Sermons tagged with Priorities

The Yo, good to see everybody. Thank you again for being here. This is the sixth part in our series going through the book of Revelation. I have really very much enjoyed going through Revelation with you all. And honestly, you guys have been more enthusiastic about it than I expected because Revelation can be a slog. It can be tough. We just took three weeks working through the tribulation, talking about the wrath of God and all the mechanics of the tribulation best we can. And to me, that feels tedious, but you guys have been incredibly supportive and incredibly kind. And it seemed like y'all have enjoyed going through this with me. As folks have asked me, how is Revelation being received? I say, it seems universally good. However, no one's going to tell me it's bad. No one's going to email me and be like, just so you know, really are looking forward to when this series is over and we can talk about something else. So that might be out there. And if that's you, I'm so sorry. Thank you for hanging with us. But for those of you who have enjoyed this, thanks so much for the encouragement because it's been really, really neat to get to go through it with you guys as a church. This morning, we arrive at Christ's return, the return of Christ. And I said last week that this needs to be the best sermon that I've ever preached in my life, to do adequate justice to the grandiosity of what's happening in Revelation 19. This will not be the best sermon of my life. I just wish that it could be, okay? So let's temper our expectations now. This is a B minus, all right? But in this sermon, we arrive at Jesus' return, at kind of the culmination of God's wrath, the final nail in the coffin. I said we've been walking through the tribulation. We've kind of looked at it through three different lenses. We looked at it in the first week to understand the wrath of God that's poured out in the tribulation, and we defined it. We defined it that week when we looked at Revelation 4 and 5, and Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, qualified to open up the seals and begin to open up God's wrath on his creation. We said he's beginning the seven-year process of tribulation. Now, what is tribulation? Well, we define that as the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on his creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. And this week, he reclaims it. This week, he does the last part of the tribulation. Then we looked at kind of the flow of it, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, and then we looked at the figures of it, and we'll talk a little bit more about the beast, the Antichrist, today. But where we're at in the narrative of Revelation is we're at the end of the Tribulation. God has poured out his wrath. We've had this great battle. There's been a great earthquake. God has sent darkness onto the kingdom of the Antichrist. And then he sends his son to finish up the work. He sends his son to answer the voice of the martyrs that cries out in Revelation chapter 6, the fifth seal. The voice of the martyrs below the throne of God that say, how much longer, God, before you avenge our death? You know who killed us. You see us suffering as your children. How much longer will you let this keep going? And we talked about in that week how we cry out with the martyrs, that every time something in our life happens that seems difficult or hard to understand or seems unfair, every time there's a school shooting, God, how much longer are you going to let this go on? Every time we lose someone too soon, God, how much longer will you let this world be broken? Every time we see something that we can't understand, we cry out with the martyrs and we say, God, how much longer, oh Lord, will you put up with this? And when he begins to open up the seals and begin the process of tribulation, he says, no more. And when he sends his son Christ, when we see Jesus in Revelation 19, that is God putting the final nail in the coffin of evil and saying, now I will make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Now I will rectify things. Now I will restore creation. Now I will answer the groanings that Paul talks about in Romans chapter 8 when we are told that all of creation groans for the return of the king. When we're told that we yearn inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters to experience eternity in the marriage supper of the lamb, we wait for this. We long for this. This is the hope that persists in our faith and keeps us anchored to our savior because we believe that revelation 19 is going to happen one day, that he's going to come get us, and that when he comes back, you guys have heard me say this before, he's not coming back as the Lamb of God. He comes back as the Lion of Judah. And we see this description in Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. So if you have a Bible, you can read along with me. I love this description of my Jesus. Every time I read it, whether it's out loud or just in private, I get chills. I love this picture of him. And I don't know, I don't know if everybody can relate to this. This may just be silly. This may just be me being a dummy, and that's fine. I'm familiar with this territory. It's not unfamiliar. But when I read this passage about my Jesus, that part of me as a little kid that loved to see the hero win in movies, that teenage boy that loved to watch Braveheart win, that loved Gladiator and seeing Russell Crowe's character stick it to him, that little boy that loves Star Wars, that loves to see the hero win against evil, against all odds, that part of us, and I'm sharing that with you because I think that God lays that in us intentionally. I think we love the hero because the hero is a shadow of this reality that Jesus becomes. We grow up learning to love when the day is saved and when the hero makes an appearance because God wove that, I think, into our hearts to appreciate the appearance of his son when that hero returns and appears once and for all. So it's with that preamble that we'll read the description as Jesus comes back to reclaim his creation. This is the description of him that John records. Chapter 19, verse 11. And behold, a white horse. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Gosh. That's Jesus, man. That's Jesus. That's our Savior. When we think of Jesus, when we pray to him, when we sing to him, when we think about him, when we think about being reunited with him in heaven, I believe that it's our tendency to think about the gospel of Jesus, to think about the crucified Christ. And I don't think that's anybody's fault. We have four gospels. We spend time there all the time. I revisit a gospel every spring with you guys. We focus on Jesus at Easter. We focus on Jesus at Christmas. And we see the teachings from Jesus come out of the gospel. And so it's right and good to think about our Jesus as the crucified Christ. It's right and good to think about our Jesus as gentle and lowly. We're actually reading a book, as the staff right now, called Gentle and Lowly, and what it tells us, and I did not know this, but that the only time that Jesus is ever asked to describe himself in scripture, or rather the only time that he actually does it, he describes himself as gentle and lowly. And I think that when we think about Jesus, we think about a humble Nazarene from the country. And that's fine and that's well and good. But that's Jesus in human form. Revelation 19, that's Jesus. You understand? That's who's waiting on us. That's who's coming to get us. That warrior king written on his robe and on his thigh, king of kings and Lord of lords as a callback to Isaiah so that we know exactly who it is. And when you read through this passage, it's unbelievable to me how rich it is with allusions to other parts of scripture so that there is no doubt about it that this is Jesus coming from the very beginning. It says that he was called faithful and true, capitalized. This is a deity. This is Jesus coming. And then it says that only he knows his name, which is, that's Exodus chapter three and four, when God refuses to share his name. That's a throwback to that. And then he says that he was called the word of God, which John is referencing his own writings at beginning of John, the gospel, when he says that the word was with God in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God through him, all things were made without him, nothing was made. And then at the end, king of kings and Lord of lords. John, in this description of Jesus is weaving together all of the scripture to point us to our savior. This is the Jesus, the one who has fire coming out of his eyes and a sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations. The one who rules with the rod of iron, who has the armies of heaven arrayed in linen, following down as he thunders down to conquer the beast and the dragon and the antichrist. That's the one that sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you. That's the one that rules for all of eternity. That's the one that we pray to. And that's the one who's coming to get you. So I want to at least take some time this morning to encourage you. When you sing to Jesus, when you pray to him, when you think of him, when you anticipate meeting him, anticipate the conquering Christ. Anticipate this Jesus. Anticipate the warrior king coming down to settle the score. Anticipate the lion of Judah coming down to wreck shop. To once and for all sweep evil off the face of the planet. And when you do that, when you focus on the conquering Christ, to me, it really caused me to think about this a lot this week, that the conquering Christ renders the crucified Christ all the more miraculous. The conquering Christ, Christ conquering renders Christ crucified all the more miraculous. Because this description in Revelation 19 with a robe dipped in blood and a sword coming out of his mouth and a rod of iron that he rules a nation with, he's gonna tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God with all of heaven's armies arrayed behind him, thundering down to wreck shop. That Jesus hung on the cross for you. That Jesus walked away from all of that, condescended to take on our form, walked with us for 33 years, nurtured disciples to birth a church that would become his true kingdom that he's coming back to rescue so that you and I can sit in here 2,000 years later. He did all that, meek and mild. And when he describes himself as gentle and lowly, yeah, you're not kidding, man. Because look who he is in earth and look who he could be this whole time. This description, this guy, this God, this warrior king, he hung on the cross for you. Not just some sage from the hills of Israel. God condescended for you. He chose to hang on the cross. So I love that moment with Pilate. He's like, are you really a king? And he's like, don't worry about it, Pilate. If I wanted to, this whole place would be smashed. At any moment in Jesus' life, he