared to enter into the kingdom of heaven. You are not ready for this life. You are not ready to sign up for this. Somebody comes to him and they say, hey, Jesus, I believe in you. I want to follow you. What do I need to do? And he says, follow me. Let's go. And he says, okay, but my dad just died. I need to go do his funeral. And Jesus says, let the dead bury their own dead and let's get going. No one puts their hand to the plow of the faith and then turns their head and looks behind them. We have to go. We are moving. We are all in on this. Paul writes about the faith and he tells us that we are to run in such a way to get the prize. He says, all runners run, but we need to run to win the race, which is look that we don't get participation trophies in Christianity. And then he says to Timothy at the end of his life, I've poured myself out like a drink offering. I'm done. I'm spent. There is no more juice in this lemon. I fought the good fight. I kept the faith. I finished the course. I won. I don't know what it means to you or how it sits on you when I say that there is zero space in our faith for comfortable middle-of-the-road Christianity. All I know is that I'm the poster child for that kind of faith. And I need to let God get to work in here. And I don't know how you feel about it. But here's what I want to find out. What would happen in your life if you gave all of yourself to your faith? Last week I preached out of Jude and I said the message of Jude is that we should contend for the faith with our whole life, with everything we have. What would happen if you did that? What would you look like if you actually gave yourself all the way over to the faith and you said, Jesus, I'm all in. I'm two feet in on this, Jesus. Whatever you want me to do, wherever you want me to go, however you want me to do it, I'm in. I'll do it. What if you joined me there and we did this together? What if you joined the people on the row with you and you said, you know what, from here on out, all in. No middle of the road. no blue belt nonsense. I'm all in on this. What could happen if we allow God to build a church full of disciples who are sold out to him? Because we finally got ourselves out of the way, we finally let him make us uncomfortable, and we finally started doing the things that he asked us to do. What could happen in this new space if there was a church full of people sold out to him, ready to accept the community that's going to come there? What kind of generational ministry can we do in that place as we prepare ourselves for the great work that's going to be open to us? I am committing to you that I will pour myself out like a drink offering for our Jesus and for this place. I'm going to ask you to come with me Because Lord knows none of us can grow this place alone. None of us can proclaim Jesus alone. None of us can move this church forward alone. Least of all me. So who's with me? Who's all in? Who's ready to get to work? Husbands, go love your wives like you've never loved her before. Go model for your children what they should do and what they deserve. Let her see a man who loves God and who pursues him, who prays fervently and consistently. Wives, let your husband see a woman who loves the Lord, who loves his word, who's diligent in prayer. Let him know that there is no one who loves him and respects him more than you do. And show him the love of Jesus in the way that you treat him every day. Parents, love your children as hard as you can. Be present for them. Model for them what godly Christianity is. Show them what a godly man looks like. Show them what a godly mother looks like. Show them what a godly friend looks like. Show them what it looks like to steward and to marshal your finances the way that God wants you to do that. Show them what it looks like to love other people who don't look like you or think like you. Show them what it looks like to gracefully disagree. Show them what it looks like to be gracious lovers of others. Show them what it looks like to build a life passionately pursuing Jesus. It's not too late to start showing them. And it's not too late to admit to them, hey, I've been coasting and I'm sorry, but I'm all in on this and I'm all in on you and I want you to follow me. It's not too late to do that. You can do that anytime you want. But leave from here. If you're all in, leave from here and go love the people in your life well. Leave from here and dadgummit, if you don't have a devotional habit by now and you've been here for years and you've heard me say over and over again, the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And you're still not doing it? Shame on you. Go do it. Come on. Go read your Bible. Darn it. Thank you. Get in God's word. Devote yourself to prayer. Let's be all in. Not on the building. I think that God wants us to build a building. I think the amount of money that we have to raise to build a building is absurd. And I think if we're going to build it, you guys are going to have to believe that too, and you're going to have to give. But I'm not going to talk about that a whole lot, because I think God's going to do the work that he needs to to do and that if he wants us to build a building, we're going to be in the building. If he doesn't want us to be in the building, we won't be in the building. I just kind of think he wants us to be in the building. In the meantime, you know what I really care a lot about? Us growing closer to Jesus together. Let's be all in on that. Come with me. Let's see what happens. And let's see what God does. Alright. Let me pray for us. Then we'll show you the stuff. God, on behalf of those who have cruised, who have set our faith on autopilot, I am sorry. We are sorry. God, we, I ask that if we feel a fresh conviction to pursue you relentlessly, that that conviction would not wear off as we leave this room, as we walk out of this space and the concerns of life begin to drown out the noise of this fresh conviction. God, would you put it at the forefront of our awareness and of our thoughts? Would you force us to wrestle this to the ground? Would you let it haunt them as it haunts me that there is no space in your gospel for half-hearted Christianity? I pray that for each person in this room, that you would lay before us the next thing you want us to do to pursue you, and that we would do it. Big or small, we would do it, eagerly and obediently. And once we do it, that we would say, God, what's the next thing? And what's the next thing? And what's the next thing? Let us not be a church full of cultural, casual, complacent Christians. But let grace be a place that is filled with people who love you and who desperately want others to love you too. Be with us as we go, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this incredibly gross, hot Sunday. I heard somebody say it's like walking around in warm soup outside. I think that's pretty appropriate. I think we're going to take out the lounge areas next week and make more space for y'all. So we're getting the message. You're coming back to church, so this is great. These lounge areas are penalties for not coming in the summertime, so now we'll get back to normal. We've been moving through a series called 27 that we're going to do this summer and next summer where we're doing an overview of the 27 books in the New Testament to kind of give you an idea of where we're going for the rest of this summer and where we're going to pick up next summer. For the rest of the summer, I'm just going to go through the general epistles, the general letters that are largely in the back half or entirely in the back half of the New Testament. We're going to do Hebrews this morning. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, did a phenomenal job covering James for us in July. So if you want to catch that one, you can go back and take a look at it. And then we're going to do 1 and 2 Peter together, 1, 2, 3 John together. Because I don't want to do three sermons out of 1, 2, 3 John that all say like, hey, if you love God, obey him. That's the message of 1, 2, 3 John. And then we're going to do Jude Labor Day Sunday. We decided that we would save the most overlooked book of the Bible for the most overlooked Sunday of the calendar. So that's going to be very appropriate when we do Jude and you guys watch online while Aaron and I work. But this morning we're going to focus on Hebrews. And deciding how to approach Hebrews and how to give you guys an overview of Hebrews was a little tricky because Hebrews is such an incredible book with so many good things and so many good themes. The overriding theme of Hebrews is to exalt Christ. The overriding point of Hebrews is to hold Christ up as superior to everything, the only thing worthy of our devotion and our affection, the only thing worthy of our lives. That's what the book of Hebrews does, and it focuses us on Christ, which is appropriate because we preached Acts last week. Well, I preached. You guys listened and did a great job at listening. I preached Acts last week, and we talked about how it's the Holy Spirit's job to focus us on Jesus, past, present, and future. And so once again, we're just going to enter into this theme in the text where the whole goal of it is to focus us on Christ. And so my prayer for us is that that's what this will do for us this morning. In an effort to exalt Christ, the author of Hebrews, who we're not sure who it is, the author of Hebrews starts out his book this way. Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he had spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right some of the most sweeping prose about our Savior that we'll find in the Bible. The only other place that compares is probably found in Colossians, which Aaron covered. Aaron, our worship pastor, covered last month as well. So from the very beginning, he exalts Jesus. He is the image of God. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He upholds the universe with his majesty, the sweeping picture of Christ. And then the author goes on to kind of build this case for the superiority of Christ. And the book is called Hebrews because it's written to the Jewish diaspora all throughout Asia Minor. As here, I know that you have a Jewish background. Let me help you understand your new faith by helping you understand your new savior. And he goes to great lengths to explain to them why Jesus is superior. And he does this through four major comparisons. He compares Jesus to Moses. He compares Jesus to the angels. He says Jesus is superior to the high priests. And he says that Jesus is a superior sacrifice. And he goes through and he tells them why Jesus is superior to those things. Now, to the Jewish mind in the first century A.D., all of those comparisons would carry a great deal of heft. They would matter. The Jewish mind would immediately know what that meant, would immediately be taken aback by the boldness of the author of Hebrews, and feel the weight of the comparison that they were being asked to make. But for us in the 21st century in America, those things don't resonate with us like they did with the first century Hebrew mind. We know, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in two decades, you probably already know that we're of the opinion that Jesus is a bigger deal than Moses. Like, we got that one down. You know that already. You know that we think that Jesus is superior to angels. No one's getting confused and worshiping angels. Aaron's never gotten a request for a praise song for angels. Like, we've never gotten a Gabriel praise song request. So we know that. Nobody has any misgivings about me being superior to Jesus. We know Jesus is the superior priest. We know he's the superior priest to everyone that's ever lived. And that's a really hard concept for us to hold on to, I think, when we see it in Hebrews that he's the great high priest. That's a difficult one for us because most of us in this room have never really even had a priest. Most of us in this room have had pastors. And pastors are different than priests, take on a different role than priests, have historically been viewed differently than priests. So that's a tough one for us. And then the sacrifice, none of us in this room have ever performed a sacrifice. If you have, I'd love to talk with you about what led you to do that in your life. I'd like to hear that story. I don't know if I want to commit to a full lunch because you're crazy, but maybe just out there, you just tell me about that time with the goat, okay? But these things are difficult for us to relate to. They don't hit us the same way. So a lot of my thoughts and energy this week went into helping us understand why these are such weighty comparisons, why they are so persuasive, and most importantly, why they're still important to us today in 21st century America so that the book and the message of Hebrews can be just as impactful for us as it was for first century Jews. So I think, as we think about the overview of Hebrews, the most interesting question is, why did those comparisons matter to me today? Why are they important to me today? So we're going to look at them and we're going to ask, why does it matter that Jesus is superior to these things? So the first one that we see, I'm doing kind of a combo platter and you'll see why, but Jesus is superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message is greater than theirs. In your notes, I can't remember if I put it there or not, but there should, it'd be helpful to write above these three points and be bracketed by the text. Jesus is superior because, superior to blank because. So that's, that's the question that we're answering. He's superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message are greater than theirs. Okay. Here's why I kind of combined those two. We probably all know, the Jewish mind certainly knew, that God's law came from Moses. God brought the law down off of Mount Sinai and presented it to the people. Now we often think that just the Ten Commandments were written on those tablets, but those tablets were covered front and back. So we don't know what all was on there, but most certainly more laws. And if you read through the books of Moses, the first five in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, you'll get somewhere around 620 some odd laws depending on which rabbi or scholar you're talking to. And so those were the laws of Moses. And those were the laws around which their religion was framed. Those are the laws around which their culture was built, around which their entire life was formed by following those laws well. And Hebrews is earth shattering to them because it says, hey, Jesus's law is superior to Moses's law. You can cast Moses's law aside. It doesn't mean there's not some good ideas in there. The one about like not committing adultery, we should probably carry that principle forward. But those laws are done. It's now Jesus's new law that he gives us in John. Jesus tells us that in these two things are summed up all of the law and the prophets. Everything that Moses or the prophets ever wrote or writings that's ascribed to them can be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells us that early in his ministry. But then at the end of his ministry, he's sitting around with the disciples and he says, this new command I give you, there's this new thing I want you to do. I'm going to add to the, I'm going to sweep away those commands. I'm going to give you this new command. Follow this. I want you to love your neighbor. I want you to love others as I have loved you. It's this new command that Jesus gives. And so that command is superior to all of the commands that came from Moses in the Old Testament. It's also superior to all the commands that come after that. His message is superior. This is what it means with the angels really quickly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the angels that took the tablets from God and delivered them to Moses as God's holy and anointed messengers. So what we're seeing in these two comparisons is Jesus' message is greater than any message that's come before or will come since, and his law is the greatest law, superior to all other laws, and it's the only one worth following. This is incredibly important for us because we live in a culture and we are people who are incredibly vulnerable to the insidious slide towards legalism. We are incredibly vulnerable to reducing our faith to a list of do's and don'ts. Okay, I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Like, I get that. But is it a sin if I do blank? I hate that question. Is it a sin if I do this? