Sermons tagged with Healing

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This is the last week in our series called The Songs We Sing, where we're looking at some of the songs we sing as a congregation, finding them in Scripture and allowing that Scripture to imbue them with a greater purpose. To finish up the series, because of the timing of it, I wanted to do a Christmas song. And so I'll tell you the Christmas song we're going to do here in a little bit, but I thought it would be appropriate as we launch forward into December and all the things that we have waiting for us post Thanksgiving. Hopefully you got your house decorated yesterday. Our house was decorated in early November, so early that I asked Jen, can we please not put the wreaths out so our neighbors don't think we're crazy? So those are going out today. I've been listening to Christmas music since November the 1st. That's the rule in our house. And if you don't like it, you can shove it because that's what we do and that's what we like. And so I'm very, very ready for Christmas. But as we move into Christmas, there's something that I want to hit on and talk about that I mention every Christmas season, and this morning we're just going to rest there because I feel like it's good and appropriate, and you'll see why probably halfway through the sermon, but I also feel like God was in the direction and the theme of the message this week. Because I write these three weeks in advance, and I wrote this without knowing all that would happen this week. But I remember very vividly the Christmas that changed all Christmases. I remember the Christmas that was a clear delineation of, yeah, Christmas will never be again what it once was. I remember that Christmas. Growing up, Christmas was wonderful. It was magical. I don't know what your traditions are, what you do in your family for us. Now, sometimes we had to go to Florida and see my dad's side of the family and my step-grandpa and grandma and my weird cousins, and that wasn't as fun. You just did it. That's a family thing. That's where I started to learn that sometimes you do things for family, even though you don't want to, and you don't like them, and they don't like you, but we're going to perpetuate this for 30 years. So that's what I learned from that side of the family. But for the other side of the family, man, it was magical. So we would go every Christmas Eve, I think after service, I don't know, to Mama and Papa's house. I'm Southern, and so those are my grandparents' names. We would go to Mama and Papa's house, and we would have Christmas Eve dinner, and then we would open up all the presents from all the families, all the aunts and uncles. My mom has two sisters and a brother, so there's four kids, and then all their kids. I think I had five cousins and then different spouses through the years and things like that. So it was a big, full house, very fun. I've told you before that my Papa, I would be the Grinch, and he would be the sleigh, and we would sneak into the room and steal Mama's presents. It was very, very fun. And then we would go home. Santa would come, wake up the next morning. What does Santa bring us? We were allowed to pick our favorite toy, go back over to Mama and Papa's house. And we would spend the whole day there, leftover lunch. And the adults would play games. The kids would run around. It was super, super fun. And my Papa was the hub of all of this. He was the glue. He was the big, huge personality, so magnanimous and magnetic that everyone was drawn to him. Everybody loved him. And I always felt like I was his favorite because I was, and he told me so. But everybody loved Pawpaw. And then in the fall of 2000, when I was 19 years old, he had a massive heart attack and he passed away. And as Christmas approached, there was the sense in our family, and I guess it was amongst the children, the aunts and uncles, where they just said, you know, I'm just not sure if we're going to be able to make it through a normal Christmas at Mama and Papa's house. So maybe we should figure something else out. Because that Christmas was coming up and we all knew it was going to be hard. And so they decided in their infinite wisdom, you know what let's do? Instead of going to Mama and Papa's house, let's go to breakfast at the Ritz in downtown Atlanta. I think maybe Buckhead. Let's go to the Ritz-Carlton. They have a really good Christmas brunch breakfast. It's going to be great. And so that's what we decided to do. So I wake up Christmas morning and I shower. I've never showered on Christmas in my whole life. What am I doing? I would stumble out of bed, go down the stairs. What does Santa bring me? I'll perpetuate this as long as you need me to. If it gets me presents, what did Santa bring me? And then, you know, you'd go to Mama and Papa's house, but I'm just putting on some combination of sweats that I find probably on the floor of my room. I'm not getting dressed. I'm going with a hat on or bedhead. I'm not like doing my hair. And now all of a sudden I'm showering. And then I'm buttoning buttons. Who buttons buttons on Christmas? What a drag that is. You're supposed to be comfortable on Christmas. And I get all dressed up and we go down to the Ritz. And the Ritz is so nice that it feels like we don't belong there. It feels like someone's going to ask us to leave. Like a couple of weeks ago, I've got a good buddy who is, he works at one of the nicer country clubs in the area. And I played a round of golf with him, and then I had an elder meeting, and I needed to get the golf stink off of me, so he said, hey, I'll sneak you into the men's locker room. You can take a shower over there. So the whole time I'm taking a shower in the men's locker room, I'm just, I'm scared. Like, I'm hoping that nobody is going to ask me my member number, and they're going to ask me to leave because I don't have the net worth to shower with that water. Like I was, I was nervous. And so the whole time it was kind of like that sense the whole time we're at the Ritz, I'm afraid someone's going to come up to us and be like, I'm sorry, you're going to have to go eat with the poors. You guys can't be in here. It was just too nice. It was weird and it was rigid and I hated it. But I knew at that Christmas that Christmas would never be the same again, and it hasn't been. We have our own kids now. They understand the miracle and the majesty and the magic of Christmas, and it's fun again to see it through their eyes, and that joy is returning. But for me, that was the Christmas that marked the last really good Christmas. It was also the Christmas that taught me this. Christmas, and all that we're about to embark on, is a joyful season. It's good. It's magical. It's fun. I love going outside in the morning and making bacon and the steam is coming off the blackstone and I'm holding my mug and there's steam coming out of that and there's steam coming off of my breath. I like the wintertime. I like how Christmas time kind of ushers in that sense of winter. I like the decorations. I love the music. I love the themes that we do here at the church. I look forward to family jammy day every year. We all wear our Christmas jammies. I'm in for all of it. I love the parties, the elder party, the staff party, the other parties. I love them. It's great. Let's do all the Christmas stuff. Christmas is a joyful season. But that Christmas taught me that Christmas is a joyful season, but not for everyone every season. Christmas is a joyful season, but not for everyone every season. That year taught me that for some of us, Christmas is hard. And so as a pastor, I never want to move through a December with the hooray and the praise and the joy and the exuberance and't we all happy, and isn't this the best, and isn't this wonderful? And not acknowledge that for some in our faith family, no, this season is not wonderful. And some of you, I know some circumstances, some are unknown to me, but I know that some of you are facing hard Christmases. Some of you are looking at a Christmas that isn't going to be the same. You're looking at a Christmas and there's going to be an empty seat at the table. It's going to be hard. You're walking into Christmas and it's a reminder. Not of what you have. But of what you don't have. Of dreams crushed. Marriages shattered. Children prayed for but not yet received. I know those Christmases. For some of us, Christmas, this time of year, is a reminder of what we've loved and lost, of what we've yearned for and not been given, of what we've had and has been broken. And so we never want to move through a Christmas season without acknowledging that for some of us, some seasons, Christmas is hard. So if that's you this season, then this morning is for you. And I believe this song is for you. The song we're focused on this morning, if you have a bulletin, the cat's already out of the bag, is O Come Emmanuel. O Come Emmanuel. And I put this here, I was trying to decide between O Holy Night and O Come Emmanuel because I think O Holy Night might just be the best song lyrically that's ever been written. And Aaron gently told me, we're not doing that twice. Okay. We're not, we're not going to do that here. And then again on Christmas Eve. So you got to pick. So I went with O Come Emmanuel. That was it. That was a whole thought process because I do love this song and I do think it's, it's really lyrically rich and important. And I think it's a great Christmas song. If you're not familiar with it, you will be by the end of the service today, I promise you. But most of us probably know that. What I did not know about O Come Emmanuel is how sad it is, how much the song languishes, how much it expresses this yearning, not, oh, Jesus, come because we want to celebrate you, but Jesus, come because we need you, because this place is broken and life is hard. I live in a world where bad things happen to good people and it doesn't make sense, so Jesus, please come. What I did not know is that it is steeped in scripture and it is absolutely the anthem for those of us for whom Christmas is hard this year or in future years. So I want to show you what I mean. I'm going to read you the lyrics where if you Google O Come Emmanuel, you'll find a bunch of verses and stanzas, a bunch of lyrics. And so it's kind of like, which ones are we going to sing? So I had to ask Aaron, our worship pastor, which one are we doing? He told me which one. And we're singing three verses in there. And so from just those three verses, I want you to see how much scripture is packed into the words that we're going to sing here at the close of the service. So the first verse of O Come, Emmanuel goes like this. I'm not going to sing it to you. O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appears. So I want you to see first and foremost that the whole name of the song, and this isn't going to be on the screen, is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. And that comes directly from Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14. And if you have the notes, if you have the bulletin, you want to write that down, you can check my references. But that comes from Isaiah 7, verse 14, where it's the end of a long messianic prophecy. I'm probably going to say messianic prophecy a couple of times in the sermon. That simply means an Old Testament prophecy that is about Jesus, the Messiah. So it's a messianic prophecy. And the conclusion of that, it tells us all these things about Jesus and who he's going to be. And then at the end, he says, and his name will be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. It might be the most remarkable name of Jesus because it captures within it the truth that he came down from heaven. He condescended and took on flesh and became like man, became man to be with us. Emmanuel captures who Jesus was and is. So first we see from the very first line that it's pulled right out of Isaiah chapter 7. And then with the rest of it about ransom captive Israel, that comes from Isaiah 35 10. And it's there at the bottom of the screen. Those who have been ransomed by the Lord will return. They will enter Jerusalem singing, crowned with everlasting joy. Sorrow and mourning will disappear and they will be filled with joy and gladness. So the author of this song, the writer of this song pulls this right out of this prophecy in Isaiah 35 where he refers to Jesus as the ransomed of the Lord. He comes to pay the ransom, or he refers to us as the ransomed, and he is the payment for that ransom. And there's an allusion here in the verse that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appears. In this verse of the song, we see this languishing and this anguish of the nation of Israel crying out to God, God, we don't belong here. There's something not right here. Will you please come and get us? Will you please come and pay our ransom? We are enslaved and we are in another nation in which we don't belong. And when we see the nation of Israel referred to in Scripture, it does and often is referring to the actual physical nation of Israel and the citizens of that nation, but it is also almost always referring to the children of God and those who believe in God. So the church, you and me, if we have placed our faith in Christ, and so this resonates with us. We resonate with the words in Isaiah 35 that God is coming to ransom us, that we feel like they feel, that we don't belong here. We are in lonely exile. There has to be something more than this place. There has to be something more than this world that you have to offer. Would you take me from here and bring me to heaven? It's a cry for us to be relieved of this. And then we move into the next verse that we're going to sing. It goes like this, O come thou day spring, come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night and death's dark shadows put to flight. This is taken from the end of Luke chapter 1, verses 78 and 79. What a long chapter. Because of God's tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death and to guide us to the path of peace. So we see again, the author of the song pulls directly out of Luke, and he puts to song the expression of these verses at the end of the prophecy in Luke chapter 1. Oh, come thou dayspring, come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here. They are saying, we are sad, We are depressed. Life is hard. This is a bad Christmas for us. We feel broken. It's right there in the words. Come cheer our spirits. We need you. By thine advent here. Clouds cover my vision and blot out my hope. I feel in the depths of despair, Emmanuel, come. Please come, O day spring, and cheer us and disperse these clouds. The last verse. O come, desire of nations, bind in one the hearts of, straight out of Scripture, straight out of Haggai, the desire of the nations. Other translations have it as the treasure of the nations, but I like this one better. This is King James. I like the desire of the nations. Whether you know it or not, whether you realize it or not, if this is your first Sunday in church, your soul has longed for Jesus your whole life. He is the desire of you, the desire of me, the desire of all the nations. And I love the titling here in that verse. And then the prayer is that he would bid thou our sad division cease and be thyself our king of peace, taken right out of the classic Christmas story in Luke chapter 2 beginning in verse 13 and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and goodwill towards men. This is the gift of Jesus that he brings peace and so so the prayer in the song of come Emmanuel is, would you please bring peace and would our sad divisions cease? It's the understanding that when Jesus shows up, he's going to heal things and bring peace with us. It's the understanding that when Jesus shows up, I don't know if you've thought about this, but when Jesus shows up, he will demolish and abolish. What's the word I'm looking for? Different denominations. He will demolish and abolish denominations. There will be no more Presbyterians. Praise Jesus. We will all, we will all of us, do you know this? We will all be Pentecostal. We will be. We'll be filled with the Spirit. We'll be cheering. We'll be going nuts. The Pentecostals in the end, they're going to win. I'm telling you. There will be no more Baptists. That's not going to happen. No more Catholics. They can drop it with the robes. None of that stuff. He's going to demolish denominations because we don't need those. Those divide us. He's going to heal our family wounds. Some of y'all, your Christmas is going to be tough. And it's not going to be tough because you've lost someone. It's going to be tough because that someone's still sitting there. And they're hard to get along with. And someone that I love very much has taught me that hurt people hurt people. And me and him know that because we hurt each other often. But we always reconcile very quickly. Some of us, there's division, there's hardship in our families. And it's not because the people in your families are bad. It's because hurt people hurt people. And they don't know how to heal themselves. More than likely the ship has sailed on that healing. So they just need grace. And when Jesus comes, he's going to heal them so that they can love you perfectly as Jesus loves them. This prayer, this song is a prayer that Jesus would come and he would heal our divisions. That what's happening in the Gaza Strip would not happen anymore. That warring cultures would find peace and love with one another. That hurting families would be healed and be able to love one another well. That his own body, the church, would knock it off with the divisions and the denominations and would come together, finally answering Jesus' prayer of unity in John 17. That's what this song is for. And so if you sit down with the words of O Come, Emmanuel, what you see is that it's a song of pain. It's a song of languishing. It's a song of hardship. And what we learn from this song is that a right and good response to despair is to long for the return and redemption of Jesus. That's what this song teaches us. That a right and good response to despair is to long for the return and the redemption of Jesus. That when something happens that we can't explain, it's right and good and biblical to say, come Lord Jesus, we need you. That's why I went through the pains of showing you all the verses that are expressed in this song that says over and over again, oh, come, Emmanuel, oh, come, Emmanuel, oh, come, thou dayspring, oh, come, desire of nations, all different names of Jesus. Jesus, come, we need you. When something happens that's hard, that we don't understand, that wrecks us, it's a right, good, biblical, righteous response to say, Lord Jesus, come. This Monday morning, this last week, like a lot of you here, I woke up to a text from Julie Sauls. Julie is on staff with us and does a little bit of everything. Howard is her faithful husband and a good friend to a lot of us. And I woke up to a text that he had had a stroke at about 4 a.m. He had been rushed to the ER and then rushed to another ER. That he was in surgery. There was 100% blockage in his carotid artery. And