could have called down these armies and just crushed anybody who opposed him. Caiaphas, the high priest, is sitting there thinking he's got Jesus right where he wants him, and Jesus is just thinking, you have no idea who I am. He dies, he's separated from God. Satan thinks he's got Jesus right where he wants him. Jesus says, you have no idea who I am. Christ conquering, to me, renders Christ crucified as all the more miraculous. And when I think about my Jesus, this is who I think about. He comes to get us and to take us back up to heaven and to start off eternity. And when he comes to get us, he takes us back, we're told, to what's called the marriage supper of the Lamb. He's defeated the beast. He's defeated the Antichrist. He locks them up. It begins the thousand-year reign. We're going to talk about that next week. There's an encore of evil, and then Jesus once and for all throws them in the lake of fire, and that's it. But he comes down. He captures the beast. The armies conquer. He takes his children, he wipes evil off the face of the earth, he purifies his bride, and then we have the marriage supper of the Lamb. And I feel bad for how I'm covering the marriage supper of the Lamb in this series. Because I'm not gonna do it justice. I'm not gonna adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this series. Because I'm not going to do it justice. I'm not going to adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this way of false humility, like, oh yeah, I'm really not doing that good of a job with it. Like, no, I'm not. We just don't have enough time to sink in to everything that's here and even all the symbolism in the marriage supper of the Lamb. But a simple way of thinking about it is the marriage supper of the lamb is the greatest celebration feast of all time. It is the greatest celebration feast that ever was and ever will be. And this should hit home with us. Because what do we do? What do we do when we want to celebrate? I got a little bit of good news last week. Such good news that I went straight to the butcher's market. I bought myself a big old ribeye and I had that for dinner when the kids went to bed. I had myself my own personal private celebration feast. When your team wins, what do you do? You have a feast. When something good in life happens, when you graduate, you have a feast. When people come into town, what do you do? You have a feast. What are we going to do this week? We're going to get together with friends and family. We're going to reflect on the blessings that God has given us, and we're going to have a feast. This is what we do to celebrate. When your kid gets married, and you celebrate kind of transitioning into that season of life. This one has passed. We've formed a new family. What do you do? You get all your friends together and you have a feast. This is what God is doing. It's the greatest celebration feast of all time. In the days of old when kings would conquer and they would come back from conquering another king, what did they do? They feasted. And Jesus is bringing us back to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Why is it called the marriage supper of the Lamb? Because Jesus is getting married. Who's he marrying? Us. The church. His bride. We see throughout Scripture that the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. We see in Ephesians that God purifies his bride. He prepares us. We are made pure for Jesus so that we might marry him in eternity. I don't know how all that works out. It's a word play, but we are made pure by our savior. How are we made pure? By the crucified Christ hanging on the cross. He died for us. He covered over you in righteousness, made you good, purified you, prepared you for this very moment, for the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the church and Christ are united for all of eternity and perfect bliss. And so it's right and good to have a feast to celebrate the marriage. And this feast, man, it's going to be a good feast. The ones that you've lost, they're going to be there. I don't know for certain. I can't find it in Scripture. But I'm pretty sure they're going to serve catfish at this feast. Because my papa is going to be there. He loves catfish. And I know he's got some waiting on me. Your loved ones are going to be there too. Your dads are going to be there. And your moms. And the children that you never got to meet because you lost them too early, they're going to be there. All the saints who have come before us, all the saints that you've loved, they're going to be there. And listen to this. They're going to be the best versions of themselves. They're not going to be sick. They're not going to be unhealthy. They're not going to be unwell. They're going to be the perfect versions of themselves. They're not going to have all the brokenness that hurts us sometimes. Do you understand what I'm saying? Your dad, who you loved, but man, that guy had a temper. In heaven, he doesn't have a temper anymore. He's just love. He's just all the best parts of him. The people who we love, who made it sometimes hard to love them. Jesus has prepared those brides too. Their brokenness is wiped away. And they love you with purity. And you're made perfect too. All the crap in your life, all the stuff that you wish wasn't true of you, all the things that you hope nobody finds out, all the brokenness that spills out of you and hurts the people around you when you don't want to hurt them and you hate that side of yourself, that side's gone at the marriage supper of the Lamb. You're made perfect there. You're made your ideal self there. You're made your eternal self there. And you can love other people finally with the purity that God loves you with. We see the best versions of the folks we love. I am convinced of this. We finally walk in the best versions of ourself and don't have to wonder what it would be like to not have to walk through life as a selfish, egotistical jerk. That one's just for me. I don't know what your thing is. That feast is going to be remarkable. And everybody's going to be there. And Jesus is coming to take you to that. And I think that's pretty great. And as I thought about these things this week, the triumphant return of Christ and the marriage supper of the Lamb and all that it represents and what Jesus really won with that victory. What does it mean for us? Yes, evil is smited. Evil is gone and all the wrong things are made right and all the sad things are made untrue. All that is very true and God wins once and for all and that part of us that loves a hero gets to see the actual hero come storming out of the clouds. He wins those things for us. We see our God claim victory and that's great. But there's something else that occurred to me too. I was prepared. I knew this was going to happen. We're not even to the hard part yet. Jeez, old Pete. Something else occurred to me as I kind of asked the question, what has Jesus won? And what are we celebrating at the marriage supper? And I was reminded of this idea that I have long carried with me, but I've not heard too many other people talking about it. I've actually never heard a pastor talk about this. It doesn't make it a unique idea. It's just one that I've not heard other people mention. And maybe it's because pastors aren't supposed to say things like this and the other ones know better and yours doesn't. But I've long carried with me this idea that faith and hope are burdens. Faith and hope are hard. We celebrate faith and hope in our belief system. We're told that the greatest of all these things is faith, hope, and love. We celebrate faith and hope. We want those. We name our children faith and hope. They are good things. But I, in my life, in my most honest moments, experience them often as a burden, as something to be carried, as something to be chosen. Because faith is a belief in things that you can't see. Faith is what we choose when facts fall short of certainty. Do you understand? There's things that we can know about the universe and about our God and about scripture and about the claims and about life. There's things that can be scientifically proven and broken down and rendered as factual. And then there's what we choose to put our faith in. Then there's certainty. And when facts fall short of certainty, we fill that gap with faith. Whether you're a Christian or whether you're an atheist, there's no way to be totally certain of what you think's going on in the universe. So when we reach the end of facts and we have to arrive at certainty, we fill that gap with faith. So faith is a choice. We choose it. We exercise it. We learn it. We let God speak into it. We let him strengthen it over the course of our life. The longer you walk with God, hopefully the stronger your faith gets, but it gets stronger because it's been tried and it's been tested and it's been a burden that you've chosen to continue to carry. Hope is a burden. Hope is a belief that one day something can be true that I want to be true. Hope, to even have hope, is an admission that right now things are not the way that I want them to be. Right now things are less than ideal. Right now things are not what I want, but I hope, I believe that one day the things that I want can be brought about. Hope is an admission of a shortfall. People who are not yet parents and desperately want to be hope that one day this can be true of us. We, as believers, we read scripture, we hear the stories of Jesus coming down out of heaven, and we hope in that day. We place our faith in that day. We believe that there's going to be a marriage supper. We place our hope in that. We place our hope and our faith in the idea that our prayers are working, that they get to God, that they are powerful and effective and they're not just bouncing off the ceiling. But sometimes, life makes hope heavy. Sometimes life makes hope heavy. When you lose someone too early and your Bible teaches you that your God could have done something about it and you have to be confronted with the fact that he just simply didn't. In that season, you choose hope. And in that season, it's heavy. And sometimes, when life gets hard, and when faith and hope become burdens, and they become heavy, we see people put them down and walk away from them and say, I can't carry this faith anymore. I don't know how to believe in a God that would let that happen, so I'm gonna set down this faith. I don't know how I can still cling to hope when I've been disappointed in these ways, so I'm going to set down this hope. Sometimes faith and hope get heavy, and they get hard to carry. When you grow up in church, being taught a simple faith, and then you become an adult adult and there are things that happen in your world that just don't align with what you were taught when you were a kid and you have to learn how to find this new faith. You have to cling to it and you have to hope and you have to choose hope and you have to find ways to make what you were taught and what you're