Sermons tagged with NewTestament

Amen. Boy, Steve, I don't know if you can hear it from up here, but that was the best singing I've heard in like a year and a half. That was amazing. Great job, everyone. One of my greatest joys as a pastor, truly, is to sit in the front and just sometimes I stop singing and I just listen to the body that I get to be a part of praise our God together. And it's just a really sweet and special thing. Thank you for being here this morning. Thank you for joining us online or listening throughout the week. If that's your habit, we are grateful for all of that. This is the third part in our series in the book of Hebrews called Greater. When we're moving through the book of Hebrews, we're looking at the comparisons that the author makes between Jesus and some of the figures and facets of the Jewish faith. You'll remember that he writes this letter to Hellenistic Jews, which are Jewish people who grew up outside of Israel in a Greek-dominated culture, probably grew up as practicing Jews, and then converted to Christianity somewhere as adults subsequent to the death and resurrection of Christ and are now trying to work out their new faith. Not only are they trying to work out their new faith, but they're being oppressed by the Roman government violently and physically, and then they're being rejected by their culture. So they're being persecuted from without and from within. And so the author writes this letter to compel them to persevere in their faith, to hang in there in the face of persecution, to hang in there in the face of isolation and stay true to Jesus, their Savior. And again, he does this by making different comparisons over the course of the letter. And so this morning, we arrive at the comparison of Jesus to a high priest, and he makes the point that Jesus is our great high priest. And as I broach the subject of high priest, and we think about Jesus being our high priest, we may feel about that news a little bit like I felt in December of 2008. December of 2008, it was the first year of our marriage. We got married in that July, and Jen's family decided it was high time that we go to Rome, Italy. They had been planning this trip for a while. Now I've married into the family, so my poor father-in-law has to pay my way to Rome as well, and I get to go and schlub all the bags all over Italy, all over the place, wherever we're going. That was my role. While we're there, we're staying in, we rented an apartment, I guess, like it was Airbnb Rome, I guess. And we're staying in this apartment, and it's a couple blocks away from the Vatican City, from St. Peter's Basilica, St. Peter's Square, and all that stuff. And we happened to be there on Christmas Day. And I knew that on Christmas Day, the Pope was going to come out, who was Pope Benedict at the time, and give a papal address. And so I thought it would be a really fun experience. When am I going to be in Rome on Christmas again, a couple blocks away from the Vatican? So I get up that morning, get dressed, and go to St. Peter's Square for the papal address. And it is packed with, I think it was a couple hundred thousand people. It was amazing to see flags from different countries all over the place. I worm my way up towards the front, and Pope Benedict comes out, and he gives his address. And I remember being incredibly impressed with him because he gave the address seven or eight different times in seven or eight languages. And he did it flawlessly. And I don't think he was reading off of anything. It was a really, really impressive thing. And for me, I didn't grow up Catholic. I have no Catholic background. I knew less about Catholicism then than I do now. And I only know a little bit more now than I did then. So it was all just kind of a new experience for me. And I remember at the end of the address, somehow or another, I learned this. I don't know if I heard him say it. I don't know if I read it on the screen where it was giving us the closed captioning of it, but at the end of his address, he offered all of those in attendance. He gave us, I got to see if I can get this right, a verbal plenary indulgence for non-mortal sins in 2008 for that year, which is great news. I was thrilled to have this. Now, I don't want to be disrespectful to Catholicism because for some people that was very meaningful. And what an indulgence is, it basically meant that the Pope forgave me of all of my non-mortal sins in 2008. I don't know what the difference is between mortal and non-mortal sins. It seems like we should try to invest our sinning in the non-mortal kind. I really don't know. But for those sins, I do not have to pay my penance in purgatory. I'm not going to be punished for those in purgatory. And as I received that news, I thought, well, that's great. But I don't really believe in purgatory. And I don't want to be disrespectful to the Pope, but I don't need your forgiveness for my sins. Jesus offers me that. So like I'm all squared away here on the verbal plenary indulgences for non-moral sins. But thank you. I'm good. And I think that that's a little bit how we as 21st century Christians receive the news that we have a great high priest. Oh, I have a high priest. Well, that's great, but like I'm a Christian, I'm all squared away here. I have direct access to God. I don't need an intercessor. Because we might understand a priest to be someone that we go to the priest, and then the priest goes to God on our behalf. And you might be enough of a biblical scholar to kind of start to piece this together from the Jewish perspective, where the Jewish people, they grew up with a high priest. You would go to your priest, and your priest would go to the high priest, and the high priest would make sacrifices on your account. You didn't go directly to God. You went to the high priest, and was your conduit to God, right? And then we know because we're Christians, we act like we have direct access to God. We can pray. We can go to God whenever we want to. I can go into the very throne room of God. I don't need a high priest. I can go directly to God myself. So that's cool that Jesus is the great high priest. It's neat that it's explained like that, but that's probably more for the Hebrew audience than it is for me, because as a Christian, I know I can go directly to God. Except for here's the thing. No, you can't. You cannot go directly to God. I'm going to tell you why in a little bit. But what I want us to understand as we begin this discussion of Jesus as our high priest is that we absolutely need a high priest. We need a high priest. We need someone to go to God on our behalf because we cannot go into the perfect throne room and the perfect presence of Creator God Almighty on our own. We cannot do that. We would be consumed by His glory in an instant. So we have to have a high priest. We need one of those. Before I tell you why we need a high priest, why we need someone to intercede to God for us. I want to tell you about your high priest, because there's some things unpacked in Hebrews. Really, the end of chapter 4 to the end of chapter 7, so close to three and a half chapters, the author invests in this comparison of Jesus as a high priest and explaining to us just the very nature and importance and grandeur of our high priest. And he introduces this idea to us in this way. If you have a Bible, turn to Hebrews. We're going to be in chapter 4, and then we're going to be in chapter, I think, 5, and then we're going to spend the rest of the time in chapter 7, and there's lots to read along with today. But if you have a Bible, turn to Hebrews chapter 4. This is how the author introduces to us the idea of our high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God. Let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who, in every respect, has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then, with confidence, draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in the time of need. There's a couple ideas there, and it's important that we understand them. There's the idea of because of Jesus, we can draw near the throne of God with boldness. We can go to God with boldness. This idea that we've inherited as Christians that we go directly to God, he says that we can do this. So we go directly to God with boldness, and we're going to talk about how we do that in a little bit. So to kind of put a pin in that idea, and we're going to circle back to it later. But he also says that we don't have a high priest who cannot sympathize with us. It's important that we remember that Jesus walked this earth, that Jesus was human, that Jesus faced the same temptations that we do. We see him in Matthew in the desert after fasting for 40 days being tempted by Satan himself. He's tempted with his desires, with his appetite for bread. He's tempted with the desire for authority. He's tempted with his ego. And we see that Jesus was tempted as he moved through life in much the same way as we are all tempted as we move through life. And so as a result, we understand that there's no temptation that we face that Jesus has not dealt with. It's not as if Jesus didn't have to manage and master his own propensity to lust in his own heart. It's not that Jesus didn't have to manage and master his own ego, his own greed, his own selfishness. When we feel fatigued and people need more and more and more from us, moms, moms, I think, are chief among this. Moms, they never get to go through their day without somebody needing something, right? Jesus felt that fatigue. He knew what it was to perform miracles, to serve and serve and serve and give, and then to go off to a quiet place, the bathroom, and have someone knock on the door, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Yes, what? He knew what it was not to lose his mind with that, right? He knew what it was to be tempted by his ego. He knew what it was to have people say things to him and have it within him to crush that person. Have it within them to verbally spar with this person in such a way that they would never speak again. And he bit his tongue. He knew what that was. There is no temptation that we face that Jesus did not walk through himself. Because of that, we have a high priest that empathizes and sympathizes with us. I think we tend to think of Jesus on the throne judging us, looking down on us, being disappointed in the things that we do, and that's not it at all. Jesus sympathizes with us. He looks at us and he says, I've been there. I understand why you made that choice. Don't make it again. It's not good for you. He offers us his sympathy. That's a really, really powerful thing. But this isn't all that the author says about Jesus as our high priest. He actually compares telling you, is the most mysterious, fascinating figure in the Bible to me. I have my whole life since I encountered him, since I read this verse, I was probably in high school and I encountered this verse and my first thought is, the order of Melchizedek, who is that? Because here's the thing, there's an order of priests in the Old Testament, the descendants of Aaron. When God sent Moses to Egypt and said, free my people, he sent him with his brother Aaron. And Moses was the civil authority and Aaron was the spiritual authority. And through the tribe of the Levites that follow from, that come from the line of Aaron are named all the priests and high priests throughout the ages. So you would expect for Jesus to be named high priest in the order of Aaron, because that's the order of priests that have moved throughout the Old Testament. But that's not what the author says. He says he is the high priest, not in the order of Aaron, and we're going to see why in a minute, but in the order of Melchizedek. And if you're paying attention, you're saying, no, what now? Why? Well, let me tell you why. Hebrews chapter 7, verses 1 through 3, we're told a little bit more about this figure. He writes this, for this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him. And to him, Abraham apportioned a 10th part of everything. He is first by translation of his name, king of righteousness. And then he is having neither beginning of days nor end of life. Oh, wait, I'm sorry. And then he is also king of Salem. That is king of peace. He is without father or mother no genealogy? He has no father or mother? He resembles Christ. He continues as priest forever. Who is this dude? And why don't we know more about him? He only shows up three places in the Bible. We see him in Genesis 14. This is what he's referring to. And I love how flippant the Bible is. Like that's an unimportant detail. Abraham was returning from the slaughter of the king. So don't worry about that or the slaughter or anything, but let's pay attention to this. I just love the Bible. It's not much for detail sometimes. But in Genesis 14, Abraham has a nephew named Lot who's dumb and gets himself in trouble. And Abraham goes to rescue him. And on the way back, he encounters this king named Melchizedek. His name literally means king of righteousness. He is the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, the first king of Jerusalem that we see in Scripture. And when Abraham encounters him, he gives him a tenth of everything that he owns. All his riches, all his wealth, all his livestock, everything that he owns, he gives Melchizedek a tenth of it. This, incidentally, is where we get the idea of the tithe. That's where the tithe started. Tithe just means tenth. And in the New Testament, people disagree on whether or not we're supposed to tithe, but no one disagrees on whether or not we're supposed to be generous. And generally, we take that 10% rule as this is the starting point. And as God grows your heart for generosity and your ability to be generous, we do all that we can. But we trace the tithe back to this incredible interaction that Abraham has with Melchizedek in Genesis chapter 14. And it's incredibly interesting that Abraham felt compelled to tithe to Melchizedek and acknowledge him as a priest. Because to this point in Scripture, all we know of is that God revealed himself to Abraham. We don't know that God has been revealing himself to other people, but clearly, somehow Melchizedek knew who God was, served God, and was this king and priest. And to the Jewish mind, for Abraham to be subservient to him, you would expect Melchizedek to tithe to Abraham to the Jewish mind. But instead, Abraham tithes to Melchizedek, acknowledging a superiority there, which would have shocked the Jewish audience. And in Melchizedek, we see, this is fascinating to me, the unification of civic and spiritual authority. In Melchizedek, we see this man who is a king. He is a civil authority. He is in charge of the military. He is governing over a group of people, and yet he is also the spiritual authority over this people. And this is not a unification that we see again in the Old Testament. From Melchizedek, we see Moses take the civil authority, and we see Aaron take the spiritual authority, and we watch those threads run through, we see those streams run through the Old Testament. But we do not see in God's Israel a reunification of the civil and spiritual authority. Actually, from here, he's only mentioned one more time in the Old Testament. David mentions him. We don't see him again. He shows up in Genesis chapter 14. Abraham pays him a tithe. He offers Abraham a blessing. Off he goes. It's this mysterious king of righteousness who's a unification of civil and spiritual authority. And then we don't see him again. And then out of nowhere in Psalm 110, David refers to him again. It's a messianic prophecy, which means David is talking about the Messiah that is to come, who we know as Jesus. And he says in this prophecy that he will be priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. And you're going, what? Why don't we know more about this guy? Why haven't they written more about him? Why didn't God include him more? And to those questions, we have no answers. But here's what's fascinating to me, and it's amazing to me that God allows David to be a part of Melchizedek's story. Because what we have in the Old Testament, if we're paying attention, and this week as I was researching this is the first time I realized it, and I thought I loved it. In the Old Testament, we see this stream of the civil authority of kingship. We see this stream of this reign of who would become David. And in 2 Samuel chapter 7, God promises David that his throne will go on for all of eternity, that his reign will persist through eternity. And we know that Jesus is the continuation of David's reign, that when he returns to earth, he's going to sit on the throne of David. And so Jesus is the continuance of David's reign for all eternity. But what we may not know is that another stream running through the Old Testament is the stream of the priesthood of Melchizedek that is also going to continue for all of eternity. But it's running parallel to this stream of Aaronic priests, priests through the line of Aaron. And it seems like Jesus is going to come back and fulfill that priesthood, and he's not. This is what I want you to know about your high priest, because I think it's amazing. Your high priest, Jesus, is the continuance of the reign of David and of the priesthood of Melchizedek and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority for all eternity. That's big, so I'm going to say it again. Your high priest, Jesus, who intercedes on your behalf, is the continuance of the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority for all eternity. Do you understand that there's these two streams running through the Old Testament that seem like they're parallel, that seem like they don't have anything to do with each other, the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek. And then in the person of Christ, those streams converge and they conclude and they are completed that the whole Old Testament is these streams running and pointing to Christ and culminating in him, that that's your high priest, the one to whom the entire Old Testament points to and culminates in. He is the completion of these two things. He is the continuance of the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek. For all of eternity, they were just simply foreshadowing for Jesus, who came to die on the cross for you and to be your high priest for your sins. And he is the reunification of the civil and spiritual authority. And in Revelation, in the new heaven and the new earth, when God sits on his throne, he sits on the throne of David and continues as our king and our priest forevermore. Melchizedek is a setup for that. And Jesus is the completion of it. When I sit in that truth, I cannot help but be awed at my Savior. He is so much more than a man who came to die on a cross. He is so much more than simply the Son of God. He is the convergence and the completion of all of the Old Testament, and the promise and the hope of the New Testament, and then the completion of everything at the end of time. Jesus is a