that they did not know. They didn't know. They didn't know if he was going to make it. They didn't know if he was going to be okay if he did make it. They didn't know what recovery might look like. They didn't even know what was happening in the surgery room. They just knew that he was there and it was serious. And if you don't know Howard, and I hesitate to say this because it's going to get back to, and I'll have to own up to it. This is for him. That's the only reason I'm wearing this stupid-looking tar heel on myself. He's a big fan. Jules, if you and Howard are watching the hospital, here you go, pal. And don't tell him this next part. If you don't know Howard, it's to your detriment. He's one of the good ones. Genuinely good. What I always say about Howard is whenever there's something happening at the church, some function, and things need to be done, if you try to figure out the crappiest job, Howard's already doing it. That's Howard. He's a good man. He's far too young to be having strokes. And as Jen and I were talking on Monday, Lily, our daughter, who's nearly eight, could just sense that something was up. So she started asking questions. And in the best way we could, we tried to explain to her what a stroke was and what that meant, what the potential road ahead for Mr. Howard was going to be. And Jen asked Lily, do you remember what Mr. Howard says to you every week when you come to church? And she responded, every week, as Lily and the family are walking down the sidewalk, most of the time Howard's outside, and when he sees her, he always says, Lily. And she acts embarrassed, but she loves it. And Jen said, do you remember what Mr. Howard says to you? And she said it. And when she said it, I just kind of got up and I hid my face from Lily. And I put my face on Jen's shoulder and I cried. And I told her, I really hate my job sometimes. Because I don't want to be the person that has to bring comfort here. Because I don't know how to do that. Because that morning, we didn't know if Howard was okay. I didn't know if I'd ever hear my friend's voice again. I didn't know if his kids would get to hear him say their name again. If Julie would ever hug him again. I didn't know. And I didn't want to have to be the pastor to come back here and be like, well, there's a reason for everything. So I cried. And we're thankful to know that there was just been a slow trickle of good news since then. Howard's doing well. He's moving both sides of his body, starting to speak. We're praying for a full recovery. He's gaining on it bit by bit. And there are others here who have walked that same path. And we know it's hard. And so I'm glad that he's doing better and I'll tell you what else I'm glad about. Jen went to see Julie and Mackenzie, his daughter, yesterday at the hospital. And Julie was choking up, bragging about you guys, about how this church has shown up for them, about how we have loved on them. And it just makes me so proud to be a pastor of a church that does that. I tell everybody I can, we've got the best church ladies in the business. But in the middle, I'm trying to compose myself so that Lily didn't see me crying. I remembered that I was preaching this on Sunday. I remembered that God put it here. And I remembered that it was okay to not feel like I had to be the agent of comfort. That it was okay instead to be able to respond with my church, oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. Jesus, please come. Please come and end this stuff. Please come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Please come so that I don't have to answer questions. I got a question this morning. It's the question to ask. I saw somebody, very first thing out of their mouth, why do bad things happen to good people? Brother, I don't know. And we're not going to know. We can ask that question all we want. I'll just tell you as a pastor, there's no answer to that. We're not going to know this side of eternity. I know that if I were God, I would mess it up, but bad things wouldn't happen to good people. But when we get to eternity, we're going to know why they do. On this side of eternity, I don't know. What I do know is that it is right and good and biblical and righteous when we hurt to say, Jesus, come. Just stop this pain. Stop these wars. Stop cancer. Knock it off with the empty chairs at the dinner table. Heal the people who hurt us. Jesus, come. This place isn't right. This world doesn't fit. I know that this isn't what you want, God. Send your son to redeem us, to get us again. Jesus, come. It's right and good in pain and in disappointment and in loss and in loneliness and in despair and in depression, to not have an answer for it, to not see a silver lining, to simply throw your hands up and put your head down and say, Jesus, please come and rescue this. It's a mess. Please come. That's what this song is. God, it's a mess. Please come. Send your son. Rescue us. Fix this. Let us exist in your perfect peace. Jesus, come. It's a right and good response to despair. And here's why this song is a Christmas song. Because Christmas reminds us that Jesus has come and instills hope that he will do it again. That's what Christmas is. Christmas reminds us every year Jesus has come. And because of that it instills hope that he will come again. Every year we acknowledge Jesus did come. He did come as a baby, meek and humble and lowly. He did come in a manger to a Virgin Mary and to a father, Joseph. He did arrive in Bethlehem that day. He was taken back to Nazareth. He did live a perfect life and die a perfect death. He did come. God did keep his promise that he made to Abraham 4,000 years prior that the nation of Israel clung to generation after generation as they are subjected to judges and terrible kings and slavery and being drug away from their nation. And they see the temple being built and they see it being torn down and they see it rebuilt again and they weep because it's a shadow of what it was. Through all of that, God was with them and God kept his promise. And we see God keeping his promise in the beginning of the gospels and the Christmas stories. And that's what we celebrate, that God kept his promise and he sent his son. So Christmas reminds us that Jesus has already been here. He came. God did what he said he would do. And because he did, because we saw that promise fulfilled after 4,000 years of waiting, we know that he will keep it again one day too. And we can cling to that promise. That's what being a Christian is. It's believing that it was Jesus who did come in a manger that day, that he did die on the cross, that he did go to prepare a place for us, and one day, we don't know when it will be, but one day he will come crashing back through the clouds and he will claim us and he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. We know that to be true. To be a Christian is to cling to that hope. And so sometimes that hope gets covered over by the clouds of night. Sometimes circumstances make our tether to that hope fragile and thin. Sometimes things happen that we don't understand that we'll never be able to explain. And when they do, we cling to that hope that Jesus will come again and we say, do it soon, Lord. Do it soon. That's what we sing when we sing, O come, Emmanuel. That's what we celebrate when we celebrate Christmas. Jesus did come, and because I believe he did, I know that he will again. That's what Christmas reminds us of. So even if this Christmas is a hard one for you, we have this song, this anthem to declare. And the good news about this song is, it's not just the bad stuff. Oh, come, Jesus, it's hard here. The chorus is rejoice. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel. Rejoice, oh, rejoice, because he's coming again. He came for you and he will come again. Rejoice, rejoice. We have reason to rejoice. And so here's the invitation. In a few minutes, we're going to sing this song together. If this Christmas is hard for you, I want you to declare this. To throw up your hands and to put down your head and to say, Jesus, come. This is hard. Come. And choose to rejoice in that truth. Here's the other thing. If you're in a good season, and this Christmas is a good one, you're blessed, and you're happy, and you're joyful. And you have all the things and all the people around you that you want to have around you, and you're looking forward to a truly joyful Christmas season. Wonderful. Here's what I want to ask you to do. I want you to sing. I want you to sing as loud as you can, because I want you to be the voice for people who can't muster that voice this morning. If they don't have the strength to sing, let them hear you singing. For those of us that don't have the voice to rejoice yet, let's let our church family carry us with their voice to God's throne as we declare this. So we're going to do that in a few minutes together. But before we do that, we're going to have communion together. Because we thought it would be right and good and appropriate to finish up this series and usher in the Christmas series by doing communion together as a church. Communion is one of the traditions that Jesus himself started. At the Last Supper, the night he was arrested, yeah, the elders can come forward and start to set things up. At the Last Supper, the night he was arrested, Jesus took bread and he broke it. And he handed it to the disciples and he says, this is my body that's broken for you. And then he took the wine and he poured it. And he says, this is my blood that spilled out for you. Every time you do these things, I want you to do them in remembrance of me. And so churches through the millennia have observed communion. The body, the bread is God's body that was broken for us. After he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death. The blood, the juice is the blood that was spilled out for us in that perfect death. And in celebrating communion, we acknowledge that to live sometimes is to suffer. But Jesus took on the greatest suffering on the cross. He became suffering for us so that one day we would have to suffer no more. He is the Prince of Peace and He did keep the promises and He will fulfill them again, and we see the depiction of that on the cross as He suffers for us so that we don't have to. He didn't come to just be a baby and live a life. He came to die that death. And so it's good for us to acknowledge that here too. So here's what I'm going to ask you to do. I'm going to invite you to stand and then we're going to pray together and then we'll take communion and then we're going to close the service out with O Come Emmanuel and then we'll go into our weeks. Father, thank you for communion. Thank you for sending your son who became Emmanuel, God with us. Thank you for the perfect life that he lived. Thank you for the death that he died for us. Lord, as we prepare our hearts to take communion, I just pray that we would allow you to do work within us, to rid us of what doesn't need to be there, to infuse us with what does. God, I lift up those for whom this Christmas is going to be challenging. I pray that they would take this song and this desire for you to return as their anthem that would encourage them through this season. God, we lift up Howard as he recovers. Be with him in that recovery. We lift up the other people in our church who are hurting now. We hurt with them and you hurt with them and we pray that you would heal them too. God, we pray all of these things in the name of your son, Emmanuel. Amen.

Well, thank you very much to the band. You guys are doing a great job lifting your voices to the Father. I say it all the time, it's my favorite noise in the world to hear my church praising God together. In a few minutes, we're going to sing, the song is going to be sung over us and then we're going to have a chance to sing it together called The Blessing. The song is taken right out of Numbers chapter 6 and it reminds me of the cultural blessings that we have all over the world. A lot of different cultures have a lot of different traditional blessings. One of my favorite ones is the traditional Irish blessing. You guys may have heard this before, but it says, may the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand. I like blessings like that. I like traditions like that. I like hopes and prayers for one another like that. And so when I came across this song and I opened the scripture to find where it was, I loved it so much. I was actually talking with a friend of mine this week and was saying that we were going to be talking about the blessing this Sunday and it comes out in Numbers chapter 6 and he's like, oh yeah, I know it. I know it. He used to go to a church where a pastor would finish every sermon with this blessing. And I think it's so great because if you look at Numbers chapter six and we're going to leave the lights down so you don't have to pull out a Bible or try to participate. We don't have any notes to take this morning. I just want us to understand this song that we're about to sing together. But if you look in Numbers chapter 6, there's really no context for this. In the preceding verses, we're talking about what to do in a Nazaritic vow. So I know that some of you guys were wondering about that. It's in Numbers 6, so you can read that later this afternoon. And then chapter 7 is offering at the tabernacle for consecration. But sandwiched in between those two topics, really germane to nothing, is just this wonderful priests. So he says, go and tell the leaders of the people. Go and tell the spiritual leaders that when my people are blessed, when you would bless them, here's how I want you to do it. It is the traditional blessing of all traditional blessings. This is the one. And so the first little part there is very simple. The Lord bless you. It's okay to wish blessing upon one another. It's probably better for me to desire your blessing over my blessing, but it's okay for me as your pastor to pray that the Lord would bless you and your families, and I do. And so when we say that the Lord bless you, what does it mean to be blessed? May you sit in the Lord's favor. May you be prosperous physically and emotionally and spiritually and relationally in all the ways. Will the Lord bless you with rich friendships, with good family. May the Lord bless you with good health or quick healing. May the Lord bless you with peace and emotional stability and a life of kind of simmering joy. Would the Lord bless you? Would the Lord see favor on you? See you favorably and move you forward. And so it's right and good to pray for one another that our families, that your families would be blessed and would be prosperous in all the ways that are good and holy. And I love that next part, the Lord bless you and keep you. What does that mean? Well, to me, it reminds me of Psalm chapter 21, verses seven and eight. And it reminds me of this Psalm because this is something that my wife, Jen, prays over Lily every day before she goes to school. She prays out of these verses. Let's look at Psalms. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forevermore. So this idea of the Lord keeping us means he's got us. He's going to protect us. He's going to walk with us. His presence will always be with us. And we love that phrase in our house, and you're going and then you're coming. And you're going out and then you're coming back in. And everything that you do and everywhere that you go and every place you arrive and every place you arrive back to, would the Lord be with you? Would he be walking with you? Would you feel his presence? Would you never feel alone? Would the Lord bless you and keep you? Would he hold you tight? And then we have that great phrase back in Numbers. If we look at the verse again, we have that great phrase, make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you and then the Lord lift up his countenance to you. So I thought a lot about what does that mean and why is it significant for the Lord to make his face shine upon us, for him to lift his countenance to us. And the image that kept coming back to my mind is what my face does when I see my two-year-old son, John. My face does it with Lily too, but there's something about a toddler that just brightens everything. There's also something about a toddler that ruins everything. So you take the good with the bad, right? But if you've ever been talking with me in the lobby or in here, and I hear his voice say, Daddy, or I turn and I see him, you know you just ceased to exist to me. It just happened right there. There's no one else in the room. There's nothing else happening. I turn and I smile and I crouch. He's everything. Everything else fades. If you have children, you've looked at them like that too. Where your countenance turns to them. Where you raise it up to them, where everything fades and they're the only thing in your universe. I can only imagine what that feeling is like with grandbabies. If you don't have children, but you have grandparents that you love, you have a mom or a dad that you love, you have a friend that you don't get to see all the time, it's the thing that your face does when you see them. It lifts and it brightens and everything fades and you're the only thing in the world. This is what it means when God lifts his countenance to us. When God turns his face to us. Everything else to God fades and it it's just you and him, and he's right there. So the Lord bless you. May he prosper you in all the ways that are important, in all the ways that are holy. May he keep you, be with you, and you're coming, and you're going, and walk beside you. And you're actually going to see Psalms, that phrase, show up in the song that we sing, in the blessing. The blessing is not just numbers. It's like a compilation of blessings from numbers and from psalms and from Deuteronomy. The Lord keep you. He go with you. He protect you as you go in your comings and in your goings. And then we pray that God would shine his countenance on you. To take it a step further, I would pray that you would feel the warmth of his face. That you would feel the warmth of his love. That you would believe that he turns to you and that his countenance delights and raises when he sees you and when you're brought to mind. And then this interesting thing happens in the song. So the first two, I don't know what they're called, verses or stanzas or whatever, I don't know songs, but the first two parts you'll see are just this two times. We'll sing it through. And then we start to move into other portions of the song. And there's a portion of the song where we sing out of Psalm 21. And we say, the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you. But we're also going to say, in your coming and in your going, in your presence, he is with you, he is with you, he is with you. And then we're going to sing, he is for you, he is for you. He is for you. And that's from Romans chapter 8. If God is for us, then who can be against us? And then we're going to get to this part that we pull out of Deuteronomy that it says, well, He blessed you for generation and generation for your children and their children and their children. And this blessing is prayed not only over you, but over all of your descendants and over your family. So it really becomes this beautiful, powerful blessing. So I want to invite the band back up. If you guys can come get in place. We're going to do something with this song that I hope can be special to us. As we start the song, I want you to hear this song as a blessing over you. And I want you to sing this song as a prayer over those you love. So for the first part of the song, we're going to invite you to just remain seated. Sit there and let this song be sung over you as a blessing in the mode of God through Moses to Aaron. The way it was supposed to be spoken over God's people. Let it be sung over you and receive it and personalize it. Let it be sung over you that the Lord wants to bless you, that he wants to keep you, that his countenance is shining on you, that he is with you, that he is for you in your comings and in your goings. Make it personal. And then you're going to be invited to stand and sing. And when you sing it, make it a prayer. And think about those who come after you. Think about those that you love. And pray that God, as you sing, would bless them and keep them, that his face would shine upon them, that he would be with them, that they would know that he is for them. So let's hear it as a blessing and then let's stand when Jordan tells us to and sing it as a prayer.