experiencing mesh and you have to find a whole new way to understand scripture and understand God and to understand how he speaks to you. In those moments, faith can get hard and hope can get heavy and we have to choose them. And I am convinced that the Christian life is simply a series of the decision to choose faith and to choose hope in Christ over and over and over again until we make it to the finish line. My prayer as I prayed before I preached this morning was that if there is anybody in here that's carrying heavy hope that it would get lightened just a little bit today. That we would have the strength and the faith to continue to carry it for a little bit longer. Just get down the road just a little bit further. Because sometimes faith and hope get heavy. And I hate that we don't talk about that as much because we should. And if that's true, if I'm right that they can be burdens, then one of the best things that Jesus wins when he comes sweeping out of the sky is on this day, he lays to rest faith and hope forever. And he says, here, you don't need these anymore. You don't need faith and hope anymore. Maybe that's why Paul writes in Romans 8, he says, for in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. When Jesus shows up, we don't need hope anymore. When he shows up, we don't need faith anymore. There's no more gap between facts and certainty. There's just Jesus. There's no more hoping for one day. There's just Jesus. One day has arrived. Do you understand that when Jesus sweeps down out of the sky, that he lays to rest for us for all eternity, faith and hope. And he says, you can set them down, weary traveler. You're here now. Let's feast. And I think that's a remarkable blessing. Because to be a Christian is to believe that one day these things will be true. To be a Christian is to believe that one day God will set all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. One of my favorite songs in the world is this song called Farther Along. Farther Along, I like the version from a guy named Josh Gerrels, and it opens up. And he says, I wonder why the good man dies and the bad man thrives and Jesus cries because he loves them both. And the chorus is, farther along, we'll know all about it. Farther along, we'll understand why. And it's just this acknowledgement, I think, that faith and hope are hard. Faith and hope are hard, but one day, I won't need those anymore. I can lay that and everything else down at the feet of my Savior. And on that day, when Jesus comes back, there are no more one days. On this day, Revelation 19, marriage supper of the Lamb, on that day, there are no more one days. It is one day for all eternity. There's no more wondering, there's no more hoping, there's no more struggling, there's no more pain. Because on that day, he puts an end to waiting on one day. And I kind of wonder now if that's why Paul didn't say what he said in Corinthians. When he gets to the end of talking about all the spiritual gifts and he says, but now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these, Paul says, is love. And I've always read and accepted that teaching, and it's made sense to me. Love binds. Love is the very nature of God. Love is what unites us together. It makes sense to me that love would be greater than faith and hope. But now I wonder, in light of what I've thought through this week, if maybe love isn't the greatest because when Jesus comes back and lays faith and hope to rest, that love is the only thing that exists for all of eternity. Maybe love is the greatest because it's the only thing left after Revelation 19. And we live in an eternity of perfect love that God designed us for, finally. As I was thinking through this sermon this week, I was pacing in the lobby. And as I was out there, just kind of walking back and forth, thinking through these things, asking myself the question, what has Christ won for us? I noticed on the information table, a bracelet, like a little ringlet. And I picked it up and I saw an inscription there. And I thought, oh, what is this? God, are you talking to me? Let? Speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm working on the sermon. There's a bracelet here. You've got to be working in this. So I reach over, and on the bracelet, it just says, it is well with my soul. Also, if that's your bracelet, it's right out there. It just said, it is well with my soul. And I thought, oh, I love that song. But that's not really helpful. Okay, God's not speaking. And I just kept pacing. And I got done and I kind of had a fully formed idea. And sometimes on Tuesdays when I get a fully formed idea, I get a little bit excited about the sermon and I'll go and I'll tell Kyle because Kyle's always up for a conversation. I said, Kyle, I got it. Listen, I told him about this idea of faith and hope being burdens and that Jesus is going to put those to rest for us. And Kyle started to get a little teary eyed. And he said, he said, that just reminds me of my favorite song, my favorite line from my favorite song. And he quoted me these lines from it as well. And I was like, oh my gosh, God is speaking. I'm just dumb. I always say God speaks in stereo. And Kyle quoted these lines. And he started crying. And I got misty, and I knew that this is what we were supposed to share, and I knew that we were supposed to end the service today with it as well. Because in these lines, we see the author of this song admitting what we've just talked about today. The faith and hope are burdens, and so it is well with my soul. We often sing this song in a response to grief as an admission that I am going to choose faith and hope even though it's heavy today. Now let's sing it looking forward to the day we can lay those things to rest and Jesus has won the final victory and forever we will say it is well with my soul. Stand and let's sing together.

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

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else? And what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day they're not nearly as big of a deal? What are our big rocks And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Isn't it cute in that video how I assumed that we were just charging right back into normal? And then here we are in masks again. Boy, the naivety as we roll into each wave of this is pretty funny, especially to think back. I can remember back in March of 2020 having conversations. Joe, the moderator of our board, called me in between the 8th and the 15th of March, and he said, hey, I think maybe we need to take a break. Maybe we can't meet in person this Sunday. And I was like, Joe, this is a big decision. I don't know if we should do this. And he goes, no, man, I really think we need to. And I'm like, Joe, listen to me. This is not going to be like a two-week thing. This could go well into April. So who the heck knows? But it's good to see everybody. Thank you for doing your part. And this is the last part of our series called Big Rocks, which if you've been here all four weeks or you've watched online all four weeks and you've watched that intro video of me four times in a row, good for you. That's serious partner of the year stuff right there. This week, as we talk about our priorities in life and approaching this fall, we're going to talk about the idea and the topic of community. And if you've been in church for any amount of time, you've heard a sermon on community. If you've been here, you've probably heard me talk about the importance of community. In our mission statement, we emphasize community by saying that grace exists to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. So you might be tempted when I say that the sermon this week is on community, you might be tempted to kind of glaze over and go, yep, got it. Christian community is important. I'm going to do it. Good. And then start thinking about whatever you've got going on the rest of the day, lunch plans, or if you're me trying to get the grass cut before the thunderstorm start, whatever it is you've got going on, you might be tempted to take your head there when I say that the sermon is going to be on community because we might feel like we kind of get it. But if that's you, I want to encourage you to lean in this morning. Because I hope that what we'll do is I'll leave here or I'll turn off our TVs, wherever we might be consuming this, that we will finish this experience this morning or whenever you're listening, thinking differently about the power and efficacy of community than when we started. I hope that we will be inspired to pursue it as if our lives depended on it. I think the idea of community is incredibly important. And if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the Gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament and you pay attention, what you'll find is a lot of we's and ours and collective you. Like when Paul writes in the letters that he says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And he says, I pray for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. That's not you as an individual. That's a collective you as the church in Rome or Philippi or Ephesus. The Gospels are written to an audience, are written to a church, are written to a group of people. You find in the New Testament very few personal, singular pronouns. You find very you singular yous. You should do this, you should do that, God did this, whatever it is for just you. You don't find those in the New Testament. What you find in the New Testament is collective we and are. The New Testament assumes that your faith will be communal. It assumes that you have other Christians around you walking in the same direction you are pursuing, the same Jesus that you are pursuing. As a matter of fact, if you go to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that's not in your notes, so you can write that down if you want to. You can turn there if you get bored at some point in the sermon, which is likely to happen. Turn to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, and make sure that I'm not making this stuff up. That is the quintessential church passage. There is no pastor who has preached more than two sermons on community and has not based one of the sermons in that passage. It is a quintessential church passage. It describes what the church looked like and did in its very infancy. As soon as Christ ascends and we have Pentecost and Peter and the disciples share the gospel, we see 3,000 people come to faith that day. That's the birth of the church. And then Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47 describes what the church did and how it behaved in its infancy. It is the barometer by which all church for the rest of time is measured. And if you read those verses, what you find is collective wheeze. It's communal. The church did this and they committed themselves to the apostle teaching. They devoted themselves to prayer. They met in one another's homes day by day. They were