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it a sin if I go there? Is it a sin if I have this? That's an immature question. It's almost irrelevant. Is it a sin? And we even do it in the early stages of our faith. Am I in or am I out? When I die, am I going to burn forever or dance in the streets? Which one is it? I just want to make sure I'm praying the right prayer so I don't burn forever. That seems like a bummer. So I'm going to believe in this. Am I in or am I out? Is there an unforgivable sin? Is there something that if I do it, I'm going to lose my salvation and then I'm out? And we try to make it about the rules. We enter into Christianity kind of asking the leader, like whoever's in charge here, can I just have my personnel handbook? I just need to know when my vacation days are. I need to know how many Sundays I can miss in a year and still be like, good. You know? I don't want to have to feel that out. We want our policy handbook. And when we make that our faith, we pervert it and distort it into things that it ought not be and was never intended to be. When we try to make the Bible basic instructions before leaving earth, have you heard that? If you haven't heard it, sorry, because it's stupid. And I just told you it, now you know. We try to make it God's handbook for life. There's a rule for everything, we just got to find it. And when you do that, the people who know the rules the best and appear to follow them the best are the spiritually mature ones. Meanwhile, the people over there who don't follow what we think are the rules super well are actually getting busy loving other people as Christ loved them. But we don't value them because we value the rules. So it's important to let Hebrews remind us that Jesus' law is superior to the laws that we add to his law. Because we love to say yes and. We love to turn Christianity into an improv class. Yes, that's true, and this. Yes, to be a believer, what does God ask of you? That you would love other people as Jesus loved you. Yes. And also you shouldn't watch shows that are rated MA on Netflix. You should not do that. Yes. And you should love other people as Jesus loved you. And you shouldn't say cuss words. Because we got together in a room at some point, and we decided that these words that are spelled this way are bad. And you can't say them. And they're very offensive. And they offend the very heart of God. Jesus didn't make that law. We do yes and, and we start to build other rules that are requisite for our faith. And at the end of that is legalism. And some of y'all grew up in legalism. I know my parents grew up in legalism. My mom went to a church outside of Atlanta where you couldn't, if you're a girl, you were not allowed to wear skirts above the knees. They all had to be to the knees or below. And if they weren't, you're a sinner. You couldn't go, you weren't even allowed to go to the movie theater. If you're going to see a Disney movie, you cannot, you cannot go to the theater. You were not, your family was not allowed to own a deck of cards because with those cards, you might gamble and offend the sensibilities of God. And what happens when we do that is people like my mom who grow up in that, when they grew up in that, in their adolescence, they're riddled with all this guilt of things that they're supposed to do and shame for not being able to do them. And that shame isn't coming from Jesus because you've offended his law. That shame is coming from rickety old deacons because you offended their sensibilities. And it's not right. We should always choose love over law because that's what Jesus asked us to do. And here's what can happen when we do that. At the last church I worked at, there was a policy, and some of you are familiar with policies like these. They're particularly prominent in the South. There was a policy that you could not consume alcohol in public. You had to privately foster your own alcoholism. You couldn't consume it in public. You can have it in your house. You can have it with trusted friends. But you can't consume it in public and you can't be seen purchasing it by someone from the church. It's absurd policy. Be all in or all out. Just say don't drink it. That's way less hypocritical than drive to DeKalb County to get it and then drive back. So one day, I'm cutting my grass. I'm relatively new to the neighborhood. And when I finish up, my neighbor, Luis, comes out. He says, hey man, hot day. I said, yeah, it's hot. He goes, you want to have a beer with me? Now that's against the rules. I'm not allowed to have a beer with Luis because I don't want to, I'm not going to get into it. According to the rules, this is bad. But he's my neighbor and we know what do you want to have a beer with me means. He's showing me hospitality. He wants to talk to me. He wants to get to know me and I need to love him. And it's not very loving of me to be like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get my water. That's just not what you do. So I said, sure. I had a beer, an illicit, an illicit beer. God, I'm still sorry. And we talked and we became buddies. And Luis had a stepson and two sons that lived with him as well, him and his wife as well. Gabriel, Yoel, and Yariel. And over the course of the next six years, I got to be their pastor. And I got to baptize all four of those guys in the church. Now, if I had said no that day, could that still have happened? Sure. But, I chose love over law, and God used it. We should be people who choose love over law, understanding that Jesus' law is the superior law. And just in case you think I'm letting people off the hook to do whatever you want under Jesus' law, as long as you're loving others, it is absolutely impossible to love others as Jesus loved us without being fueled and imbued by the love of the Holy Spirit. We cannot love others as Jesus loved us if we do not know Jesus and love him well. That the two things that sum up the law and the prophets, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen, love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as Jesus did if you do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. It takes care of everything. And suddenly there's times when you shouldn't watch that, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't have that, or you shouldn't shouldn't go there or you should do this or you should do that, but not because it offends some law or sensibility that we've added to over the years, but because to do that or to not do that is the most loving action to take. That's why it's important for us to still acknowledge that Jesus's law is the superior law and that Jesus is a superior messenger and the angels. Now your notes are out of order. The next one we're going to do is priest and then sacrifice. So I'm sorry about that. But it's important to us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priests because Nate is broken. It's important for us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priest because I am broken. When we were running through the slides before the service started, we got to this one, and the band and the tech team laughed at me. They're like, Nate, you think we don't know that? We haven't pieced that one together. And I said, well, my mom's coming. So this one's for her. Sorry, mom, this is news to you. I know that you don't need me to tell you that I'm broken and that I'm a human. And that I'm going to teach you the wrong stuff sometimes. The way I think about faith and the Bible and God and Scripture and all the things evolves. It changes. There's things I taught when I was 30 that I'm so embarrassed about now. And there's things I'm saying to you right now that when I'm 52, I'm going to be like, oh, what a moron. I just know that's true. I'm broken. And even though you guys know that, and you guys know not to put pastors on pedestals, and you would probably all say that you have a pretty healthy idea about that, and I consider it part of my personal ministry to you to act in such a way where it's very easy for you to not put me on a pedestal. That's my ministerial gift to you guys. You would probably all say that you know better than that. But we still get the jokes. Those still happen. I had a friend, a good buddy, still a friend of mine named Heath Hollinsworth. Heath had three brothers. He still has three brothers. Jim was the oldest and Jim was an associate pastor at the church that Heath and I both worked at. So we all worked together. And then Ryan and Hunter worked construction. So they're a little bit less important in the kingdom of God than me and Heath and Jim. Which is the, that's the point I'm making. And whenever they would be around their dad for a meal and it came time to pray for the meal, Heath was in charge of the service. He was program director. It was a big church. So he had positions like program director. Here, Aaron does that. But whenever it came time to pray for a meal, their dad really didn't like praying in public, so he would always get one of the boys to do it, and he'd kind of look them over, and he'd be like, Jim, why don't you lead us today? You're the closest to the Lord. You have the most direct line. And Heath would be like, I work at a church too, and I'm sure it flew all over Ryan and Hunter. But he would joke about it. It didn't really make him mad. He just thought it was the stupidest thing because Jim was ordained and Heath wasn't. His dad thought he had a more direct line to the Lord. And as stupid as that sounds, you guys say that to me. I know we don't really believe it, but we keep saying it. When I golf with y'all and I hit one in the woods, which is rare, but when I hit one in the woods and it comes bouncing out just miraculously, just a squirrel throws it and it just lands in the middle of the fairway, somebody is going to say, got that pastor bounce, somebody's going to say it. We make the jokes and we think the things, and I can tell you from personal experience, we exonerate pastors too much. We honor pastors too much. We think too much of them. We have too great an expectation for them. I am not to be exonerated. My job in God's kingdom is not more important than your job. My gifting is not more valuable than your gifting. And listen, your character is not less important than my character. A lot of us have more expectations for me and what my character should be than for ourselves. And that makes no sense because you're a royal priesthood too. If it's okay for you and not okay for me, then you either need to raise your standards for yourself or lower them for me. Probably raise. And I don't mean to hit that too hard, but the church has a long history of making the people who stand here way more important than they actually are. And we've got to knock that off. While I'm here, and just kind of kicking you guys in the gut, let me kick you in the teeth. The other thing I was thinking about with priests and why this is important is the historic role of the priest. Do you realize that for a vast majority of Christian history, from the first century A.D. to now, for the vast majority of that, Christendom did exist under a priesthood. And that those priests were the sole arbiters of the truth of God in the lives of their people. Do you understand that? The people, for much of history, were largely illiterate. The vast majority of people were illiterate for much of church history. And before the printing press, a Bible was so expensive that it took the whole town to raise money to get one, and then they'd put it up on the lectern in the church or in the pulpit, and they would literally chain it so that nobody could steal the Bible because it was that valuable, and it's the only one that existed in the town, and because everyone's largely illiterate, the only person who can read it is the pastor. Do you understand how easy it is to manipulate when that is true? Do you understand how vulnerable that populace was to the malice that might be in their pastor? Do you understand how limiting it is for your faith if there's only one person who can explain to you who's reading scripture on your behalf and then telling you what it says and then telling you what you should do about that? That's how we got indulgences and we paid for St. Peter's Basilica because they manipulated the masses in that way. Because I'm the only one in the room who can read this and I get to tell you what it means. That's incredibly harmful. And now, we live in a time when Bibles are ubiquitous everywhere. You all probably have multiple Bibles in your home. You probably have more Bibles than you do people. If you'd like to add to your collection, take one of ours. You can download it on your phone. You can look it up on the World Wide Web. You have universal access to the scriptures of God. And yet, I see so many of you, so many Christians, walking through life, functioning as scriptural illiterates, trusting your pastor to spoon feed you truth twice a month for 30 minutes. And that's all you know of this. People have fought and people have died and people have lived to make this available to you. And yet as Christians, many of us live our lives as functional illiterates who still rely on our pastor or spiritual leader to spoon feed us the truth twice a month? How can we be Christians and be so disinterested in what God tells us? How can we call ourselves passionate followers of Christ and yet not read about him? How can we have access to this special revelation of God and the inspired and authoritative words within it that tell us not basic instructions for life but about our wild and wonderful and mysterious father? They tell us all about that and we have access to it all the time. We can read it whenever we want. We can do all the research we want. We can even, you can download professors walking you through this as you explore it on your own. And yet we function as illiterates still acting like the only source of truth is our pastor for whatever sermon they want to give that day. Jesus is your pastor. He's your source of truth. And he made sure that this got left for you so that you could learn about him. I'm here to augment the work that you're doing. I can't do the work for your whole life. Neither can your small group leader. It's important to know that Jesus is our high priest because we have the freedom to go to him and to pray to him whenever we want. We don't need a go-between. We don't need someone else to spoon-feed us truth. He makes it available to us here. Now, let's end on a higher note than that. It's important for us to know that Jesus was the superior sacrifice because he was enough. It's important for us to know that Jesus was a superior sacrifice because he was. This is important to mention. Because the old sacrificial system, you had to perform a sacrifice, and then you were good until you messed up again, and then you had to go back and you had to sacrifice. Like I wonder about the people who like went to the temple for a certain festival and they performed all their sacrifices and they're good. They're good before God. If they die, they're fine. And then they like take a wrong turn or there's traffic getting out of Jerusalem and they say things they shouldn't say. Like, I guess we got to go back to the temple and do this again. But Jesus is a superior sacrifice because we need one for all time. That's it. We're done. We don't have to go back and keep making sacrifices. And yet, we do the yes and thing again where we go, yeah, Jesus died for me and he made me right before God, but now that I'm a Christian, I keep messing up, so I need to do more and I need to better, and I need to perform my own personal sacrifices to get myself back in good graces with God. And we make Jesus' sacrifice not enough. Yeah, that was good then, but I know better now, and I need to keep working harder and keep being hard on myself and keep making my own sacrifices to then get back into the good graces of God so that he will love me more and approve of me more. And we live our lives, I do this too, as if Jesus' sacrifice wasn't enough. And now God in his goodness and glory and perfection requires me, Nate, to make greater sacrifices to supplement the insufficient sacrifice that Jesus made for me. I think that we would do well to wake up every morning and remind ourselves, even if we have to say it out loud, what Jesus has done for me is enough. God loves me as much as he possibly can and ever will. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me less. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me more. And there's nothing I can do today to make myself more right before God. Jesus was enough. He did that for me. And then walk in the goodness and freedom of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Walk in that fullness. Walk in that grace. Walk in that gratitude by allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to be enough. That's why Hebrews can still, that's how Hebrews can still resonate with us today. By acknowledging that Jesus is superior to the law and the message of old, that he's the superior priest that gives us unfettered access to him, and we ought to passionately pursue that, and that he is the greatest sacrifice because he's enough for us once and for all. We don't have to keep supplementing that with our insufficiency. And to do all of this, as we're reminded of all of this, and we start with the sweeping prose about Christ, and then we see the comparisons, he starts to close his book by drawing this conclusion, and I think it's a great place for us to stop and put our focus on today as we prepare our hearts for communion after the sermon. But he starts to summarize his book and to wrap up by telling us to do this. I preach about this lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, my Bible says, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. In light of all that we learned, in light of who Jesus is, the image of God, the very imprint of His nature, and in light of the ways that Jesus is superior and serves us and sacrifices for us and is our high priest, in light of the law that is to love Jesus with all our heart, in light of the law that is to love other people as Jesus loved us and then so in turn love Christ and be fueled by that love, in light of all these things, what are we to do? What are the rules that we're supposed to follow? How are we supposed to live this Christian life? Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. Run your race. Go out there and run hard. Pursue Jesus with everything you've got. Go love other people with your whole heart. And to do it well, you've got to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we don't do that by white-knuckling it. We don't do that by trying to be our own sacrifice. We don't do that by supplementing the work of Christ in our life. No, we do it by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If we'll do that, we will follow God's laws. We will pursue Jesus hard. We will love others well, and we will have run a good race. That's the point of Hebrews. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are, for how you've loved us. Thank you for your son. Father, I pray that it would be critically important to us to acknowledge the superiority of Christ. That it would be critically important to us to pursue Him, to love Him, to know Him. Father, if we are not in Your Word, if we're not pursuing You on our own, would you light a fire in us to do that? If we've spent too many years not knowing your Bible well, would you let this be the year that fixes it? If we've spent too many years adding to your law, would this be the year that we let that go? If we've spent too many years supplementing your sacrifice, would this be the year that we finally accept yours? And God, as we go from here, would you help us run our race? It's in Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. Thank you for being here on Palm Sunday as we catapult into Easter. Easter is just about here. It feels like this year is going by so very quickly. And I love Easter. This Palm Sunday is part five of our series, The Table, and we're going to be looking at the Last Supper, the most famous of Jesus's meals at the table. And then next week we get to Easter. For me, Easter is my favorite holiday. Easter is victory holiday. Easter is when Jesus wins and death loses its sting. Easter, to me, for a Christian, is the best. It's the greatest holiday. I know Thanksgiving is great, and I know that Christmas is fantastic, but for me, from a spiritual perspective, Easter is the one that I most enjoy celebrating. Although Christmas is tough because Christmas is pretty good, and one of the things I really like about Christmas and the celebration of Christmas is how understated it is, how understated the arrival of Christ is. I know that's funny, but when it's understated in the Bible, not understated in our culture. Okay, sorry about that. That's less than clear. That also should have been read as a joke. But no, no, no. The arrival of Jesus is incredibly understated. And as a people, I think we are drawn to humble, understated things. When you consider it, the entire Old Testament points to this coming Messiah. God sends his son to earth to reconcile us to him. We're going to talk about that more in a little bit. And Jesus shows up. And when he shows up, when this great Messiah shows up from heaven, we would expect him, I think, to show up like he does in Revelation 19 with just armies of angels behind him and trumpets sounding. And in he thunders to the world. And that's not how he arrives. He arrives as a helpless baby to a nondescript mom in a nondescript town in a nondescript country. And it's just like, ta-da, he's here. And I think that's a really neat part of the Christmas story, and it's a really neat part of how our God works. Our God is remarkably understated, leaving us often to find the impact and the largesse of the things that he does. Similarly, I believe that the Last Supper is every bit as understated and significant as the arrival of Jesus himself. This is Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday launches us into Holy Week. Palm Sunday signifies the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem. If you've read your Gospels carefully or closely or paid attention over the course of your life as you've interacted with the stories of Jesus, you'll find this peculiar thing that Jesus does whenever he performs a miracle. It feels like he's always like, okay, I'm going to heal your leprosy, but don't tell anybody. Okay, I'm going to heal your mom, but don't tell anybody I did it. And you're like, why is he doing this? This is weird. Isn't the point to tell other people about Jesus? Because Jesus knows that if too much fanfare gets out, that certain things are going to be set in motion that cannot be undone that will lead to his crucifixion. So when he goes into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he is knowingly setting in motion the wheels of events that will lead to his crucifixion. That's what Holy Week is. On Friday is the crucifixion of Jesus. It's called Good Friday. We're going to have a service here, and we're going to reflect on that. But I wanted to take some time this morning to reflect on what the Last Supper was and why it is so very significant. Because I think the Last Supper, this last Passover meal, the institution of communion together, again, is every bit as understated and significant as the arrival of Jesus himself. And I want to tell you why I think this, and I want that to allow us to kind of reflect on the significance of what the Last Supper represents. So before I continue, let me just read you the account of the Last Supper from the Gospel of Luke. It's in all four Gospels, but we've been going through the book of Luke, so I'm going to read from the Gospel of Luke in chapter 22, verses 15 through 20. He said, And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant of my blood. We'll stop right there. It's easy to just be reading this story, to read the Gospels, get to chapter 22, read this part. They're having dinner. They break bread. He says, this is a symbol of my crucifixion. If you continue to read the story, by the way, one of you is going to betray me, and then move on. But I want us to understand what's happening here. Because, again, the Passover, the Last Supper, immortalized by Da Vinci, is one of the most significant, impactful nights in all of the Bible, what he's talking about here. Do you understand that the whole Bible points to this night, to this weekend, to this death, and to this resurrection? Do you understand that the whole Bible points to the illustration of bread and wine that Jesus is using here? Even the night on which he chose to do it, they're celebrating Passover. Passover is a Hebrew celebration that is a celebration and reminder of the grace that God gave them when they were in Egypt to set them free from slavery. If you turn to the very beginning of your Bible in the book of Exodus, what you find is that God's chosen people are slaves to the Egyptians. And that God raises up a man named Moses, and he gives him the instruction, go to Pharaoh and set my people free. Pharaoh does not like this idea. God sends 10 plagues to change Pharaoh's mind. And the last one that he sends to break his will and to change his mind once and for all is the death of the firstborn son by the angel of death passing over Egypt. And the plague is this one night, the angel of death is going to pass over the nation of Egypt. And if you do not have the blood of a spotless lamb painted on your doorpost, on your doorframe, then that angel of death claims your firstborn son. If you do have the blood of a spotless lamb painted on the frame of your door of your house, then that blood is sufficient for the death and your firstborn son is not claimed. That is a very clear picture of the death of Jesus on the cross. I'm not going to go through the whole thing and make you work with me, but if you were to be a Hebrew person at that time and you heard that you needed to sacrifice a lamb and put its blood on your doorpost, you would paint it in the top center and you would paint it at about the height of your shoulder on the two frames. And that would form the shape of a cross on your door, the blood of a spotless lamb. What was Jesus called years later? Behold, the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. We just sang about the lamb of God. Jesus is the lamb of God who was sacrificed, who died a death so that we don't have to. And even though they didn't realize what they were doing when they were painting the blood on the doorframe, they were painting a picture of the crucifixion of Jesus. They, without knowing it, were pointing you to this and pointing all of history to the cross. They were painting a picture of what Jesus is depicting in the Last Supper, and then they go into the desert. And in the desert, some scholars say they could have been about 500,000 strong. However many it was, it was too many to feed off of what they could find to eat in the desert. So what did God do? You know. He sent manna. He sent the daily bread. He sent the daily sustenance for what they needed. He sent them enough for that day. We hear echoes of this in the Lord's Prayer. When the disciples look at Jesus and they're like, you pray different than anybody we've ever heard. Will you teach us how to pray? Jesus prays in part. Give us this day our daily bread. Give us our manna. Give us what we need for today. Give us the Jesus that we need to get through today. Give us the grace and the peace and the mercy and the love and the kindness and the persistence to get through today. What happened in the desert, in between Egypt and Israel, every day is God providing enough for that day. It is a picture of his provision of Jesus later. Manna is most closely associated with bread. It is the picture of the bread that Jesus would break at the Passover meal. It's a picture of who Jesus was. In the book of John, Jesus says, I am the bread of life. When you eat of me, you will hunger no more. He says, on the living water, when you drink of me, you will thirst no more. Jesus says, I am the bread of life. I am all that you need. And then as I was thinking about this and just, and there's more to do, I just don't have time to tie together all the symbolism in scripture that points us to the Passover meal and what that symbolizes. But even as I was thinking about last week's sermon on the feeding of the 5,000, there was five loaves of bread. And Jesus took them and he began to break them. And he began to feed everyone who was there, maybe about 20,000 people. And I wonder if there is a point, like bread number one. This one's good for about 3,500 folks. Oh, that one's done. And then he goes to the next one. I doubt that. This is just a guess. Okay, this is just a hunch. This is not in the Bible. This is just Nate talking to you. I wonder if he didn't take the first bread and break it, put it in the basket and the second one and break it and put it in the basket and the third and then the fourth and then he got to the fifth. And I wonder if that was the one that just kept breaking. I wonder if that was the one that had enough. And I wonder if the first four loaves weren't a picture of the Old Testament sacrificial system and the temporary sacrifices that we make. They only work for a little bit and then they run out. And then if that last piece of bread wasn't a picture of Christ being broken over and over and over and over and over again for all the people there so that they had more than what they needed. Even if it didn't go that way. And he dispersed the breaking equally over the five. It's bread being broken over and over and over and over again for all who were there so that all could have their fill. It is a picture of the crucifixion. Of Jesus. The bread of life being broken for us to give to all who have need. So much so that there is plenty of Jesus left over to go around for everyone. All of the Bible points to this night that is a picture of what happens in the hours to come. What I want us to understand is that what's symbolized here at the Passover meal, at the Last Supper, our entire history points to this singular act. Our entire history, the entire history of the world culminates and points to this singular act. What happens, what Jesus is depicting there in Luke 22 when he says, this is my body that's broken for you. Speaking of his body hanging on the cross. This is my blood that's poured out for you. Speaking of his blood that is spilt from the cross. All of history points to that singular act. It is the denouement of human history, what we see happen on Good Friday and then subsequently on Easter Sunday. And this Passover meal is a picture of it. Not only that, but all of our human history and all of our present traditions point back to what happened on the cross. So all of human history points to the singular act. And then everything that happens from then continually points us back to what happens on the cross. We're going to celebrate baptisms next week. Those are made possible by the cross. We're going to celebrate communion this week. That's made possible by the cross. Everything, everything, everything in history points to the crucifixion of Christ. Which begs the question, and it's really what this morning needs to be about, why is the crucifixion worth all of history's focus? Why is this one singular act worth all of the organization and the pointing and the pictures and the imagery that we find in the Old Testament pointing us to the crucifixion? Why does all of history reflect back on and reliant upon the