pretty big deal, and that's your high priest. And not only is he the continuation of the reign of David and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority and the continuation of the priesthood of Melchizedek, but your high priest is the perfection and completion of the earthly priesthood. He is the perfection and the completion of the Aaronic line of priests that they had in the Old Testament. And we see that in these verses here. I've grouped some together, Hebrews chapter 7, verses 11, 18, and 19. I'll kind of jump around, but this is what the author writes. Now, if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood, for under it the people received the law, what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than one named after the order of Aaron? For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness, for the law made nothing perfect. But on the other hand, a better hope is introduced through which we draw near to God. I know that's a little confusing, so here's what's going on in that passage. The Hebrews followed the priesthood of Aaron, and the descendants of him were priests. And these priests were messed up dudes. They were human just like me and you. They were pastors. And the best that a pastor can do is be human. I mean, your pastor may or may not have snapped at his sweet daughter on a road trip this weekend when she asked one too many times if we were in a new state yet. I mean, that could have happened. We are fallible, gross humans. And the author of Hebrews points out, that's who your high priests were. They were men who sinned and first had to offer a sacrifice for themselves before they could even get to your business. And now we have a high priest that doesn't need to sacrifice for himself. They were men who lived and then they died. This high priest does not do that. The priesthood of Aaron, the Aaronic priesthood existed much like the law did to simply show you your inability to earn your way into heaven. And it said, why would we need another priesthood unless the one that you acknowledge, the line of Aaron, was fallible and ultimately showed you that it couldn't bring you to salvation. We actually needed a priest in the order of Melchizedek to be perfect and to be complete, which is what Jesus was. So he's the perfection and the completion of the priesthood that already existed. So that's who your high priest is. He is the one on whom the entire Old Testament converges and is personified in. He is the completion of the line of priests that we see run through the Old Testament. Both streams. He's a pretty big deal. But I said at the beginning that we actually need this high priest. It's not just nice that we have them. We're not just awed at the majesty of Jesus and who he is. We actually, we need him. And we're told why in chapter 7, verse 25. Verse 25 starts out consequently, is the first word there. And it starts out consequently, which means because of everything that I just said, because of everything I just said from starting in chapter 4, verse 14, moving through chapter 5, 6, through all of 7, now as a conclusion to by dying on the cross and by raising from the dead. And that in that, in what we celebrate here in a few weeks at Easter, Jesus' death on the cross on Good Friday and then his subsequent resurrection from the dead, that Jesus conquered death, he conquered sin, he conquered the grave, he conquered hell, and on our behalf, now we are saved if we simply place our faith in him on the cross. And that is true. However, Hebrews chapter 7 verse 25 tells us that unless he goes to God and intercedes on our behalf, unless he goes to God and sits at the right hand of the throne and prays for you in your salvation, that that work of salvation is not complete. So what we understand is your very salvation relies on the prayers of your high priest. Your very eternity, your spot in heaven. We sang a few minutes ago, I'm a child of God. I'm free indeed. In my father's house, there's a place for me. That is all true. But it's not true if Jesus doesn't go to the throne of God and intercede for us. The salvific work of Christ was not completed on the cross or rising out of the grave. It is completed as he goes to God and sits at his right hand and says, I got them. When they talk to you, I covered them in my righteousness. I love them. I died for them. God, they're good. At your worst moment, Jesus looks at you and he prays for you and he says, Father, they're good. Forgive them. They know not what they do. And if our faith just rests in what Jesus did on the cross and that he rose from the grave and we don't acknowledge that we have a high priest in heaven who's praying to God on our behalf, who is interceding for us, that our understanding of what's working for our salvation falls short. Our very eternity relies on the prayers of our high priest. How arrogant and ignorant is it of us to say that I don't need a high priest, I can go directly to God. No, you can't. You get to go to God because your high priest, Jesus Christ, sits at the right hand of him and allows you to do so. That's why in chapter 4, verses 14 through 16, he says it's because of our high priest that we go boldly into the throne room of God. Because if he's not there going, he's good, she's good, let her in, let her speak. Then we are dashed in the glory, we are consumed in the glory of God. We cannot hope to stand in the throne room of God. And maybe I'm just speaking about myself here, but sometimes we just arrogantly think or claim or feel that I don't need any of that, I don't need a high priest, I can go directly to God. Yes, you do, you need a high priest more than anyone. But your high priest is Jesus. He died for you. Hebrews says he was perfected in that suffering. He conquered death by raising from the grave for you. And then he goes to Father to complete your work of salvation, and he intercedes on your behalf once you place your faith in him. That's your high priest. That's what he does for you. Do you understand that that's why we pray in Jesus' name? That when you pray and you end your prayer because you heard your parents or some other person as you were growing up in their prayers in Jesus' name or the Bible study that you went to, they said in Jesus' name, and so you just started saying in Jesus' name. Do you understand that this is why we do it? Because if we pray in our name, then God's not hearing our prayers. If we pray in our name, in the name of Nate, I pray. Shut up. No. In Jesus' name, we pray. It's an acknowledgement. Whether you understand it or not, it's acknowledgement at the end of your prayers. God, I'm asking for these blessings. I'm thanking you for these things. I'm confessing my sins. I'm asking for intercession here. I'm presenting all of my prayers and petitions to you in the name of my high priest who died for me and sits at your right hand and prays for me. In Jesus' name we pray. Because of his completed work of salvation by sitting at the right hand of the Father and praying for us. Now I don't know about you, but as this washed over me this week, I couldn't help but be awed at my high priest, at pulling these threads from the Bible and seeing how they all work to converge on the person of Christ, and be humbled by my arrogance in the past to think that I get to go directly to God without acknowledging my utter need for a high priest in Christ. But I do hope wherever you were in that spectrum that we will never again go to God without acknowledging that it is because of the death and resurrection and prayers of our high priest that we are able to do that. I hope that this sermon in particular this week helps us paint a more full and rich picture of the person of Jesus in our life whom we come to and whom we worship and who we submit ourselves to. I hope it enlargens our hearts with gratitude and even with awe as we consider Jesus our high priest in the order of Melchizedek. And because we can pray in Jesus's name, I want to invite us to do that now and then we're going to participate in communion. Well, there's one more thing about Jesus and Melchizedek that I'm excited to share with you. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for hearing our prayers in the name of your Son, Jesus. Thank you for praying for us. Thank you for interceding for us. I pray that you would enlarge our hearts with gratitude and faith as we revel in all that you are. Jesus, we can't wait to see your face, to see you sit on the throne of David as our king and our high priest. May we have a fresh gratitude for our salvation, God. May anyone who is listening to me now, who doesn't know you, who has not received the gift of salvation, would they please by faith receive the gift of their high priest, Jesus, whom they so desperately need? Would you please make us daily aware of our need for him? Thank you for your servant Melchizedek and how you used him. Enlarge and enliven our hearts to you, Father. And it's in Jesus' name, our high priest, that we pray. Amen. Right now, we're going to take a minute and observe communion together. So if you're watching at home and you're able to grab some of the elements, we hope that you will do that. Here we have these packets just by way of review. The very top flimsy layer reveals a stale wafer, and then under that is the juice. Again, this is the COVID-friendly version of communion. Nobody likes it, but it is nice to be able to share in it together. This represents the bread and the wine from the last supper that Jesus had with the disciples. Jesus is about to be arrested, and he starts this tradition with his disciples, and he offers them bread, and he says, whenever this is my body that is broken for you, do this in remembrance of me. And then he pours the wine, and he said, this is my blood that is spilled for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And so it became a tradition with the followers of Christ that when they would gather to consume this bread and wine and to do it in remembrance of Jesus and this tradition that he started. And we see in Acts chapter 2 that this was a defining trait of the early church. They would gather in one another's homes and they would break bread and they would share wine and they would pray together and they would remember their Savior. And the reason that we're doing it this week is back in Genesis 14, when Abraham offers a tenth of all that he owns to this king of Salem, Melchizedek. Melchizedek, in return, offers Abraham a blessing. Do you know what that blessing was? It was a blessing of bread and wine. Just another way that the life of Melchizedek tips its cap and points an arrow to Jesus. Another way that our Savior is foreshadowed in the Bible. So as we focus on this mystery of Melchizedek, let us acknowledge together that he offered Abraham the peace and blessing of communion thousands of years before Jesus came to define it so that when we participate in communion today, we don't just go back to Jesus and the disciples, we go back to the very foundations of our faith with Abraham and Melchizedek and participate in this millennia-old tradition as we focus on our Savior together. So I'm going to be quiet for a minute and pray on my own. As I do that, I would invite you to pray too. Go into the throne room of God, ushered there by your high priest. Ask God to unveil in your heart anything that is there that shouldn't be there. Ask him to create in you a renewed sense of gratitude for him. And be awed by the fact that you are participating in a tradition that goes far back beyond Christ, all the way back to the very beginnings of our faith. Let's pray for a minute. I'll say amen and then we'll take the elements together. Amen. Jesus took the bread and he broke it for the disciples. And he said, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And he poured the wine. And he said, this is my blood. This is poured out for you. Whenever you drink of this wine, do it in remembrance of me.

Well, it's good to see everybody here. It's good to see or thank you for joining us online. I don't know why, but I feel compelled to share this with the church. Every week, I thank folks for joining us online, and I think that this is actually pretty fun. So, I think it was Christmas Eve. It was either December 23rd or 24th. I got an email from a woman in Chicago named Heidi. Good morning, Heidi. Thank you for watching. And she said, I've been wanting to write this email for a long time. It's about time that I tell you that you're my pastor. She said that somehow or another, she found us online in the summer during quarantine and started watching sermons and watching worship and things like that, and told me that this had been her church for a long time. She is a partner of Grace. She lives in Chicago. She watches online every week. We are now multi-state, so no big deal. Yeah. So thanks, Heidi. If we could all long-distance high-five you from a safe social distance, we would, but we're glad that you're a part of the family. This morning, we are starting our new series called Greater. It is a study through the book of Hebrews, and it will surprise you to know that I am particularly excited about this series. I love the book of Hebrews. I have an adoration for this book that I've always wanted to cover it, and it just hasn't worked into the rhythm of our series, and now here we sit, and I'm so excited to do it. I've been planning this one since the fall, even in how we would approach it. And in Hebrews, what we find, and we'll talk about this more, but what we find in Hebrews is this soaring picture of Christ. What we see there in the book is this high view of Jesus, where the author goes through a very carefully crafted argument and presentation to share with us exactly who Jesus is and exactly why he's worthy of our dedication. And he does this through the lens of really four big comparisons. He compares Jesus first to angels and then to Moses and the law, and then he compares Jesus to priests, and then he compares Jesus to sacrifices. And his conclusion in each of these comparisons is, this is why Jesus is greater. And so we're going to move through those comparisons. And then we're going to take two extra weeks to pull out two big themes, one big theme in the book of Hebrews, and then we're going to end in what is one of my favorite passages that I circle back to, both in the way that I pastor and in my private life all the time. So I'm really thrilled to get into this series with you. And as I approached the series and did the requisite research that, you know, half-decent pastors are supposed to do before they just get up here and wing it, as I dove into the research, it became apparent to me that there was really kind of two ways to approach this series and this book. And they're this. We could choose to mine Hebrews for application for ourselves, or we could make it our goal to understand the book of Hebrews. We could make it our goal to simply mine applications from the book, to open up the book and read it. Or we can make it our goal to understand the book of Hebrews, to be inspired by the book of Hebrews, to really let it move us and shape us and articulate our view of Christ. And hopefully, hopefully, and this is where we'll spend our time today, it will leave us with this soaring majestic picture of who Jesus is and who we serve. And it's okay to mine scripture for meaning sometimes. It's okay just to, when you mine it for application, what you do is you just, you grab a verse, you pull it out, we read it together, we look for application to us, something that can help us in the moment, we apply that and we go on. And we really don't have a working knowledge of the book of Hebrews, but we are inspired to move closer to God and he's exalted and that's all right. But sometimes it's worth it to do the work to understand what we're doing. And to do that work, you've got to understand the context and the background of this letter. You have to know who it was written to. You have to know the best you can the intention of the author when they wrote it. We've got to understand some cultural things going on around the recipients of this letter if we're going to begin to appreciate the message of this letter. And so I think it's worth it for us to take a morning and dive into understanding the background to this book and the thrust and intention of this book so that we can appreciate it as we move through it together. My hope is that you wouldn't just hear it from me on Sunday mornings. My hope is that maybe you'll talk about it in your small groups. My hope is that you'll read along with us. If you've been a part of Grace for any time at all, you've heard me about a year and a half ago, and I preached on reading the Bible, and I kind of issued a challenge. I said, you know, it should be a rite of passage for every Christian to have read the Bible cover to cover. If you've been a Christian for any amount of time, I know that feels intimidating. I know some of you are like, oh gosh, I could never do that. But listen, I'm just telling you, set it as a goal to work towards. And if you've already done it, do it again. It should be a rite of passage. I met a guy for drinks this week and we were talking and he was talking about how he makes his steak and I was talking about how I make my steak. And we said, what was the deal? And listen, my dad's going to watch this and whatever. But I said, what was the deal with our dads growing up that thought you made a steak by just throwing it on a grill and charring it and then slapping some A1 sauce on it? Like, steaks in the 80s were terrible. I don't know what was wrong with people and why we didn't take more pride in how we make steaks. But he said, man, making a good steak, that's like part of your man card, right? Like, you need this. That's something every man should be able to do. And it's true. I see some young fellows over here. Learn to make steaks, boys. It's going to serve you your whole life. It's the same with reading through the whole Bible. It should be a requisite for every believer that this is something that we have done. And so he responded to that challenge, and he emailed me, and he said, Nate, it's been, I was trying to read it through in a year, but it got to the point where I realized I was just doing it to check a box and not to really understand what was there. So I slowed myself down intentionally, but it's been about a year and a half, and I've read all the way through it, and it's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. So I would encourage you to begin a practice, to take back up the practice of reading Scripture every day and praying every day. We have a reading plan online, graceralee.org slash live. If you're watching online on our webpage, it's just down at the bottom of that page. It's a reading plan through the book of Hebrews. I would encourage all of you to be reading along with us as we pace it through the series. But we're going to this morning, as we approach this book, make sure that we understand the context