together all the time pursuing teaching, sharing meals, praying together, learning together, pursuing Jesus together. It is a communal activity. Your faith, if you have it, is quintessentially communal, which is why there's a little bit of an issue in evangelical churches with this phrase that we like to use sometimes. Raise your hand if you've ever heard the phrase that Christianity is about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Have you ever heard that? Now listen. Christianity is about a personal faith. It's about a personal belief that God is the creator and author of the universe, that to reconcile his creation to himself, namely you, he sent his son to die in your place, and we place our faith in Jesus' death on the cross, and we place our hope in his resurrection on Easter, that one day we will be united with our God and reunited with those who also have faith in our Jesus, and we have a hope that will not put us to shame. To be a Christian, you need to individually believe that and have faith in that, and one of the remarkable things about Christianity is that our God does offer us a personal relationship with him. But listen to me closely. We must have an individual faith, but your faith is not about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ because your relationship with Jesus Christ is not personal. It is communal. We see it over and over again in Scripture. It is a communal faith. It is not just your business. It is our business as a church. We don't see that phrase, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, pop up in the Bible. We see a necessity for an individually claimed faith. But make no mistake about it, your faith is quintessentially communal. It is, I would argue, it is impossible to grow close to Jesus and have a vibrant walk with him totally by yourself. To take your Bible and a prayer book and to wander off in the desert like these mystical people who have existed before us that we somehow, we look at and we think that they were the ones who had nailed faith. And I don't think any of those existed, but the people who just go off by themselves and just totally ensconced in God's word and in prayer, and it's just them and God. you can't have a vibrant walk with Jesus doing that because loving Jesus requires you to love others. If your love from Jesus does not cause you to pour out love onto other people, then you are not expressing the love that Jesus has lavished on you. You are bottling that up. You are keeping that to yourself. To live a non-communal faith is fundamentally self-centered. And we miss out on who Jesus is by not lavishing his love on others in the same way that he loves us. John tells us in his letters at the end of the Bible that if we love Jesus, then we will love others. The Christian faith was not designed to live alone. I think that there are parts of Jesus that you find in loving other people. We cannot come to know Christ in the way that he wants to be known if we are trying to do it void of loving others and serving others and doing his work. This is why the mission statement at Grace is connecting people to Jesus first, but also connecting people to people. Because your walk with God will not be as vibrant and as healthy as it can be if it is void of community as you share your faith. So community and our faiths is vitally important. It's why I think that community is God's primary tool for tethering, comforting, and sustaining his children. Community is God's primary tool for tethering his children to him, for comforting his children in their time of need and for sustaining them in their walks and in the commitments that he's led you to make. Now, I would offer you a caveat here. I need to, if you have notes, if you're a note taker, please write this in your notes. Community is God's primary tool dash outside of heaven. It's God's primary tool this side of heaven to tether us and to sustain us and to comfort us. Because he tethers us with his son. He sustains us with his spirit. He comforts us with Jesus as he weeps with us. But these things, this community I'm going to show you is the way that God gives himself time to work in your life to bring you to a place where you're walking with him. It's the way that God the Father throws his arms around you in times of trouble. It's the way that God comes beside you and sustains you when your faith and your commitments are faltering. So I do not at any point want to replace the work that the Holy Spirit and God the Father and Jesus are doing in our lives and moving in us, but I do want us to see that community is often the tool that they use to work powerfully and effectively in our lives. I say that it's the primary tool for tethering, for kind of keeping us attached to the faith, even at times when we might be wandering off. With that in mind, I'm going to share something with you that I really am not sure that I'm all the way ready to share, because if I share it and then I don't do it, I'm a failure and a quitter. But last week, I committed with some friends of mine to run a half marathon at the end of February. I committed to do this because I'm fat now, and I need to. Somebody asked me before the service, why is your shirt tucked down? Like, are you being serious today? I'm like, no, no, I'm fat. I need to be able to blouse a little bit for the camera, you know? But I'm sharing that with you because if you know me well, you know that I've got a group of really good buddies. One guy I've been best friends with since I was five years old, so we've been friends for 35 years. And then there's eight of us total. We've been friends together, all of us, for at least 20 years. And we talk on this app called Marco Polo. It's probably for high school girls, but we love it and we use it to talk back and forth. We talk every day. And so there's eight of us and we legit, we talk every day. Whatever's going on in the world, whatever's happening in sports, whatever's happening in our lives, we talk about it. Just this morning, I was watching my friend, he dropped his daughter off at college yesterday and was telling us how emotional he got about it. And I'm in my office getting emotional about Lily starting kindergarten tomorrow. And if I talk about it for too long, I'm gonna get emotional in front of you. So we talk about stuff all the time. And then we have different threads for different topics. You know, different things that some of us may wanna talk about, but not everybody does. Anyways, we've got one for exercising. I can't tell you the name of it. There's a cuss word in it, but we've got one for exercising. And I started it. I started it back in January. I was like, guys, I'm fat now. I think I want to start eating well. I think I want to start exercising. Is anybody with me? And seven of them were like, yeah, let's do it. My one buddy, Tim, God bless him. He does not care. And I wish I could be more like Tim. But the rest of us were in there. And so we're encouraging each other every day, right? But eventually, I just stopped caring. I kind of fell off the wagon. Having a nine-month-old or an eight-month-pregnant wife will do that to you. And then so will having an infant and a three-month-old. It kind of takes you out of your regular rhythm. So it's been more difficult, and I kind of just lost my desire to do it, and to the point where they were daily talking about their workouts and the stuff that they're doing and yada, yada, yada. And I would just skip. Like, I wouldn't even listen. I would just fast-forward to the last one, hit play, skip to the end of that one, and so that those didn't show up as new, because I don't know. You people that just leave notifications on your phone, I don't know how you live with yourself. So I would have to go and just skip all the way through it, right? Ignoring it. And then I even became the devil on the shoulder of the people. They would share sometimes when I would listen, like, I didn't do anything today. I've been eating like crud lately. I just don't feel good about myself. And then I'd go out there and be like, come on over. It's great over here. There's barbecue and sweet tea. This is wonderful. Just buy larger fishing shirts and you're good. Like you can just let it all hang out. It's really, really great. It's good over here. But somewhere in that week and a half ago, my buddy got on there and he said, hey, I found a half marathon in Greenville and I think it would be fun if we would train for it together and try to run it together. And something about it, I don't know what it was. I don't know. I had some weakness that day and I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Like it caught me on a good day. And I said, let's do this. Let's do it. And they were all very surprised that I was into it. But now I think there's five or six of us who are going to do it. And I'm only a week and a half in and I'm just a slow lumbering mess. As a matter of fact, if you live in my neighborhood, Falls River and then Bedford or whatever, and you see me running, can you just do me a favor and avert your eyes? And we'll just both pretend like that never happened. Do not honk at me or wave. I do not want to know that you saw me. I'd just like to live in this world where no one can see me lumbering down the road. But it's been fun to get back to it and to begin to train and begin to exercise and share that with my buddies. And I feel more inspired now to do this than I have in a long time. And I really think it might stick. So barring injury, which is more of a factor than it's ever been in my life, Lord willing, I'll run that thing in February and I'm looking forward to doing that. I share that story because I believe that this is what Christian community does with us for the church. To be a Christian for any amount of time is to go through a season of wandering. It's to go through a season where I was once committed, I once cared very much about my spiritual health, I was once very consistent in going to church and going to small group and reading my Bible and praying on my own, and I can remember seasons of vibrancy in my life, but now I'm just, whatever you want to call it, I'm in a rut, I'm wandering off, I don't feel it right now, I just am not, I'm going through some things and I just not sure that I can really connect with God. I'm not really sure that's a thing that I want. To be a Christian is to have gone through a season of wandering and probably not just one. And what community does is it keeps us tethered to our faith, even in times when we're not necessarily very committed to our faith. I didn't leave that thread because I like my buddies. I wanted to know what they were talking about. I wanted the community there. Even though I wasn't engaged in what they were engaged in, even though I wasn't pursuing what they were pursuing, I didn't want to totally detach myself because I thought maybe one day I will. Plus, I want to know what my friends are talking about. I don't want to have FOMO. So I