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is the second part of our series called The Songs We Sing. Last week, we opened up and we did Graves in the Gardens. I gave you kind of a background of worship, and I started to, it's kind of trickled into me some good feedback that you guys are excited about this series, looking forward to it, looking forward to seeing what we've been singing in the Bible, what we will be singing in the Bible. And so I am thrilled to be going through this series with you because like I said, it's one that I've been wanting to do for a while. And last week when I got done preaching and we sang together, I was so encouraged at the voices being lifted up. And this morning we'll have the same opportunity. I'm going to preach about the song that we just sang because it's pulled straight out of Psalm chapter 8. And then we'll sing it again, knowing it better, having a better understanding of what it means in a full-throated, open-hearted way. And then we'll sing some other songs that are really special to us. And then we'll go into our week. So I'm feeling really good about this Sunday. And I just feel like it's worth saying sometimes that I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for my church. I'm so grateful for the love and the community that we experience here, for the handshakes and hugs and laughter and the lobby for the stories of the team coming back from Mexico I'm just grateful for y'all I'm grateful to be here and I'm excited to teach to you out of the book of Psalms this morning now to do a series focused on worship and to not have at least one morning out of the book of Psalms would be sacrilegious. It would be absolutely awful because Psalms is the hymn book of the Old Testament. It is the hymn book of the Hebrew people. It is intended to be sung. A vast majority of the Psalms are intended to be sung. And sometimes there's even instructions about it at the beginning of eight. You don't have to look there yet, but the very first thing it says is to the choir master, according to the Giddeth, nobody knows what that is, a Psalm of David, but they think it's a certain tune to which it's supposed to be sung. So David is even giving this to the choir master. I wrote this to praise our God. Let's sing it to this tune. Let's sing it together. A vast majority of the Psalms were written with the intention of God's body of believers singing them his words back to him, which I think is remarkable. And Psalms is a remarkable book. It sits in the dead center of our Bible. It's the longest book in the Bible with 150 chapters. It's divided into five separate books within the book of Psalms. It has the longest chapter in the Bible in Psalm 119, which comes in at, I believe, 176 verses. It's a super long chapter of the Bible because it's a beautiful Hebrew poem. There's 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, and each stanza, every line begins with that letter of the alphabet as the psalmist moves through. It's the one thing in the Bible that really makes me want to learn original Hebrew so I could hear that psalm read and sung in the original language in which it was intended because I've got a feeling that it is beautiful. I'll just wait until I get to heaven. I'm not actually going to do the work to learn Hebrew. That seems super hard. The seminary I chose, I chose it so I didn't have to learn original languages, so I'm not about to reverse course now, you know? But it's the longest book with the longest chapter, and it's filled with songs. And they're not all praise songs. They're divided up in different ways depending on who you ask and who's doing the dividing. You can find some people that divide them into five different types of Psalms, some as many as 20 and everything in between. But just a few examples of the types of Psalms that you can find in your Bible as you read through Psalms. And shame on me, I realize I haven't done a series in Psalms in the six and a half years I've been here. Shame on me for that. So I am promising you that coming up, we will do a series in Psalms at some point. But if you want to know some of the divisions of the book of Psalms, the different types that we have, there's Psalms of praise. Obviously, there's royal Psalms, Psalms of lament. And we're actually going to talk about those next week. I'm so grateful that our Bible has Psalms of lament, expressions of sadness and grief. There's what's called imprecatory psalms or psalms that are prayed and sung to seek vengeance over our enemies. David had a lot of reason to sing those. You probably don't. You probably don't have many enemies that you should sing imprecatory songs over, but they're in there. Psalms of enthronement and then psalms of pilgrimage. And I think these psalms of pilgrimage are really interesting. And I want to actually point you towards a book for my people who are readers. There's this book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson. Eugene Peterson is the pastor that faithfully translated the message to make scriptures a little bit more approachable for people who have never encountered them before. I read his biography last year, and I think it was an autobiography, a memoir, and it was one of the more moving books I've read in a long time. I was really, really touched by the heart of Eugene Peterson. And probably his most famous book is a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. And A Long Obedience in the Same Direction actually moves through what's called the Psalms of Ascent, this group of pilgrimage psalms And I've wanted to, that may be the Psalm series that we do. I'm either going to do it as a series as we walk through the book together, or I'm going to do it as like a Wednesday night course where those that want to come and we move through it together. But if you're a reader, I would highly encourage you to go grab or write down or put in your Goodreads, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. But in the book of Psalms, we have all these different categories. We have all these different verses. And one of the things we see that I think is remarkable is that a majority of them are written by David. They're not all written by David. There's some authors that are just referred to as the sons of Asaph. And Asaph was, I believe, the choir master, the worship leader. And then these are his sons that he has passed this responsibility down to. And they've written their own Psalms in there. But one of the remarkable things about the book of Psalms is to see the heart of David just kind of filleted open on the table for you. And I love that God in his goodness includes the Psalms to offset the other stories of David. Because if you read the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, you can also see the stories in 1st Kings but more of details of the story are in 1st and 2nd Samuel and if you read the story of David you see this traditionally masculine macho guy who's fighting and killing and he kills Goliath and he fights lions and bears with his bare hands which you know who hasn't and then there's a song about him him. David has killed his tens of thousands. Saul has killed his thousands. It's just like, yeah, spear-throwing, meat-eating dude. And then you open Psalms, and here's a guy that's brokenhearted. Here's a guy that's highly emotional, highly vulnerable, who displays his tears and his lament and his repentance and his hopes and his fears and his deepest prayers for all of time to see. And the juxtaposition of Psalms and 1 and 2 Samuel kind of brings together this vision of what we can be as people and how multifaceted we can be. So I'm grateful that Psalms reads almost like a prayer journal of David at times. But to me, the most remarkable thing about the book of Psalms is that when we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. When we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. And you can sing the Psalms. Write this down if you want to, if you want something else to listen to. There's this, I don't know, I guess they're just a duet, a duo, I don't know the rules, a band, Shane and Shane. And they have an album called Psalms, where they have set the Psalms to music, and it's one of my favorites. I love it. I've loved it for years and years. You can go find it. It's on Spotify. It's on all the things. And you can sing the Psalms. I would highly recommend it. When we sing the Psalms, understand this, we are joining in to an ancient chorus of all the saints. I spoke last week about how when we worship, when we praise, when we sing out, that we join our brothers and sisters in Christ in unity. It unifies us according to the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. When we sing together, it unifies us in this remarkable way. When we walk in Republican and Democrat, we walk in 80 and 20. We walk in stressed and not stressed, successful and not successful in a season of plenty and a season of need. And we lay all of those things down and we praise our God together and it unifies us. And I've just, I just got to tell you, I shared this with the band and the tech team before the service. But this is just a, just such a good picture of how it unifies us. if I don't say it I might die a little on the inside. So I'm just gonna have to Yesterday I was at the funeral for a friend of mine's wife 40 years old perfectly healthy Went on a girl's trip Heart heart attack, died in the bathroom. No other explanation. Incredibly sad thing. Two kids, sixth grader, third grader. So I drive down, I go to the funeral, and the husband's name, my buddy's name is Jeff. There's about 750 people in the room. And in between speakers, they put up a slideshow of Jodi and her family. And they started playing under that slideshow a song called Gratitude. We've sang it here a couple of times. It's going to be the last song that we sing this morning. They started playing Gratitude. And when that song started, Jeff, the husband who lost his wife a week ago, stood up and raised his hands in worship. And so, if you're at a funeral and the husband of the deceased woman stands up and raises his hands, you stand up and you raise your hands. So 750 people stand up and raise their hands to this song too. And then they spontaneously started singing it. And I'm six hours away from my church family, with my old church family, singing a song with myriad other church families, with our hands raised, choosing to praise in a moment of grief, and it just unifies you in a way that nothing else can. It was a remarkable moment. And when we sing it this morning, we join them and their praises to a God in spite of grief. We join Jeff in our prayers for him. We join the other congregations that sing that too. So when we sing the Psalms, we join into the ancient chorus of all the saints. Do you understand? When we sing in a few minutes, Psalm 8, back to God, we are singing it with David. We are singing it with the generations of David and Solomon and the faithful generations of Jeroboam and Rehoboam. We're singing it with Hezekiah and King Asa. We are singing it with the faithful generations, with the remnant that gets taken to Babylon. We are singing these psalms with Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. We are singing these psalms with the Maccabees who lit the menorah in Roman oppression. We are singing these psalms with the generations that cried out in the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Matthew We are singing these songs with Jesus himself and with the disciples And with the early churches that met in the basements in Rome when we sing the Psalms We are joining with the underground churches in China and in Lebanon and in Istanbul, singing God's songs back to him. One of my favorite quotes about the Psalms is by Charles Spurgeon, and I'll tell you why he deserves to be the one who writes this in a second. Also, I'm just going to compose myself. We've got a long way to go here. This is premature. I can't afford this. I only have one tissue. Jen's laughing at me the hardest, she knows. It's been an emotional weekend. Back off. All right. Spurgeon writes this, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. I love that. The book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. That when we sing Psalms, we are mounted on wings of eagles and we soar in the presence of God. Now let me tell you why Spurgeon has a right to write that sentence and should rightly be pointed out in any sermon on Psalms. If you don't know who Charles Haddon Spurgeon is, he was a preacher. He was loud. He had combed back hair and a beard and a belly, and he suffered from gout, and he liked to drink whiskey. So, just saying, he was called. He was and is called the Prince of Preachers. He holds the world record for preaching to the most people in one space at one time without a microphone and being heard. One time he was preaching in an auditorium. This is in the late 1800s in London. He was preaching in an auditorium, going through what he wanted to say, and some janitor in a hallway that he couldn't see bowed on his knees right there and accepted Jesus listening to Charles go through his sermon. It's an amazing story. The volume of work of Charles Spurgeon is unbelievable. The amount of books that he wrote. You can look up any of his sermons online, and they're long, wordy, lengthy sermons. And it was said of him that people would come from all over the world to hear him preach, and what they would say is, yeah, the sermon's great, but you need to listen to the man pray. He was known all over the world. He wrote tons of books. He ran a seminary out of his church. He wrote books for the seminarians that I have, that I refer to regularly, that still help me and my approach to pastoring and preaching and all the things. But his whole life, he worked on one book that became a three-volume set called The Treasury of David. It's a commentary on the book of Psalms. And he carried it with him wherever he went. He worked on it for decades. He would work on it for a bit. He'd put it back down, he'd pick it back up. You better believe that I've got the treasury of David in my office. And that every time I preach out of a psalm, that's the first place I go. If you're someone who appreciates materials like that, go get it. It's not like super expensive. Find it on Amazon with a cheesy cover. And he writes in the intro to his magnum opus, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. The book of Psalms is worthy of our study and it's worthy of our singing. And we ought to acknowledge when we're singing it back to God because when we do, we join into that ancient chorus of all the saints through all the decades. Now this morning, we're going to be in Psalm chapter 8. So if you have a Bible with you, I would encourage you to turn there. And I'm going to say this this morning. I don't try to get you to do a lot of stuff because I want it to matter when I ask you to do something. So I intentionally don't try to put pressure on you to do things. I just want you to be a good Christian adult and do what you want to do and do as the Spirit moves you. But I'm going to encourage us as a church to begin to bring our Bibles to church for Sunday mornings. Some of you like to read through apps. That's fine. Read your app. Bring it. Have your phone out. I'm giving you permission to have your phone out in church. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not scrolling something that you shouldn't be scrolling during a church service. And if you are someone who likes to read the Bible on your phone, that's fine to have it out. Just make sure that the screen is visible to the people next to you, okay? So that they can smack you if you're cheating and you're checking a score or something. But let's be people who bring our Bible to church. Because here's what I want for you. I want you to sit, and I want you to have your Bible open. And when something strikes you, I want you to be able to write a note. When you see a verse that you like, that you want to remember, I want you to be able to highlight it. I want your Bibles to serve you as kind of these spiritual journals where when you flip through them, you see where you've been. You know that God's spoken to you there before. When you go to different places, you have notes on the sides and you have dates and you have prayers so that as you flip through your Bible years from now, you see times when God was faithful. I can't tell you how many passages I have written beside them. What does this mean? God help me understand. And then I'll hear sermon on it, or I'll hear somebody teach about it. I'll read a book on it, and I'll turn to that passage, and I'll go, oh, I think I understand this now. Thank you, God, for your faithfulness. I want to encourage you to bring your Bible to church. Open it up. Make notes about what I'm saying or what God is saying to you. And then let me just tell you this. If things get boring, as they often do, you can start flipping through your Bible like you're source checking me or you're just interested in something. And then you look double spiritual. The people in your row are going to be like, yo, they're cross-referencing Nate. That's, look at, look at them. That's super spiritual. So just bring it, man. We'll probably make you an elder if you start doing that stuff. And you're just doing it because you're bored. It's so many benefits. Let's start bringing our Bibles if we don't already. But right now, what I want you to do is grab the Bible. If you don't have one, grab the one in front of you and let's read Psalm 8 together. It's only nine verses and I thought it would be well worth it to spend some time reading it together this morning. Find Psalm 8. It says this. When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Verse 9, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. What a wonderful, declarative psalm of praise. This is the psalm that we sing from. This is the psalm that when I'm done talking, we will sing from again. And as we look through it and we go through it together and see what it has to offer, I think there's such depth of wisdom and goodness here. I love the way that the psalm starts. Verse 1, if you look at it in your Bibles, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. What I love about this, and this is a point that Spurgeon made, not me. What I love about this is the inadequacy of that declaration. This is a psalm that is clearly meant to glorify the majesty of God, that is clearly meant to frame him up among the stars, that is clearly meant to swoop us up and to carry us away into a reverent awe of the majesty of God. This is a big deal psalm. This needs to resound through the generations. And so we would expect some honorifics to go along with the Lord's name, wouldn't we? We would expect some more adjectives to be there. How majestic and all of your grandeur and the worthiness of your ways and whatever else. We would expect it to be this grand entrance as we open this declaration about God. And yet it's not that. It's this humble, oh Lord, our Lord. That's the best David could muster. Oh Lord, our Lord. It feels so inadequate for the moment, but that's why it's so good. Because to start a majestic psalm that way, so humbly, is to confess without even having to say it out loud, my words are inadequate for your greatness, oh God. What else could David say but oh Lord, our Lord? What else is fitting? What honorifics should he put there that would adequately capture who our creator God is? There's nothing worthy enough of writing. So he just humbly puts, oh Lord, our Lord. And so when we sing those words in a few minutes, when we say, oh Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name, we are admitting in that song and in that declaration and with our voices and in our hearts that we are inadequate to adequately title God's glory and goodness. We are inadequate to adequately express and explain and capture who he is. And so we surrender to the simple, humble, oh Lord, our Lord. How majestic is your name. It's such a good beginning of the psalm to start it with humility and with simplicity as we confess through our words and our spirits, our inadequacy to capture who our creator God is. Verse two, we're actually going to look at in a second. That becomes important when we start to think about how Jesus employed this psalm. But verse 3, I love, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. Psalm 8 proclaims that God has told the story of himself through his creation. The song that we are singing based out of Psalm 8 is called Tell the Story. And it talks about how creation tells the story of God and how we participate in that. When we look at creation, when we look at a sunset or a sunrise, when we're on a plane and we can look out and get that unique view of God's creation and his earth, when we hike and we see beautiful things, when we look into the heavens and we marvel at God, when we get away from the city and we can actually see the stars, when we do those things, the heavens are declaring the glory of God. They're preaching to us about the presence of God. The purpose of creation is to tell the story of the creator. And since you are his creation and you are the only one imbued with a voice and entrusted with a voice, then it is our responsibility to cry out to God in ways that the rest of creation cannot do. It is our responsibility to make sure that the rocks don't have to cry out to our God because we're going to do that because we are the part of his creation that was made to praise him. And so we do it loudly. We do it vigorously. We do it openheartedly. And I'm reminded in verse three, as it points to God's creation, kind of declaring who he is of Romans one, Paul writes about this. Paul in Romans 1 says that the Lord has revealed himself in creation so that no man is without excuse. Through the millennia, men and women and children have looked at God's creation and marveled at the creator. The sun, the moon, and the stars tell the story of our God and who he is. And then we move into verses four and following what could be a little bit of a confusing portion. Because as I read it earlier, you may have picked up on the difference. If you were following along in an NIV, if you're using one of our Bibles this morning, then you're reading an N NIV maybe you pulled up an NIV on your app or that's what you carried in this morning but what you saw is in verse 4 when it says what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him your version says them so the ESV and some other versions say him and your version and some other versions say them. And so the question becomes, why is there a difference there? Why does that matter? Why is that important? Well, the Hebrew word there can be translated either way. And so some translations choose to say them because clearly some of these verses are referring to us, to humankind. I mean, when we read it, especially verse 4, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? That's not talking about Jesus. Who is Jesus that you would care about him, that you are mindful of him? Obviously, it's not talking about Jesus. It's us. Who are we that you would care about us? And to this point, just to bring this home, I do like that verse. I'm going to pause here. We're going to get back to him and them. But I like this thought, who am I that you would care for me? Why do I matter to you? I don't know if you've ever experienced someone singling you out in a way that made you feel special. You're like, why are you paying attention to me? Years ago, a few months before I moved to Raleigh, my pastor growing up died. He had had an aortic aneurysm, survived for a few years, developed an infection, and he passed away. He was very old, though. He was about 62, I think. He was too young. And his church had grown pretty significantly, and they had started other churches. So the people who were there were in the thousands. There was so many people who wanted to pay their respects for Pastor Buddy that they had to have a visitation the night before at the church. And the line was over an hour long to talk to the family. And when I got there, I hadn't been going to that church in years. I worked at another church. I grew up with, I grew up at that church and Buddy has three kids, Gabe, Joy, and Spring. Joy's my age. Gabe's a few years older than me. But Gabe and I, we were buddies growing up. We played Goldeneye together. He was my Goldeneye buddy. I don't know if that resonates with any of you. Like four of you, they're like, yes, Goldeneye buddies. But we weren't like super tight. And I really didn't expect to talk to anybody. I was just showing up because I have a lot of respect for Buddy and I love that family. And before I could get in line, I heard Gabe call my name. And I'm like, cool, I get to skip the line, which I love doing. And I go up to Gabe, and he hugs me, and he says, it's such a funny question. He goes, dude, what are you doing? Like, you got anything going on? I'm like, I'm at your dad's visitation, man. This is what I'm doing. You know, like, I didn't say that, but I said, no, I'm not busy. And he goes, come on. And so he leaves the line, and he takes me back to a hospitality room where there's Zaxby's. I'd love to say it was Chick-fil-A. It wasn't. There's Zaxby's. And he sits down, and he just wants to talk with me. And I just remember thinking, why are you talking with me of all these people why do i why am i the one that gets your time why are you treating me like this and in that case i really do think it was because i knew him when we remember growing up we we were at the church running around together we were the ones running around in in the service after it was over before there was thousands of people going there. And I guess nobody else kind of knew the family like I did. But the whole time I'm sitting there, I just felt such privilege of why in the world do you care about talking to me right now? And I feel like that's what the author of Psalms, David, is describing. God, why do you even notice us? Why are you calling me out in a crowd? Why do we matter to you? That should not be something that's lost on us, that God sees us, that he calls our name, and he says, hey, come here, let's talk. That's a remarkable thing. And so back to the he, him, and them. There are some verses that are very clearly talking about humankind, us. But there are some verses that are very clearly talking about Jesus. Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You gave him dominion over the works of your hand. You have put all things under his feet. Clearly that's talking about Jesus. And so the question becomes in Psalm chapter 8, in verse 5, is the psalmist talking about us or Jesus? Yes. He's talking about both things. He's talking about both us and Christ. Again, because clearly there are some verses here that could not apply to Christ. Who is Christ that you should consider him? That doesn't really work out. He's part of the Trinity. So that has to be for us. But he has not put everything under our feet. He's put everything under Jesus' feet. So clearly that's for Jesus. And I'll tell you how I know that's for Jesus, because Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews also thought that it was for Jesus. If you turn to Hebrews, you'll see, I forget the chapter. I think maybe I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah, chapter 2. The author of Hebrews is comparing Jesus to the angels, saying that he's superior to the angels. To do that, he quotes Psalm 8 and uses it to point back to Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15, verses 25 through 27, this is one of the times that you could flip and check me if you're bored and you'd look super spiritual. Paul is talking about Jesus and he's telling the people this is who Jesus is. He's the one that Psalm 8 was referring to. He's the Messiah that we are waiting on. The whole earth is in subjection to him. That is who we serve. And then Jesus himself uses this psalm to prove to a group of Pharisees that he's actually Jesus. He uses it to tick them off, which, you know, I'm a fan of. But this is what he says. Matthew 21 verses 15 and 16. I cheated. I had it marked. So I got there extra fast. Jesus says this, well, this isn't Jesus yet, but he'll talk soon. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did and the children crying out in the temple, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant. Now they're indignant because for, for someone to declare Hosanna to the Son of David is to declare them the Messiah. It is to declare them God incarnate. And they were not willing to accept that about Jesus. So the children acknowledged who Jesus was before the adults were willing to acknowledge it. They were indignant. Verse 16. And they said to him, Do you hear what these are saying? Like, you need to tell them to be quiet if you have any sense. And Jesus said to them, Yes. Have you never read? Which is hilarious. Have you never read? That's like asking a Tennessee fan if they don't know that they got their tails kicked yesterday. Yes, of course they know that. Of course they do. Have you never read? It's ridiculous. Have you never read? Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise. It is a direct reference to Psalm chapter 8, where Jesus says, yeah, have you not read that Psalm? It's about me. So how can I be sure that Psalm 8 is about us and Jesus? Because Jesus told me. He uses it as a proof text to say, yeah, I am Hosanna, the son of David. And so what this means, what all this means, and I don't want you guys to miss this. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of our God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. That's what's packed into these nine verses. We declare the majesty of God. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. We declare God is grand. God is big. God is huge. We declare it along with the churches down through the centuries. We declare glory unto God. We marvel at his wonder for us. Who are we that you should pick us out of a crowd, that you should call us, that you should talk to us, that you should care about us, that you should know us, that you would want my praise. Who am I that I matter to you, God? Why in the world did you send your son for me? So we marvel at God's love as we sing. And then, and then we declared glory for the risen Savior. We shine him in glory, understanding that Psalm 8 is also a messianic psalm that talks about Jesus and declares his glory and puts him in dominion and says the world is under his feet and we are in that world so we are subservient to him. So in this psalm, as we sing it and as we move through it, we declare the glory of God. We wonder at his love for us and we declare the glory of our risen Savior all in those nine verses. And if this all doesn't stir your soul to sing, I can't help but think I must be a terrible pastor. Because as I studied this, as I prepared this morning, as I thought through this, I couldn't wait to sing with you guys. If I were you, I would want me to shut up so I could start singing. That's what I would want right now. And so I'm going to do that right before I do. I just want to show you the words we're about to sing. And I want to show you the verses that they come from. So when we sing this song together, when we, in a few minutes, join the ancient chorus of believers who have been singing this song through the centuries. When we join the churches all over the world who have been singing this song and who might even sing this song or sing from the songs this morning. I want us to know what we're singing. So let's look. The first verse, the first words, O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name. That comes directly out of verse 1. Directly out of verse 1. We're singing that right back to God. And then the words right after that in the song are your glory on display. The works of your hands show us who you are. That's verses 2 and 3. Do you see? That's verses two and three when it says the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. We're singing those words back to God. That's where they're pulled from. On down we see verse three highlighted again where it says, O Lord, our Lord, you light up our world, the sun, moon, and stars. Declare who you are. Declare who you are. And then finally, we see verse 4, and O who am I, unworthy one, that you would give your only son? Who are you to care for me? Amazing love, how can it be? That's where directly out of verse 4, we wonder and marvel at the love that God has for us, that he would notice us and care about us. And then the whole psalm declares the glory of Jesus. Anytime we sing about Jesus, who am I that you would send your only son? That's Jesus. That's who we're singing about. And then we say and we declare, tell the story. As we sing, God use me to tell your story of creation. I would remind you, all of creation was made to tell the story of God and declare praise for him. We're the only part of that creation that was given a voice to praise him. So let's use it together as we close out in these songs together. I'm going to pray and then Aaron and the band's going to come and we're going to sing together. Father, you are worthy of our praise. You are worthy of our adoration. Our words and our praise and our declarations are insufficient for you. They are inadequate for you and who you are. We admit that, God, as we look to sing to you. Lord, would you fill our lungs with praise for you? Would you fill our hearts with your grace and your goodness and your love that we might pour it back out to you? Would what we experience as we sing now not simply be something that makes our Sunday morning better, but will it carry us on a wave of praise into our weeks and maybe wash back up on these shores next week ready to praise again. God, fill our hearts with praise. Fill our hearts with joy. And let us do now, God, what you created us to do, to sing your praises back to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate again, and if I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You came on the perfect Sunday to meet people. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So after this, we go to that parking lot there and we just kind of celebrate God and his goodness, reflect on the year that we've had. This is something that we do every year. We call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. So it would be dishonest to call it the annual Hootenanny. And we care about honesty here. So it's this sometimes annual Hootenanny. And I hope that you'll stick around and talk to some folks and say, hey, and again, if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. This morning is going to look a little different. You can see I'm going to be talking to a couple of different folks within the church this morning about service and about volunteering. One of the things that we realized, I guess it was in August, I was talking with Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, and we realized that we hadn't highlighted service at Grace and volunteering at Grace in a really long time. And we said, it's high time we do this. And then we thought, well, how do we want to do it? Normally, you just preach a sermon about serving and servanthood. And God wanted us to partner with the local church and things like that. And I would bet 75% of you could predict most of the things that I would say in that kind of a sermon. And because of that, and also because I'm always looking for ways to get other voices up here and in front of the church so that we can hear from one another and learn from one another, we thought it would be good and interesting to do this kind of like Ministry Partner Sunday. So in the summer, we have Ministry Partner Sunday where we highlight the different ministry partners that we have outside the walls of the church, and I'll bring them up and talk to them about what they do. And so we thought we would do that with some of our volunteers this morning. Before we do that, just to kind of set up the conversation to set you guys up as you consider your role at Grace or any local church, I did have some thoughts from 1 Corinthians. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, 1 Corinthians chapter 12. I'm going to start in verse 18. The idea of the church being a body is all over scripture. It's all throughout, particularly the New Testament, particularly the writings of Paul. And there's some seminal passages where he talks about this, but this or Romans are probably the two, and this has a little bit more detail. So in chapter 12, Paul is detailing the spiritual gifts. He talks about this idea that God has given each of us gifts that we are to use in his kingdom. One of the verses I highlight often and say to you guys often is Ephesians 2.10, where it says that we are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we should walk in them. And so the idea is that as we live the Christian life, we are trying to determine, God, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What do you have for me to do and to walk in? And so that ties in here in this idea that we're all part of a body. We all have a part to play. We all have a role to fill. We all have something to do. And so it's incumbent upon us to figure out what that is. This is what Paul says. But as it is, he's just talked about the body and the ear needs the eyes and the eyes need the feet and the feet needs the hands and none of them can exist without the other. And then he says, but as it is in verse 18, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them as he says, of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow greater honor. I love this passage, particularly as a pastor, because I addressed this a few weeks ago, I think when we were talking about Hebrews in August. But we can make pastors more important than they should be, more valuable to the church than they really are. We can start to feel like staff, the people who work here, we're the most important people, and everybody else is kind of auxiliary, and they're helping. I know that when I grew up in my church, I kind of sensed that. And it's really important for me to point out, as often as I can, in God's kingdom, nobody's more important than anybody else. Nobody plays a more crucial role than anybody else. Leaders are to have a higher degree of accountability because it's our job to teach truth. But that's not a higher value in God's kingdom. And so I believe in grace. All of our partners are equally valuable. Everything we do is equally valuable in God's kingdom and in God's eyes. And so you can't, there's some, sometimes there are people who serve behind the scenes and I will get from them that they don't, that they feel like what they do is kind of small potatoes and it's not. It's hugely important. Everything that we do as the body of Christ is hugely important and matters in eternity and matters to God and is valued by God. Because of that, I wanted us to hear from different portions of our body that play different parts and different roles, and maybe we can relate to some of them. Maybe we'll be inspired to serve. We all have this sheet in our seat, and I'll be going through this at the end of the sermon time today. But I wanted us to hear from people in the church who serve and kind of get to know them a little bit. I felt like it was appropriate on Hootenanny Sunday because we're going out to talk and to be communal and to be a family. So this is kind of a family meeting this morning. Mike and Holly, if you guys want to go ahead and make your way up here and grab that microphone. Oh, you have it? Okay. Is there a microphone over there? There it is. Okay, good. I wanted you guys to hear from parts of the body as well. These are Mike and Holly. This is Mike and Holly Anderson. Just to kind of... I want to say wet your whistle a little bit, but that feels like I don't want to say that. Just at the Hootenanny, ask Mike and Holly what their email names are for each other, okay? I'm just going to, I learned that when they first started coming here. We met for lunch, and I saw what their email names were for each other, and they're great. So ask them what they are. I'm not going to say them from stage because there's children in the room, but just ask them what they are. Mike and Holly, you guys have been coming to Grace for how long? Two and a half. Two and a half years. Two and a half years. And in what capacity do you guys serve? So we fill your tummies every Sunday with yum, warm, yummy coffee. That's what we do. And what made you guys decide that we want to do coffee every Sunday? Because they literally do it every Sunday. I'm like, we can get you extra help. They're like, we're good. We like it. We'll do it every Sunday. So what made you decide, let's get involved, and let's get involved at the coffee level? Okay, so my wife and I, we own our own businesses. so we have an opportunity to do every year, like you do in corporate America, is we do a goal-setting session. And so we go through all of our business plans and all of our personal plans about what we want to get accomplished. And so we usually do that the end of November, early December, every year. And so the year that we were doing this, our personal plans was how do we invest more time, resources, money to Grace? That's kind of where we were. And this was our first. We were eight months, nine months into Grace at that point in time. And just trying to figure out where can we get plugged in? What can we do? How can we get more involved? Small group is definitely something we had just started. And we wanted to figure out how to get further more engaged and so the sunday of after setting those sessions on um that service was all about not being a consumer of grace and how do you be more of a provider as a partner and it really hit it hit us real quick and we shot nate a quick email you guys were just you were just leeching off the the system. We were just little leeching. Yeah, you were dead weight. And so we had lunch with Nate and we said, how can we help? What do we, we want to get plugged in somewhere somehow. And he tried to put us back there in that big old booth back there. And we know nothing about that booth. So we weren't going down that road. And so coffee, obviously with COVID and being very sensitive to what was going on in the world. We thought, you know, that would be a great way for us to kind of really get plugged in and start that back up and really move on. So we just kind of jumped on it and went from there. Now, tell me, Holly, I think it's helpful to get a little bit of y'all's background. Not like, how'd you meet? Not that, but you guys met doing a similar job, and I think that the job that you did contributes to how you guys approach how you do coffee. So what did you do when you met, and how does that help what you do here? Yeah, sure. So Mike and I met. We did sports tourism industry for a long time, so the hospitality industry. We worked for convention and visitors bureaus, and it's all about hospitality and service. And we approach everything in our life like that, our new career now. So we expect a high-level, high-touch service. And so it's the little things, like writing the messages on the cups and having a flavor of the month in creamer. So we never go here. We're always, like, way over the edge, sometimes too much. But it comes from our past and how we met and just high-touch customer service, and we wanted to bring just our love of that to the people that we love here at Grace. Yeah, and that's why you guys are discovering in real time right now that you're going to be planning the golf tournament for us in the spring when we do that. We've both done that before. They're perfect for it. And so they take their professional background and they apply it to coffee. Now, coffee is underwhelming. That is a small thing compared to what you normally organize. But one of the things I noticed right away is the writing on the cups. I don't know if you guys have noticed the writing on the cups, but we don't buy them like that. They do it. And which one of you does it? Mike does it. I have the worst handwriting ever. That's his penmanship on the cups. And I saw him back there this morning. He's got a note on his phone where he's typed up the little messages that he's brainstormed, and then he's just alternating as he's writing those on your cups, just bringing a little bit extra to it every Sunday morning. How have you guys, it's a combo question, so answer it however you like. How have you guys personally benefited from getting to do that for now, close to a year and a half, almost two years? And then most importantly, how have you watched God work to use that bit of service to bring you closer to him? Yeah, we kind of talked about how those kind of coincided, we felt like. And I think so much of it is we love coming here. We love sitting in this building with people that we've just really grown to see as family and friends. And it's been cool in the short amount of time we've been here. And so there's a selfish part of it that's like, I have to get up and go. Like, if I just want to put my PJs on and have coffee and watch Nate for my house, even though he'll give me business about it later, I at least, like, I can't even think that way, right? Like, I know that I have a reason to be here. So there's that selfish reason of I know I have to be because I've committed, but it's also because we want to be here. So I think it's helped that, and it's just helped plug us in. Like, just being here in the morning, I think we've gotten to know, you know, you guys and staff better, which has been really cool, but also the people that serve, too, and really get to see what it takes to make this all happen on Sunday. And it's been really, you know, really neat. We were talking that the church that I was most involved with when I was a little kid and my family was really involved. This is the first time as an adult that I've been plugged in. And it has just felt like the most perfect place. I call my mom all the time and I'm like, I can't believe God brought us here. This is just, it's perfect and amazing. And what I've been looking for for a long time. So That's great. That's great. I love to hear that. Well, we're grateful to you guys for serving. We're grateful to you for planning the golf tournament. And it'll be in the end of April. And we're grateful for the coffee. But if you want to sign up for coffee, they've agreed to relinquish some rights for Sunday mornings. So if you want to partner with them and help or just give them some reprieve and do coffee with them, we would love for you to do that. Now, you've got to rise to their standards, okay? They're tough bosses, but we can still use some help there if that's something you guys want to do. Thanks so much. I'm going to call up Jacob and Elena Farmer. Where are they? Okay. Jacob and Elena are so committed that they drove straight from the beach this morning to be here to do this. Is that true? Yesterday. Yesterday. Oh, yeah, because their dog got a little bit of a struggle. There you go. They've been in here for two weeks. Elena couldn't be less interested in being on the stage right now. I couldn't believe. I knew that Jacob would be game. Jacob's fine. But I couldn't believe. I was like, if Elena wants to do it, I think people would benefit. And I knew that you were going to be like, no, not a chance. And then Jacob said, yeah, we'll be there. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to ask any questions. I didn't ask permission. Yeah, sure. Sure. So, um, a little bit of background on them and I didn't have time, nor did I think it was appropriate and sure service, but it would have been fun. Jacob is a huge birdwatcher. So if you like birds, talk to Jacob at the hootenanny and he will love to talk to you about it. I know. And I almost, I wanted to do a slideshow of birds and see if you could identify them, but maybe another time, maybe another time. But after they had been going here a while, Jacob and I got lunch and he told me a little bit about his background, and he kind of let it slip that he could play guitar, that he could lead worship. And whenever, in my position, you hear that someone's musically talented, you kind of go, okay, you want to get involved? I mean, that's a high skill position. That's pretty tough. But I kind of told him, like, I'm not going to tell Aaron. I'm just going to let you sit on it. You let us know when you're ready. And so Jacob's story, and it's one of the reasons I wanted you all to hear from him, is I'm kind of, I'm teeing this up for you a little bit. He had done it a lot, gotten burned out, found a new place, and wasn't sure when he wanted to re-engage and if he even trusted doing that. And so I thought his perspective on why you decided to like, yeah, let's go ahead and sign back up and play guitar and all that stuff. So if you kind of want to fill in the blanks there for that story, that's great. Yeah, sure. So, um, yes, long story short, I've been in praise and worship since seventh grade. So whatever, whatever age that is, 13, um, got burned out. I mean, every, every church I was involved with was a, was a plant we were tearing up, sitting down every Sunday. We were serving multiple roles. Um, and then adding onto that, I kind of got burned a little bit at church as well. So I kind of had a sour taste in my mouth. And we were out of church for a long time. And I was not playing for a long time. In fact, I think the first thing I told Aaron was I probably haven't played in a band setting in close to 10 years. So we can tell, but you're getting there. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my first practice Aaron, Aaron's like, yeah, come, come, come sit in. And then he's like, Oh, see you Sunday. I'm like, Oh, that wasn't at all talked about. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so for me, I guess leading up to it as a series of things, my wife dragging me here into church when I was stubbornly not wanting to be here, her volunteering to serve initially in the children's ministry, you know, just all these things that were poking me. My parents, my dad actually had been borrowing my guitar for over a year, and he brought it back to me at the beach vacation last year in September. And he's like, I think you're going to need this. And so everyone around me was seeing the writing on the wall, and I was feeling kind of the tug on my heart. And I think our conversation, which I was intentionally coming here and hiding. I didn't want to be known. I wanted to be unknown. Because the second you find out, you play guitar. That's right. Yeah, a need. Right. Um, so I was, I mean, and that was impacting my ability to connect. Um, I was, I mean, I think you even made the comments like, Hey, you've been like here for a year or more and I don't know a thing about you. I think that's how you preface like, let's get lunch. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there was something else you said at lunch, um, that I think it was a week later. I talked to Aaron after service and I'm going to paraphrase it. And you probably said it much more eloquently than I'm going to do. Basically, basically you said you want grace to be a place to heal, but not hide somewhere along those lines. No, that's better than I would say. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to actually, and that was just like the final like stab of like, okay, you're, you're hiding you know, you're healed. You there's, there's writing all on the wall that you need to jump back into this. And so that was, you know, the series of events that led up to me jumping back into worship. But I think a couple months before that, I had worked as an usher a couple times, kind of dipped my toe back into the service realm. Yeah. Yeah. And, Miss Elena, in what ways do you volunteer here? This is active service for her to be here right now. Yes. Yes. Right this second is how she's doing it. I volunteer with the kids ministry. Yeah. Yeah. Elena does a kids' men, but we're going to bring up Shane and Carter to talk about that. You don't have to talk about kids' men. We don't even care about that. That's what on my notes are. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I want your notes, but I also, one of the reasons that I think her perspective is so great is because if you are also a person who would literally hate to be sitting where she's sitting and having me talking about you right now, like my wife, Jen, everybody look at Jen. She hates this moment. Like if that's you, sometimes it feels like you got to be out front or whatever. And like you don't. Elena, she's remarkably crafty and creative. And so, yes, yes. And so two summers ago, and I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings with this, but two summers ago, the Summer Extreme theme was Under the Sea. Is that right? And every week, every year, the week before Summer Extreme, the Sunday before, we decorate, and then we kind of add to it throughout the week, and then we do the stage. And when we did Under the Sea, I walked through here the Monday after they got done decorating and was like, who'd we hire? Like, what happened? Like, anybody who comes every year knows that was amazing. And they were like, Elena Farmer. And, like, she started coming. I was like, this was her idea? And so then we got her going on Summer Extreme for this year. Last year, I didn't even know she was going to do this. I don't know if you all remember, but the Christmas theme was Not Home Alone. And it's kind of a Home Alone feel. She did the auditorium in Home Alone stuff. There was paint buckets, and there was a war map on the drum thing. I didn't even know she was going to do it. I just showed up, and it was done. So quietly behind the scenes, she's using this gift and this skill to make the church better. And she's able to do it without ever having to do this or even get any public feedback for it. And then she's already working on the theme for next year's Summer Extreme, I heard. So we're excited about that. But, yeah, when you guys started coming, you jumped in pretty much right away, just kind of helping wherever you could help. What made you want to do that? I knew, so I guess we had, we'd been married for a while, but we had just had Wren, and so I think she was maybe a year or so. And I knew I wanted to have kids, our kids and future kids involved in church and growing up around church. I wanted them to see that God was like important in our family and to us, and it was a priority. I also knew that I wouldn't be committed and prioritized coming to church if I didn't get involved. So it was very important to me to jump in somewhere and get involved so I would be accountable to come. Now, which one is more fun for you? Is it the decorating part? Because there was one day this year where she and I think Faith and maybe Liz were here until like 1.30 a.m. decorating and getting it done. So y'all get after it. Like y'all work hard. And I would imagine there's an element of that that's fun. At least I hope there is. Absolutely. Which one do you find that you enjoy more? Do you enjoy them the same differently? What do you get from kids ministry? What do you get from doing that behind the scenes stuff? I absolutely love doing the decorating. Like that is, I think having a goal and an idea and just being able to plan it and then doing it with my best friends. Like it's just, it's like a girl's party at night at church and nobody's here with no kids. It's amazing. That's right. They tell their husbands, just need a couple more touch-ups. It's great. A few more clouds. Sometimes he brings ice cream. I mean, it's great. For the kids' side, I love it just because I don't know who I was telling, I guess maybe Aaron a few months ago, that it's amazing to hear the kids retell the stories that they hear and then just to know that you kind of had a part in that relationship that they're developing with God. So that's really cool