and background of what's going on here. And so the first thing that's important to know is who it's written to. This book is written, the recipients of this letter were Hellenistic Jews under persecution. The recipients of this letter, this book is a letter, just like a lot of the New Testament, it's a letter, and it is written to Hellenistic Jews who are enduring persecution. Now, that may be the first time some of you guys have encountered that phrase, Hellenistic Jews, or maybe you're in a Bible study where somebody who was fancy used that term, and you just nodded your head like, yes, the Hellenistic Jews, and you had no idea who they were. Well, I'm going to help you out, okay? Hellenistic Jews are simply Jewish people who live in a Greek context. So it's basically, at this time, it's Jewish people who weren't from Israel. Okay, they were born in the surroundings. It's called the diaspora or the diaspora, the cities surrounding Jerusalem. There's Jewish communities in these cities or surrounding Israel. So as far over as Rome and even over towards Iraq, there's different cities. And inside those cities, they were all Greek-speaking cities because of the preponderance of the Roman Empire, and these Jews grew up in these Greek-speaking cities. So they're already a little bit out of place. They have their own religion. They are practicing Jews. We call that faith Judaism. That's them, okay? So it's just Jews outside of Israel, and they were believers. And so it's the case for most of these Jews that they grew up as practicing Jews. They grew up practicing the faith that is detailed for us in the Old Testament. And then right after the death of Christ, were compelled to believe in him and have now transitioned to becoming Christian Jews. We call them now in our culture Messianic Jews, but that's what they were. The only ones who didn't have this experience were maybe some of the younger bucks in the different tribes and in the different groups who were actually born into a family of Christian Jews. But for the most part, these are people who have all had a conversion experience in their life from Judaism to Christianity. They're also under intense persecution from within and from without. Now, I'm going to tell you why I'm saying that in a second, but they were under intense persecution. In the first century AD, in the years immediately following Christ, the Roman Empire was particularly hostile to this new faith. They were violently opposed to it. We've heard the terrible stories of Christians getting thrown into the arena and lions eating them. There was one emperor that used to tar Christians and use them as torches to light the path into Rome. Nero persecuted them heavily. They were a heavily persecuted church. In fact, the author of Hebrews gives us some insight into what it was like to be a believer at this time and even addresses some of the persecution that they were receiving from the Roman Empire. He writes this in chapter 11. He says, mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering about in deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth. This was their experience. That first sentence, it says that they were flogged, they were beaten and tortured, and then they refused release because they wanted their torturers to just kill me now so I can go to heaven. They were stoned. In that culture, when you got stoned, what it meant is they tied your arms behind your back and pushed you off a cliff and dropped big rocks on you until you died. That was getting stoned. They were sawn in two. Did you catch that part? That's what it was to be a believer then. To publicly profess a faith in Christ was to invite that violence on yourself and your family. To do what I'm doing this morning is to invite this kind of violence on yourself. To do what you're doing this morning, to attend a gathering where we're going to preach and honor and worship Jesus, and by gathering, implied in your attendance is your approval of the message that I'm giving you, you now are at risk for persecution. I have a tremendous, that word doesn't even really cut it, admiration for the Christians in this time. Because if you ask me, Nate, would you continue to preach the gospel? Would you still have your job if this is what was at stake to have your job? If you might be tortured like this, would you continue to preach the gospel? And I could play you the tough guy card and say, yeah, bring it on. This is my calling. He is my Jesus. If I need to die for him, I will. And I don't even know if that's true. It's probably not. I would probably cower like a sissy. I would probably run away and hide. But then you start to threaten Jen and Lily if I do this? No. No, I'm not doing that. But they did. That's what it took to be a believer. That was just the persecution from without, from the Romans, from the Greeks that surrounded them. But they were persecuted from within as well because they've converted away from their Jewish community. So now the people that they grew up around, to the eyes of their family, they have betrayed their faith. To the eyes of their childhood friends, they have betrayed their heritage. And now they're ostracized within their own community. They have a hard time getting jobs. No one's going to come to their shop. No one's going to want to hire them. They have just their Christian brothers and sisters. So please understand that in this time, to choose to be a believer was to invite violence on you and your family, and it was to choose ostracization from your culture and choose a life of poverty and loneliness. That's what it took to be a believer. It's worth noting, and you can Google this, this is a tracked fact, that the church thrives the most when it is under the most persecution. Within a couple hundred years, Christ was, he was the center of the Roman Empire. Constantine ushered him in, made it legal, made it the predominant religion, and over half of all Romans worldwide claimed to be Christians within a few hundred years of this. It's amazing how the gospel exploded out of this environment. Under the most intense persecution, the church always does the best. Why? Because the barrier of entry is so high. There's no room for casual Christians in this time. If you're kind of on the fence, if you're not really like on fire for Jesus, if you don't have this thing that burns within you to love him and to obey God, then you're not going to church. The church actually historically does the worst. Grapples for power, becomes hypocritical, gets infiltrated by people who don't really believe, lets the doctrine wander in their heart for Jesus, wane when it's in positions of cultural prominence and the barrier of entry is incredibly low. That's when we begin to invite corruption and ego and everything that's so far from the Spirit of God. One of the things that we fight in the American church is that the bar of entry is so low that you can come to church for decades completely casual in your faith. I wonder what would happen to our churches if we began to be persecuted like this. We've heard cries over the last couple of years that the church is being persecuted. No, it's not. That's dumb. We're not being persecuted. And if we were, we'd shrink. I don't know if you guys would have a pastor. I don't know how many folks we'd have coming in if we were under this kind of persecution. But they were. And their faith was strong. This is the audience that the author addresses. This is the audience that he's writing to, this beleaguered and shrinking church. And I say the author because the reality is that no one knows who wrote the book of Hebrews. No one knows who wrote Hebrews. The early church, the very early church began to attribute it to Paul, but as early as 135 AD, we see record of those pastors and leaders beginning to question that. Because basically, if Paul wrote the book of Hebrews, then for just this letter, the Holy Spirit inspired him to write 400% better and more eloquently than he had in any of his previous writings. So it's probably not the case. Most scholars today no longer believe that Paul wrote the book of Hebrews. Whoever it was, was very likely a Hellenistic Jew, which is important because it gives them an intense knowledge of the inner workings of the Jewish faith because you cannot begin to understand this book unless you have an intimate knowledge of the Jewish faith. Unless you know the practices and the beliefs and what they hold dear and what they hold sacred, then this book really doesn't hit you like it should. It's a very good argument for why it's important for Christians to also study the Old Testament. It's a very important argument for why it's worthwhile to spend five weeks in the book of Ecclesiastes or four weeks in the book of Ecclesiastes, why we go back to Elijah, why we study the festivals in the Old Testament for a series. We need to do it so we can understand our New Testament better. And so the author was likely a Hellenistic Jew who had a good working knowledge of these things. They were very likely someone who was referred to as a second generation Christian, meaning they didn't receive the gospel from Jesus himself. They would have interacted with Jesus at some point in their life if their book is included in the canon, but they received their faith from somebody else. Somebody told them about Jesus. So it's actually one of the first products of witnessing and evangelism, which is pretty cool. And we don't know who wrote it. There's different theories out there. Some people say Priscilla, which I think is a pretty cool option. Others say Barnabas, which I think is just thrown in there because his name happens to be in the Bible. And so we say Barnabas, but there's really no compelling evidence to suggest Barnabas. Another one is Clement of Rome. And then I would put my money on Apollos when I can't wait to get to heaven and for Jesus to tell me that I am wrong and that my dad is right. I can't get my dad off of believing that Paul wrote the book of Hebrews. He will die in his ignorance one day and then in eternity it will be Apollos. But we don't know who wrote it. We don't know who wrote it. And if we read it, what we find is that there is a sweeping, soaring view of Christ. It's the best picture of Jesus, of the majesty of Jesus that we find in the whole Bible. The only thing I think that even compares is a little bit maybe John 1 and then some pictures of Jesus in Revelation, but Hebrews on the whole paints such an incredible picture of Jesus. And it's interesting to me that it paints this picture of Jesus because you would think, as you read it, and I have for years, that the reason for writing this book is to give the early church a solid picture of who Jesus is. Because we've talked about this a little bit before in here, that in these early years, before the Old Testament was done and in every church and everybody had access to it, the New Testament rather, there was some murkiness around Jesus and what to believe about him and exactly who he was. And so it would make sense that he wrote this letter, that the author wrote this letter to the Hebrew people in the diaspora to give them a more accurate view of who Jesus is. And it's true that that was in part his point. He did that. He does write to give an accurate view of who Jesus is, but that is just something that is serving the greater intention, which is this. The author's intent is to compel a persecuted church to remain true to their calling and persevere in their faith. He doesn't write just to give them a good picture of Jesus. He writes to compel a persecuted, beleaguered, shrinking church to remain true to their calling and to persevere in their faith. The church was shrinking. There were people who were looking around at what was happening to their friends and loved ones and going, I don't want that for me or my family. And so they would shrink back. Maybe they shrunk back and embraced Christ privately. Maybe they devoted themselves to him in secret and not in public. That would be very easy for us to do if we were faced with these choices. But they were falling away in numbers because of the violence that was being enacted on them. And their Jewish teachers, their old rabbis, and their families were continuing to make arguments against this Jesus and for the old way, for the old faith. And so they're being tempted not only to escape violence, but also tempted by being welcomed back into families and embracing an old faith. And they're receiving these arguments against this Jesus guy. And so the author of Hebrews writes to compel them, to compel the Jewish audience, no, no, no, no, no, please understand. This faith that they're trying to get you to come back to, this Judaism that they're trying to lull you back into, you need to understand that Jesus is the right and good fulfillment of all the things that you were taught when you were growing up. You need to understand that it's not a different religion, it's a continuation of the same one, that Jesus is the fulfillment of all the things you were taught growing up. Let me show you how. And then he makes those comparisons. And then for those tempted to fall away from persecution, he just exonerates Christ and continues to hold him up. It's actually pretty amazing to me how he chooses to start this letter in an effort to compel them to stay true and to stand firm. If you were tasked with writing that message, understanding what those people were going through at the time, I wonder how you would start your letter. I wonder what you would lead with. I wonder how you would form it. I'm not sure how you would. I'm not sure how I would do it. But he begins by painting one of the most sweeping pictures of Jesus I think I have ever read. And it feels different than the rest of the New Testament. The only statement I can think of that kind of compares is the way that John opens his gospel. I think it was last spring or spring before last, we went through the gospel of John. So you might remember that the gospel of John opens up like this. He says in John 1, in the beginning was the word. The word was with God and the word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. It's this assertion right out of the gates that Jesus is God. He is king of the universe. He is part of creation. Without him, nothing was made. Through him, all things were made. He is the very word of God. It is this really bold assertion at the beginning of John's letter, but yet it, to me, pales in comparison to how the author of Hebrews opens up his letter. Listen to these words with me the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels, Man, I love that passage. Every time I read it, I get the chills. Every time I read it, I just kind of want to put my Bible down and let it kind of wash over me. When I sat down to begin to prepare for this week, as is my habit, I open up the Bible on Sunday afternoon or Monday and read the passage that I'm going to preach on and go ahead and get my brain kind of working on it a little bit. And when I read it this time, I just sat it down on my desk and looked out the window at the sky for a little while. I love this picture of Christ. And I think that one of the things that we do when we think of Jesus that does him a huge disservice is we think of Jesus like this. This is, I think, the image that we usually think of when we think of Jesus. This white dude with well-conditioned brunette hair and a well-trimmed beard and blue, compassionate eyes who was just meek and mild. Looks like he was just kind to everybody. That guy, by the way, was incapable. The way that that goofy guy looks, he's pretty incapable of fashioning a whip and clearing out a whole temple. But, you know, whatever. That's usually how we think of Jesus. Or we think of him maybe as beaten and bloodied on the cross for us. But we don't think of him as the author of Hebrews describes him. We don't think of him in those grand terms. And I love that sentence in the third verse. I love it so much. It says, he is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power. He's the radiance of the glory of God? He's the exact imprint of His nature? I wanted to do some work this week to help you better understand what that meant. To come up with a metaphor or a way to explain what it means to be the exact imprint of the nature of God. To be the radiance of his glory. What is that like? How can we wrap our brains around that? And so to try to unpack that a little bit more, I started opening up the commentaries and read what people smarter than me wrote about it. And they wrote pages on these sentences. And I get into one of them and there is, he writes five pages alone on just verse three. And there's like this comparison chart of parallels with words that are used in other places in the Bible and cross references and dissecting out the Greek words and the tenses and the participles. And it's just all these pages of systematizing this great sentence. And man, it was gross. I hated it. I shut my commentary. I put it on the shelf and I thought, why do people read these dumb things sometimes? It was gross. This is maybe the most well-written book in Scripture. The author said what he meant. And he doesn't need my help explaining it to you. And it wasn't meant to be systematized like that either. We shouldn't write four pages on it to try to understand all the nuances of it. We should just let it wash over us. And so when he writes that Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, that may not be something that our minds can fully wrap themselves around. That may not be something that our mind adequately comprehends, but I've decided that that's okay because our soul does. Our soul feels the weight of that glory. Our soul knows that that's our Savior, that that's our Jesus, that our Jesus gave up the radiance of that glory for a little while to come, and it says there in verse 3, to make purifications for our sins, to come die on a cross and cover over us. And then he went back to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, where he sustains the universe with the power of his words. The only thing close we get to that version of Jesus is in Revelation 19 when he comes crashing down out of heaven on a white horse with fire coming out of his eyes and righteous and true tattooed on his thigh and he's coming back to wreck shop. It's the only thing close we get to that picture of Jesus that the author paints in Hebrews. And I think that we need to start thinking about Jesus more like that than like the Burnett ski instructor that we put in all of our pictures. And it's interesting to me, the centrality of Christ in Hebrews. It's interesting to me that this is what he chooses to hang his hat on as he tries to compel the church to stay together, to hold the line, to persevere. He doesn't have this, he doesn't guilt them into it. He doesn't try to win them over with this starting off with these sound arguments. He doesn't start off by threatening them. He just shows them Christ right