stayed in there. And then one day, because I was tethered to that group by the community in that group, something caught me right. And I said, yeah, I'm going to make that choice for my health or for my children. Church community does this too. As we're going through a season of wandering, maybe we're not feeling faith right now. Maybe we're not super committed to it. Maybe we're not doing the things in private that we know we ought to be doing, but we keep showing up because we love the people in our small group. We keep showing up because we love to serve on Sunday morning. We keep showing up because that's our community and we don't want to miss out and those are our people. And then one day when you're at church or your small group or you're having a conversation or one day God speaks to you. He shows you something. You have an experience that moves you. Something catches you right. And that's what clicks and you re-engage in your spiritual life and you begin to pursue Jesus again. Our community tethers us to God in a very real way. Don't raise your hand, but I would ask you, those of you who are Christians, has there been a season of your life where if you didn't have Christian brothers and sisters who loved you and who just accepted you, not who came after you and got onto you and tried to convict you for the decisions that you were making, but who simply loved you, have you had seasons in your life that if it weren't for your Christian community tethering you to your faith, that you would have walked away from it entirely? Yeah. Or you're not being honest. God places us in community because he knows there will be times when we wander, and when we do, he's tethering us about this wandering at the end of his book. he writes this, my brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Not only do we have brothers and sisters who love us as we begin to wander and tether us to our faith and kind of draw us back to God as God works on our souls to soften them back to himself. But we also have the opportunity in Christian community, in church community, to be the one that pulls back a wandering brother or sister. To be the one who just consistently loves, who just consistently shows up for, who just consistently says, I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to love you. I'm here to enjoy you. Not a project friendship, deep, meaningful friendship. When we express that with one another, when we express the kind of community that I've seen at Grace, we are used by God to tether people to their faith and draw them back towards him. You are a tool in his hand used to draw back a wondering brother or sister by simply maintaining community with people even if it feels like they're wandering. So those of you who have wandering friends, which, has there ever been an easier time than now to wander away from the church? Continue to love them. Continue to be that tether that lets them know anytime you want to come back, we're here, we love you. And you can be a brother or a sister that is blessed according to James as we do that. The community here is absolutely a huge way that God keeps us tethered to him and to our faith. Community is also an enormous tool in the hands of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit as they seek to comfort us. We're told in Psalms that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, that he saves those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we're at our lowest, God is at his closest. I've preached from stage many times, John 11, 35, the miracle of that verse. It's the shortest verse in the Bible that says that Jesus wept when he met Mary in her sorrow at the loss of her brother Lazarus. Jesus' response was to weep with her. And we get to preach and we get to claim and we get to know that we have a Jesus who weeps with us. And that's wonderful. But have you ever thought about how he does that? Have you ever thought about how God brings himself close to the brokenhearted? Will he bring his presence and his spirit close to the brokenhearted? Yes, absolutely he will. And he will speak into difficult times. Just yesterday, I was sitting on my porch swing and we've had a difficult couple of days and I felt pretty stressed. And I was just sitting there in the rain because that's what I love to do. And it was a good storm yesterday. And there was just this moment where God spoke some encouragement into my life. And it instantly gave me a peace. And so God will absolutely do that and comfort us in that way. But have you ever considered that the church community itself is also how God wraps his arms around us? Have you ever considered that our church community crying with us is also how Jesus weeps with us? Have you ever considered that that might be why Paul tells us to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn? Because that is the expression of the very body of Christ hurting with those who hurt. Jen told me as I was talking through this sermon with her, she said, you got to tell the Lisa story. And I'm actually glad she's not here. Jen's not here this morning, because we'd be a sobbing mess. But if you've been going here since the end of last year, at least, then you likely know that in December of 2020, December 29th of 2020, just to cap off a real humdinger of a year, we lost Jen's dad, John, to pancreatic cancer. That's who our son is named after. And so in the months prior, Jen had been down there a lot. They're located in Athens. Jen had been down there back and forth a lot. And at some point she came home. After Thanksgiving, she came back with me and we were home. And John has a brother-in-law named Edwin who's a doctor. And Edwin and Mary stayed with John. And Edwin told me, Nate, go back home, take your family. We don't really know what's going on with John. But when you need to be here, when it's time for family to be around him, we'll call you. I said, all right. So we came back. We were back for about a week. No, it was just a couple days. It wasn't even a week. And it was the Sunday of December 6th. And at the time, we weren't meeting in person because we'd had a COVID flare up, and so we were just chilling out for a little bit. And so I had to come that morning on December 6th, and we did a live service. So we had worship worship and then I was to preach, right? And five minutes before the service started, my phone rings and it's Edwin. And he says, you need to get down here. So I said, all right. So I called Jen. So we need to get down there. I'm going to go ahead and preach this sermon. And then we'll hop in the car and we'll go home. Let me tell you something. I have no idea what I preached December 6th. I have never been less present for a sermon in my whole life. If you watched it and got something out of it, the Holy Spirit is good, okay? Because my mind was not on that sermon. And I got done and things felt so urgent that I literally, and I never do this, I just pulled off my mic and everything. I set it down. I got right in my car and I drove away. Steve was still playing. The band was still going. Folks were still here. I just got in my car and I left. And when I got in my car, I texted Steve and Kyle because they were both here that morning. And I said, hey, I'm so sorry for leaving so quickly. Here's what's going on. We got to head home. And I go home. I get Jen and we're scrambling to get out the door. We scrambled to get out the door so quickly that to pack for this trip, I just opened up the biggest suitcase I have and dumped all my dirty clothes in it and then grabbed clean clothes and threw them in there, zipped it up, and we headed out the door. I can do laundry where I'm going. I don't know how long I'm going to be there. But that's the kind of urgency that we were trying to get out the door with. In the middle of that, somebody rings our doorbell. And we're like, who's ringing our doorbell on a Sunday morning? And we look, and it's Lisa Goldberg, Steve's wife. And she's at our door, and clearly Steve had called her or texted her and told her what was going on. And see, Lisa's mom passed away of pancreatic cancer a few years prior. Actually, right before, right as Steve and Lisa were moving here to become a part of Grace. And she knew the road that Jen was about to walk. So Jen goes and answers the door. And Lisa has a little gift bag prepared for her and hands it to her and just gives her a hug and starts crying. And Jen was telling me about it this week, and she said she can't even remember Lisa saying any words. Maybe I'm sorry. They just hugged for a really long time. And then we got in the car and we left. And that hug and those tears meant more to Jen in the following weeks than they did in the moment. Because in the moment, she didn't know the hell that she was about to walk through. But Lisa did because she had walked it. And so that provided her with comfort as she walked through that period. You can't tell me that that morning wasn't Jesus coming to our door and wrapping his arms around my wife. He did. That's how he weeps with us. That's how he comforts us. That's why he tells us to weep together. Because when we do those things, we're the hands and feet of God. We're the hands and feet of Jesus wrapping ourselves around people who are hurting. That's how God expresses his love to us. That's how we express ourselves as the body of Christ. He places us in community so that our community can comfort us when we need it. So that he can be close to the brokenhearted. So that we can experience having a God that weeps with us. That's what community does. And it also sustains us. And this is my favorite. Community sustains us. There's this great picture in Exodus. Exodus chapter 17. I'm just going to tell you the synopsis of it, but the story is in verses 8 through 16. I'm going to be a mess. David, can you go get me a tissue? Do you mind doing that? Thank you, sir. Oh, Wes is on it. Thanks, Wes. That's why Wes is an elder, because he does things like that. Oh. That's why Cindy's a resting elder. Thank you. All right, give me a second. I'm sorry. Especially if you're watching online. You're just going to watch me turn my back. All right. Does anybody else need some of these? I saw a couple of tears out there. In Exodus 17, there's a guy named Amalek who's brought his armies against Israel. Moses is the head of the nation at this point. Joshua is his general. Moses is too old to lead people into battle. And so Moses tells Joshua, you go down into the select some men, go down into this valley and you fight Amalek. And as you fight him, I will be up here and I will have my hands raised to God. And as long as my hands are raised to God, then you will win the day. And Joshua says, okay. So he goes down and he begins to fight Amalek. And as he's fighting Amalek, Moses is on the top of the mountain with his hands raised. And as his hands are raised, then what he said comes true. And God is with Joshua and Joshua is winning the battle. But battles are long and Moses