crucifixion? Now, I know that we're in a Bible-believing church, so this seems like an obvious question. Why is the crucifixion such a big deal? And many of you know the answers. But I did think it was worth taking a Sunday as we barrel into Easter to reflect and to consider what is won for us at the death of Christ? What exactly happened on the cross? I think for many of us, if not all of us, we go to this place in our mind, well, that's how we're saved. And that's fine. That's a good start. But I would encourage us to reflect much more deeply on what is actually happening in the death of the Son of God on the cross. I'm not sure that you can make an exhaustive list of all the things that the crucifixion does, of all the things that it wins, of all the things that it stands for, of all the things that it symbolizes. I'm not sure that you can exhaust that list, so I'm not going to attempt to do that. But I do have for you this morning three things that I think that the crucifixion does for us. The first is the crucifixion exhausts God's wrath for his children. The crucifixion exhausts God's wrath for his children. Now, this is not something we talk about a lot. It's not polite dinner conversation, God's wrath. How have you experienced God's wrath in your life lately? That's not something that we do. And we don't really like to reflect upon it. Matter of fact, I have some people in different Bible studies and just in different conversations that I'm in, in and around church, who almost have a problem with God's wrath. Where we'll see passages in Scripture that indicate that God's angry with sinners, that God does have wrath for us, and they'll kind of ask a question, which is it? Do we serve a God of love or do we serve a God of wrath? And you just kind of have to go, yeah. No, you take 40 years and figure it out. But let's talk just a little bit about the wrath of God so that we can see that it is an earned wrath. I happen to believe that the Bible is true and that we can trust what it says. And if we will accept that the Bible is true, then what it tells us is that there is a perfect creator God. And that that perfect creator God, out of His goodness, created us so that we might experience Him. He literally said, what we've got going on here, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is so good that I'm going to create a whole race of people so that they can share in this. And so he created the earth. And at the very, very beginning of the Bible, we see that he created the Garden of Eden, and he put Adam and Eve there. And when he was done with creation, he looked at it and he says, it is good. It is very good. It is perfect. This is exactly what I wanted. And we learn later that in that perfect utopian world that God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That in this perfect place, all that God wanted was to be with us and all we wanted was to be with him. And it was everything that God had intended. And God was perfectly happy to live, to exist in this way with us for all of eternity. The only rule was from God, I get to be God and you don't. That's it. I get to be God, you don't get to be God. As long as you're good with that, we can exist like this. And Adam and Eve said, yeah, it's not going to work. We need to be equal partners here. And when we sin, that's what we say. You realize that's what all sin is? Any sin you've ever committed, all you're doing is saying, for now, you're a wise, trusted advisor, or you're a father figure I resent, whatever you want to pick. But you are not God. I am. I'm going to make my own choices. That's all sin is. So we collectively, at different times in our life, look at the creator of the universe who placed us here to experience a relationship with him, and we said, nah, I'm like you. I'm as good as you are. I'm going to follow my own rules. I don't trust your rules for my life. And when that happened in the garden, everything broke. They corrupted God's perfect creation. When sin entered the world, creation broke down. Things entered into creation that God did not intend for his creation. Things like cancer and abuse and hurt people who hurt other people and on and on and on the list goes. That was not in the Garden of Eden. That was not what God intended. When we sinned, when we declared that we were God too, we broke it. And we broke that relationship with him. The one thing that God wanted for us to be with him, we broke that. And God looked at us in love and he knew that we cannot fix this. We are powerless to repair that relationship. So what does he do to repair that relationship? Genesis chapter 12. He enacts this grand plan through the line of Abraham to bring us a Messiah who will die a perfect death on the cross so that we don't have to. He will be the blood of the Lamb on our doorframe so that we do not have to die. So that we might be reconciled back to Him. He says, I created a perfect world. I made it just for you. I made it so that you could experience relationship with me. You messed it up. You can't fix it. I'm going to fix it at great cost to myself. And then we do one of two things. Either we never at all accept that gift. I heard a quote from Ted Turner years ago. This is a very loose paraphrase because I don't remember it wholly and it wasn't worth looking up because I can get the point across to you. He basically said, why did Jesus die for me? I never asked him to do that. I don't need it. When we in our life do not become Christians, do not at any point express a faith in Christ and a gratitude for his death on the cross for us and a repentance of the sins that necessitated that death. We are essentially saying what Ted Turner said. Who's this Jesus guy? Why did he die on the cross for me? I didn't need that anyways. Now tell me that an all-powerful, perfect God who created us to exist in relationship with Him, who built a bridge back to Him at great cost to Himself, you explain to me why He shouldn't be rightly offended at that disgusting attitude. And then for the Christians who have accepted the love of Christ, who have accepted His sacrifice, understanding that it covers over our sins, what do we do to inflame and deserve the wrath of our God? We cheapen Christ's blood by presuming upon God's grace. With every willful act of reclaiming the God role in our life, with every willful act of reclaiming the God role in our life, with every determined break from God's will and choosing our will, with every knowing sin that we commit, we cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. I know I shouldn't do this, but I'm a sinful person. God has forgiven me. I'm good. I've prayed the prayer. I've repented. I go to church. I believe in Jesus. I know I shouldn't do this thing, but also I know that I'm good. God's got it. As if we're at some corporate dinner and we opt for another glass of cheap wine because we know that God is footing the bill. Every time we willfully sin and act discordantly with God's will in our life, we cheapen the blood of Christ that he spilled on the cross because we presume upon the grace that it signifies. And you tell me, if you're in heaven watching us trample the blood of your son with our willful sin, would you not be just a little ticked? Would you not be just a little annoyed? So yes, we serve a wrathful God. But yes, that wrath is earned. But, this is the beautiful part. When Jesus is hanging on the cross and he utters, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It is in that moment that our earned wrath is poured out on his son on our behalf so that we don't have to experience that. God's wrath is exhausted in that moment on his own son so that we live life exempt from God's wrath, only experiencing God's love. This is why it's so puzzling, I think, for Christians when we encounter the wrath of God in scripture to be told that it exists because we don't experience that God. We experience a loving God without acknowledging that the wrath that he has for us was already poured out on his son so that we don't have to experience it. So what does the crucifixion do? It saves you. Sure, fine, use that language. But what it really does is it exhausts the wrath of God for you so that all that's left for you from the God of heaven is love. So we can sing our songs and so we can live in peace and so that we can be reconciled back to him. That's what's won on the cross is we don't experience God's wrath. People who never come to faith do and it's terrible. But lest we make the cross, as we often do, about our personal salvation project, which is not its intent, let us also acknowledge what else the crucifixion does. Because the crucifixion reconciles all of creation. It reconciles all of creation back to God. I love Romans 8, and I quote it often when it says that all of creation groans together for the reconciliation of us back to our God, for our adoption as sons, for the forgiveness of sins. All of creation groans to be reconciled back to the perfect utopia that God intended. When we get the call that someone is very sick, that someone found a lump or a mass somewhere, and the results of the scan come back and it is not good. That is creation groaning for a return back to Eden, for the return of the King. That is creation groaning for Jesus to come make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. When a marriage breaks down and children are left being shuttled back and forth, that is creation groaning for the way things are supposed to be. When a husband is abusive and a wife feels that shame, creation is groaning. When the leaves fall off the trees and die, and winter is barren, and the days are short, creation is groaning. When COVID sweeps through and shuts us down, creation is groaning. It is telling us, this is not right. This does not feel right. When tragedy strikes and we're sitting in the middle of it, creation is groaning with you for the reconciliation of God's children to himself, for the forgiveness of sins and the restoration of Eden. Creation is groaning for the promises in Revelation. And those groanings are only fulfilled through the cross. Through Jesus reconciling not just us back to our God, but creation back to its creator. On the cross, we are promised that those things will not always be true, which begs us to discuss the last thing I want to say about what the crucifixion does, which is the crucifixion gives us hope for the future. We're told in Romans 5 that we have a hope that will not be put to shame. And if you have lived life for any amount of time, you know that everything you hope in eventually puts you to shame. Everything that you've ever placed your hope in has hurt you. Everything that you have ever placed your hope in has let you down. Except God. There are times, I will admit, when He feels like He has let you down. But what we have in the crucifixion is the promise that ultimately he did not. Do you understand that if we don't have the crucifixion of Jesus and the subsequent resurrection, that all there is is careening through life from tragedy to tragedy? Do you understand that if there's no crucifixion, then all we have is Ecclesiastes, where the wisest man in the world at the time wrote, with much wisdom comes much vexation. The smarter I get, the sadder things are. Do you understand that if we don't have the crucifixion, that all there is, it's just eat, sleep, and be merry for tomorrow we die. If today happens to be a good day, well then bucko, buddy. Good job, because tomorrow's going to stink. If there's no crucifixion, then when we lose a loved one, it's just goodbye. That's it. Death is final. It wins. It will claim us all. And we live with that cloud over our head for our whole lives. And the best we can do is stave it off. But because of the crucifixion, when we lose a loved one who knows Jesus, it's simply goodbye for now. And frankly, I don't know how a hurt world, how a lost world makes sense of tragedy without the crucifixion and the hope that one day these sad things will be made right and untrue. How do you cope with what happened in Nashville without the crucifixion? How do you watch your dreams crumble around you in the marriage that you thought that was going to work and hasn't without the crucifixion? How do you deal with miscarriage and loss and illness without the crucifixion? How do you find any hope that anything gets any better without the crucifixion? Without the promise that one day our God will be with his people and his people will be with our God and there will be no more sin and no more crying and no more death anymore for the former things have passed away. How do you have hope for that without the crucifixion? That's what's won there. That's what the crucifixion means. It's not just our personal salvation project. It exhausts the wrath of God. It reconciles all of creation back to Him. And it gives us a hope that this world can't touch. We asked earlier why our entire history looks to this moment and it's simply this. Our entire history points to this singular act because our entire future relies upon it. Everything in human history is marshaled to focus us on the cross because all of the hope of the future of humanity rests on the cross. So when we celebrate communion, that's what we celebrate. In just a little bit, I'm going to pray, and then the elders will come forward, and we'll move into a time of communion together. And when we do that, remember these things. Remember that as you break that bread, that it symbolizes Christ's body breaking for you on the cross. As you dip it in the wine, that symbolizes his blood poured out for you on the cross. And that on that cross that day, the wrath of God, the earned wrath of God was exhausted on your Savior so that you might experience the love of a good God. And that on that day, there is a promise made that one day He will reconcile all of creation back to Himself exactly the way He intended. And that on that day, the pain that you feel right now, the hard things that you are walking through right now will be anathema. They will be no more. It is done. There is a hope that you can cling to. So I'm going to pray, and as I do, I would like for you to pray too. Pray with me or pray on your own. But allow God to prepare your heart to take communion. Carry to that communion table whatever it is you need to carry. Carry to that communion table whatever brokenness it was that you walked in here with this morning. If you walked in here in a good space, if life is good, if you're in a sweet season, then praise God for that sweet season as you break the bread that earned you that season. If you're in a time that makes you need hope, then break that bread for hope. That God sees you, that God knows you, that God loves you, and that God has made promises to you and that you can hope in those promises and that they will not be put to shame. As I pray, spend time preparing your heart for communion, and then I'll give you some instructions as the band comes up. and over again in my life. I know that the chances are high that I will presume upon your grace this week. And the week after that. Thank you for loving me anyways. For pursuing me anyways. Thank you for loving us despite our willful disobedience. Thank you for exhausting your wrath on your son on our behalf so that we might experience your love. I pray that we would walk faithfully and gratefully in that love. And God, to those who need it most, for those who are hurting, I pray that communion this morning can be a symbol and a reminder of hope. That not all days will be like today. It's simply creation groaning for you. And that in your perfect time, in your perfect way, you'll send your son back to get us and make all these wrong things right and make all these sad things untrue. Thank you for everything that was won on the cross. Give us a fresh gratitude for it that we might walk in that. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody, Alan, welcome back to the service. It's good to see you all. Did you shout getting some coffee? That was a great timing. That was the time. That was the spot. It's better than leaving right now. Yeah, you did great. No, you did great. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that so that in future services, I can make fun of you when you do stuff. And that will be great. This is the second part of our series called The Table. And we're focusing on Jesus's ministry and Luke around the table and how he uses meals purposefully and strategically in his life. And if you've spent time around me, if you've been here for any length of time, you know that one of the things I like to remind people of is the fact that I believe that God speaks to us in stereo. If we hear something from one isolated friend, they say one thing. If a sermon pricks our heart in a certain way, that's great to hear that one thing and try to respond to it correctly. But if we hear it from another friend and then from mom or dad or a husband or wife, and then we hear it from a sermon and then we hear it in a song and then just something, we're scrolling and we see it again, then I would argue that God is trying to get your attention and tell you something very specific. Because again, I believe he speaks in stereo, which is why I thought it was so interesting that I went to a pastor's conference this week in Orlando. And there's like 6,000 other pastors there. Some of the best communicators in the Christian world are there just kind of telling you their ideas and experiences. And it was a real refreshing time. I'll tell you more about that a little bit later in the sermon, but I thought it was really, really interesting that here I am, we're in the middle of this series called The Table. That wasn't my idea, it was Carly's idea, and then I get into it, and it's really, really great stuff. And then I go down to this conference, and what do all the speakers say? The speakers say the future of the Christian church in America is around the table. The future of evangelism in the United States is around the table. The future of discipleship, Christian maturity in our country is around the table. And we believe God is doing something and he is moving and he's moving around our tables. And so I'm sitting in the conference going, okay, I'm in. Like what you got? God, I'm listening. So for me, I do believe that God is speaking through this idea of the table. I shared with you a couple weeks ago, I do think God is doing something here. I do think he's moving here. Look how many of you showed up today. You're better Christians than the people who are cozy and warm watching online. I'm sorry, you know it. If you're home, like, you know that that's true. Thank you for coming here this morning. You really meant it. You really wanted some Jesus today, so we're going to try to take you right to him. But I believe that God is moving, and I believe that God is speaking. And if he's speaking to you about the sacred times around our tables and how we can use those and employ those and use those to push us and others closer to Jesus, then I would encourage you to lean in and listen today as well. This morning is called The Table for Relationship. We're looking at how Jesus uses the table for different purposes throughout his life. And this story we take from Luke chapter 7. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Luke chapter 7. If you didn't bring one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Luke chapter 7 has this great interchange between Jesus and a Pharisee named Simon. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were the lawyers and the senators and the pastors all rolled into one. And Jesus gets invited over to Simon's house, and he has this great discourse. And I'll get into it, and I'll read it. And when I read this passage, it's the second part that we're not going to cover today that always, to me, jumps out as the most resounding portion of this passage. But I'm actually saving that portion of the passage for our Good Friday service. So again, that Friday before Easter, we'll be here. I don't know the time yet, probably seven o'clock, but don't quote me on that. Just don't make other plans that night. Come to our Good Friday service, and we're going to cover the rest of this story there in a different way. But I want to focus on the front half of this story that we find in Luke chapter 7, verses 36 through 39. If you have a Bible, read along with me. If you don't, it should be on the screen. One of the Pharisees asked him, Jesus, to eat with him. And he went into the Pharisee's house and took his place at the table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at the table in the Pharisee's house, him saw this, he said to himself, if this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner. Okay, we'll leave the story there. It goes on, and Simon accuses Jesus of this. Why are you interacting with this woman? Jesus tells a little parable about a debtor being forgiven his debt, two debtors being forgiven their debt, and the larger debtor is the one that is more grateful. And Jesus says this great line, yes, he who is forgiven little loves little, but he who is forgiven much loves much. And it's this great instruction about how grateful we are for Jesus and who he is operates in direct correlation to the weight of our sin that we feel. And if we don't feel a great affection towards Jesus, then it's very likely that we walk around thinking we're a lot better off than we actually are, thinking we're somebody when we ain't. But again, we're going to focus on that with Good Friday service. For this, I think it's helpful and interesting to focus on something else in this story. And before I tell that, just so I know that we're all on the same page, I told you what a Pharisee was. Pharisee was the religious leader, senator, lawyers, all wrapped up into one of the day. They were the religious elite. This woman is from the city, and she is a sinner. So that should tell you what she did and what her profession was. It was the oldest profession in the world. If you still don't know what this woman did for a living, ask someone next to you and, you know, make fun of them if they ask you, and then tell them, okay? But that's who she she was and that's what she did. Women didn't have a lot of options back then. And so she comes in and she anoints his feet and she wipes away, she dumps alabaster ointment on his feet, perfume, and then she cries on his feet, she kisses them, and then she washes his feet with her hair. And I'm not going to get into it. Culturally, this was an okay thing. This was understood. Everybody kind of knew what she was doing. It wasn't nearly as weird and awkward as it would be now. If I come to your house and some lady just wanders in and just starts crying on my feet and dumping perfume on them and kissing them, I'm never coming to your house again, okay? That's super weird. I'm not just going to sit there and be like, well, this is biblical. I'm going to, I'm going to leave. And I'm going to swear to Jen, I do not know that lady. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. But in this context, it's fine. So what's interesting to me about this dinner invitation is why Jesus accepted it. Why did Jesus go? We see him, and we'll look at this next week when we look at the table for celebration. When he asked Levi, the tax collector, who later becomes Matthew and writes the gospel of Matthew, he asked him to be one of his disciples. And Levi says, come to my house, I'm going to throw a feast. And he throws a feast with all of his sinning tax collector friends who don't know Jesus. And then Jesus is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard for going to that party and for going to other parties like that. And Jesus' response is, a physician does not come for the well, but for the sick. I came to seek and save the lost. And so we see in Jesus this very high degree of interest in hanging out with people and being around people who we good church people would not typically associate with because they're gross and we're better than them, right? Spoiler alert, we're not, okay? You suck and they do too, and that's why we all need Jesus. So we know that Jesus accepts those dinner invitations, but this one's interesting to me because it's not from a sinner, quote unquote. It's not from the outcast of society. It's from the religious elite. It's from the people that seem to not need Jesus, who he doesn't seem too interested in carousing with, except he gets an invitation from Simon and Jesus accepts it. Now, why does he accept this invitation? Now, this is a guess for me, okay? I don't have a verse to hang on this. This is my guess based on what I know of Jesus and what I know of Scripture, this is my best guess. You guys know Jesus. You know Scripture as well. You're welcome to your best guess, and you're welcome to disagree with this. But it is a guess. Why did Jesus accept this invitation? Was it to be polite? Maybe. Was it just a commonly accepted practice? It could be. But I think that Jesus was also concerned about Simon's soul. I think that Jesus also wanted him to see the light. We see throughout the New Testament and the Gospels that Jesus is pretty hard on the Pharisees. He calls them a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs. He's pretty pointed with them. If he's going to be harsh with anybody, it's going to be the Pharisees and then a couple times the disciples. But in this scene, Jesus is actually amicable to them. He wants to go spend time with them because I believe that Jesus cares about the souls of the Pharisees as well. Not only because he says he cares about everybody, he says he loves everybody, but we see him go into Simon's house. We see him in John chapter 3 have a private, subtle, under-the-radar discussion so he doesn't get in trouble with Nicodemus, another Pharisee. We see Jesus in quiet moments act favorably towards them. Why? Because he cares about their souls too, and he wants them to know the truth. So I believe that Jesus took this dinner invitation, at least in part, to begin working towards the conversion of Simon, to evangelize him. And he knew that Simon's friends would be there, and he'd have an opportunity to begin to work towards their conversion as well. And I believe that Jesus in his wisdom knew that this woman was going to be there as well, and that would give him an opportunity to include her, to rope her in, to say in front of the religious elite, I love her too. She's all right with me too. And you should accept her at your table as well and quit separating things out and quit thinking that you're better than because you're not. Everyone's equal in the kingdom of God. I believe that he wanted to slowly chip away at their thought processes and chip away at her thought process and invite them in. So I believe that Jesus uses this meal for conversion and inclusion, understanding that both require relationships. I believe that Jesus was using this meal to begin to work towards the conversion of Simon and his friends and the inclusion of this woman and people like her into one table, realizing that both of those goals require relationships, require friendships. Jesus understands that for a man like Simon, entrenched in his ideology, since birth he has been poured into by other probably well-meaning rabbis and spiritual leaders who have simply misled him because they were misled. And it's really scary to think how generational teaching can lead to people reinforcing bad ideas on down the road until you as parents are teaching things to your kids because they were spouted to you by some ignorant Sunday school teacher when you were a little kid and you've never reconsidered them in your whole life. You see how this happens? And so this is what was happening with the Pharisees. It's not that they didn't love Jesus or it's not that they didn't like God and want to be in right standing with Him. It's that they were blind. They had been misled. And you don't break someone like Simon free from his ideology with one exchange in the town square, with one pithy remark or parable or saying. You break someone free like Simon from their ideology with conversations over time. You gradually open their eyes. If there's someone in your life who you love who does not know Jesus, we can take a page out of Jesus' playbook and engage in relationship with them and realize it's going to happen over time and over conversation and over consistency and over watching someone love them like they actually love them and love Jesus too. It takes relationship to see people come to faith. And Jesus also uses relationship for the inclusion of this woman. She is a woman one would assume. Maybe she didn't, but I don't think it's a bad guess to assume that she lived with a degree of shame. Maybe she didn't feel it all the time. Maybe when she was around other people who did what she did and other people who hired the kind of people that she was, maybe she didn't feel shame around them, but in general society, anytime she entered into a house like this, I bet she felt shame. I bet she felt unwanted and unwarranted. I bet she felt rightly excluded from genteel society. And what Jesus is doing here is going, no, no, no, no, she's good with me too. She's okay too. She's included here. When we first wrote this out, I was going to say the table for adoption or the table for inclusion and how we can use our table and we can use our friend groups to invite people into the space and say, they're good with me, they should be good with you too. And that's what Jesus was doing. He was providing her a cover for that relationship and for these people saying, we're all equal and we're all even. The challenge for this with her is that when you live your life in shame, it takes hearing that you're loved and accepted more than once for you to actually believe it, doesn't it? You know this is true in your life. Most of you in this room, if not all of you, have heard plenty of times God loves you, he forgives you, he desires you. We sang earlier, he runs after you. There's no mountain he won't climb up, shadow he won't light up coming after you. You know that intellectually to be true. You may even know that if you're a believer, you're an adopted son or daughter of the king, and he loves you as much as he can ever love you, no matter what you've done, no matter what you're going to do, he is passionately in love with you. And you may know that he approves of you and that he accepts you just the way that you are. But isn't the Christian life a slow, painful acceptance of that? Don't we have a tendency to say other people are loved and accepted, but God does not feel that way about me because I know better? Don't we heap shame and guilt on ourself and assume that we're unacceptable to God and others because of what we've done and assign His acceptance and His love to other people? Isn't it one thing to know intellectually that you're loved and forgiven and another thing to know in your heart and soul and actually live like you are? Doesn't that inclusion by Jesus take a long time for us to learn? So Jesus knows, if I want to convert Simon and his friends, and if I want this woman to know that she's truly included and loved, it's going to take time. It's going to take relationship. And Jesus sets a model of relationships in his life. I don't know if we think of it in those terms or if you've considered that before. But at these meals, we see him building relationship. When Zacchaeus is in the tree and Jesus walks by him, he says, hey, I'm coming to your house for lunch. Like, let's hang, man. Let's go. He develops relationships with his disciples. He develops relationships with the people around him. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were some of his best friends, and he went and retreated there. Those were his people. That's where he was safe and trusted, and they were safe and trusted as well. Relationships are important to Jesus, and I believe he lived a life modeling the importance of these relationships. And I believe that one of the reasons he did it is because Christianity requires relationships. Biblical Christianity requires of us biblical friendships and biblical relationships. The whole Bible is written not to individuals, but to communities, groups of people. Even the books of the Bible that are originally addressed to individuals, Philemon, Titus, Timothy, Acts, and Luke, which are addressed to blessed Theophilus, were intended to be shared as groups, in groups. Were intended for people to consume together. It's this unique perspective of Western philosophy and Christianity that has reduced Christianity and faith to our own personal salvation project, where the most important thing in faith is whether or not we're saved. And Jesus offers us so much bigger, robust gospel and love than whether or not we're going to heaven one day. He offers us a relationship with our creator God now that we can share with others on this outpost of eternity. Christianity was never, ever intended to be lived alone. As a matter of fact, if you've spent any time at Grace, hopefully you've heard me say there is no such thing as a Lone Ranger Christian. I would argue with you it is absolutely impossible to grow as close to Jesus as you can without other people in your life walking with you. That's why when we had a discussion as elders years ago around our current mission statement, connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people, there was some pushback. Some of the folks in the circle at the time felt like it should just be connecting people to Jesus. We should not elevate connecting people to people on that level. It's connecting people to Jesus. And it was kind of tough for them to get over connecting people to people. Like, that feels too simple. That feels too easy. And so we agreed that we would put it second. So there's a clear priority there, which who cares? But I was a real stickler about connecting people to people, and some of the other people in the circle were a stickler about that because I would contend that you cannot grow as close to Jesus as you possibly can without other people in your life who also love you and love Jesus. And so we are committed to connecting people to people to help you in that walk. And if you think that, if you have any hesitation about that being true, about closeness with God being possible without, all I need is my Bible and prayer and God and I'm good. Okay, well Adam had that. The first book of the Bible, second, third chapter, he had that. In chapter two, we see him. He has the perfect relationship with God, the exact relationship with God that God created us for, the exact relationship with God that we will finally one day experience in heaven. Adam walked that. He had that. He walked with God in the cool of the evening. They talked every day. Adam was the perfect man. He was intellectually superior. He was emotionally intelligent. He was utterly fulfilled. And he had a perfect relationship with the perfect God. And he lived on a perfect earth with no pain and no death and no struggling. And he didn't work. It's like living in a country club with just amazing fruit everywhere and pretty much walking through life like me, if you think about like the perfect man. And even in that perfection, he looked around after a period of time and he went to God and what did he say? I'm lonely. I'm lonely. I need, I need a companion. You cannot live out this life on your own. You cannot live the Christian life without relationships. To further that point and to show us how essential they are, I actually want to share with you something I heard this week. I've heard this before from this same guy, and I heard it again, and it was such a good reminder, and I feel bad for not having shared this with you before. But the Bible is full of one another's, isn't it? If you read it, we should be kind one to another, we should pray for one another, we should hold one another accountable. We should confront sin in one another. We should love one another. We should outdo one another in humility. We should bear one another's burdens. We should celebrate with one another. We should mourn and grieve with one another. There's a lot of one another commands in the Bible. And one another's are impossible outside of genuine, honest friendships. All those commands are impossible to obey outside of genuine and honest friendships. Now, there's some that are easier. Be kind one to another. We don't have to know people very well to be kind to them. We can be kind to people. But the better you know somebody, the more kind you can be. If I think about Cindy, our wonderful and lovely sound technician today, and I want to be kind to her. It's her birthday or something. Jen and I can buy her flowers. Buy her flowers and have a flower sent to her house, and oh, that's a nice gesture, whatever. But I know that Cindy loves the Duke Blue Devils. And if you don't, pipe down, nobody cares, okay? She loves them. And so if I made the flowers blue and white and sent them to her, that'd be a little bit extra kind, wouldn't it? Or you know what? I might find out that Cindy doesn't even like flowers. So knock it off with that stuff and send her donuts. I don't know. The better you know somebody, the kinder you can be. But there's some of these that really, unless you know somebody, unless you're friends with them, you can't obey these commands. Pray for one another, which seems simple enough, but you guys have been in a small group and you've been in those circles. Hey, does anybody have any prayer requests? Yeah, could you, my cousin's friend has a girlfriend who's, she might have COVID. Oh gosh, is she okay? I mean, it's just a head cold right now. She's probably okay, but let's pray for her. I'm like, I'm not, nope, I'm not gonna do that. And also, just so you know, sometimes Christians, you don't have to pray for everything. Somebody can tell you something and you can be like, okay, you don't have to like, I'm gonna ardently seek the Lord's throne over this. You can just let that one be. Or it's, you know, it's surfacy stuff. My wife is sick. My kids had a little bit of a cold. I got a trip coming up. Pray for traveling mercies. Sure. But when you're in a small group for a long time and trust begins to develop, the prayer requests get different, don't they? Pray for us. Our kids are struggling in school. They might have to repeat kindergarten. We just want wisdom there. We don't know the right thing to do. We just want to do the best thing for them. You start to get really real prayer requests. Hey, man, can you just pray for my marriage? We're not doing great. It's been a rough couple, two, three years. And I really don't know how this is going to go. Will you just pray for me that I can be a good husband? Sure. Hey, I lost my dad last year, and it has really done a number on my faith, and I don't really even know what I believe, and I'm having a hard time trusting God. And I don't even know if your prayer is going to work, but would you pray it anyways? When you're friends, you start to get real prayer requests. And you can really actually pray for each other in meaningful ways. And if you're close enough with them, when they tell you to pray for their cousin's friend who might have COVID, you can tell them to shove it and pray themselves. We can't start obeying these one another's until we're actually friends. If we're supposed to confront each other with sin, let me just tell you, for me personally, you do life how you want to do life. For me, if you want to sit me down and say, hey, Nate, I've noticed this destructive pattern in your life and I really don't think it's good for you, we better be friends or I'm out. I might sit there politely and say thank you. And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to leave that conversation and I'm going to call a friend. I'm going to say, listen to what this person said. Is this true? But I'm not going to hear it from you if you're not my friend. We don't have a track record of going through life together. And listen, confronting sin and other people, the only way it can be done is with the foundation of relationship. When the Bible tells us to mourn with one another, to grieve with one another, to celebrate with one another, those are things that require a deep bedrock friendship and relationship there to be able to do that. We cannot be obedient to instructions about biblical Christianity without the power of relationships and friendships in our life. And I would even say this, just to push it a little bit further. When I hear about folks who are going through a rough patch, marriage is really, really hard. They've developed an addiction of some sort and they're fighting it. Their personal life is falling apart. Their professional life is falling apart. Whatever it is, when I hear about people whose lives are beginning to spin a little bit out of control, can I just tell you what I often find and what they often share with me? They say things like, you know, I really don't feel like I have many friends. I'm not sure if I have any friends at all. Let me tell you something. As your pastor, and if you're sitting in this room today, I'm your pastor at least for today. As your pastor, if you are doing life without friends, you're in trouble. If you are doing life without friends who share your values, if your closest friend is your spouse and you don't have any true friends outside of that, you're in trouble. And if your closest friend is your spouse and you don't have any true friends outside of that, you're in trouble. And if your closest friend is your spouse, and you don't have, I'm not saying your closest friend shouldn't be your spouse, I'm just saying you should have really good friendships outside of your marriage. If you don't, you're putting too much pressure on them, and they're putting too much pressure on you, and you're going to let each other down, and things aren't going to go good. Jesus designed us to walk in friendships. If you don't have them, the biggest encouragement I could give you is to pursue them. When I counsel with young couples doing premarital counseling, very often I'll do the marriage of people who don't live close to us. They don't live in Raleigh. They live in Fuquay or they live in Greensboro or they live wherever they live. But centrally, their family's around here. So they're choosing a venue in Raleigh. So they want a pastor that's local and close to the venues. They find me online and I agree to do their wedding. And when I talk to these people, I ask them, what's your plan for finding a church? And very often they'll say, you know, we don't have a church. We're looking for a church. What would you recommend? How can we find a good church? And I always tell them the same thing. Listen, find a church. And I mean this, you're gonna laugh, but I really do mean it. And I think this is actually what most of you have done. Find a church that has a tolerable pastor. They don't have to be great, okay? The sermons don't have to blow your doors off every week. You can download really good sermons every week. Find a pastor that doesn't drive you nuts and sit under that teaching. Find worship that's good. Here we have great worship and we're lucky. But find it that's good. But you know what you really need? Find a church where you can make friends. Find a church where you can make friends. And then everything else kind of fades away. You can go to the church with the best preaching and the best worship and the best programs. But if you don't have friends, you're never going to connect in the way that you need to. And that church isn't going to serve you how it should serve you. So when you choose a church, choose a church to build friendships, to do life together. With all of that being said, I want to bring us back to the power of the table and ask, what would happen if we viewed our meals as Jesus did? What would happen if those opportunities around the table, and I don't want to be unrealistic, not every day, not every meal, not every time we sit with somebody who's going to have a sacred element to it, but man, it happens far more often than we think it does. What would happen if we would understand that relationships and friendships are absolutely essential to my faith, and they're essential to the faith of others, and they're essential if I see someone I want to convert, if I see someone I want to move closer to Jesus, if I see someone I want to influence, then relationship is essential within that influence. What if we accepted that and began to use the meals in our life to further those things, to pursue those things? What would happen if when we had the opportunity to go out to eat after church with our friends, we had one or two intentional questions? We don't make the whole lunch and impromptu Bible study, but what if we had one or two intentional questions? What's God been teaching you for the last six months? Anything at all? What'd you get from Nate's sermon? What'd you think of that? That was terrible. Did you agree it was terrible? Yes, I agree it was terrible. And then have a great conversation. Did you love it when he made fun of Alan at the beginning? Yes, I loved that. Whatever it was. Point of fact, I told you I went to conference this week, and the idea for that, it came to me last fall, and I texted an old buddy of mine. We were on staff together at the church I worked at previously. He left and started his own church. He's been a senior pastor for, I think, about eight or nine years now. I'm in my seventh year of being a senior pastor, and so we talk multiple times over the course of the year, how are things going, and I was telling somebody before the service that when you're a senior pastor and you have the opportunity to talk with another senior pastor, the conversation's just different, right? Because we're smarter and more spiritual than all of you. So it's just, no, it's because we have the same job. Like if you're the national sales director of whatever, and you talk to another national sales director of whatever, and there's a lot of similarities there, then you're going to be able to just talk about things that other people don't understand and can't talk about. So the ability to relate is very, very high. And so I wanted to go and have some extended time to spend with another senior pastor and just talk about what it's like to do life in the way that we've chosen to do it. And what his church is almost the exact same size as our church. And so it's good one-to-one comparisons about how you're handling different things. And I wanted to go to this conference, but I was determined to use the conversations that we had with a purpose. And some of you may have seen that I put on social media, we went to, we were going to go golf, and I said, I'd rather go see the Star Wars section because I've never seen it. Nobody in my family cares about it. And so we went to see the Star Wars section, which was great. I don't know if it was $165 great. I was there for like 90 minutes, and I was like, cool, I'm going to go to the hotel. But it was really fun. I got us matching t-shirts because of course, you know. And we had a great time. But at the breakfast, when we wrapped up, we had gone to conference for two days. We went to Disney and had that experience and shared meals together and all this stuff. At breakfast on the last day on Friday morning, I asked him, what are your takeaways? And one of the things that we agreed upon, he said, this was not a frivolous trip. This was an absolutely spiritually encouraging trip. And I made the comment, I would argue that the most important things on this trip happened in line and at meals, not at the conference, not with what we learned. And he said, a thousand percent. And it was because at the beginning of the trip, we shared, we want this to be purposeful. We want to have important conversations. We want to talk about important things. So we talked about silly stuff, our mutual affection for Caitlin Collins on CNN. I mean, we both think that she does a great job as a news anchor. But then we also talked about family. And do you think your mom and your dad and your sister are part of your ministry? What are your responsibilities for them? What do you do with hosting? How do you plan