out of the gates with who this Jesus is. He is the radiance of the glory of God that he holds up the universe with the power of his words. He is the imprint of his nature. He starts with Jesus. How does he compel and inspire a shrinking and fatiguing church to come back to faith? By showing them who Christ was. By painting for them the best picture of Christ that may have ever been painted. And it speaks to me a little bit about folks in our life. If we want people who we know and love to come to know Jesus, then maybe we should simply show them who he is. If we have people, neighbors, family members, friends, coworkers, and we want them to know Jesus too, maybe we should simply show them who Jesus is. That's what the author of Hebrews does. Maybe we should show them in our words and in our action and in our spirits the majesty of our Savior. Maybe we should compel them with the picture of Christ that our life paints so that they're as compelled to follow Jesus as these Hebrews were. And it begs the question, how, and this is me included, this is a very intentional we here. How can we compel people with a picture of Jesus if our picture of him is so very impoverished? How can we compel others with the majesty of our Savior if we aren't swept up with him as well? How can we compel others with the majesty of Jesus if we're not reading through the Gospels every year? How can we compel others with the majesty of Christ if we don't know it ourselves, if we don't pursue it ourselves, if we aren't enlarged and fulfilled by Jesus ourselves? If we only think of him as the meek and mild teacher that broke bread and handed it out to people, and we don't think about him as the radiance of the glory of God. And I don't mean to demean the person that Jesus was. I'm just saying that that's a limited view of who he now is. He came and he did what he came to do. He purified your sins. And then he went back to be who he is. And we forget about that Jesus. How will people ever see him in our lives, in our words, in our actions, in our thoughts, in our spirit, if we aren't swept up with who Jesus is too. So that's my prayer for you. It's my prayer for me. That as we go through this series, as we look at the book that paints a soaring picture of who Jesus is. That we, like the Hebrews, would be compelled by this letter. My prayer for you is that your view of Jesus is enlarged this spring. My prayer for you is that by the time we get to Easter and we talk about him as the greatest sacrifice, that your heart is soaring knowing that that is your Savior and that that is your Jesus. My prayer for grace is that the book of Hebrews would work in us to so enlarge in our view of Christ and our desire for him that we will be different for having gone through this book. And I've got more points to make in the sermon, but I don't want to make them. I just want to finish there. Let's make that our prayer for ourselves. That like Hebrews, like the author intended, we would allow this portrayal of Christ to so enlarge and enliven our hearts that the people around us would see him in us and that they would be compelled to look towards him as well. Will you pray for that with me? Heavenly Father, thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. Thank you for what he did. Thank you for the purification of our sins, Jesus. Jesus, we repent of our paltry view of you, of our limited view of who you are and what you did and what you're doing. Father, if there are Christians wandering from you who for different reasons entirely, but much like the Hebrews, are tempted to fall away from you, are fatiguing in their faith, would you use this exploration of this book to draw them near to you? Would we be compelled by the picture that is painted of Christ on these pages? And Lord, would you give me the words and the wisdom to do justice to such a great letter? Enlarge in our hearts towards you. Change us forever. And it's in Jesus's name that we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. I hope that you're having a great Memorial Day weekend. If you're one who has the opportunity to be watching from the beach or a mountain cabin or a lake house or something like that, good for you. I hope that you've had a good, restful weekend. For the others of us, I hope that you enjoy this unique Memorial Day weekend. And thanks, as always, for watching this morning or this week. This morning, we continue in our series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts and looking at some of the practices, philosophies, and principles from the early church that still apply to us today. And hopefully we're getting a sense of the shoulders that we stand on and the roots that we share in common as the book of Acts details the beginnings of this fledgling church trying to find its way and figure out who it is and what it is going to do. And that was 2,000 years ago, and here we are 2,000 years later, and the church has looked very different over the years, has it not? Over the years, the church has changed in dramatic ways. And historically, there have been churches where people, the pastors would dress in robes and wear fancy hats. And then in other churches, you wear suits and dresses. And then in other churches, you wear jeans. And now in isolation, we wear sweatpants. As we watch this together, there is about a 98% chance I will be in my sweatpants as the pastor. And so church has changed a lot. There's churches that are high church and are in cathedrals and ornate buildings shaped like crosses and everything has a meaning. And there's different conclaves and there's different areas and there's different prayer centers and then other churches are in places that are next to aquarium stores and in warehouses with a pole in the middle of them. Some churches are highly liturgical, meaning they observe this order of service that was passed down generation after generation and do the same chants and the same verses and the same songs and they stand together and they kneel together and they pray together and they cry out together. And other churches don't have any liturgy whatsoever. We just do whatever we want to each week. Some churches observe the Lord's Supper every day or every week and others a couple times a year. In some churches, there's no microphones at all. And in others, there's a light show and laser show and smoke machines and everything else. And it just kind of makes you wonder over the years as we've adapted and adjusted and evolved and changed from this early church in the book of Acts and all the different iterations and expressions of church over the years, it makes you wonder how we even know we're doing it right, right? I mean, I don't know about you, but I've wondered a lot if Jesus or Paul were to walk into the doors of grace on a Sunday morning, would they look around and go, you guys are nailing it. This is exactly what we intended to start. Would Jesus go, yes, this is exactly what my bride should look like? Would Paul say, yes, this is what I gave my life to begin was what's happening here at grace. I kind of do wonder if we're doing it right. It reminds me of a story as we think about how do we know if we're doing church correctly. I've told this story before. It's a short fictional story. It's a parable that's made up, but I think it helps us make a good point this morning. The story goes that there is a man walking along a country road, and in the distance he sees a barn, a red barn. And on the side of this barn, there's a bunch of different targets. And in the middle of every target is an arrow just in the dead center of the bullseye. And then he sees a young boy with a bow and a quiver of arrows who's been apparently hitting these bullseyes with remarkable accuracy and consistency. And so the man goes to the boy and he says, listen, you're incredible at this. Can I watch you fire these arrows? Can I just see how you do this? I want to watch you do what you do. You're so good at it. And the boy says, yeah, sure, if you want to. And so the boy takes an arrow out of the quiver and loads it up into the bow and just kind of haphazardly aims towards the barn and fires away. And the arrow just lands in the middle of a sea of red. No target in sight. And the man feels badly. He says, my gosh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to mess you up or mess up your system. And here you've missed the target. And I feel bad. I feel like that's my fault. And the little boy says, oh, no, no, no, no. It's no problem. And he walks over to the barn and he grabs a can of paint and he starts to paint a target around the arrow that he just fired. And I think so often in life, we start things or we do things or we try to execute things without a clear target painted for us. We just charge forward. We just charge ahead. We just do what it is we think we're supposed to do. And then when we get to the end of the road, we paint a target around wherever it was that we landed and we go, success. And sometimes I wonder if we're doing that with church. Sometimes I wonder if we just all get together and we preach the word and we sing together and we pray and we do what we think we're supposed to do. And then when we get to the end of a year, the end of a decade or the end of an era, we go, did we do a good job? And we go, well, yeah. And then we just paint a target around whatever it was that we did and say that was the goal. And so as we think about that, are we doing this right? Would Jesus and Paul show up and look at our church and say, yeah, that's the target that we painted. You're nailing it. How do we know if we are? How do we know if we're aiming for the right target? How do we know if we have the right bullseye in mind as we do church together as grace and as we pursue God as individuals? I think it's an important question to ask because we arrive at a passage in Acts chapter 2 that effectively paints the targets for all churches for all time. I think it's an incredibly useful and helpful passage. I'm going to be in Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47. It is the description, the quintessential description of the early church. If you want to know what should the church look like, what should characterize and define the church, what did God design the church to do, we find it in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47. If you want to ask a question like this, what target was painted for us as a church by Jesus and by Paul? It's this. We find it here. And in this passage are some distinctives that we want to pull out. I'm actually going to pull out seven distinctives. We're going to look at three this week and four next week. I've expanded the Acts series by a week so that we can just sit in this passage, in this text, and walk through and look at the different things that define the early church and should therefore define us as a church. So this is early church distinctives. Look at what we find here in Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47. By way of reminder, what's going on as we enter into this passage is in Acts chapter 1, Jesus has been alive for 40 days after resurrecting from the dead. He goes up into heaven, and as he goes up into heaven, he tells the disciples to build the church, to go into all the world, spread the gospel, baptize them, make disciples, build the church. And then he says, wait for the Spirit. Wait for the gift of my Spirit and then go out and build the church. And so they sit around in the upper room waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Acts chapter 2, they receive the gift of the Spirit. They walk out on the porch and they preach. And the results of that message that they preach about who Jesus was and about, hey, you, the crowds, killed the Messiah, the Son of the living God, their response is that they were cut to the heart. They said, what do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. And last week we talked about that repentance as repentance of who we thought Jesus was. That's the foundational repentance of the church. And about 3,000 people, the Bible says, repented that day and joined the church, became Christians. And so now we have this church of about 3,000 people in Jerusalem. And what do they do now that they're a church? Now that there's this infant organization, what do they do? We find exactly what they do in these verses, 42 through 47. And in these verses are the distinctives or the target that was painted for us that we're supposed to be hitting now 2,000 years later. So let's look at the things that defined the early church. It says in verse 42, That's the beginning of the church. That's where you and I come from, is that incredible cataclysmic time of the church's infancy where it's learning to find its footing and learning to walk and figuring out what they're going to be about as an organization. And in this passage, in those seminal verses, are some distinctives of the early church that we should seek to emulate today. And you know, different authors and scholars pull out the distinctives in different ways. I saw one person sum up everything in four basic categories of characteristics, and others might have nine or even more than that. For us, we're going to look at seven distinctives, three this week and four next week, things that define the early church and should define us. So for those of you who like listy sermons, this is good for you. We're going to have seven things. You can number your paper. You can write the thing that I say and then take notes underneath it. If you're a note taker, you're really going to love this. So the first one that we're getting to right out of the gates is exactly what they said. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. So the first distinctive of the church that we are to emulate is that they were eager learners. They were eager learners. They wanted, they wanted, anytime an apostle was speaking, they were listening. They were, they were eating it up. They were vociferous in their desire to learn more about God and his church. And this seems like something that might be obvious, that they were devoted to teaching, but it's important that we understand why they were so hungry for this teaching. We don't think about this a lot, but this was a really uncertain time in church history. We're so used to church. For those of you who are church people, even if you're not a church person, you just have a cursory understanding of church and what we believe. We're so used to having an authority. We're so used to having a Bible, to having a place where we turn to, where we go, is what you said true or false? And we can go here and we can determine if it was. We have a grid to determine truth and we have a rich history of teaching tradition. We have a rich history of theology that we walk into so that we kind of know some of the basic tenets of our faith. We know that most Bible-believing churches are going to affirm that Jesus was the Son of God, is the Son of God, that he was 100% God and 100% man. Most churches are going to affirm that God is a triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that the Bible is God's word and that it is inerrant and that we can trust it and that it is the authority in our lives. Most churches are going to affirm that God is the creator God and that Jesus are the very words of God. There's some basic tenets of our faith that we can agree with that aren't murky at all. But in the time of Paul, in the very early church, those things were incredibly murky. They didn't know what to think of Jesus. They didn't know for sure if he was a son of God or if he was an incredible prophet. They weren't quite sure what to believe. Can you imagine the different beliefs that existed in different groups of friends in the different communities? Can you imagine the old stubborn man who was just certain that he knew what it was that he thought he knew and told everybody that you should do this and you shouldn't do that based on nothing at all but his own presumptions. Can you imagine the difficulty of being a Jew with all the laws of Judaism and then trying to transition into this New Testament, into this new way of believing, into this new era of faith, not sure which things to leave behind and which things to bring forward with you. Can you imagine the difficulty of grafting in the Gentiles? Before this Jewish faith was just for the Jews. They grew up generationally understanding it. And now all of a sudden this faith is for everyone regardless of culture or ethnicity. Can you imagine the difficulty and the tension in grafting that in? A lot of the tension in Acts is that very tension of how do we graft Gentiles into this ancient faith? It was really murky and uncertain. It was a lot like it is now trying to figure out any truth whatsoever about COVID. As I thought about the situation that they were facing, trying to get certainty around the teachings of this new church without any written documents and void of authority outside of the apostles, I thought of us trying to figure out what's true about the coronavirus. I don't know how deeply you've delved into trying to learn the truth about even the numbers and the reporting around coronaviruses, why our cases are spiked or why they're not spiked, or if they really are spiked, or if they really are going down, or if there's going to be a surge or a second wave, or any truth at all around what's going on with the pandemic. I had a friend just this week I was talking to who read an article in one minute. At one time, he sat down, he read an article, and this article said that the hospitalized cases of COVID in the state of Georgia are down around 1,000 right now. And that state has a population of about 8 million, so that's a really small percentage. That's really good, right? Well, then he flipped the page or scrolled down and he read another article about a woman who's created a model online to track COVID cases who was approached by a particular state that asked her to flub the numbers a little bit to under-report the cases so that things look better so that they could open back up. Two totally different stories, and you don't know which one to believe. Who has authority? And listen, I know that that could get political about who says what about COVID, but the truth of it is we can all understand that it's difficult to know what's true. This is the era of the early church. For them, it was difficult to know what was true. It was difficult to know who to trust except for the apostles. The apostles were the authority. The apostles, the disciples of Christ, had spent time with Jesus. They had face-to-face interaction. They were the carriers of the keys to the kingdom. They had the authority. If there's somebody over there in Bible study or small group or after church who is teaching something about this new way of faith and it contradicts what the apostles said, then that person's wrong and the apostles are right. The apostles had the authority. They were the truth tellers of the early church. So people clamored