is old. And I guarantee you, he had lived a life of shepherding for 40 years. If you wanted to have a hold your hands over your head contest, he would crush everybody in this room. But at one point or another, no matter how strong you are, you'd get fatigued. And he needed to take a rest and let the blood get back in his shoulders. And when he would rest, the army would begin to be defeated and the battle would go towards Amalek. And so he's in this struggle of trying to hold his hands up, but not having enough strength to do it. And they're losing the battle if he can't hold his hands up. So what happens? Well, his brother Aaron and his friend named Hur, H-U-R, are next to him and they find a rock and they put a rock behind him and they tell him to sit on it and then they stand. I love this picture. They stand next to him and they hold his hands up so that he doesn't have to anymore. That's the best picture of community in the Bible. Because each of you, your husband, your wife, your friend, your Christian, your son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, if you're a woman in this church who's married and you have children, you've got a marriage that you're holding up, that you're offering to God. You've got children that you're trusting to God. You've got concerns in your own life. You've got your own faith that you need to carry. You've got your own stresses and your own anxieties and your own worries, and you're facing those battles. And life is long, and I don't care how strong you are. At some point or another, your hands get tired. At some point or another, you think, I don't know if I can do it with this marriage. I don't know if I have the energy it takes to make this thing go. I just don't know if I can pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can continue to love these kids the way they need to be loved. I don't know what to do. I can't pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can walk in faith. I just can't see it. I have so many questions. God's disappointed me in these ways. I just don't know if I can keep doing this anymore. And when you're on your own, you're right, you can't. This is why we're placed in community, for our friends to come up beside us and grab our hands and say, hey, buddy, I got you right now. I will fight for your marriage right now. I will hold your hands up and fight for your faith right now. I will stand beside you and hold your hands up for your children and for your business and for your health and for your love of Christ right now. I will stand in this gap for you, and I will be the strength that you don't have. That's what community does for us. Our friends come alongside us, and they hold our hands up, and they give us the energy and the strength for the battle that we can't fight right now. And that's what community offers to others. This is why I think that community, this side of heaven, is the most powerful and effective tool that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit use to tether us to him, to comfort us, and to sustain us in our faith and the commitments that he's led us to making. And I'll end with this because I think this is important. Community is a choice. It's a choice. That kind of community, that kind of community where someone shows up at your door just to wrap their arms around you because they know what you're about to walk through, that kind of community that grabs your hand and holds you up when you can't do it, that kind of community that loves you when you're wandering and keeps you tethered to your faith so that you can wander back. That kind of community, that doesn't happen by default, man. We don't just stumble into that. That kind of community we show up for. Sometimes in small groups, I'll talk about it in a second, we sign up for. And then we let the Lord do his work in bringing us together and knitting lives together. We have to choose that community. Just last night, some friends of ours had a birthday party. And our childcare fell through, and so we had to figure out what to do. And so we decided that Jen was going to go to dinner, and they were going to go to drinks afterwards. Jen was going to go to dinner, and then when she got home, I was going to go and have a drink or two with our friends and then come back. That's what we decided we were going to do. Well, Jen stayed at dinner until like 9.15. I needed her to be back at like 6.15. Do you think, listen, I don't know how well you guys all know me. You think I wanted to go anywhere at 9.30 on Saturday night? No, I was in my gym shorts with paint on them and a big baggy t-shirt and Crocs and I was unshowered. I didn't want to go anywhere. But I also knew that I couldn't get up here today and preach about community if I wasn't going to prioritize my own. So they got Saturday night and ate and I showed up just how I was dressed. And we had ourselves a grand old time over at, I think, Tonic in Wake Forest. We have to choose community. It's not always convenient. You're not always going to want to go to small group. You're not always going to want to prioritize it. Parents of elementary and middle school age kids, you'll never be in a busier season in your whole life. It's so hard right now to prioritize small group. Do it. Community is a choice. It's an essential tool that God has placed in our life to bring us closer to him, to experience his love of us. In a minute, I'm going to talk more about small groups. But I want to encourage you here at the end of the sermon to sign up for them. If you're not in one, join one. Step into this community and let's begin to pursue it together and let's let God use this place to further connect us to him. Let's pray. God, thank you for you. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for who you are. God, thank you for our friends. Thank you for the people who love us, who we get to share life with. Thank you for our brothers and sisters who draw us back in our wandering. Thank you for the ones who comfort us. Thank you for the ones who sustain us and hold up our hands when we are too weak to do it. God, give us the desire and the conviction to choose community. To choose to live our faith with those around us. Remove any obstacles that we might have, whether fabricated or real, and knit us together, God, as a church family, that we might love one another well, that we might express your love for one another well. That we might support and sustain one another well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. It's so fun to watch myself for two minutes before I preach every week during this series. This is the third part in our series, Big Rocks, where we're talking about the large priorities in life. And this week, I want to talk about having a Jesus-centered home and a Jesus-centered family. So this, I will tell you up front, is family-centric. But it applies to having a Jesus-centered marriage. If you're a single person, there are principles here that we can absolutely apply to having a Jesus-centered life. But when I throw out that term, Jesus-centered home, I think a lot of us would go, yeah, we have one of those. Like our home is a Jesus-centered home. But I want to kind of challenge you up front on that by just making this simple point. A pro-Jesus home is not the same as a Jesus-centered home. A home that's pro-Jesus, if we would say, yeah, we got a Jesus-centered home, well, is it a pro-Jesus home or is it a Jesus-centered home? For instance, the Rector House, our home, is a Kyle Tolbert pro-home. We are pro-Kyle Tolbert. Thank you. Thank you for that. He's running sound today for me, so a little less pro-Kyle right now. But overall, the Rector Home is a pro-Kyle home. We like him. We hope things work out for Kyle. I bet most of the homes in this church are pro-Kyle homes. We want the best for the guy, right? We hope things work out for Kyle. We hope that he has good days. We're fans of what he does. We like DJ KT and Christmas Kyle and Easter Kyle and Summer Extreme Kyle. We like all the versions of Kyle, right? But it's not a Kyle-centered home. We don't pray every day that John and Lily will become more and more like Kyle as they age. We don't wake up going, what can we do? What can we implement in our home to get our children to be closer to Kyle, right? Like we don't do that stuff. We don't have WWKD bracelets, right? We don't have what would Kyle do, like anywhere in our home home. We're pro-Kyle home. We're not a Kyle centered home. I think a lot of us have pro-Jesus homes. We're foreign. We hope things work out for him. We want his will to be done. We might pray that sometimes. We support, in this house, we support Jesus. There's no more, I don't mean to step on any toes. If I do, I'm a little bit sorry, not a lot of it, sorry. There's no more pro-Jesus sign in a home than at Christmas time when you see the poster or the postcard or whatever it is of Santa kneeling at the cross. Like in this house, first Jesus, then Santa. Santa kneels to Jesus here. We are pro-Jesus, even during Christmas. Good job, right? We have pro-Jesus homes. Do we have Jesus-centered homes? Do we have Jesus-centered conversations? Do we wake up every day thinking, what can we do? What can we implement so that our children grow more closely to Jesus? What can I do to make Jesus the center of my life? What can we do to make Jesus the center of our marriage? What kinds of things can we implement to make sure that the relationships in this house, the things that happen in this home are things that revolve around Christ? And so to that end, I wanted to talk this morning about actually having a Jesus-centered home. And I'll tell you this up front, okay? As I was thinking about the sermon and the best way to approach it, and really, most of the time when I'm thinking about a sermon, I'm thinking, how can this be maximum helpful to the people who got up and showered and brushed their teeth and came today? Like, how can this be maximum helpful for you? And so as I thought about that, I really didn't think it was worth investing a ton of our time in this idea of having a Jesus-centered home. I didn't want to come in this morning and try to convince you to have a Jesus-centered home or leave with this compelling vision of what can happen when Jesus is the center of your home. Not because I don't think a compelling vision is worth having, but because I think you're probably already with me on that. Like you got up in the summertime and you came to church and your kids are over there or you're here or whatever it took you to get here, you're here. So I think I'm going to assume that a majority of us, I'm not saying that everyone in here is in on this hook, line, and sinker, but a majority of us in here, if I could talk to you and say, do you want to have a Jesus-centered home, you would say yes. So I'm going to assume that we came this morning, you didn't wake up thinking, boy, I really want a Jesus-centered home. But when I first started mentioning it, I'm