to see and to be a part of. And what age kids are you with usually? So I am now back with two, three, but I had been with the K through, I guess three, K through two. Yeah, K through third. Yeah. And Jacob, or to either one of you, whoever wants to answer, she's very happy to give that up. How has God used stepping out in faith and serving, going, okay, for consistency's sake, I'm going to do this, or God, I feel like you're just pushing me in this direction. How has God used that to encourage you to draw you close to him, to, to build you up as a, as a believer? Yeah. So existing in that kind of rub or the friction that I was in coming to church, but not wanting to commit, I mean, intentionally, um, hiding, I wasn't, I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. Um, and you know, you mentioned, I mean, intentionally, hiding. I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. And, you know, you mentioned, I guess, what 1 Corinthians, but I think 1 Peter also mentioned something about gifts, about whatever gifts you received, you know, basically serve others and demonstrate God's grace in its various forms, paraphrased. That's good. But for me, I mean, the same reason I've always wanted to be a leader at work is the connection to people and be able to influence people and be able to connect with people to understand how I can best serve people. And that's foundational. I mean, that's arguably one of the biggest parts of my walk, period, right? I mean, I got saved in seventh grade. I started playing place in worship in seventh grade. So, I mean, it's been quite literally foundational to my walk. And so to connect back to that, you know, it's opened my heart in the sermons. It's opened my heart in prayer and quiet time. I found joy in understanding how I can serve others. And I think something else that we really hadn't discussed, but I was thinking about out there, is how his presence fills our home. My kids were six before they heard me play the guitar, right? So, or Wren was six years old. So, and now Praise and Worship is played constantly. I mean, they know what a metronome sounds like now and they probably hate it, but praise and worship fills our house every week. Even the weeks I don't serve, I enjoy tagging along and practicing and playing. So, I think an unintended benefit, right? And so my kids are singing along and they know more of the words to the songs that I play than I do. So that's great. It's unintended. And I think a huge benefit to kind of serving. I love hearing that. And is it just for the record is Aaron now writing you like a rented mule? I mean, are we just driving you right back to burnout? Oh, no, no, no, no. So, well, well, I don't know. Yeah, we have a real discussion here. So, you know, I had never played with in-ears, never played with tracks, you know, hadn't played with a band. He's like, you know, one week of practice and I'm on stage. And then he's like, part of the story, it was before Christmas and I think it was an acoustic set and it was Greg and Carly and Jordan up here. And I remember thinking the whole I was like I probably could play acoustic guitar would probably be nice and that was another thing that kind of pushed me on this journey and I mentioned that to Aaron and he wasted no time and giving me that opportunity to be the solo acoustic guitar up here so I mean I'm improving as a musician selfishly it's nice to have a praise and worship team that's pushing me there. And so, yeah, I enjoy it. And I guess kind of to connect further on to wanting to serve, and I guess people that are maybe apprehensive, everyone's super, super accommodating, right? I mean, I just took three weeks off. I just blocked entire months off, and he hates it, but I do it. And I send him pictures of all the fish I'm catching at the beach. And the birds you're seeing. And the birds, yeah, well, no one cares about that. In fact, if I could get as good as evangelizing the gospel as I could about birds, I think I would be in a better place. That's a separate service. Yeah, right. Yeah. Elena, what would you say, and the last question, what would you say to anybody who's considering serving, not just in kids, although you could, but anywhere who's not serving yet but they're thinking about it? This is more intimidating, sitting up here. I would say just do it. Try it, and if you don't like it, then try a different spot or try somewhere else. I don't know. I don't feel like... That's not what I had in my notes. That's not what I had in my notes. It's all geared toward kids. I don't know. You put me on... Yeah, you put me on the spot. Sorry, Elena. She's never doing this again. Never, ever, ever. This is the one time. No, but I think, and I think we would agree on this. There's a sense of accomplishment, right? There's like, there's plenty of days at work that I leave work and just battered and tired. And I'm like, what did I actually get done? I have no clue. But I think we both feel a sense of accomplishment. You know know we mentioned how we're impacting how she's impacting the kids and and the summer extreme and I doubt I'm impacting anybody musically but I have fun yeah but being part of a team right and and and and just having a sense of pride and what we're accomplishing here and what we're doing here at Grace. Yeah, I like that. Thanks, guys. I like that. You can leave, Elena. Shane and Carter. This is Shane and Carter Smith. They serve in children's ministry together. They've also served as small group leaders. Carter actually served on our architectural committee and helped us come up with the design of the floor plan for the building. So she was there for all the meetings. And really, we should just be talking to Carter. She's a lot more valuable to us than you. If we had to pick one. Carter does a tremendous amount behind the scenes. We have a few people who work behind the scenes that whenever I hear their name brought up for something else, I always say to the staff or to the elders or whoever, like, just be careful. Like, they do so much. Like, please don't ask them. Like, offer to take something else off their plate before we ask them to do this other thing. And Carter is one of those. She's, she's, do what? Yeah, right, right, to do this. And then Shane, Shane used to be a bouncer, so he's in charge of security all the time around here, and he's a Panthers fan, and we beat them two weeks ago, and that's great. Thanks for being up here. What's up, Wake Forest? Okay, Shane and Carter, where do you guys serve? Because you guys serve together. Carter, you're on the children's ministry leadership team too, correct? Okay, but you guys serve together. So I started out actually ushering, I don't know, five or six years ago as a way to kind of get involved. And then Erin kept sending us some nagging emails about how much help she needed on the children's side. So being a coach, I was like, I guess I can try helping over there. And I don't know, it was pretty fun serving over there too. Carter, for everyone else, can you tell us what over there is? We teach K-3, and that's the other wing. K-3, so kindergarten through third grade meet over there. Yes, so we teach the kids over there, large group and small group on Sundays. What does that typically look like? Because that can sound pretty intimidating to go teach. Sometimes know, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 20 elementary age kids. You get the lesson during the week. What kind of prep goes into it? Like, what are you guys doing behind the scenes so that you're ready for Sunday morning? And then how does a typical Sunday morning go? Well, Aaron and Julie set up absolutely everything and their team. They have a team behind them. They have everything set up. They email you the lesson plans. They email you kind of an outline for the morning and are available to offer and ask and answer any questions that you have. The kids come in. You do a little activity. You get to sing and dance with them and they get a lot more wild than we do in here. And then we teach them large group and then we break into small group for second and third grade and kindergarten and first grade. And sometimes it's five kids total and sometimes it's 25 total and we just get to all cram back in there. That's great. And Shane, besides Carter Volland telling you probably to do it, what made you decide? because one of the reasons I wanted us to hear from Shane is because we we get we get women to volunteer in the children's ministry more often than we do men and frankly men probably need to just step up to the plate because there's there's not for nothing there's there's there's two genders in all of classrooms, and they should probably be able to look up to both genders as they lead them and guide them and teach them about Jesus. So I think it's good for our boys to see men in their teaching. I think it's good for our girls to see women in their teaching and vice versa. And so we're always grateful when a dad steps up and says, yeah, this is something I want to be a part of. So what made you decide like, okay, yeah, I'm going to do that? Because I didn't, I didn't, I meant to mention this up front. I've asked the volunteers to come up in ascending order of difficulty. So Mike and Holly Anderson running the coffee, and I ran this by Mike beforehand. That's compared now, if we really wanted to get easy, we do like ushers. Okay. But I didn't bring up any ushers. But then the coffee team, right? And then there's the security team, which you just stand out there, and you don't have to listen to the sermon. It's a nice team, actually. And then being in the band, that takes some skill, but I think the hardest ask in the church, honestly, is what you guys do, the K-3. That's super intimidating. It's really difficult, And I think we just disqualify ourselves from the jump, but I don't think we need to. And so I just wanted to hear from you, what made you decide like, yeah, I'm going to take that plunge and go volunteer in that room. Yeah. I think again, just being involved with coaching, you know, coaching different baseball teams and football, I kind of knew what to expect from kids. And I felt like, you know, I could at least teach them. Like I said, Aaron makes it pretty easy on us. She gives you basically a sheet of paper, and as long as you read from it, you can pretty much teach kids a class. For me, I felt like it was almost a way to answer the question of being a disciple making disciples too because I don't feel like I'm ever going to be like a street preacher. I'm not going to go out there, and it's hard to talk to adults, you know, about those situations. But going over there and teaching the kids some of the basic stuff, I just feel like that's a way that you can grow. Just feel like you're, you know, making disciples, somebody else that's hopefully going to grow up and lead this church as well. I love that. I love that a lot. And, Carter, you know, I mean, you guys were here when I got here. Y'all, y'all, y'all been here a long time. You've been serving the whole time that y'all have been here. So it's a part of your DNA and who you are. What is it that makes you continue to serve, continue to come back, continue to sign up and let us put you up on stage and things like that? Like what, what's the joy that you get out of it? Why do you continue to do it? Um, I don't think Aaron would allow me to keep coming to Grace if I didn't serve in the kids ministry. No, we get, I used to teach first grade before I had my oldest son, Cason. So I think that's part of it is selfishly. It's something I do enjoy and I enjoy doing it more for an hour than a nine to five. But we get poured into here every Sunday and it's just a chance to pour into kids. And they are just like little sponges and so excited to be there and so excited to learn and learn about Jesus. They have no hesitation asking hard questions. They have no hesitation expressing their joy through dancing and singing. And they're just genuinely excited to be there. And I find that excitement contagious. And my favorite Sunday to teach back there is Easter Sunday. Oh, wow. Why is that? I mean, I've heard Easter sermons for 30 years. They're pretty good. They're pretty good over here. They're pretty great. The podcast is great. But no, they are so excited. And for some of them, it's their first time hearing it. For some of them, they've heard it for a few years, but each time, something new is clicking for them. The story is unfolding, and they are more excited about the Bible than most of the adults I know. I love that. And last question for you guys. How has God used your opportunities at service, whether it's leading a small group, serving on a leadership team behind the scenes, or serving in the kids? How has God been using that over the years to draw you closer to him and build up your faith? So, I mean, it's for us, obviously, it's been a way to get to know a lot of people in the church. You know, and it's also a way that we feel like, as Carter mentioned, you know, the church pours into us so much. It's a way that we can give back and really help this whole community grow. I mean, we're all here to try and, you know, promote the kingdom. So I feel like it's a way for us to be able to give back. And again, I'm not going to be up on stage doing any preaching anytime soon. So, you know, teaching the kids is a lot easier. Just let me know when you want to. For me, I think teaching takes the focus off of me. It makes me be less self-centered in when I'm getting ready to come to church on Sunday in my prayer life. I'm thinking about the kids, praying for them, praying over what I'm going to be teaching. And so I think any opportunity I can take to be less self-centered is a good one for me spiritually. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming up and for sharing. As we wrap up the morning, just a couple of thoughts. And I say this with some hesitancy because I want to be careful with my words, and I don't want them to be self-serving. That's not my heart at all. But I do think that based on the body passages, body of Christ, spiritual gifts mentioned, he mentioned, Jacob mentioned some in Peter, they're in Romans, they're in Corinthians, they're in Ephesians. They're all over the place. Because we have good works to walk in, because God calls us to be a part of a local church, I don't think it's optional to serve in a local church. And when I say that, I say local church intentionally because I'm not trying to leverage this and the Bible to get you to guiltily serve at grace. But what I can tell you as a pastor and someone who cares about you is, it is God's will for you to be using your gifts to benefit his kingdom. I know that for sure. It is God's will for you to be using the gifts and the talents and the abilities that he gave you to grow his kingdom. Now, many of you are doing that outside the walls of grace, and that's great. I would not reduce serving God and using your gifts to things that can be done here. But I would say that there's a reason that we have partners and we don't have members. Members tend to consume, partners tend to contribute. One of the things I am so humbled by in this church is that it doesn't go with just staff. Unless people are giving of their time, talent, and treasure during the week to sit on elder boards, to sit on committees, to be thoughtful about the church. We have some people because of their professional backgrounds who kind of mentor or pour into or befriend different people on staff. I've watched people in the church come alongside Aaron and begin to help him and give him some advice. I've watched them come alongside Kyle or Aaron Winston or me. And so there's different ways to serve the church and they're not all reduced to this sheet, okay? But here's what I would say. You ought to be doing something. You ought to be doing something to allow God to use the time and the talents and the treasures that he gave you to serve his church and build his kingdom. I don't know why. Well, I would want you to be going to a local church that you love so much that you wanted to partner with them and serve in some way. That's what I would say. Now, what Jacob said is true. And Jacob, the way you said it is better than I said it. We do want grace to be a place for you to heal, but not necessarily to hide. I know that there are people here because I've spoken with you. You have been burned by church. You have been worn out by church. You have been chewed up and spit out and something hurt you or something wore you out or whatever. And this can absolutely be a place to come and rest. But it ought to be restorative rest so that when you're ready to go again, you get going. So I would ask you guys to prayerfully consider, and in a minute I'm going to pray, Tamir's going to come up and give us a little bit more instructions, and then we're going to have a song sung over us while we kind of look over this and think about what we might want to do. Really quickly, if you want to grab this sheet, anything that might not be clear, Worship Team Tech and Production is back there. Those are, besides sound, largely low-skilled jobs, so you can do them, all right? I was joking around with David. David's running the live feed this morning and, uh, there's somebody else here. He's, he's being, he's being, uh, shadowed. Somebody's watching him to make sure that David doesn't mess it up. David runs a software company. So I'm pretty sure he can handle the live stream. And I was joking around with him beforehand. Like, dude, if you get stressed and you need to take a minute and get out of the sound booth, like go ahead. And we were laughing about it. So if you want to get, if you volunteer back there, that's, that's great. You can do that, but that's what the tech and production team is. And it's a vital team that we need greeters and ushers. That's if you're new or you've been coming here for a while, but you're not really plugged in, join one of those teams. It's a great entry point to join one of those teams, start meeting new people. It really doesn't impact your schedule a whole heck of a lot. You get here 15 minutes before you normally would unless you're late all the time, then you need to get here 25 minutes before you normally would and then you don't necessarily have to stay later but you get to meet a bunch of people, learn a bunch of names, shake a bunch of hands. That's a great way to get plugged in and involved. The prayer team is pretty obvious. We send prayer requests out to that. The care team is a big one, too, because we don't want people slipping through the cracks with care. And so the way that care works at Grace is first your small group leader is kind of responsible for you but sometimes people require ongoing care sometimes people are not in a small group sometimes the need is greater than what a small group can provide and we like to have a team that we can call on to go visit people who aren't able to leave their house or where they're living to make some phone calls. We even have a wonderful team of people that serve in something called Stephen Ministry that exists throughout a bunch of churches. And they provide ongoing pastoral care in ways that pastors just simply can't and don't have time for. And there's a whole training process with them. And they do incredible, incredible addition to that things that are not on here we have committees we have a finance committee that helped with the with the money at grace to make sure that everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen we have a personnel committee that serves as kind of the HR department at grace while we're while we're healthy and the staff development department so if you have a background in that, that's a great way to serve. We have a missions committee that determines who we get involved with and what activities we do outside the walls of Grace. So there's different ways that we can help and different things that we can do. But my heart would be, and what I would ask is, if you call Grace home, then prayerfully consider how you might jump in if you're not doing that already. If you call Grace home, take a few minutes right now, and prayerfully consider, God, what would you have me do at the local church where I go, where I can pour myself into? Maybe it's not on here. This sheet is a starting point. Maybe it's something else. Maybe you want to have a conversation about it. That's fine. I'd love to have that conversation. Maybe you can make us a little note on this and tell us what you'd like to talk about or what you think you'd like to offer. That's great too. But if you call Grace home, partner with us, let's work together and let's build God's kingdom together and move this place forward. Let me pray and then Tamera's going to come up and give us some more instructions. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your servants that we got to see this morning and hear from. Thank you for the ones that are doing your work right now so that we could be in here. Thank you for the hands that set up tables and chairs. Thank you for the hands that will be cooking and prepping the meals for us. Thank you for the worship team that's leading us into worship, God. Just thank you for the workers in all the children's rooms who are pouring into our children so that we might be in here and hopefully you're pouring into us. God, we just thank you for this morning. We thank you for grace. We thank you for all that you've done here and all that you are, the way that you're so faithful to us. And God, we pray that in return, we would continue to be faithful to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here with us this morning, especially on a holiday weekend. I always joke around about you being a better Christian if you're here on a holiday weekend, and while I do believe that is true, I also think that it's just really nice and impressive when it is a holiday weekend and you choose to make church a part of that. So that's touching for me and I think good for you on that. And good for you if you're watching online and making it a point to be with us in spirit this Sunday as well. We did it. We made it to the end of the summer. This is the last in our series for this summer called 27. We'll pick it back up next summer when we jump into Paul's letters and finish in Revelation. So this is the last one that we're going to do. We're focused on the book of Jude this morning. And as if you guys needed more evidence that my wife, Jen, is a better Christian than me, when she asked what the sermon was on this week or which one I was going to be writing for this week, I said, Jude. And she goes, what are you going to do it on? And I'm like, I don't know. It's Jude. Like, I don't know the last time I read Jude. And she was like, well, I love this verse. You should do it on this one. And I'm like, of course she knows a random verse from Jude. So that was humbling. And you'd be better off if she were your pastor. But you have to settle for me this morning until she can be convinced otherwise. When I sat down to study Jude, I saw very quickly that it was kind of a microcosm of the entire Bible, of one of the dynamics happening all through Scripture and in the way that we understand scripture. So I'm starting us off here. Jude is a perfect depiction of both the depth and approachability of the Bible. Jude is this kind of microcosm and a picture of both the depth and the approachability of the Bible. Jude in verses 5 through 19, that's 15 verses. I know that's 15 verses because I counted on my fingers to make sure that I would not be wrong when I said 15 verses. In those 15 verses, there are 18 references to other scriptures, to Old Testament scriptures, and even apocryphal writings. Within just those 15 verses in Jude, 18 references to Old Testament scriptures and apocryphal writings. Some of the quotes are from the book of Enoch. For many of you in the room this morning, you didn't even know that was a book. You didn't even know the book of Enoch exists. It's an apocryphal literature. You'll find it, I think, in the Catholic Bible, but you don't find it in the Protestant Bible. But in Jude, there's references to the book of Enoch. There's, again, 18 references and 15 verses. And so if you're looking at Jude and you're trying to understand Jude, which by the way, Jude is probably short for Judah, which was a brother, a half-brother of Jesus. So if you're trying to understand his letter to the churches, how could you possibly understand Jude without understanding those 18 references? And scholars believe that the audience that he wrote this letter to, the churches in Asia Minor, they were people of a Jewish background and had grown up with a Jewish faith. They understood these references. It was like when I would refer to you and I would say, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. You know that, John 3.16. Most of you can fill in the rest of that. These references to them were that ubiquitous and that identifiable. And so as I'm studying Jude, again, I think to myself, how in the world could we seek to understand this book if we don't have any bearing for the 18 references found in the middle part of it that make it come to life and make it understandable. And this, I feel, is a depiction, too, of the depth of Scripture. I'm 42 years old. I've spent almost my entire life studying Scripture. I grew up in a Christian home. My dad was a deacon. He was important and fancy. I went to church every time the doors were open. And this was back in the day, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. I went to the church so often that my pastor felt totally comfortable calling me out in the middle of Sunday night service and telling me to quit talking. And then I would get in big trouble. I got spankings, is what I got. I would get struck with objects when I got home for that offense. Back when we raised kids right, you know. That's right. That's right, Jeffy. Let's let it all hang out here on Labor Day Sunday. Who cares? Beat your kids, Jeff just said. Don't do that. Don't do that. Totally off the rails. Jeff, this is your fault. Shut up, Jeff. But I grew up in church. I did Awanas. I memorized all the verses. I don't know if you guys did that when you were kids, but I memorized verses every week. I memorized them for the test, and then I promptly forgot them because I was eating candy right after that and then playing games. But some of them stick because sometimes I'll start to quote a verse, and it'll be in the King's English, and I'm like, oh, that's from Awana. That's from KJV back in the day, right? I went to Christian private school. I went to Christian high school. I've had a Bible class. I went to Bible college and studied theology. I got a master's degree in more theology. I've studied the Bible my whole life. Now, not as hard as I should have all the time, or maybe ever, I don't know. Not as consistently as I would like to all the time, but far and away, for the balance of 42 years, I've studied God's Word. And I'd be the first to tell you, there are myriad 42-year-olds who know way more about this than I do. But I can also say that I've devoted a life to studying it. And here's what I know. I'm embarrassed by how little I know. I'm humbled by how much more there is in this. I feel like God's word is an ocean and I've waded into it up to my waist and been like, yeah, okay. I think I get the gist. You can spend your whole life plumbing the depths of these pages and you will never get to the bottom. You will never stop learning from it. It will never return null and void. It will never not have more layers. You will never not see more connections, and there's so much of the Bible that's really impossible to fully understand without a grasp of the rest of the Bible. You can never understand the book of Galatians if you don't understand the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. You just can't do it. It's why, it's one of the reasons I say as often as I can, it's one of the reasons that one of the traits of grace is that we are people of devotion. It's why I say that 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. Because the bottom of this is unfindable. The depths of this are unknowable. And some of you have spent your life studying it too. And you know I'm right. Your heads are nodding the most because you've done it. And it always leaves you wanting more. So there is a degree to which approaching the Bible feels a little bit like approaching Jude. You could read Jude on your own with no background and with no study, and you probably wouldn't recognize but a couple of the references, if any, in verses 5 through 19. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know that you're not getting the depths of it. And sometimes I think people get intimidated by the Bible and how deep it is and how much there is to learn because I know good and well. Not all of you grew up being exposed to scripture every day. Some of us, when I say, and you're good believers, you love Jesus, you love the word, but when I say turn to Galatians, you're like, I don't know yet where that is. I want to know, I just don't know yet. And you go to small groups and there's other in the small group, and they're not professional Christians. They don't get paid to be a Christian like I do. That's all being a pastor is, is I just went pro with my Christianity. I'm still doing the same things that you guys should all be doing. I just get paid for it. I don't know if that's right, but I do. And you're sitting there in your Bible study with the other amateur Christians, and somebody knows way more than you. Right? They just know the Bible. We have them in every small group. And maybe you think to yourself, gosh, I don't know how I will ever understand that much. It just, it can feel intimidating. But that's also why I think it's beautiful that Jude depicts the approachability of Scripture as well. Because sure, the Bible is complicated. It's challenging. It's difficult to understand. It's unmasterable. And yet, some of the messages that come from it are so simple as to make it immediately approachable. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the whole gospel. That's all of Romans compacted into a sentence or two. Right? Jesus says this new commandment I give you, go and love one another as I have loved you. That's it. That's all the law and the prophets compacted into this one commandment. I don't really understand the rest of the Bible, but I believe in Jesus and I can go love people in his name. Okay. Then you get it. And so in Jude, again, we have this depiction of the depth of scripture, but also the approachability. Because even if you don't get the references from verses 5 to 19, there's a simple message in Jude that we can all understand. Sorry, I had to crunch the ice without you guys hearing. And that's what I want to look at now, is this simple message in Jude, and we're going to spend the rest of our time on it. What is this message that Judah, the half-brother of Jesus, wanted to give us, and why did he write this short little note and it get tacked into the end of the Bible as the penultimate book? Well, I think we see the beginning of this purpose in verse 3. This is the simple message of Jude. This is why he wrote the book. And even if we have no context, we can pretty much understand what this means. In verse 3, Jude says this, Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. So here's why he wrote the book of Jude. He says that he had been eager to write to them concerning their common salvation. And so a lot of scholars believe that Jude was trying to write a letter that looked more like Romans or Hebrews, something long and formal where it kind of outlined this faith that they would share. And that's what he was eager to do, and that's what he was working on. But another matter began to press, and he thought it was so important that he put that large work on hold so he could write this short note to them. And what he wants them to do is, I wanted to talk to you about our common faith. I wanted to lay out all the things that we believe to give you some clarity. I don't have time for that now, so I'm just writing to you to urge you to contend for the faith. Why? Well, because in verses 5 through 19, what we learn is that there's false teachers. The early church, they didn't have an agreed upon Bible, an agreed upon book, agreed upon doctrines. They didn't have denominations in theology. They just had their faith and understanding in Jesus, which means that the populace in the church was very easily deceived, very easily misdirected in the wrong ways. And so the churches had false teachers that were entering into them, gaining clout, proclaiming that they knew the teachings of Jesus. And yet the morality of those teachers did not line up with the words that they were teaching. They were teaching a kind of hedonism that's clearly out of step with scripture and with God's will for his people. And so Jude was writing the churches to say, hey, you can't listen to those guys. They're trying to steer you in the wrong direction. They're wrong. You need to contend for the faith. And what's really interesting is I was thinking about it, at least this is interesting to me, is when in churches, especially in the South, you use phrases like we need to contend for the faith. That usually means go out and fight a culture war against the waves of culture that are trying to bash down and beat down the truth of Scripture. But that's nowhere in here with Jude. It's contend for the faith. Where? Well, it looks like, based on what he says, within yourself. Contend for your own faith. Fight for your true and sincere faith. Because God doesn't need culture warriors going out there fighting for the faith. Contend for it in your own heart and then guess what? You're abiding in Christ and you'll produce much fruit. Contend for it here and you will be who you need to be as we operate in culture. So I believe that Jude is telling us to contend for our faith. And the simple message of Jude then is to contend for the faith with your whole life. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And we're going to read the verses that make me think this is true here in a second. And really this is kind of a launching pad into what I'm going to preach about next week when we do our big reveal Sunday. Next week, we're going to show the plans for the new building. If it's your first Sunday with us, then you have no idea what we're talking about. But we have four acres over off of Litchford Road, and we're looking to build there. And so we're going to share the plans with the church next week. And I'm very, very excited to do that. And the message that I'm going to preach is basically this. We have to contend for the gospel with our whole life. Contending for the gospel, contending for your faith, takes everything you got, and you can't let up. And that is the simple message of Jude. It's interesting to me. Sometimes, I don't know if you guys get to see this from your perspective, but from my perspective, as I just kind of, we map out series and what we're going to teach and what we're going to cover. There's so often that God has woven things together and woven themes in week in and week out to kind of prepare our hearts for things that are coming and help our hearts respond to things that have happened. And I see him weaving things together as we approach next week as well. But I believe that's the simple message of Jude. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And I believe it because of what he says at the end. So he says, contend for the faith. Here's why. Here are the threats. Verses 5 through 19. And then he says, if you're going to contend for that faith in yourself, here's how you do it. But you, beloved, verse 20, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life and have mercy on those who doubt. So Jude says, contend for the faith. Here's what's threatening your faith. Here's what you need to protect yourself against. And then he ends with, and here's how you do it. And he gives us four things that we can do to contend for our faith. Now, here's the thing. If you're here on a holiday weekend, you didn't accidentally come to church. All right. Labor day Sunday is typically not the Sunday when non-church people decide, you know what I'm going to do on a holiday weekend? I'm going to try church. That's not normally how that goes. If you're here, chances are you are probably a church person. If you're here, if you're listening, chances are your faith matters to you or you're visiting people that drug you to church. Either way. But I'd be willing to bet that your faith matters to you. I'd be willing to bet that you are a people who want to contend for your faith. That when Jude says this, if we are believers, we lean forward and we go, yes, how? So I'm going to give you four ways that we contend for our faith directly out of scripture. But here's what I would say to you. I don't think that any of us, and maybe you will, and if you do, that's wonderful. But I don't think that any of us are going to take all four of these things, keep them in our heads and work on all four of these things this week. So here's what I'm going to ask you and challenge you to do. Pick one, one of the four things that I'm about to mention that we can do to contend for our faith. My hope and my prayer is that one of them will resonate with you, that one of them will move you, that you will lock into one of these as you move into your week. And between now and the 10th, you will turn the dial on this in your life in such a way that you are responding to the simple message in Jude and beginning to contend for the faith with your whole life. So like I said, there's four things that Jude tells us to do to contend for the faith. And the first one that we see right there at the very beginning is to strengthen your faith. When I contend for your faith, you need to strengthen your faith. This is an interesting idea to me. How do we strengthen our faith? I don't think our faith is too much different than like a muscle or a muscle group. I've joked before, and I do think it's true, that I've probably had more first days in the gym than just about anybody in history. I've had a lot of first days. Some of those first days were also my last days, and I just didn't know it yet. But I've had a lot of first days in the gym. And one of the things I like to do when I go to the gym is I like to do squats. Big muscle group. I like to do squats. I think it's important. I don't know anything about anything, but I see people in better shape than me. They do squats and like that seems smart. So I do squats, right? And I don't know how much longer my knees are going to hold out and let me like do this. I don't know how many more of those I have in me because I'm aging more like a light beer than a fine wine, but that's how it goes for me. And one of the things I notice when I go back to the gym on the first day, especially if my last day was the last day after like a lot of days and I was actually kind of like in good shape, when I put the weights on the rack and I go to do what I think is going to be a warm-up set. Okay, for those of you who don't work out a lot like me, a warm-up set is when you do a little bit less weight just to get the muscles going and then you put on the actual weight and then you do the exercise. So there's been a couple of times on my first day where I've put the weight on, you know, just like 375, 400 pounds, and I'm just doing a warm-up set. And I go down and I'm like, yeah, this ain't no warm-up set, man. I only got about four of these in me. This is the real deal. This is the real set that I'm doing right here. Because my muscles have atrophied. Because I haven't done that in a couple of, they go into atrophy and they shrink and they get weaker if we don't continue to use them. I think our faith works the same way. If we're not using our faith, living a life that requires faith, then the faith that we have, I believe, can begin to atrophy so that it's not even as strong as it once was. So Jude tells us to strengthen our faith, acknowledging that this requires a regular use of our faith. And I did not come here this morning with the intent of convicting you or making anyone feel bad, but I do just want to ask the question, when is the last time that your life required faith? When is the last time you took a step of obedience, knowing that if God doesn't come through and deliver, this is not going to go well? If we're not taking those steps, if we're not living a life of faith, then our faith is going into atrophy, and it's not being strengthened. It's being weakened. I thought back to 2015, December of 2015, Jen and I were pregnant with Lily and we were, uh, we were not wealthy people. I was an associate pastor at a church. She was a part-time office manager. Uh, we did not have a ton of money, but because Lily was due in January, we had about $5,000 set aside for medical expenses and all that stuff. That's what we figured would work and cover it. And at the beginning of December, her car, her 4Runner, started to make weird noises, and so we took it to our guy who goes to the church, a guy named Kelly. And Kelly called me one day, and after I took the car in, he said, hey, man, how you doing? I said, I'm pretty good. How you doing? I said, hey, Kelly, how are you doing? And his first words were, better than you. And I went, oh, geez, what's going on, man? And he goes, we have to replace the engine. And I said, ugh, this is terrible. How much does that cost? He said, $5,000. Which apparently is super cheap for an engine now, but back then it was not. He says, $5,000. And I'm like, well, you got to do what you have to do, I guess. So make it happen. And there goes our new baby cushion. And we're just looking at each other like, great, what do we do? And that same week, a little bit prior to that revelation, we had committed to giving a certain amount of money to the Christmas offering that year. We had talked about it, prayed about it, and there was an amount that God had laid on our heart to give. And so I went back to Jen and I'm like, I don't think we can afford to give that anymore. We just lost all of our cushions. Certainly God would understand that. But the more we talked about it, and mostly Jen thought this, I was against it. The more we talked about it, the more we thought, no, God put that on both of our hearts. He did it knowing that we would have to pay for an engine. And we should be faithful to that. We should walk in obedience. Okay. So we did. We gave the amount that we had agreed to give. The very Sunday that we gave that amount, some random person walked up to me in the lobby and just said, hey, just want to say thank you. You and your family have been such a blessing to us. And they handed me a Christmas card. And then the Christmas card was a check for the amount of money that we had given to the church that morning. And it was like God was winking at us going, I'm going to take care of you. All right, don't worry about it. Now, do you not think that my faith got stronger after that? When I took this step of faith and obedience, God, I feel like this is a thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do it. And then I watch him come through for us. That strengthened my faith. My faith got stronger. We made a decision that required God to come through in an incredible way. And he did. And so for many of us, I think it's very possible, particularly in our affluence and in our abilities to live lives that do not require faith. And so maybe what you need to take this morning is this little nudge from God to make that decision that requires some faith. To step out in obedience and trust him to come through. That's the first thing Jude tells us to do. Strengthen our faith. The next thing he tells us to do is to pray in the Spirit. I love this. Pray in the Spirit. He doesn't just say to pray. He says to pray in the Spirit. Now, why does he say to pray in the Spirit? And what does it mean to pray in the Spirit? We get an insight into this in Romans chapter 8. It's so funny to me that God laid Romans 8.28 on Aaron's heart for worship. And now just this morning I added in Romans 8.26 for the sermon because there's just so much good truth there. And God often speaks in stereo. But in Romans 8.26 it says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. Meaning the Holy Spirit hears what comes out of our mouths and then communicates to God what we really need because we are spiritual babies and we don't really know how to pray for what we actually need. I don't think it's too dissimilar from when my two and a half year old son, John, says he needs a passy. I need a passy. I want a passy. He wants a passy, but what he really means is, I'm tired. What he really means is, I want to snuggle, which, come on, I got plenty of that. He can do that whenever he wants. What it really means is, I just feel a little bit off kilter and I want to be centered and I need some peace. That's what it means. We're praying to God for passes and the Holy Spirit's like, here's what they really need. And so to me, I think if we learn to pray in the Spirit, it's praying with an awareness that the Spirit is going to translate this to God anyway. So how do I change my prayer? How do I have an awareness within my prayer to pray according to what the Spirit will ask for, to pray according to what the Spirit will translate? How do I pray according to the desires of the Spirit and the very heart of God? To begin to put that filter on our prayers. Before we just blurt out what we need and what we want and what we're hopeful for, to put on the lens of, I'm praying in the Spirit, I'm praying through the Spirit, The Spirit is going to translate this to God. What is it that he's going to translate? I think this is why Jesus teaches us to pray by starting off praying for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We need to put on this mindset when we pray of Holy Spirit, how would you have me pray for this? Which begins, I think, with praying for things that actually concern the Father. This is appropriate at the beginning of football season. I'm not entirely sure God is very interested in the outcome of football games. I could be jaded because I prayed fervently at the beginning of the Falcons Super Bowl a few years back. And he let me down, which means that he does not care about football at all, because certainly he would have come through for my Falcons if he did. It always makes me laugh at the end of a football game when the athletes and the coach want to give glory to Jesus for this victory. Because I just think like, man, you really lucked out playing that whole team of atheists over there so that God could very clearly pick a side. He had to have been against that football team. And if God really did care about football, how does LSU ever win? Like they're Cajun rednecks. It's the worst combination. And yet they're good. So God doesn't care. It's silly, but often we pray about things and God in heaven just has grace and patience for us. I wonder what the translation is when we pray that a certain team would win. I wonder if the translation is, this one's faith is weak, God. I'm working on it. And it's funny there, but there's other ways in which it applies and it matters. One of the things I've learned over the years and the way that I pray for people who are sick and maybe dying is when I have opportunities to go and pray for families over seemingly terminally ill loved ones. If the family asks me to pray for healing, I will because I think that's an honoring thing to do. So sure, I'll pray for healing. But when I pray privately for that family, I almost never pray for healing. I always pray, Father, help this family see and accept your will. Help them to be comforted by it. And help what they're about to walk through to conspire to make their faith in you stronger, not weaker. God, please don't let this path that they're walking shake their faith to a point where they question it. Would you make everything that's about to happen, whether you heal or whether you take, would you let everything conspire to make this faith stronger in this family? I could be wrong, but I think that's a more reflective prayer of what concerns the Holy Spirit. And I think if we can teach ourselves to pray in accordance with the will of the Spirit, we better acquaint ourselves with the heart of the Father. And we see a lot more answered prayer when we do it that way. So pray in the spirit to contend for your faith. The next thing we do is we walk in God's love. We walk in God's love. Now this is what we talked about last week. How do we walk in God's love? And it's actually in the verse, it actually says, keep yourselves in the love of God. So I probably, I should have said, keep yourself in God's love. How do we do that? That was last week's sermon. That's how God's weaving things together. That was first and second and third John. How do we walk in God's love? How do we walk in love for God? We obey him. Because when we obey God, we admit his expertise and that we trust in it. When we obey God, it proves that we trust him. Right? Obedience proves trust. So how do we walk in God's love? We walk in obedience to God. And some of us may have carried in the same sin and the same weight and the same thing that's entangling us. Last week when we preached a sermon on, hey, if you love God, obey him. Where are we being disobedient? Where do we need to walk in obedience? And maybe we brought that exact same disobedience into this sermon this week, into this place this week, and God is still after us. Hey, when are you going to hand that over to me and walk in obedience there? And so maybe this week is just a reminder for you that God really does care. He really does want you to let that go. And he really does want you to walk in obedience. And that's how we need to respond this morning. The last one I love, and I love that it seems to just be tacked on there, but it's such an important concept as we contend for the faith. Have mercy on doubters. There's not too many other places in Scripture where we're given instruction on how to handle doubt and doubters, but it's really interesting to me that Jude, as he's listing these other things that we would all agree with and expect to be there, walk in God's love, strengthen your faith, pray in the Spirit. Sure, we know that. We hear that kind of stuff every week and all the time. But then after that, just as importantly, have mercy on the doubters. And I love that this is in here because can I just tell you a secret about faith? If you are a thinking person, if you are an observant and thinking Christian, then doubts in your faith are unavoidable and absolutely necessary. They are essential and unavoidable parts of faith to run into places where you are experiencing doubt. And if you have never experienced doubt, you either have the strongest faith of anyone I've met, or you, I would gently say, have not really deeply considered your faith and what it means. Doubts, wondering if all this is true anyways, are an unavoidable and completely essential part of our faith. Why do I say that? Because I know personally from experience that the faith you find on the other side of doubt is more rich and more full and more vibrant than the previous version of your faith could have ever imagined being. I walked through a profound season of doubt in my early 20s as I was finishing up Bible college and doing ministries. And then I walked through another profound season of doubt during COVID in the summer of 2020 while I was pastoring. It felt like reassembling a plane in midair. So I know that doubts in our faith are unavoidable and absolutely essential. And I know that when we do the hard work to learn and to actually answer the questions, not let the questions drive us away. I don't understand this, so I'm done with faith, but I don't understand this, so I'm gonna dig in harder. I'm gonna look from new sources. I'm gonna look new places. I'm going to ask more people. And when we find the answers that actually satisfy the doubt, what happens is we emerge with this firm foundation and this vibrant faith that's more rich and more generous than what we could have ever imagined. And what we find on the other side of doubt is that we actually love God more because he gets bigger and more mysterious and we find out we can trust him. Doubts are good, but we shouldn't stop at doubt. We should work through them and talk through them. The problem in churches with doubt is that often doubts are met with condemnation and not mercy. I shared with you guys weeks ago, and we all know that this is happening, that over the last 12 years or 20 years, 40 million people have left the church or something like that. We know the church in America is shrinking. We are now very familiar with this term deconstructing, which refers to someone who grew up evangelical Christian, who grew up with faith and as an adult walked away from it. We're familiar with that. Why is this's going on in our culture it's something that i think about a lot but one of the big reasons it's happening is because doubts in our churches tend to be met with condemnation and not mercy because our pastors and our leaders are not obedient to jude's instruction to have mercy on doubters And when people raise their hand and they go, hey, what about, or how come, or I don't understand, but how could this be true if this is also true? When people express doubts, sometimes they're met with dismissals. Sometimes they're met with condemnation. When I grew up, you felt like this person with a weak faith if you had any doubts. If you didn't understand. That the people who were in charge, the spiritual leaders, the pastors and the deacons and the elders and all those people, they were the people with the fewest doubts. They were the people with no chinks in their armor. They were the people who had all the answers and understood it the best. And so having doubts made you weak. And I think we need to have a church where having and expressing doubts actually shows some strength because you're trying to fight through those rather than bury your head in the sand. And you have a desire to enrich your faith by working through those and finding answers. So if we're going to be obedient to Jude, we need to have mercy on the doubters, understanding it's a necessary process in faith to move through those and find answers. This means, parents, we create that environment in our homes where our children are allowed to doubt, and they are allowed to ask questions, and they are allowed to wonder, and they are allowed to learn other information that causes them to question things about their faith. And they are allowed to move through that in mature ways that are helpful for them, believing that on the other side of that doubt lies a rock-solid faith. So we give them mercy when they have questions. We create environments in our homes where we can have spiritual conversations, and they don't have to agree with mom and dad about everything. And then maybe most of all, for some of us, we have mercy on ourselves. And we allow ourselves to express those doubts. We allow ourselves to express that uncertainty. We give ourselves some grace and start to seek out answers. Not being afraid of the doubt, but knowing that pushing through it and seeking answers in the doubt is going to lead to a faith that we don't have right now, but we desperately want. So we have mercy on the doubters. That's the simple message of Jude. That's how we contend for the faith. The simple message of Jude is to contend for the faith with yourself, with your whole life, with everything you got. How do we do that? We pray in the Spirit. We walk in God's love. We strengthen our faith. And we have grace and mercy on those who doubt. And we walk through this together. I don't know which one of those resonates with you. But if any of them do, I pray that you'll take it from here and you'll leave and you'll work on that this week. And contend for your faith with your whole life in accordance with the message of Jude. Let's pray. Father, you love us. We know that you do. We feel it and we see it. It's all around us all the time. God, if anybody doubts today that you love them, I pray that they would see evidence of that sometime before their head hits the pillow tonight. Lord, we thank you for the simple message of Jude and ask that we would be people who would contend for our faith, that we would contend with our whole lives and our whole heart. Lord, if we have lived lives that don't require faith, would you help us take steps of faith and watch you come through? Lord, if we need to learn to pray more in the spirit and according to your will, would you make us aware that your spirit is with us as we pray? Make us sensitive to praying according to your will. God, if there are areas of our life we know are not in accordance with your word, that we know we are walking in disobedience, would you help us to walk in obedience and therefore walk in your love? Father, if we are experiencing doubts, would you help us be brave in those? To have mercy on ourselves. And to seek out the conversations that we need to seek out. To help us arrive at a stronger, richer, more vibrant faith. Help us contend for the faith that you've given us. In Jesus' name, amen.