around them every time they opened their mouth to hear what it was they had to say and had to teach because they were the authorities that brought clarity around this new faith. And over time, these apostles wrote down what they were teaching in the form of letters to other churches. And then they wrote down what they were teaching in the form of the Gospels, the account of Jesus' life and his ministry and what he came to do and accomplish and everything that he taught and what was meant. And over time, these writings were compiled together and they became known as our New Testament. And so now, as a modern church, if we want to be committed and devoted to the apostles' teaching, if we want to be eager learners, if we want to hit that target that's painted for us, what that means is we are eager learners of the New Testament. That the New Testament, the books from Matthew to Revelation and our Bible are the ones that we would pour ourselves into, that we would pour over, that we would learn from and pull out from. And it might sound to you like I'm downgrading the Bible or I'm downgrading the Old Testament, and I'm not doing that at all. I love the Old Testament. And as a matter of fact, it's impossible to understand the New Testament without understanding the Old Testament. You can forget understanding Acts, Galatians, Romans, Hebrews without an understanding of the Old Testament. You can forget understanding the Gospels if you don't know the Old Testament. You can forget understanding Revelation if you don't understand Daniel and Ezekiel. But if we want to be committed to the apostles' teaching like the early church was, that means we're committed students of the New Testament, that we are eager learners about God's Word, that we are never satisfied with it. That's why, that we're never satisfied with what we know about it. That's why on Sundays, as long as grace exists as a church, that preaching and teaching will be a centerpiece of what we do together. Not because the pastor is someone special, but because we are collectively devoted to the apostles' teaching. Because we are collectively eager learners. That's why I believe it's my responsibility not just to provide biblical knowledge and insight for people who might be new believers or non-believers or not as biblically literate or experienced as others. Hopefully, if that's you, then you get something every week from what we're teaching. But I also firmly believe that my job as your pastor is to give you things from God's word, is to teach you from God's word a different perspective or a different insight or a different teaching that you may not have heard before. My hope and my prayer is that even if you've been walking with the Lord for years and years and years and have a very good depth of knowledge of the Bible, that at least more often than not, you're walking away from the sermons of grace and you're going, I didn't know that, or I hadn't thought about that, or I hadn't considered that before. I hope that we all continue to learn together. So as a church, we hit that target by being committed to teaching God's Word. But as individuals, we can continue to hit this target in our own life and be the right version of the church now by continuing to be eager learners, by pursuing other avenues of learning about Scripture. And as I thought about this, I realized that we live in an unprecedented time of availability of the apostles' teachings. There has never in history been a time where we had more information at our fingertips. You can listen to podcasts where people talk about God's Word, where people talk about scriptural things. You can go get a book for very cheap. You can listen to a book. You can play the Bible on your earphones or over your car stereo as you drive down the road. You can listen to the Bible on a greenway as you take a walk or ride your bike. There's so many churches and so many good pastors and so many effective teachers. You can find any of that material online. There is an online conference on church stuff just about every week of the calendar year that you could participate in if you wanted to. We have so many options to dive deeply into the apostles' teaching and to learn more and more and more about God's Word. So my challenge to you in this distinctive is to continue to be an eager learner. Don't be satisfied with what you know about God's Word. Don't be satisfied with what you know about the New Testament, but dive more deeply and with more curiosity and urgency into the depth of God's Word. And let's continue to be eager learners together as they were in the early church. Another thing that I wanted to pull out this morning, the second distinctive that I want us to look at is that they were devoted to spiritual disciplines. They were devoted to spiritual disciplines. We see in this at the beginning of the passage that they were devoted to prayers, it says, plural. Not prayer, but they were devoted to prayers. And as I read and researched this, a lot of people like to go off on what it meant to be devoted to prayer. And that's an important investment of time. However, I suspected that there was more to it than that because it's plural, prayers. And it turns out that it was, that this Jewish audience was in a habit of observing three times of daily prayer. To be a devout Jew at the time was to pray three times a day on schedule, in the morning and in the afternoon at the ninth hour, which is 3 p.m. And let me just, as an aside, if you want to go down a fun Google rabbit hole, Google all the things in the Bible that happened at 3 p.m. It's amazing. I think that there is something significant about that time that we don't even understand yet somehow, because so many things happened at that time in Scripture. They prayed in the morning, they prayed in the afternoon, and they prayed in the evening, three times a day. And different rabbis and different synagogues would have different programs of prayer, different things that you're supposed to focus on during that time of prayer. But what they did is they were a Jewish people who were devoted to prayers, this rhythm of prayers. And then when they converted to Christianity, they continued with that same discipline. They continued with that same rhythm. And I'm calling this a spiritual discipline because they didn't have scripture to read. They had it memorized. They could recite it while they prayed. They could pray it back to God, but they didn't have a Bible to open. And so their version of spiritual discipline was to be praying three times a day. This devotion to spiritual disciplines is why you will always hear me say that there is no greater habit that any person can develop in their life than that of getting up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. A distinctive of the early church was a church that was devoted to these spiritual disciplines, that was devoted to studying God's Word, that was devoted to prayer. They were disciplined to do that in that way. So if you want to be spiritually disciplined, if you want to be like the early church and be hitting that target in your life, then you need to be committed to prayer. You need to be committed to reading God's Word. Maybe pick a time of the day where you say, this is when I'm gonna read the Bible. I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna have coffee, I'm gonna read the Bible. I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna go to work, and on my way to work, back when you used to do that, on my way to work, I'm not gonna listen to anything else. I'm gonna listen to the Bible app and let them read the Bible to me as I go into work. On my lunch break, I'm not gonna talk to anybody. I'm pull out my app. I'm going to read the Bible. Pick a time to make that a part of your daily discipline. And I would encourage the same thing for prayer. And maybe the best way to think about it is like this. A couple months ago in our Grace is Going Home series, we talked about discipleship at Grace and how we're going to define discipleship moving forward as simply taking our next step of obedience. So in regards to spiritual disciplines and prayer, I would just ask you, what's your next step of obedience? What's your next step of obedience in reading the Bible? Is it to be more consistent? Is it to start at all? What's your next step of obedience in being more obedient in prayer, in being consistent in prayer? And listen, you may not pray at all. And that's all right. I mean, you're there by yourself or maybe you just have family around you. You don't have anybody to impress. You don't need to lie and pretend like you dive deeply into the ocean of prayer every day. Like, it's okay if you're just sitting there right now and you're going, honestly, I don't really pray very much. That makes your next step pretty easy. Pick a time at all to pray. If the only time you pray is at meals, pick one of those meals and pray about something besides the food. Intentionally pray about friends or family or loved ones. Intentionally thank God for things that he's placed in your life. If you already have a habit of prayer in your life, think about what it would take to go deeper in that prayer. Can you come up with a prayer plan where on certain days of the week you pray for certain things or certain people? Or could you develop multiple times of prayer during the day? I know there's a season in my life when I set an alarm on my phone, and every day it would go off at three o'clock, and I would stop whatever I was doing every day and set things aside and pray. And sometimes I would dive deeply into prayer. Other times it was a quick cursory prayer, and other times I just skipped it and then felt like garbage the rest of the day for skipping it. But it was a good season. I did it for about a year, and as I've been preparing this sermon and thinking through things in my own life, I've been convicted to start that practice again. So for some of you, I would invite you, set an alarm on your phone, and at three o'clock, let's pray every day. Let's just stop what we're doing and refocus ourself on God, and let's pray. And like the early church, let's be devoted to these spiritual disciplines. As I think about prayer for grace, one of the things that we're going to do moving forward and I'm excited to share with you is beginning this Wednesday, the 27th, from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., we're going to fling the doors open of the church and invite you to come and pray here. Whoever wants to come can come and pray. We'll pray together. We'll pray separately. We'll pray socially distant. If you need prayers, you want people to pray over you, come here and I, along with others, will pray over you. If you just want to pray together with others, come here and we will pray together. And as long as we can sustain it, we will continue to do it. We're going to do the first one this week. on the 27th. I'll open the doors at 7 o'clock. We'll see who shows up and we'll pray together. And we'll be a church that is devoted to prayer and spiritual disciplines. The last distinctive that I wanted to focus on today, the last thing that I see in this church that we need to be emulators of is that they were committed to Christ-centered time together. They were committed to Christ-centered time together. It says that they were devoted to fellowship. And you know, over the years, that word fellowship has taken on a lot of different meanings and been applied in a lot of different ways. And it's become distorted to just mean anytime Christians are together, they're fellowshipping, right? But fellowship really isn't just people getting together who also know Christ. But the idea of fellowship is to get together to celebrate the thing that you have in common, to allow something that we hold in common to bring us together and then to spend time focused on that thing. When I think of fellowship, I think of a time that I spent with Steve Goldberg, our worship pastor, and a guy named Keith Cathcart, one of our great church partners. If you've never had the experience of going to a team bar for a game, I would highly recommend it. I am of the conviction that going to a team bar is the best way to consume a sport. It's super, super fun. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, all over the country in different cities everywhere, there will be fans that are fans of a particular team. And when that team is playing, they will gather in one place and watch it together. And this happens here with Steelers fans because Steelers fans are prevalent. They are everywhere. The Steelers are like a religion to them. To some of them, it is a problem that deserves some good and right conviction. And in a state like North Carolina, where there's really no other decent team to speak of, it is ripe for Steelers fans to blossom here. And so the Hibernian over on Falls is actually a Steelers bar. All the Steelers fans come out of the woodwork and they go there decked out in their gear and they watch the games together. And so one Sunday, I decided that I wanted to go with Keith because I love going to team bars and watching sports with other people who are celebrating that. And we even invited Steve. Steve's not a sports guy, but he's a friends guy. And so he came and he enjoyed it with us. And I love the experience because I go to this team bar and I don't know anybody there. I don't have anything in common with them. I don't know what their names are. I don't know what their week was like. I don't know what they did that morning. That morning I was preaching. They probably weren't. I don't have a lot in common with the folks there that I know of. But man, when those Steelers score, I get to run around and give high fives to strangers. I start hugging guys I've never even met in my life. When there's a fumble, we erupt. When the ref makes a terrible call, we boo him and deride him and have the best possible time. And you get to get fully into it. And I don't even really care about the Steelers or the game. I'm just having fun celebrating them with other people. That's fellowship. This thing that they have in common, their affection for the Steelers, brings them together. And then the time that they spent together is spent focused on the very thing that they share in common. That's what fellowship looks like. Fellowship isn't when Steelers fans just get together and talk about business or talk about the stock market or whatever else. It's when they get together and they celebrate the very thing that gives them something in common. So for us, for believers, Christian biblical fellowship is when we come together acknowledging that Christ is what we share in common and the time that we spend together is focused on him. Fellowship looks a lot like Sunday morning church. Fellowship looks a lot like coming here on Sunday mornings like we used to in the old days, saying hey in the lobby, celebrating triumphs and comforting one another with tragedy in the lobby, coming in, sitting in these seats, singing together, proclaiming to God together, listening, learning about God together, being convicted or motivated or inspired together, and then leaving with a sense of camaraderie as we spent time here in the service celebrating the very thing that brings us all together, which is Christ. This is why we will always meet on Sunday mornings. This is why we will get back together just as soon as we possibly can. This is why community is so important to us at Grace because we want to come together and be focused on and celebrate the very thing that we have in common, which is Jesus. And so I want to challenge you in your small groups. Make sure your small group time is fellowshipping. Make sure that's Christ-centered time. In your circle of friends, it's not fellowship just because we get together and we all believe in Jesus. It becomes fellowship once we're focused on him for a portion of that time. So let's begin to think of intentional ways that we can fellowship with one another when we're spending time together. To help us begin to dip our toes back in the water of community and fellowship, we're actually going to begin to support watch parties. We've moved into this weekend, phase two of the governor's plan officially. So we can do this now. We can have watch parties on Sunday morning. I think it would be great if we would invite people over to the house and say, hey, I'm going to be watching my church's service this morning. Why don't you come with me? Or hey, I know that you guys watch it. Why don't you come over here? Let's watch it together. This is a great opportunity to reach out to your neighbors. I know a lot of us in this time of isolation have grown closer to our neighbors, have met them and interacted with them and spent more time with them than we ever have. What a great vehicle. What a great way to say, hey, this Sunday I'm going to be watching our service. I'd love for you to come over and join us. Let's have a watch party together. I've reached out to the small group leaders and asked them to help facilitate some of these, those of them who are willing. And that's certainly a way to begin to frame up who we would watch these with, but I would just encourage you to watch these sermons with other grace people or other people that you want to invite into your home. And I know that not everyone's going to feel comfortable with this yet. I know some of us are hesitant about that, and that's all right. I don't want you to feel pressure like you have to, but for those of you who are ready to dip your toes back in the water of community, for those of you who are ready to pursue and experience fellowship again, I think the way that we can begin to do that for the next several weeks is to invite people into our homes or to go into the homes of others and watch these services together and begin to experience this community again. And if you want to go early and have breakfast, great. If you want to stay late and do lunch together, great. And if there's kids involved, maybe one parent can take the kids out back and run around with them while the rest of the parents focus on the message. However it is, you figure it out, and however it breaks down, however you're able to accomplish it. I would love to hear more about these watch parties springing up all over the Raleigh area as we experience church together again and begin to dip our toes back into this idea of fellowship. Those are the three distinctives I wanted to look at this morning, to be eager learners, to be devoted to spiritual discipline, and to be devoted to fellowship, to Christ-centered time together. Next week, we'll look at the last four distinctives that I'm excited to go through with you, and hopefully you'll watch this and then watch next week's together, and it can be one concise lesson on who we are as a church, on what we're supposed to pursue, and really answer the question, hey, how do we know if we're doing this right, if we're doing this well? All right, I'm going to pray and let you guys continue on with your Sunday mornings. Father, you're so, so good to us. Thank you for who you are and how you love us. I pray that we would be eager learners. That for those of us who may have set that torch down a while back, maybe you can inspire us again. Maybe you can impassion us again to want to understand more of you and your word. Give us paths and avenues to explore that. God, help us be disciplined in our prayers. Give us the willpower, give us the strength, give us the desire and the earnesty to maintain and to foster these spiritual disciplines. And God, I pray that we would fellowship well, that we would come together and celebrate you, that we would be more intentional about making you the center of our time. And as we consider watch parties, Lord, I just pray that you would watch over us, that you would protect us, that you would bring wisdom there as we begin slowly to experience your community again. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. Before I jump into the sermon, I wanted to pray for a couple of our Grace partners. Most of us don't know this, but there's a couple that are in their 30s named Matthew and Brianna Brown, and they have been in the process of adoption for probably the better part of a year, I would say, if not longer than that. And they actually flew to Columbia in South America this morning to pick up three teenagers that they're adopting from Columbia, which is amazing. This is our primary way to grow at Grace, is to just go get children and then bring them here. So we're very grateful for that. But really and truly, I want to first of all just celebrate their faithfulness to do that and God's goodness in granting them these children. And then also just pray for them as they're there and as they come back and we surround them as a church family. So stop and pray with me and then I'll jump right into the sermon. Father, we are so grateful for you and the way that you love us. We are grateful that you have adopted us into your family, that you give us this picture. God, thank you so much for what you've placed on the heart of Matthew and Brianna. We pray that you would calm their nerves, that you would give them wisdom as they meet their new children, that you would give those children wisdom and grace as they meet their new parents. God, we can't imagine all the thoughts and feelings and emotions swirling around, but we know that this is a family that you have built and constructed with your will. And so we just ask for your blessing on them. We ask for a safe, good, beneficial trip. We ask for good assimilation as they arrive in the States. And God, we ask for special insight as a church, for ways to love them and show those kids that they are welcome here and they are a part of our family. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen. One of my favorite things about the Bible is that it's not just 66 individual books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament. It's not just a string of 66 individual books that exist independently from one another, like a history book or something, but rather the Bible is a tapestry of stories woven to present to us one big overarching story. And one of my favorite parts about that tapestry and learning more about it as a pastor is to look at the things in the Old Testament that are pictures or signposts that point us to the New Testament and more specifically point us to Jesus. If you spent any time in church, you know of some of these signposts and perhaps the most popular one, the one that's the most well-known, that we're most aware of, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, or this is your first time in a church in a long time, or maybe ever, you would probably recognize the term Passover. It's still a holiday that the Jewish faith celebrates. It's still something that we acknowledge on a regular basis as believers. And to me, it's one of the more clear signposts or pictures in the Old Testament that points to an event in the New Testament that points very clearly to Jesus. And Passover is the fourth feast that we're looking at in our series as we go through all the feasts and festivals that were in the Old Testament calendar that God prescribed in the book of Leviticus, chapter 23. This is the fourth one. We've got two more to go. And for this morning, I did want us to kind of catch up on Passover and know what it is, but then I want us to ask a really important question about Passover and what brought it about. So just so we're on the same page and we understand what Passover is, it's actually the tenth plague that God inflicted on the Egyptian people. The situation is God's people, his chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, have existed in the nation of Egypt as slaves for 400 years. It's all that they know. It's generation after generation. They are a people. They are a people of slaves. And so in Exodus chapter 3, God grabs one of the guys that he's chosen to use, a guy named Moses, and he appears to him in a burning bush. And he says, Moses, I want you to go to Egypt and I want you to free my people. Which is a pretty tall order, because he would lead a nation of slaves against the most powerful nation in the world. Egypt was the worldwide superpower at the time, so it felt like a pretty hopeless errand. But he says, I want you to go free my people. To help you do that, I'm going to inflict plagues on the Egyptians. Moses didn't know that at the time, but over time it became apparent that that was God's plan. And so Moses goes to Pharaoh and he says, you need to let God's people go. And Pharaoh says, you're ridiculous. I don't think so. This is a loose paraphrase of a conversation in Exodus. And then God starts to inflict the plagues on the Egyptian people. The waters turn to blood. There's a swarm of locusts. There's gnats. The day has turned to night. The livestock dies. There's boils. There's other plagues that are inflicted on the Egyptian people to soften Pharaoh's heart. And a couple of times he says, you guys got to get out of here. We're tired of these plagues. And then he changes his mind. He says, nope, you got to stay here. Just kidding, you can't go. So they keep them as slaves. The tenth plague becomes known as the Passover. This was the one that finally softened Pharaoh enough to get him to let the people of Israel go. And Passover, what God told Moses to do is to go to Pharaoh and tell Pharaoh, tonight the angel of death is going to pass over all the nation of Egypt. And that angel is going to claim the firstborn of every family, even of the livestock. And God tells Moses that if you want protection from this angel that's going to come as the final plague, that what you need to do is you need to go find a lamb. Sacrifice the lamb and then take the blood of the lamb and paint it on your doorposts, on the top and on the sides. And when the angel passes over Egypt, if that blood is on your doorframe of your house, then he will pass over you and the death that was supposed to happen in your house will not occur because I will accept the death of the lamb that died in their place. And so that's what happens that night. The angel of death passes over the nation of Egypt and the families that didn't have the blood on their doorframe lost their firstborn. And it said that the cry in Egypt that night was great. And the next morning, in his sorrow at losing his own son, Pharaoh tells Moses, get out of here. Go. And Moses gets all the people. They take some gold and some jewelry from their Egyptian slave masters, and they go out into the desert, and they begin to search for the promised land. And that's the story of God's rescue of his people out of slavery. He does it through the series of the ten plagues capped off by what's called now the Passover because the angel of death was passing over Egypt and would pass over your home if you had the blood of the lamb on your doorpost. And it's a very clear picture of Jesus in the New Testament. Very clear picture. When Jesus arrives on the scene, he's introduced by a man named John the Baptist. And John the Baptist, when he sees Jesus of Nazareth walking towards him, says, Behold, the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. Jesus was the spotless Lamb. And just like in the Old Testament, the lamb died so that your home didn't have to experience death. In the New Testament, the lamb dies so that we don't have to experience death. In the Old Testament, the lamb dies at Passover so that God says, there's no penalty required here. You guys are right with me. Just like that in the New Testament, Jesus dies, the Lamb of God, and God looks at that death and he says, that's good. There's no penalty required here because the Lamb has died on your behalf. It is a one-to-one picture that points us to the miracle of Jesus in the New Testament. The Lamb makes us right with God in the Old Testament, and then the Lamb makes us right with God in the New Testament. Passover is a picture of salvation. And now most of you here, this was really my challenge this week, you're church people. You know what Passover is. You could have just done this part so far. And so I thought, I wonder, what are the important questions to ask around Passover that can help us now as we reflect on that festival? And the question occurred to me, what was it that brought about the Passover? What was it that the people of Israel did that got God, enacted God, spurred God, was a catalytic event for God to say, now is when I want to enact my grand plan of rescue? Really what I want to ask is, what was their role in their rescue? What part did they have to play? What did they do? If we were to ask the question today, we would say, what's our role in our salvation? What do I have to do to be saved? We've all asked this question before. Before you were a believer, or now if you're not yet a believer, you would wonder, what do I need to do to be saved? What's required of me? What's my role in my rescue? Some of us wonder if we did it right, if we prayed the prayer right, or if we really meant it, or if we really obey enough. We don't really know if we did everything right, and we wonder still, what's my role in my rescue? What's my role in my salvation? What's our role in our rescue? What do I need to do to be saved? What's my role in my salvation? It's all the same question. And I remember when I was 17 years old, I was at a summer camp called Look Up Lodge. I've mentioned it before. And the camp director was a man named Greg Boone. And he asked the same question, but he just asked it this way. He came out and he asked all the students. There's about 300 kids at the camp that year. And he asked us, what do you have to do to be right with God? What do I have to do to be right with God? And it's one of these questions that somebody asks it and you know that you don't know the answer and that to give an answer, you're just going to get made fun of. Like my dad loves these kinds of questions. My dad asked me one time, son, and I was, I mean, I graduated from seminary. I had reason to believe that I could answer this question. He looks at me and he goes, son, what's the Bible about? And I'm like, geez, I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's about God. Like, that feels like a good answer. And he goes, no, it's about missions. Great, great dad, whatever. You're ridiculous. He's going to listen to this. I still, dad, I still think you're ridiculous. So it's one of those questions. He says, what can we do to be right with God? And we all know that we're not going to get it right, but there are those of us for whom the glory of the correct answer is too irresistible, right? If I get this right, if I somehow unlock the code and I'm the one that's correct, then I will get all the esteem of all of my peers and everyone here is going to know I'm the smartest one. So we have to try. A lot of kids had the sense to not try, but some kids did try. And I don't remember how exactly it went, but I do remember it well enough to know that it went something like this. Someone would raise their hand and offer an answer, and they would say, well, you have to pray a prayer. And Greg would say, well, that's fine. Is it possible to pray a prayer that you don't mean? Is it possible to just say words that aren't sincere? A person would sit back down defeated. Yeah, it is. It's not prayer. There's no magic words to make ourselves right. We know that. Somebody else would say, well, you have to be committed. And I remember thinking like, that sounds pretty good. That's convincing. You have to be committed. And Greg says, okay, how committed do you have to be? They're like, like all the way committed? And they go, yeah, and sat back down because they knew they weren't all the way committed. They were a terrible Christian. And then somebody else says, you have to obey. You have to submit yourself to God and be humble and obey. And I remember thinking, oh, shoot. They might have it on this one. And to us, I think that that would make sense. If you were to ask us, what do we have to do to be right with God? What's our role in our rescue? We might say obey, especially in an Old Testament context. Those of us who know our Bible know that in the Old Testament, your spirituality, in some ways, it was very easy for it to drift towards measuring your spirituality on your ability to follow the rules. In the Old Testament, God gives the Ten Commandments. He gives the laws, 600 and something laws. It's like 630. There's 300 and something thou shouts and 200 and something thou shalt nots. And if you follow those and you do it just right, then God will love you and he'll approve of you and he'll bless you and he'll give you all the things that you ever wanted because you were obedient. And that feels right. It kind of makes sense. I obey God, I follow his rules, I honor him, I'll appease him, and then he'll like me and he'll give me all the things that I need. That's probably our role in our salvation, to obey. The problem with that answer, if we look at it for Passover, what was their role in their rescue? It couldn't have been obedience because the law didn't exist. Moses has yet to bring the Ten Commandments down the mountain. They have yet to write the book of Leviticus with all the 600 laws. They don't have any clear laws to follow. They did turn around and paint the blood on the doorframe, but that was just for that one plague. That wasn't what enacted their whole rescue. So the answer in the Old Testament really couldn't have been obedience. And listen, we know in our own lives, experientially, that obedience is not how we bridge the gap between us and God. Come on, church people. We've tried that, haven't we? Haven't you tried? Isn't it exhausting to try to obey your way to God's approval? If I have just the right attitude and I don't lash out at people and I can control my anger and the terrible thoughts that I think I just mutter under my breath and I don't give voice to them, or if I can ever become super, super nice and just never think those thoughts at all, if I'll watch my language, if I'll give to the church like I'm supposed to, if I'll serve where I'm supposed to, if I'll suffer the way that I should suffer and I don't have the fun that they have and I won't laugh at the jokes that they do and I won't watch the shows that they do and I will be very, very disciplined and we'll just white knuckle our lives to God's approval. Isn't that exhausting? Doesn't that wear you out? And haven't you found that at every effort to obey our way into God's favor is futile? And what's more sinister than that is we always fail. We inevitably fail. Do you understand that in the Old Testament, God gave us the rules to show us that we can't follow them so that we would conclude that we have a need for him? And so when we think that we can obey our way towards God's approval, and we try really hard to do all the things, to dot all the I's and cross all the T's and be the person that God wants us to be, and we fail, we assume that we don't have his approval. That our Father's in heaven looking down at us disappointed. And I think that if you get nothing else today, especially if you're someone who's been a believer for a long time, if you don't hear anything else I say, maybe this morning can be the time when you finally, finally, finally let go of the idea of winning God's approval and admiration through obedience. We cannot perform our way into God's favor. And can I confess something to you? I'm 38 years old. I really do believe that I came to know the Lord at the age of four. And that I've been rescued for 34 years. I still cannot figure out how to quit trying to win God's approval through my behavior and through what I do and through how I perform. I still can't figure out how to just know that God loves me and to exist outside of this performance-based economy. Who knows, maybe if I preach hard enough today, I'll finally get it too. So if you haven't figured it out yet, you've got at least me as company. But it's not obedience. That's not the answer. That's not our role in our rescue, obeying our way to God's favor. And so it was at this point in the night that I thought, I think I've got it. I think I'm ready. I'm ready to crack the code. So I speak up and I said, Greg, you've got to love God. You've got to love him. And I felt like I was on good biblical standing for this because Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. How about them apples, Greg? So he says that's a good answer. How much do you have to love God? Like what percentage? Like 100? He goes, yeah. Do you love God 100%? No. And I sat back down. And all 300 heads turned to me aghast. How could you not love God 100%? And I just remember thinking, you shut up, you hypocrites. Like, you don't either. You're judging me. That's not loving. So it was a... But that wasn't the answer either. And that night, after everyone finally gave up, Greg offers us the answer, and he says, nothing. There's nothing you can do. But as I reflect on Scripture and what my life has taught me and a passage that I see in Exodus chapter 2, I don't think that's the answer either. I don't think it's nothing. I think that they did something, and I think we see the something that they did in Exodus chapter 2, verses 23 through 25. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Exodus is the second book of the Bible. And at the end of this chapter, it kind of bridges the gap. Before this, the author of Exodus is setting up what's going on, just what's happening in the culture. And basically what he's told us is there's people, the Hebrew people are slaves. They've been slaves for 400 years, but there's this boy named Moses who was born and he was adopted into Pharaoh's home and he grew up learning to lead. But then God put him in the desert for 40 years because he murdered some people and he needed to be prepared for the leadership. And then God is about to call him in chapter three. But right before God calls Moses to rescue his people for his part in rescuing his people. We see what the people did that I think is because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel, and God knew. These people were slaves. They had been for 400 years. Can you imagine what it would have been like to be a civilization of slaves? To look your children in the eye when you have them and know that their life is not going to be any better than your miserable life. To know as fathers and mothers, there's nothing I can do to bring about a change for you. To feel that impotent and powerless. Can you imagine how anonymous the people of Israel must have felt? There's no nations around them that are going to swoop in and overthrow Egypt and free them. That's not on the geopolitical agenda. No one's going to pick a fight with Egypt. Most nations probably don't even know that they're there. They're totally unseen and totally unknown. They're completely impotent and helpless. And I think based on the beginning of this passage, it says, during those many days, the king of Egypt died. I think that they were hoping, this Pharaoh stinks. He treats us really poorly. Maybe if we can hold out long enough, he'll die and the next one will be nicer. But the Bible tells us that the next one was worse. And I happen to believe that this is when they gave up their last strand of hope. And in this hopelessness, in this isolation, in this feeling of impotence, the people of Israel cry out to God. They groaned in their slavery. And I think that there's a quality to this cry. I think there's essential qualities to this cry. I think that this was an earnest, admissive cry. Earnest in the idea that God, this is broken. This is not supposed to work like this. We're your people and life shouldn't feel like this. This is not how it's supposed to go, God. You didn't design it this way. Life feels broken. And I think that we felt that before too. God, this is not how this is supposed to go. This feels broken. This doesn't feel right. God, I'm not happy. God, we are miserable. God, we are hopeless. So there's this earnest, honest cry that this is broken. And then there's this admission, and we can't fix it ourselves. The next Pharaoh isn't going to fix it. Some other country's not going to come in and fix it. We're not going to rise up in rebellion and overtake and overthrow. We don't have any options, God. We cannot fix this. We are totally and completely reliant on your favor and your mercy. God, help us. It's an earnest admission. God, this is broken, and we are impotent to fix it. And when they let out this earnest cry of admission, what does God do? I love these three words. It says he remembers them, he saw them, and he knew. God doesn't forget things. It's not as though when they cried out that God was in heaven preoccupied with dealing with something with the angels and went, oh my goodness, man, 400 years goes by so quick. I am so sorry that I left you guys in Egypt. He doesn't forget. It's a way to say that this is when God acknowledged them. He saw and he knew. He didn't just then see. That's not a present tense. It had always seen and he had always known. And that know there is an intimate know. It's an intimate word. It's a word of empathy. Not only did he know what they were going through, but he had personally felt what they were going through. And it tells me that our God never forgets us. He doesn't forget that we exist and we are never at any point unseen, no matter how isolated we feel, no matter how hopeless we might feel, he sees us and he knows. That's why he's called El Roy, the God who sees. Do you know the power of being seen? Of being known? Have you ever been walking through something in your life that was incredibly difficult and had someone come alongside you and say, hey, I've been through that before. I know it's tough. Let me tell you what I learned from that experience. You know how life-giving that is? Have you felt the power of being seen and known? So when they cry out, this earnest, admissive cry, it says, God remembered them, he saw them, and he knew them. And then, the very next chapter, he calls Moses and enacts his grand plan of rescue. But if you were to ask me, for the people of Israel, what was their role in their rescue? I would tell you it was to come to a place where they let out an earnest, admissive cry to God. God, this is broken, and we can't fix it. So for you, what's your role in your rescue? What's your role in your salvation? If you're here this morning and you don't know Jesus, what do I do to be saved? You let out an earnest and admissive cry to the Father, Father, this is broken and I'm impotent to fix it. Father, life was not supposed to feel this way. I have all the things that I want. I have the job that I want. I have the house that I want. I have the family that I want. I have the toys that I want. And I still feel empty. I still don't like the quiet. I still don't like the silence. I'm still uncomfortable with my own thoughts. I'm still not at peace. Father, I need you because I thought that this was going to make me happy and it hasn't. Father, I have all the kids that I want and I'm still not happy. Father, I have everything in my life that I want and it's still not doing it. God, I had that and I lost it and then I reached for this other thing and I thought that that would be the thing that made me feel okay, that made me feel at peace, that made me feel happy and it's not. It's just another lurch at empty. God, I need you because this is broken and I don't know how to fix it. That's what salvation is. What's our role in our rescue to salvation? It's an earnest cry to the Father. What's our role and our rescue from sin? Many of us here, we're believers. We know we're believers. We don't doubt that, but man, there is just sin in our life that we cannot kick. We have things that are growing in the shadows that we are terrified are going to tear us down. We have attitudes that we can't get over. We don't like the way we act when we're angry, but we still have a temper. What's our role in our rescue for sin? It's the same thing. To make an earnest cry to God, God, I'm broken. I don't know how to fix myself. I've tried everything I know how to try to get better at this, to not sin in this way anymore, to not let you down. I've tried everything that I possibly can, and I don't know what else to do. And I think God says, good, because I love you anyways, whether you do this or not. And I'm ready to rescue you if you'll make space for me. What do we do? What's our role in victory over sin? It's an earnest cry to the Father, God, this is broken and I am impotent to fix it. It's the same for spiritual success. What do we do to raise kids who love the Lord? What do we do to have a healthy, vibrant marriage so that when people look at it, they go, man, that is a picture of how Jesus loves his church, which is what the Bible tells us our marriage is supposed to be. How do we live up to that picture? How do we obey Paul and live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? How do we obey the author of Hebrews and run the race that is set before us by throwing off every sin and weight that so easily entangles? How do we do all of that that feels so impossible? We cry out to the Lord, God, I'm broken and I'm impotent to fix it. I need you. I think that this is the cry for salvation. And I think it is the cry for a believer every day. Every day that you wake up and this isn't what we say to the Lord, Lord, I'm broken today and I need you today and I'm impotent to execute your will today. Every day we wake up and we think that we're going to step into it and do it ourselves, that our role and our rescue is our performance, we're going to hurt that day. So this morning, I want to invite you to the same thing that I believe Passover invites us to, to make an earnest cry to the Father. Maybe for the first time if we don't know him. Father, I'm broken and I'm impotent to fix myself. I need your rescue. I'm going to pray and then the band is going to come. They're going to lead us in one more song. And I want you, as we sing together, make that your cry to the Father. In this song, we'll sing the lyrics, Our Hearts Cry Out. Let's honor Passover today and make a collective cry to the Father. God, we need you. We're broken without you. And it says in Exodus that when his people cried out to him that God saw them. And as we cry out in a few minutes, I want you to know that the God who saw all of his children still sees his child. Let's cry out to him together. Let's pray. God, you are good. You are a good father. Even for those of us who didn't have good dads, you are a good father. God, if there's anything in us that's still holding on to a pride of success or of performance or of being good enough, help us to let that go. Help us be like your children in Israel who cry out to you earnestly and admissively that we are broken and that we need you. God, we feel your rescue rushing into impossible situations even today. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Somebody's near those lights in the back. Can we hit them? Thanks, David. Both of them. There we go. I want to be able to see everybody, even Jim Adams in the back. Welcome to Grace. It's good to have you here. I'm so excited to be kicking off the fall. I really, as a pastor and just as a person who's no longer in school, hate the summertime. It is too hot. Nothing in my life calls for the temperature to be over 70 degrees. I really like football, and I really like two services, and I really like when small groups start. So I'm so excited to be launching into this new series. As a clerical note, as we begin here today, those of you that got the bulletin when you came in and you are my note takers and you like to fill in the blanks, I have bad news for you. I'm not going to use those today, okay? I'm going to use them kind of. There's going to be enough in the sermon that you can fill in the blanks if you really want to, but I went back to Alan running the computer and I said, we're just going to put the verse on the screen when I get to it. Other than that, don't worry about the notes because they're just going to mess me up this morning. Okay. So anyways, I just wanted you to know that. Don't get frustrated when you're like, I don't know what to write down. You're not gonna. It's going to be a big fun mystery. I want to take you to our staff meetings. We have staff meetings now every Tuesday, every Tuesday, full-time staff. So that's me and then Steve. Yeah, the one with the curly hair that comes up here sometimes. Steve, our worship pastor. Kyle, our excited student pastor. I'm a little worried that the stage is now too wide for him. It's got too much space up here. And then Aaron, our wonderful children's pastor. And then sometimes some of our part-time staff will join us for lunch and stick around for a meeting. So that's what we do every Tuesday. And so we go out to lunch and then we come back and we sit down in a room over there and we talk about whatever it is we need to talk about. And I don't know how your staff meetings go. I'm sure that you are all on staff or have been on staff in different places. You have meetings that everyone loves. And I don't know how well you guys stay focused, but I know for us, all of our meetings go at least 33% longer than they need to because all four of us are very prone to chasing rabbits. It can very easily go something like this. If you could please silence your cell phones, that would be super. I'm just messing around. I just always wanted to say that. We'll sit down in a meeting and we'll be like, okay, we got to plan the Hootenanny. Hootenanny's coming up. We got to plan it. Let's talk about it. What do we want to do here? And then I'll say like, what kind of food should we serve? And maybe Aaron will say, well, how about just hot dogs? Those are easy. Let's try hot dogs. And then Steve will go, oh, man, I was downtown, and I had the best hot dogs at Crazy 8's. They were so good. You guys have got to try this restaurant. And then Aaron will be like, yeah, Harris and I love that restaurant. That's the best. And then I'll hear about Harris, and I'll get excited and be like, hey, how's Harris doing? Is he doing okay? Has he been able to get out and golf lately? I know that dude likes golfing. And then Kyle will be like, yo, me and Harris just went frisbee golfing like yesterday. It was great. And I'll go, get out of here. Where did you go? And he'll say, we went to such and such park. And then Steve will go, Grayson loves that park. And then Aaron will say, I do too. And then I'll go, let's all get together and hang out at the park. What do we need to bring? Hot dogs? And then eventually somebody goes, hey, hey, hey, hootenanny. We've got to focus. And we go, oh, yeah, okay. And then we go. I mean, am I lying? That's totally how it goes. And we've got to stop. We get to wandering off. We get caught up in everything else, and then we have to refocus on what's important. And I bring that up because I think that that happens in life, right? I think that in life we all choose our priorities and our things that are important to us. If I were to ask any of you, what are the three most important things in your life, for most of the people in the room, even if you're lying because I'm the pastor, you would say, well, my faith and my family and then like job or friendships or whatever else comes next. We'd all say those things to one degree or another. But then as we get into life, sometimes that gets skewed a little bit because life just gets crazy. I was talking to somebody last week who said that they learned while all three of their daughters were in middle school, high school time, they got a new car, and they learned very quickly that the mom was putting 1,000 miles a week on her car just getting all the kids to all the different places that they needed to be. That's busy, man. That's hectic. We volunteer for stuff. We overextend. We fill our calendar so that we feel like we're doing something and we don't have any time in the margins. We got to go to meetings that we don't care about. A lot of us live our life out of a sense of ought. Someone asks us to do something and when we feel like since they asked me, I should say yes. And then we wake up in the morning resenting that thing that we have to do, but we go and we do it anyways because this is what good people do. And we just go on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that sometimes our years get away from us. And this is why holidays are great. Because holidays force us to slow down and focus on this thing that we've designated as important. Right? This is how Mother's Day works. We go through the year, and I don't know who gave it to us, Hallmark maybe, I can't back that up with paperwork, but we're grateful to them. We go through the year, and if we have a good mom, we take her for granted sometimes. We forget to tell her that she's awesome. We forget to thank her for all the things that she does. We forget to call her when we should. And we just kind of go through the year doing that. And then May comes and everybody goes, hey, hey, Mother's Day. All right. Say you're grateful. Oh, yes, thank you. And then we do the flowers and the hugs and we go eat at the restaurant with the bad service, right? That's what we do. It's the same for our anniversary. If you're married, you go through the year. And often, I mean, it never happens in my marriage with Jim, but I've heard that other people take one another for granted and they just go through the year kind of forgetting and then your anniversary comes up and you go, oh, that's right. And for that day, you focus on what's important. And I think that this is what holidays do for us. I think holidays orient us on what really matters. Holidays remind us to focus on what's actually important. This is why I think God instilled some holidays in the calendar in the Old Testament. This is an aside. I couldn't move through the sermon without saying this because it's something I've been thinking about with the rhythm of life. We're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the six festivals or holidays or feasts that God installed into the calendar of his people that we see in Leviticus chapter 16. We're going to look at those six holidays and figure out what they mean for us and what we're celebrating now as we remember them. And I've loved diving into them. I've learned more, more quickly than I have in a long time because this represented a big gap in my biblical knowledge. And so one of our great partners gave me a stack of books that I've just been reading through for every holiday. It's been so enriching. But one of the things I've been thinking about is if holidays serve to reorient us on what's important, to take our focus off all the stuff and focus us in on what really matters. And this is the rhythm that God has installed so that every now and again, at a certain rhythm over the course of the year, before we get too far off the mark, God goes, hey, and he focuses us. Then isn't this what happens on Sundays? As he installed the rhythm of church, we go through our weeks, and before we can get too far away, God brings us back into church and focuses us on him and says, hey, don't forget about me, I'm important. And isn't that what's great about the rhythm of waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer? I've said a bunch of times that you can develop no more important habit in your life than to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. And if nothing else happens, if this sermon this morning is a dud and you leave here, you're like, I didn't get anything out of that. I wouldn't blame you. If you get up and you read the Bible in that particular week, you kind of go, gosh, I just didn't get anything out of this. I just didn't see anything today. Isn't it good that if nothing else happened, there's this rhythm in your life of bringing your focus back to God every day through prayer and through scripture reading and every week through church and then every so often through the holidays that he instills. I think there's something to a rhythm of life that reorients us on what's important. But we're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the festivals that God installed in the Hebrew calendar. We're going to do this with a little bit of an awareness of why God did this and when he started these in history. So just so we're all on the same page, the Hebrew nation really looks at the people of Israel, God's chosen people, they really look back at Abraham as their founding father, as their forefather. For Christianity, he's kind of the forefather or the founding father of the faith. For the unindoctrinated, he would be like our George Washington, okay? Like he was the guy. And so way back in Genesis 12, God made Abram, at the time he wasn't yet Abraham, some promises. Three promises of land of people and of blessing. I'm going to give you the land that we know as modern day Israel. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. That's going to be the Hebrew people, the Jewish people. There's going to be a bunch of them. And then one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth, is the promise. So in Genesis 12, God makes these promises to Abraham, and through those promises, he becomes the forefather, the founding father of the Jewish faith and of our faith, if you're a believer. Then from him, he had some sons, and a couple generations later, there's Joseph. Joseph is a guy who ends up down in Egypt. All of Abraham's family moved down to live with Joseph. The Bible fast forwards 400 years between the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus, the first and second books of the Bible. And then we have Moses sitting there in Egypt. They are a people who are enslaved by Egypt and God tasks Moses in Exodus 3 and 4, the burning bush, with leading his people out of slavery. So Moses leads the people out of slavery. They're in the desert. They're wandering around, and it's this fascinating time. It's fascinating biblically, but just historically, if you like to think about things like this. Here's this nation of people, maybe about 500,000 strong, between three and 500,000 strong, that are living as nomads in the desert. And they have to now figure out life. They have to figure out laws. They have to figure out a religion. They have to figure out a civil structure. And so Moses installs a government and God gives them laws. This is the Ten Commandments that he carries down from the mountain. They start meeting. They set up a tabernacle, and they have a whole group of people called the Levites, or the priests, who are in charge of setting up the tabernacle and performing all the ceremonies necessary at the tabernacle to relate to the God that's meeting them. They start to form this little society, this little civilization. And as part of the civilization, God says, I want you to have six holidays that you observe every year. And so for the next six weeks, we're going to look at those six holidays. Because what these holidays do is they teach us and they show us that our God is a God of remembrance and he's a God of celebration. Our God is a God of remembrance and he is a God of celebration. He wants us at each of these holidays to remember something that he's done, to look back at something that he's done. He wants us to celebrate something that he's done. And I kind of like pointing that part of God's character out to people. I think sometimes we get the idea that church needs to be somber and sober and serious and that I should be wearing a suit and that we should put on our best for God and that it needs to be just high church of the utmost all the time, when really God designed fun. He initiated fun. He gave you the ability to smile. He likes laughter. He likes hearing your laughter. He likes watching us laugh together and enjoy one another, which is why in a couple of weeks when we have the Hootenanny, there's going to be a bunch of silly stuff and a bunch of funny stuff around that. We're going to have competitions in the service, and if you win one, you're going to get a fanny pack, and it's going to be the Hootenanny fanny. And you get to wear it to the Hootenanny so that everybody sees how awesome you are for the rest of the day. You're going to be the king or the queen of the hootenanny. It's going to be great. And we'll laugh and we'll giggle and we'll share stories and we'll talk about fantasy football. I'm going to win the league this year at the church. Worst to first, it's going to be an incredible story. And listen, God celebrates that. God ordains that. When we have the moments in here where we cry and we're brought low, those are holy moments. But when we have the moments where we celebrate and we're brought high, those are holy moments too because God initiated those. He is a God of remembrance and of celebration and we'll see these in the festivals. So this week we want to look at the first festival that God orders in Leviticus chapter 16. It's called the Feast of Trumpets, and it's initiated by the sounding of a trumpet, which is why we had Brandon come up and play the shofar at the beginning of the service. If you didn't get to see that because maybe you rolled in a little bit late, then you have to stay for the beginning of the next service. It's just a must. So he sounded the trumpet, and it initiated the service, and that's what they would do for the beginning of the next service. It's just, it's a must. So he sounded the trumpet and it initiated the service. And that's what they would do for the Feast of Trumpets is they would sound it and it would initiate and bring in the Jewish New Year is what it was a celebration of. Oddly enough, I don't know how it works out. Okay, I don't ask questions like this. Their New Year began in the seventh month of the year. It was a month called Tishri. It mirrored a large portion of September and the beginning of October. So according to the calendar, we're observing it and looking at it at exactly the right time. And I think that that's really cool because to me, this first full service, I mean, we had Labor Day, we did Grace Serves, and it was amazing. But this first full service in September, to me, initiates the new year at Grace, the new ministry year. And that may sound funny to you, but for me, the rhythms of the year kind of work like this. In September, everything's back, right? Small groups are back, people are back from vacation, and the church is full again, and people are consistent again, and schedules are a little bit more regular. And so September is a big month at Grace. And so we push hard in September. We get ready for it, and we push, push, push, and we go, go, go. And really, we push really hard until Christmas. And Christmas is a big celebration. And then we kind of take a deep breath, and we get ready because January is a huge month too. We gear up for January, then we push really hard to Easter and then through Mother's Day and then after Mother's Day, schedules kind of start to get irregular again. People go on vacation and we know that. That's perfectly fine. And then over the summer, we kind of take a deep breath and then we gear up for September again. So that's kind of the rhythm of church. And so to me, this Feast of Trumpets mirrors our new year as well. Their new year mirrors our new year. And so I thought it was a good place to start as we dive into these feasts. And they sound the trumpet because it was symbolic of a lot of things in Hebrew culture. The trumpet, the shofar, the ram's horn. And we have a small one, but you guys have probably seen those big, long, loud ones that would just fill the area with sound. You've probably seen those. Trumpets meant something to a Jewish person. There's the ram's horn, but then there was also a silver trumpet that was sometimes sounded. And the silver trumpet was emblematic or symbolic of the redemption that God buys for us, the way that he makes a way for us to be right with him. You would sound a shofar as a battle cry. You would sound it so that people would prepare for an announcement. It was sounded around the walls of Jericho. To me, one of the coolest things, because there's a parallel in our New Testament, is it would be sounded to call the workers in from the harvest. So it's time for synagogue or it's time for temple. One of the priests would go out and he would sound the shofar and all the people working out in the field would hear the sound far off and know to come in because it was time to gather for assembly. And I think that's really cool because in Thessalonians and in Corinthians, we're told that one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to claim his children to himself. And if you're here and you're alive, then you are a worker in the field. You are active. You should be about actively bringing other people along with you to heaven. We all have work to do. That's one of the reasons why at Grace we have partners. We don't have members because we kind of believe that members tend to consume and that partners tend to contribute. And we believe that we are an entity that is about getting something done. So we're looking for people to partner with us. We are laborers in the field and workers for the harvest. And one day Jesus is going to return and he's going to call us home. And do you know what we're going to hear when he does that? The sound of a trumpet. I would bet everything I have that it's a shofar. What a beautiful parallel there is from the Old Testament to the New Testament promises. But I think the most profound symbolism that we see in the Feast of Trumpets is that the horn that was blown is symbolic of the ram that was caught in the thicket in Genesis 22. I told you that Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people and that God promised him that through you, you're going to have a ton of descendants. This was an issue because Abraham and his wife Sarah had not yet had any children. And so very late in life, I think Abraham was 99, if I remember my Bible correctly, they had a son named Isaac. And a few years into Isaac's life, God says, I'd like you to offer Isaac to me. And so Abraham, in obedience, gets up and takes the physical manifestation of the promises of God to this land, to this region of Moriah, up onto a hill, and he prepares to sacrifice him. And right at the moment where Abraham was going to strike down Isaac, he hears a voice that says, Abraham, Abraham, do not touch the boy. And there's a ram caught in the thicket. And the voice tells him, go and get the ram and let that die in Isaac's place. And so he goes and he gets it and he kills the ram and the ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. And it's the picture of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament that says and acknowledges that when we sin, and sin is any time we put our authority in our life over God's authority in our life. God says, I think that you should do this thing, and we go, no, I don't think so. I think I need to do this thing. That's sin. Whatever it is, it's when we elevate our judgment over God's in our life. And when we do that, we're separated from God. And that separation requires a death. And so God in his sovereignty in the Old Testament installed the sacrificial system so that essentially that ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. It's a picture of what's called a substitutionary atonement. And the really cool part of this is, this is what the Hebrew people would remember. So on the Feast of Trumpets, the trumpet is blown. It stands for all these things, but it most pointedly stands for the ram caught in the thicket in Genesis chapter 22. And so God told them, I want you to remember the promise that I made to Abraham, your forefather, and then remember how I kept it in the form of a ram. And now here you are today at the time in the land of Israel with the promises of God kept. And so what the Feast of Trumpets is really is a time for us to celebrate and remember the promises that God has kept to us and anticipate the promises that God has made to us. And so for a Christian, as we look at this festival, what we understand is that it points directly to Jesus. Do you know what the picture in Genesis 22, when Abraham takes Isaac up on the mount, do you know what that's a picture of? It's a picture of the crucifixion of Christ. Do you understand that all of Israel looked forward? They would celebrate the Feast of Trumpets every year. They would celebrate, next week we're going to look at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. They would look at that and how there was an atoning work done for them. And they would anticipate one day God's going to send a Messiah, his son, a messianic figure, and he will be the atonement for us all. He will be the ram for us all. And so it was a remembrance of the promise that God made to Abraham and a looking forward to the fulfillment of that promise. And as believers now in 2019, we look back and we see how God kept his promise to Abraham and his people by providing Jesus. That the sacrifice of Jesus to that point is the apex and the perfection of history. That all of history before Jesus looked forward to him coming. That the feast of trumpets was a yearly reminder that we anticipate the coming of Jesus. And then after that, we anticipate this perfect utopia that God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth where his children live in peace, and that Jesus brings that about. And as New Testament believers, we see that the ram is really a picture of Jesus. And so the shofar that is sounded at the Feast of Trumpets to us is not a reminder of the ram. It's a thing that points to Jesus. And it's our job to remember on a day like this the promises that God made to us and kept so that we can gleefully anticipate the ones that he will keep. To me, the Feast of Trumpets is a big ceremony that's existed for thousands of years to point us to what I believe is the most hopeful passage in all of Scripture. If you were to talk to an ancient Hebrew person on the day of the Feast of Trumpets, they would tell you that one of the promises they were anticipating, the main promise they were anticipating was being in eternity with God one day. It was a utopia that God is going to create with a new heaven and a new earth. And if you were to talk to a Christian and say, what are you hoping in? We would tell you, ultimately, we are hoping in an eternity spent with God. And in Revelation chapter 21, one through four, we see this eternity kind of synopsized in four verses. John writes this. The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. If you are a believer, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then that is the hope that you cling to. When life doesn't make sense, when things get hard, when days are dark, that is the hope that we cling to. And we cling to that hope because Romans tells us that our hope will not be put to shame. We cling to that hope because we remember the other promises that God has kept. And if he's kept those promises, then I know he'll keep that promise. If he's been faithful to his church through Jesus and his death, then I know that he'll be faithful to his church through Jesus and his return. I know that I'll hear a trumpet again one day and I know that he's gonna call me into this promise in Revelation where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be made untrue. And all the things that you don't understand in this life will make sense. And so on the Feast of Trumpets, we reflect on the promises that God has kept. And we eagerly anticipate the ones that he will fulfill. We do that as a body of believers, as the church Big C Church. We do that as Grace, Little C Church. It would be right and good to reflect on where the church has been and how God has been faithful to us through the years and anticipate what we believe his promises are about our church as we move forward. And I think most importantly this morning, it's a time for us as individuals to reflect on the promises that God has kept in our life and be hopeful about the things that he will bring about in our life. Some of us are walking through hard times. For some of us, our anxiety level when we walked in here is up to here. We're struggling with depression. We're struggling with anxiety. We're struggling with sleepless nights. We're struggling with indecision or pain or hardship or grief. And if we're not struggling now, we know enough about life to know that those days come, that there's dark days too. And the Feast of Trumpets slows us down in the midst of our anxiety and focuses us and says, hey, do you remember all the things that God has done for you so far? He will see you through the next thing. And so I think it's right and good today for all of us, no matter where we are, no matter how we felt when we walked in the room, to remember the ways that God has come through for us in the past and know that he will come through for us in the future. I've shared with you guys before that the most difficult season of my life was our miscarriage. We struggled for a long time to get pregnant. We finally did, and then we learned that we had lost the baby. Those are the darkest months of my life. That shook my faith the most. That made me the most angry with God. Those days were the most difficult ones to pray. Those were hard. And I remember those moments. But now I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lily. And she's the fulfillment of things. She's the promise of God. She's my physical manifestation of his goodness that he will come through for me. And every now and again, I get to put her to bed. Most nights not because Jen is her favorite and she makes that very clear. She will tell me, Mommy is my favorite. I do not like you today. Okay. Same as our friends. But when I do get to put her to bed, we do the whole routine. And then finally we lay down and I'm laying there next to her and I sing her some songs. And the last song that I always sing is God is so good. God is so good. He's so good. He's so good to me. And she doesn't know it. She thinks I'm just singing. But she's the goodness. And the last stanza, there's a bunch of different ways you can sing that song, but the last stanza that I always sing when I put her to bed at night is God answers prayer. He answers prayer. He's so good to us. He answers prayer in your life too. You have the manifestations of God's goodness in your life too. And the Feast of Trumpets, even in the hardest of times, focuses us on the promises that God has kept for us in the past and gives us hope even when we don't see how, even when we can't piece together why, that God will fulfill those promises in the future, that he will see us through again. So today, that's what we celebrate. I'd like you to pray with me, and then we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, we love you. You are so good to us. You do answer prayer. God, you've seen us through so many seasons of our lives. You've come through in so many ways. Father, I pray specifically for those who came in with heavy hearts this morning for whatever reason. That you would focus them in on the things that you've done for them in the past so that they might have a little hope that the future is bright too. God, thank you for all the manifestations of the goodness in our life. I pray that we would take a minute today and realize those before we get out of here, before we run out and let life pick up again and forget what we should be focused on. I pray that we would each take just a minute and be grateful for your goodness in our life and the way that you've come through for us in the past. God, be with our brothers and sisters, our family members who are hurting. Pray that you would heal them. Pray that you would give them your peace. And we thank you that you are a God of celebration and that you are a God of remembrance, Lord. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.