series? How do you keep your spiritual life vibrant when church feels like it's dragging you down? We had good, meaningful conversations that helped both of us. So what would happen if we all did that? And the meals that we had around our table, we began to use intentionally. And we came in with one or two intentional questions just to check on the people that we were having meals with or just to help us become better friends with them. But what if we didn't see our time around the table? And I don't mean just meals. It can be any setting where we have an opportunity to talk with people and we don't have anywhere to go and nothing to do or be? In those settings, how can we use those more purposefully to build friendships, to build the relationships that are essential to biblical living? And then I would ask you, what relationships do we need to pursue so others might begin to pursue Jesus? Who do you have in your life that you can leverage your table to push towards Jesus, to convert or include? Who do you have in your life that you can encourage spiritually? And shame on me for not including this one, but what relationships do you have in your life that you can pursue to begin to push you towards Jesus? Who seems to have things figured out maybe a little bit better than you right now that you can invite around your table and just ask them questions. There's so much benefit from doing that. I issued last week the Dinner Table Challenge for the series and said between now and Easter, we're encouraging everyone here to have someone around your table from grace who's never been around your table before. And we're encouraging everyone to have someone around your table who's not from grace, who's never been around your table before. Point of clarity, someone asked me last week, is that the same meal or is it two separate meals? It's two separate meals. For me, I'm not really down with mixing universes. I don't like it when someone invites me over to their house and they've also invited over other people who I don't know. And I'm like, well, I've been ambushed. What is this? I just want to go back home. This is completely, I was not prepared for this. But listen, if you're down with that, if that's your deal, you like mixing universes and making people uncomfortable, sure, invite them both over and let's just see what happens. But I would encourage you, don't just invite the easy ones over. Be strategic. Who can you invite over and hopefully encourage them towards Christ? Who can you invite over and maybe learn from them? And when God places you in opportunities, in small groups and in meals and around tables and in friend groups, and as you have new acquaintances that you're allowed and enabled to pursue, how can we use those to push them and ourselves closer to Jesus? But what I want us to take away from today, if nothing else, is the Christian life is impossible to live without friendships. It's impossible to live without relationships. If you don't have them or you need stronger ones, the best place to begin to do that is around the table. So let's use those strategically as we move throughout the rest of our weeks leading up to Easter and prepare our hearts for celebrating Easter when it comes. Let's pray. Father, we love you and we thank you for the example that was set for us by your son. How he modeled for us sitting around tables with people and having conversations that needed to be had. Loving on people in surprising ways, encouraging people towards conversion in gentle ways. Father, I pray for people here who feel like right now in their life they're a little bit lonely and they're a little bit alone and they're not sure if they have the friendships that they need and that they want, would you bring them people in their life that they can pursue, that will pursue them, who love them and who love you? Would you build friendships in their life? Father, would you give us the courage to pursue those, to extend the invite, to make the offer, to reach out and bridge the gaps. And God, around those tables, would you bless the conversation? Would you build friendships that last for decades? Ones that encourage us towards you? And God, in these relationships, would we find more of you there? In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm DJ Hill. I'm a partner here at Grace along with Laura, my wife, and three daughters. Today's reading is from Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, verses 9 through 12. Two are better than one, because they have good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two can withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Thank you. Thank you, DJ. I was pleased to discover that you're literate. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This is the fourth part in our series called The Traits of Grace, where we're going through and we're just talking about the things and the aspects that make grace, grace, that make us who we are. Part of it is getting to pick on each other a little bit. And so this week is one that is, this is near and dear to all of our hearts. If this is, If you have been at Grace for any amount of time, then this is something that resonates deeply with you. It's something that characterizes us and who we are, and it's something that we choose over and over again in the way that we structure ourselves, in the way that we do things, and in the kind of church that we want to be. And so this morning, we get to talk about the fourth trait, which is that we are partners at Grace. We are partners. And we say that we don't have members at Grace, that we have partners instead, which is actually kind of funny to me that I'm such a stickler about having partners instead of members, because I've been doing vocational ministry 20 years. And one of the things I've always thought is kind of funny about the church is the way that we like to name stuff. Like we're super cool and we're coming up with new things. I was the small groups pastor at my previous church and I watched those things. First, when I was growing up, it was called Sunday school, right? And then in the 90s, we changed it to small groups. Now we're fancy. And then small groups weren't fancy enough, so we started calling them community groups or life groups or discipleship groups. And then there was this whole movement in the last couple of years to start house churches. And you're like, well, what's a house church? Like, well, you gather together and you kind of pray for each other and you talk about things you worship. I says, oh, it's like a small group. Like, no, no, no, house church. Well, what do you do on Sunday? Well, we go to big church together. Oh, so it's a small group. Like that's what we do. We like to rename things so that outsiders can't figure out what's going on in here. And it's really, it's just stupid. And I did it too. I was talking about this with my wife, Jen. And I was like, what are some other dumb church names that we've come up with over the years? Like on Sunday mornings, instead of calling it the service, we call it the gathering. And instead of calling it a sermon, we call it the talk, right? Because we're just trying to be cooler and more relevant in what we do. And she got on to me. She was like, you were guilty of this. She said, what was your ministry called in your first church? The first church I worked at was in Franklin County, Virginia, Rocky Mount, close to Smith Mountain Lake. And I had a buddy that started a church called Covenant Community Church. I believe it's still going. And we met in this old colonial home out in the middle of nowhere in the farmland of Franklin County, Virginia. We had about 30 people who came every week, which, by the way, we're about the same size as Grace is now based on the amount of families that stood up. We don't have space but for 30 people a week if you guys, if you families come every week. But I led a ministry. It was the student ministry, and I called it One because it was based on, I believe, Luke 15 where Jesus is talking to Mary and Martha, and he tells Mary, you need to worry about but one thing, and it's loving me. And so I called it One, which was aptly named because that's about how many kids I had per week on the Wednesday, right? And then I get to the big church with 200 kids in the middle school, and that was my ministry, and I called that Up and Out, right? Well, what's Up and Out? Well, it means love God, love others, love up, love up, love out. Oh, that's great. Well, who's it for? Well, it's for middle school. So it's middle school ministry? No, it's up and out. It's up and out, right? And this is what we do. We come up with dumb names for stuff and they're unnecessary and we don't need them and Grace is guilty of this too. I don't know if you know this, but if you haven't been going to Grace for a long time, you might not know that this is called Grace Hall. Now, I've never called it that, but the people who came before me call it that. This is an auditorium, and really, that's insulting to auditoriums. This is a big room with a pole in it, right? That's what this is. So I'm real big on just call it what it is. If it's Sunday school, call it Sunday school. If it's a small group, call it small group. But if it's ministry, call it ministry. So why am I such a stickler about, no, no, no, at Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. And I catch heck for this. I'll be talking to elders or leaders in the church or people who have been going here for a while and they'll be like, yeah, yeah, well, how many members do we have right now? Or what's the membership vote on that? Or are they a member of the church? I'm sorry, they're partners of the church. Like, we got you, buddy. We'll help you carry this load of calling things partners. And everybody kind of giggles at me that I'm a real dummy for insisting that we use the term partners. And I understand. I would make fun of me too if I were you. But let me tell you why I'm such a stickler about this word partner and why it really does define who and what we are at Grace and what we're trying to do. The first reason is not the main reason, but the first reason is the one that I repeat often. A lot of you can probably say this as well. You probably know how the sentence ends, but members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's one of the first reasons. At Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. Members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute, right? If you become a member of something, what do you become primarily concerned with? What are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this thing? If you joined BJ's, what are the rights and privileges I get? Costco, you get a dollar slice of pizza. That's a pretty good right and privilege. You join Northridge Country Club, what are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this place? Right? When you're a member, you kind of sit back and you go, well, what's in it for me? What do I get out of this? What can I consume? When you're a member, you expect a certain experience. You expect to consume a certain experience. And then when you can't consume it, you critique it. Until you do get to consume the experience you want. As a pastor, I don't really want a church full of members who consume an experience and then critique it when it's not what they want. We want partners who partner with us because partners tend to contribute. Partners take ownership and what they're partnered in and see it as their personal responsibility to see the success of this thing work out. And really, the more I thought about it this week, because we're going to talk about how this is true, but the more I thought about it this week, the more satisfied I was with understanding partners this way. Partners share the burden. That's what partners do. Partners share the burden in myriad ways. The greatest picture of partnership that I've seen in the Bible, and I love this picture in the Bible. I don't have any tattoos, not because I think they're sinful or something, but there's nothing I want to put on my body that I'm sure I'm going to want there in 20 years. So I haven't done anything yet. But if I were going to get one, it may very well be an image of this story. When I think about this story and this scene in the Bible for too long, I'll tear up. I'll start to cry. And I'm going to read this to you, and you're going to think, why is this dude tearing up at this story? Listen, first of all, the older I get, the more I tear up at. Jen and I are back onto watching the Great British Baking Show, and we cry at the end of every episode because we're so happy for Juergen that he gets to call his wife again. Like, we're so thrilled that we tear up, and then we look at each other, and we laugh. And the older I get, the more stuff I cry about. And if you want to judge me for that, I'll tell you right where you can put your judgment. But when I think about this passage and the picture here, it moves me to tears because of how powerful it is. So what's happening is we're in the book of Exodus. I'm going to read from chapter 17. And in the book of Exodus, God's children are wandering through the desert. They're being led by Moses. And a man named Amalek comes up against them with his army and he attacks the Israelite people. He attacks the Hebrew people. And so Moses sends his general, Joshua, out to battle. And he says, I want you to go and I want you to fight against Amalek. And I'm going to go up on the top of this hill and I'm going to hold my staff over my head. And when you're down there fighting and you look up at me, as long as my staff is up over my head, you will prevail. So go and fight. So Joshua does. He gathers the army and he goes and he fights. And this is what happens. We pick it up in verse 11. It's such an incredible picture. Moses says, go down there and you fight that battle. And I'm going to hold this staff over my head. And as long as I hold it up, you guys will prevail. But you know, holding a stick over your head burns the shoulders a little bit. It fatigues the muscles. And so every now and again, he had to shake it out. He got weary. He got tired. He couldn't hold it up. He couldn't carry that burden. And as he got weak, the men on the battlefield began to suffer. And so he had to find the strength and pick his hands back up again for as long as he could to carry that burden. And eventually Aaron and Hur, H-U-R, burden. The burden was too great for Moses. The responsibility was too much. It was too much for one person to handle. There's not a single person here who could have held that over their head for the duration of time that it would require for Joshua to defeat Amalek. And so he needed help because it was too much. And so God sent him partners to bracket his arms, to hold up the staff when he was too weak, to carry that burden when he couldn't. And it is, to me, one of the most poignant pictures in the Bible of community and friendship. And if I'm honest with you, I think that's exactly why it's in the Bible. Whenever you read anything in the Bible, you've got to ask yourself, why is this so important that God wanted me to know about this thousands of years later? Why this detail? Why this story? Why not just write Joshua defeated Amalek? Why not just write Amalek came up against the forces of Israel and God blessed Israel and Israel won? Why not just skip it and go on through? It doesn't matter. I'm sure they had plenty of skirmishes over the 40 years that they were in this desert that we don't know about it because they're not recorded in history. Why this one? I'm convinced. This is just me. I didn't learn this in seminary. Okay, this isn't gospel truth. But if you were to ask me, why is this in the Bible? It's because it's a picture of community. It's a picture of partnership. And it's to show us that there are times when we can't carry the burden on our own and we need people around us to bracket us and hold it up. There's times when the people who we love very much are weary and they can't hold the burden up anymore. And we come and we bracket them and we hold their hands up for them until their strength returns. It's such an incredible picture. And so at Grace, that's what we are. We are partners. We see and we notice when the burden gets too much. And we bracket and we put our hands on the people that we love and we help them carry the load until their strength returns. At Grace, we are partners. And so that word partner is so much deeper to me than a simple, clever replacement for member. That comparison, members consume and partners contribute, that's just the surface level of what a partner is at Grace. Partners carry the burden. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We partner in the things that God would have us do here. This starts at the staff level. We have staff meetings every Tuesday. And we talk about everything that everyone is doing. And no one carries their burden by themselves. We talk about when Summer Extreme is coming up, we talk about it in staff meeting. We begin talking about it in February and March and saying, Aaron, our children's pastor, Julie, what can we do to help you? How can you use us? The weeks leading up to Summer Extreme, I tell the staff, hey, we all work for Aaron. She's our boss. Whatever she needs the next couple weeks, that's what we do. When we're heading into the Christmas series and the Christmas service, we work for boy Aaron, worship leader Aaron, the bad Aaron. We work for him. For two, three weeks leading into that, what can we do? How can we help you? What do you need? We speak into everything that we do. What's going on in student ministry and how can we help? Before we do a series, we all talk into it. Before I do sermons, we all talk into them. We share the burden across the spectrum. And so we believe that trickles down to everyone in all that we do. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We don't just sit back and say, well, I hope the church is able to do that. Let's see. No, we jump in and see a personal responsibility. There was a great example a few minutes ago. I ran to the hallway after the children's dedication because I like to make sure that while I'm preaching, I don't need to use the restroom. I like to be 100% focused on you. So I ran over there to take care of business. And then I came back. And as I was in the hallway, it dawns on me, gosh, we've got a lot of babies being handed into that small space back there because we got child dedication today. I wonder if we're double staffed. And I looked at a lady who just happened to be standing in the hallway. She was just fodder. She came to attend the service this morning, and I looked at her and just presumptuously said, you might have to jump in that room this morning. She goes, yeah, no, I'm going to stick around and see. That's partnership. There's a need here. I'm a partner of the church. I'm going to step in and I'm going to help carry that. We're going to build a building. We have land we're looking to build. We need partners, which are not to stand back. I hope the church can do this, but actively, how do I partner with the church to make sure that this can happen? In our small groups, your small group leader asks a question, and it's a bad one. It's a dud, right? It's just a dead fish in the middle of the room. You're like, I don't know. I don't know how to answer this question. Your partner in ministry, bail them out, man. Say anything. Say what you're doing for dinner tomorrow. It doesn't matter. Just get the conversation going again. If Erin looks tired, if her hands look weary, if we see the same faces in those hallways and in that back room week in and week out, volunteer, step in, bracket, hold. We jump in. We are partners in ministry. We share the burden in what's happening here. We believe wholeheartedly in that. So at Grace, we are partners in ministry. More importantly than that, at Grace, we are partners in life. We partner with each other through all the seasons of life. One of the things that I've gotten to see more than ever in my position is the wisdom of Solomon when he writes in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that happens to you happens to everyone else. Every struggle that we walk through is shared by those who came before us and will come after us. And when I think about life and how I get to see these common struggles meted out through all the folks that God allows me to minister to, I just think of people coming out of college in their 20s. And that place where you are, where you're just trying to figure out, who am I? Can I get a job? I'm going to be homeless or live in my parents' basement forever. Can I figure this out? Who am I going to marry? Who am I going to meet? Do I want to build a family? Is that a thing that I want? And then you do get married and you're trying to figure out how can we make it together? What's going to happen here? And then maybe you build a family or maybe you start to build a career and you're just thinking about how do I take the next step? And you have people around you and you have all the same stressors. It's all the same stuff. How am I going to figure this out? How am I going to work out work-life balance? If I'm single, when am I going to meet the person that I want to spend my life with? If I'm married, is this the right person that I actually did want to spend my life with? Like all the things, right? And then you have kids and I'm standing up here and I don't have too many years as far as parenting is concerned on the people who were up here, but there's some with just brand new babies and I've got a six-year-old. I know that I don't know what's ahead of me, okay? So don't hear ignorant arrogance in this, but I also know that these folks over here that just have this tiny little baby and I've got my six-year-old, boy, there's a lot of space and stress to cover between six months and six years old. And so I know a little bit about what they face. And we know a little bit more about what to pray. And then those of you who have kids in high school or older, you know that I'm sitting at six years old and I'm going, gosh, I'm so stressed. And you're like, you don't know nothing. Shut up with your stress. You know what I wouldn't give to just lose an hour of sleep a night and know that my kids are okay? And then they go to college and then they get jobs. And then you look at your husband and your wife and you try to figure out, do we still like each other? Because we just ran a small business for 25 years. We were ships passing in the night trying to get things done. How do we figure out this marriage, right? And then it's not too long that you're empty nesters when you start to take care of your aging parents and all the challenges that are there and everything that awaits you doing that. There is nothing new under the sun. I have watched so many of my friends enter into that phase. And then you leave that phase and you get the joy of being a grandparent maybe. And then you start to age. And aging stinks. And you move into that phase. But in all of that, everything that you're experiencing where you are, all the folks who are older than you have walked through that. And all the folks who are younger than you will. And there is nothing new under the sun. And we face those things. And in the midst of those predictable cycles come the unpredictable diagnoses and loss and triumphs and promotions and surprises and tearful blessings. But it's all things that everyone else has experienced too. And so at grace, you should never walk through that alone. Whatever that is, whatever the fill in the blank is, if you're a part of grace, you should never walk through that alone. You should never, ever walk through parenthood alone, through trying to figure out what to do with this little human, you shouldn't feel like you're facing that alone. When your kids are in middle school, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you're single and you don't know if you're going to meet your person or not, that you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience tragedy, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience triumph and celebration, you shouldn't walk through that alone. Is there anything sadder than someone experiencing tremendous joy, getting the best news possible, and not having anyone to share it with? No, that's heartbreaking. You shouldn't walk through caring for your aging parents alone. You shouldn't walk through empty nesting alone. We shouldn't walk through any of that stuff alone. We were not designed to walk through it alone. That was not God's intent. We are partners in life. We walk with each other. And we have a friend whose strength is failing. And she doesn't have the strength to fight for her marriage anymore. She's done. It's hard. Her shoulders are tired. We come beside her. We get her a seat. And we bracket ourselves against her and we hold her hands until she has the strength again. We have friends who are parents and they've given up and they don't know what to do. We bracket them and we hold them up. We have a friend who's facing addiction or sin and they feel like giving up. Their arms are tired, and they just can't hold out anymore. We come alongside them. We press up against them, and we hold their hands up in the fight until their strength is restored to do it again. We are partners in life. I am convinced that one of God's greatest gifts is that of community and friendship. There is almost nothing in my life I hold more sacred than the people who I love, than the friends who are close to me, than the people who have come alongside me and held up my hands when I was too tired, than the people who I've stood beside and watched them regain their strength and stand back up. At Grace, we are partners, and that means we are partners in life. And here's the other thing I'll mention. I had a lunch with someone this week. And I found out that over COVID, one of them lost both of their parents. Another one of them had to put their parents into memory care and separate his parents. That's an incredible burden. And they've been carrying it alone. And I told them I was going to say this. Grace, don't walk alone. They didn't tell anybody. How can the church do what it needs to do if you carry all that yourself? If you sit there on the top of the hill, holding it up, struggling, crying, failing, knowing that it's all going to have to collapse. Tell us. Tell us. Let us come alongside. Let us hold you up. And this is where I would press in and chide you a little bit if you're a longtime grace person. At grace, and I would assume most places, we love to be, are anxious to be, excited to be, happy to be the person who stands in brackets. We will do this for you all day long. We will do this for you for as long as it takes until your strength is restored. We're happy to do that. We do not at all want to be the person here needing help. But this doesn't work if we don't let other people partner with us too. So get over yourselves, Grace. Let people help you. Let people be your partner too. Finally, we are partners in faith. We do not walk the spiritual journey alone. Most importantly, we're partners in faith. We come alongside one another and we help one another grow. We're going to talk more about this next week, how we can be partners in faith when we talk about how we are step takers. But at Grace, we are partners in faith. We come alongside one another. We foster one another's spiritual life. I saw somebody say this week or last that they are convinced, and I am too. I totally agreed with this, the longer they are in the Christian faith, the longer they are in this Christian life, the more they believe that it is simply about hanging on. It's simply about clinging to Jesus. That's why I think when Paul tells us in Ephesians 6 to put on the full armor of God, he says, put on the full armor of God, and he goes through all the things that you're supposed to put on so you can stand against the wiles of the devil. And then at the end, he says, and when you have stood firm, stand firm therefore. Just another one. When you have done it, when you fought the good fight, keep fighting, keep standing firm, keep clinging. In every list of Christian attributes, you will eventually find perseverance. Just hang on. Just cling to faith. I'm reminded of what Jesus says to John the Baptist when John the Baptist essentially says, hey, I'm pretty sure you're Jesus, but you've kind of let me down here because I'm going to lose my life in this prison. And Jesus says, yeah, you are. And blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. Blessed are those who still choose faith in me when I've let them down because their expectations of me were wrong. I'm reminded of when Jesus told the gathering of people that unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And all the crowds went, that dude's weird. And they left. And he looked at his disciples and he said, are you going to leave me too? And Peter says, you're Jesus. Where are we going to go? You don't make any sense to me. I don't want to cannibalize you. I'm not into that. But I also know who you are. Where else am I going to go? That's faith. We know Jesus. Where else are we going to go? Even when he mystifies us, even when it doesn't make sense, even when it's hard to figure out, even when we're faced with those situations where we go, how does a good God let stuff like this happen? We cling to faith. And sometimes our hands get tired. Sometimes clinging to faith is hard. And so we need godly people around us who love us and who love Jesus to hold our hands up for us and help us cling to faith when ours is failing. That prayer that's prayed, Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. When we pray that, you know how he helps you sometimes? By bringing friends in to encourage you. A phone call or a text or an email or a lunch. So most importantly, Grace, we are partners in faith. We help each other cling. We help each other thrive. We help each other strive. We help each other take steps towards Jesus. That's what we do. That's why I asked DJ to read a 300-fold cord. I want us to use our tremendous community and our tremendously deep friendships to be partners in ministry, to be partners in life, and to be partners in faith. And my closing encouragement would be that if you were one who feels like you don't have that yet, pray for it. Pursue it. Ask God for it. You'll find it. If you are one who does feel like you have this, and you do have good and rich and deep friendships here, please know that God did not give you that community just for you or the people who are already in it, but that the job of a good, godly, biblical community is to turn outwards and to say, who else needs what we got? Because it's pretty good. Who else can we partner with? So when I say at Grace we have partners, we don't have members, this is what I mean. And this is why I'm a stickler about it because I believe it's that important. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for who you are and what you've done for us. Lord, I pray that if there's somebody here who doesn't know you, who hasn't accepted Jesus as their Savior, that they would do that. God, I lift up once again these families that are represented today. Would their extended families partner with them in the raising of these children in godly homes? Would the friends of these mamas and daddies rally around them and raise their hands up when their arms are weary? For the people in this room and listening who are caring for aging parents, God, would you surround them with people to raise up their hands? God, for the folks here who need you, who are tired, in whatever it is, would you surround them with godly community? Would you surround them with partners who pick them up? And God, for those of us who need help, for those of us who are tired, for those of us who just don't know if we can hold it up anymore, would you give us the humility to reach out to our friends, to our community, and to our partners, and experience the life-giving goodness of your community, God. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.