going to assume that you're with me and that this is a thing that you'd like to pursue. This is something that you'd like to implement. So to that end, a couple things. First of all, my goal for you today, if you have someone to drive home with today, is to have a family meeting in the car. It's to schedule a family meeting in the car on your way home. If you have children, I want you guys, my goal is for you guys to schedule something with your children to talk about some things that you're going to do. I want mom and dad to talk about how can we make this a more Jesus-centered home. I want husbands and wives to look at this and go, okay, there's some things that we can implement. How do you want to, which of those seem practical? Which of these seem like something that we can actually do? So my goal is for you guys, to whom it's applicable, to have family meetings as a result of today to talk about how to implement some of these things. Also because of that, this is just a ridiculously practical sermon. I'm going to give you six suggestions of things that you can do to have a Jesus-centered home. Because again, I wanted it to be maximum helpful. I didn't want to bring you in, talk to you about having a Jesus-centered home, and then send you home with no practical ideas, just leave you to search Google and figure it out on your own. So this is the place where we're going to do that. Our guiding passage today is found in Deuteronomy chapter six. So if you have a Bible, it's the fifth book of the Bible. Deuteronomy chapter six is just a sideline. This doesn't mean anything. Deuteronomy, the word Deuteronomy literally means the law repeated. So Deuteronomy is like a synopsis of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Okay. So if you really want to know what's going on in those three books, Deuteronomy will kind of give you the highlights for better or for worse. And it finishes up the narrative of that portion of scripture. But in this portion of Deuteronomy, they had just received the law, and Moses is telling them how they are to teach it to their families, how they are to implement this as a culture. How are we going to learn this law, to breathe this law, to obey this law as a culture? Here's how we're going to do it. This is what he says. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. He's talking about the law. You shall teach them diligently to your children. And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your. When Moses is telling them, this is the law of God, this is our religion, this is our faith. Here's how we're going to implement this countrywide, nationwide. To us, it'd be nationwide. To them, it was peoplewide. The Hebrew people, this is how we're going to implement that law. You're going to teach it to your children. You're going to write it in your homes. You're going to keep it on your hands and on your head. To this day, if you go to Jerusalem, you go to the wailing wall, you will see some Orthodox Jews, some men who have it, literally, phylacteries, I think is what they're called, tied to their head and tied to their wrists with these elaborate leather bands in obedience to this. This is how they said that we are going to learn God's word and learn the law and learn our faith. And what's interesting to me is he does not say, diligently take your family to church, diligently go to synagogue, diligently go to the tent when we set it up and we have the sacrifices. No, no, no. And he doesn't say, listen to your pastor, listen to your priest. He doesn't say, make sure the kids get to youth group. What's he say? He puts it all on the parents. You teach it to your children. How's this faith going to go forward? You teach it to your kids. You teach it in your house. You teach it in your house. We'll teach it in our house. And the next generation will do the same thing. And somewhere along the lines, we kind of lost this a little bit. Where we bring our families to church and that's where they get their Jesus. But our families need to be learning Jesus from us, from the parents. So the other thing that I want to say about this as we apply it to our lives, this verse is talking about the law, the Ten Commandments, the law of God. However, the New Testament teaches us that Jesus perfected the law. Jesus himself said that he did not come to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it. Romans tells us that he perfected it. And so not in every case in the Old Testament, but in this particular case and others like it, I think it's fair to apply what God wanted his people to do with the law, to apply that to his New Testament people and say, this is what God wants people to do with his word and with his son. So teach our kids the word. Talk about it. Write it on our houses. Keep it in your head. Keep it in your hands. This is how we are to have a Jesus-centered home. This is how we are to be obedient to this command in Deuteronomy. I think the same impetus still sits on us to center our lives and our homes around Jesus and around God's word. So how can we do that? What are the practical ways to be obedient to Deuteronomy, to have not just a pro-Jesus home, but to have a Jesus-centered home? Well, the first thing is the most obvious one. It's where all of your heads went, so I just thought I would go ahead and get it out of the way and say it up front. Family devotions. Have family devotions. In your marriage, read something together. Talk about what you're reading in the Bible. Even if you're not reading the same thing, you're not on the same reading plan, you're doing different small groups, you're doing whatever, read it and talk about it together. But for those who still have children in the home, have family devotions. And I know that that feels intimidating. I don't even have my own devotions. How am I going to do a family devotion? This is a good way to learn them. And here's the thing. Your kids have never had a family devotion either. They don't know that it sucks. They don't know that you're not good at it. So just start. They're not going to know that you're not any good at it. And you'll get better. And you'll figure it out. And here's the thing that I bet most of the parents in this room don't know. Do you know that every week, one of Erin Winston, our children's pastor, one of her volunteers, every week, puts a piece of paper in your hand when you pick up your child that has prompts, that has devotional prompts on it for three to five days of the week. Age appropriate according to what they talked about in that room and in that room over there on the other side of the aquarium store. According to what they talked about, she puts a piece of paper in your hand with prompts that are age appropriate. They get more and more detailed as your child ages to help you have these conversations and have devotions in your home. She also last summer gave to all the families a devotional book and has a ton of resources for you. So a devotion is just a time where you sit down, you read usually just a verse of scripture, you reflect on it as a family, and you move on. So if we want to have a Jesus-centered home, one of the first things we can do is implement some regular family devotions in our house. You can do it. Moms, dads, step up to the plate. It'll be all right. You can do it. Married people, have your quiet times. Don't hold each other accountable. Don't pester each other about it. That doesn't work. I don't think that works in a marriage. If that works in your marriage, that's fine. I'm not advocating that, but every now and again, you should say, hey, what have you been reading? What have you been learning? That's a good conversation to have. The next thing that I would tell you to do to have a Jesus-centered home is to have public quiet times. Have public quiet times. And what I mean by that is quiet times that are visible to the rest of your family. I don't mean put on your cool jeans and go to Sola and read your Bible like a lonely hipster. I don't mean that. I mean, read your Bible in a place where your family can see you. I've told you guys this before. Growing up, I would come downstairs to go to school in the morning as a teenager, And every morning I would see my mom's Bible open to a different portion of scripture. And I would see a mug of coffee that was almost all the way gone every morning. And I knew that she was praying for me every day. And I knew that she was reading God's word every day. And I'm going to tell you something. When she told me the Bible says this, or I think God says this, or I think you need to do this, I gave her words more weight because I knew that she was reading her Bible. My dad traveled all the time, but when he would travel, he would take his Bible with him. I saw that in my parents. I knew that they knew their Bible. I have been meaning to, I read my Bible when I get into the office. That's my quiet space because we have two young children. But I'm going to try, you can hold me to this, I'm going to try to intentionally shift to sit in the chair that you can see. I can see the stairs so that when Lily wakes up, she'll see me there doing my devotions. Steve, our worship pastor, he gave me this idea, and it's a great one. He listens to scripture on his phone. He's got a great porch with a great view of some woods. He'll turn Scripture on on his phone on the Bible app and just let that read it to him. So you could do that on your way to work or whatever, but he'll sit there, have his cup of coffee, and let the Bible app read Scripture to him. And I thought it was such a great idea that me and John, my three-month-old, listened to Colossians four or five times through this week while I was feeding him in the mornings or whenever else. And while he's doing that, sometimes his son Grayson will come outside and he'll say, what are you listening to? And he's saying, First Thessalonians. And he's like, can I listen too? Yeah, sure. So then they talk about it. Have public quiet times. Let your spouse see you doing that. Let your kids see you doing that. Make it a part of the regular rhythm of your home. It's not a thing that needs to be hidden. Another very simple thing to do to make your home a Jesus-centered home is to write scripture on your wall. It's simple. It's easy. But it's important. Pick a verse. Pick a passage that characterizes your family. That really depicts. Maybe it's the fruit of the Spirit that you want to hang on the hallway. Not so that your children will have the fruit of the Spirit, but so that you'll be reminded to have the fruit of the Spirit with your children, right? Put the verses in visible places in your home so that they become a part of your family life. When I walk in the door every day, one of our favorite verses is on the wall right when you walk in from the garage door, and it's a phrase out of Psalm 1611. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, neither me nor Jen put that there so that we could walk in and go, ah, fullness of joy. We didn't think about that. We just put it there because it's small and it fits on that wall. That's why we put it there. But when I walk in and I see it, there are times when I see it and it reminds me. In God's presence, there's a fullness of joy. And I remember that my family is one of God's biggest blessings to me. And so the joy that he intends for me is found in this place. It grounds me. Jen may not say that that feels true to her, but it's true sometimes. She doesn't know what I would be like if I didn't read that verse. Put it on your wall. We have something that we're going to put on our wall. It's written out. It's a prayer from Paul that we've had. Her cousin wrote it out. I've got to get it framed, and that's going to sit in our living room wall and kind of be our family verse. If you go into all of the children's rooms, Erin has selected a verse that's appropriate for that season of life, and she's put it on the wall. If you walk back through the hallway into the kids' room back there, the one thing you see down the hallway is love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. You see scripture everywhere. Put it in your home. Display it. Go into Hobby Lobby in Kirkland, those stores that are filled with what I call old lady clutter. There's tons of it there. Go look at the old lady clutter because some of it has scripture on it. Buy some pretty old lady clutter and then put it in your home. It's an easy, easy way to have things, to make, to follow this prescription from Deuteronomy that says write it on your walls. So legitimately do it. Find a verse, find a scripture, find a passage that's encouraging to you, find something that you want to implement with your kids and display that on your home and those verses will stick with them and they will stick with you. It's an easy, easy way to do it. Pray together. Number four is pray together often and about everything. Pray together often and about everything. Do we pray for our meals? Let's start there. Let's pray for our meals and let's do it in such a way that we're actually remembering who got us there and why we're there. Do we pray in the morning before we take them to school or camp or wherever it is they're going? Do we pray at night before they go to bed? Do you pray with your spouse? When your spouse is stressed, is your knee-jerk as a couple, let's go to Lord in prayer on this. Or is it the same, that stinks, and keep talking about whatever else. Listen, I'm not good at this either. But if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, I think one of the easiest things to do is to pray often and to pray about everything. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so got a bad diagnosis. Let's pray for them real quick. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so is pregnant. Let's pray that God, let's celebrate and then pray that God keeps this pregnancy safe. I'm stressed about this at work. I'm stressed about this for our kids at school. I'm unsure about this thing. Okay, well, let's stop and let's pray together. And to that end, I would just throw this out for you guys. Give your spouse permission to suggest that you pray. Give your spouse permission to grab the kid and pray about something. And here's why I'm saying that. Because if you exist in a relationship where there's never any prayer at all, and after hearing this sermon, your husband, the next time something comes up, reaches over and says, well, let's stop and let's pray about this. Your inclination is going to be to go, who the heck are you? What? It's weird. No. I'll pray about it later. Your inclination is going to be to look at them like they're a hypocrite. And it's going to be to say, you're only doing this because Nate said we should do it. Yeah. That's the reason. If it wasn't happening before today and it happens after today, then yeah, it's happening because I brought it up. All right? So let's just accept that up front and let's let prayer be brought into our marriages and into our homes. This refocuses us consistently and constantly on the Father. It refocuses us on his throne, on who he is and on who we are. It reminds you this is out of your hands anyways. There's nothing that you can do about this. It settles down control freaks and people who like to worry. If you do it with your children, doesn't it set this incredible pattern for them and their own life to go to the Lord in prayer all the time? To have this ongoing conversation with the Father? Doesn't it set them on a pace to be obedient to the instruction in Thessalonians when he tells us that we should pray without ceasing? To have a continual conversation with the Father. Let's implement prayer more in our homes. Let's give each other permission to work on this, to do this well together, to not look at each other like we're hypocrites when we suggest it. Let's start modeling that and bring our attention to God as spouses and then model bringing attention to God for our children. So that one day when they're grown up and they hear a sermon about incorporating prayer in the home, it doesn't feel like a weird, awkward thing for them. All right? We're already, we've lost. Okay, we're done. We failed, but they have a chance. Let's pray and teach it to them in that way as well. Number five, and I'm excited to get into this today. Know your role. I wanted to talk to you guys about gender roles in the house this morning. I'm just kidding around, I'm not doing that. Know your role. We're not talking about roles in the home. It's an easy way to say and to remember this idea. You are in your spouse's life. You are in your children's lives. You are in your family's lives. As a tool to be used by God to help them become the person that he created them to be. That's your role. Do you see why I reduced it to know your role? You're married to your husband because God is sanctifying him. God is changing him. God is working in him. God is developing his character and his spiritual maturity. And he is trying to learn to walk with God more and more every day. And the world is trying to get him to not do that. And you've been placed in that marriage by God to help him become the godly man that God wants him to be and created him to be. Husbands, you are in your marriages to help your wives become the most beautiful version of themselves, which is to say the most spiritually healthy version of themselves. You have been placed by God in that marriage to help them walk more closely with the Father than they ever have before. That's your primary role for your spouse, is to cultivate their spiritual life and their spiritual health and to see them flourish and become people who are passionately following Jesus. That's why God placed you in that marriage. It's not for you. It's not because you're a good decision maker or you're a bad decision maker or I'm not good at directions and she's good at directions, or we both like the same music, or any of that stuff, God placed you in that marriage first and foremost to be used as a tool by him to fashion your spouse into the person that God created them to be. To help them see more and more that they are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that they might walk in them. That's why he placed you in that marriage. And I think that sometimes we lose sight of that. I know I do. But when we think about our spouses, if we want to have a Jesus-centered marriage, our very first thought towards them ought to be, how can I help them grow into the person that God created them to be? The thing that we love most about them ought to be how much they love Jesus. It ought to be a heart for the Father. These should be regular things that happen in our marriages. And then the next step is our children. Know your role with your children. I'm going to say this to particularly parents with young kids. We have a five-and-a-half-year-old. Sometimes we like her more than we did when she was three, sometimes less. The summer entering into kindergarten is a challenging one. And there are things that Lily needs to learn. But I need to be constantly aware of and reminded of. My goal in parenting is not to have a six-year-old who behaves herself so that I don't get embarrassed in public circles. My goal is to raise a daughter, excuse me, who fiercely loves Jesus and requires as little counseling as possible. That's my goal. My goal is to raise a son and a daughter who care about the people around them, who love Jesus better than I do, who are humble, kind, meek, gracious adults. That's my goal. And if we get so caught up in parenting our children as if the goal was for them to not embarrass us when there's people around, as if the goal was for them to not be inconvenient during this season, which goodness, that's a great goal. But if we'll parent them knowing that the goal is to release grown-ups into the wild who love Jesus fiercely, who we respect because of that. So when Lily does something that she shouldn't do, when she displays an attitude that she shouldn't display, as a loving, godly parent, it's my role and my job to find the good part of that attitude that she just displayed. Well, you're very defiant. This can be good because you're going to be willing to stand up for yourself when you need it. Try not to stand up for yourself right now. That's not needed here. But at some point, it will be. Our role as parents is to fashion our children into the people that God created them to be as well. And, you know what's funny? That's why they're in your life too. I was talking with a buddy of mine, Shane, over there outside, and he just made mention to me. He said, man, I tell you, I just can't pray for enough patience right now. These kids are driving me nuts. And I just made the joke like, yeah, I never pray for patience. Because when you pray for patience, God just puts things in your life that requires patience, right? So I pray that God, would you give me grace and the patience that you're teaching me and can it be enough yet? Like I never pray for more patience. I'm happy with the current amount that I have because to get more stinks. But in a very real way, those children are shaping his patience into being a more gracious version of Shane. And God is using them as tools. All of the family dynamics are there to bring us closer to God, closer to the Father, closer to Jesus. So let's know our role within those dynamics and see that as our goal to help the people in our families and in our lives become the version of themselves that God created them to be by helping them to walk more closely with Jesus. That's your primary role in your home. Finally, number six is have Jesus-centered conversations. Talk about them. This goes back to the devotions. What are you reading? What are you learning? How's your faith? What'd you think of the sermon? What's your favorite worship song? What do you think God's teaching you right now? How's so-and-so's faith doing? Have Jesus-centered conversations. I saw this in the Bible. I didn't know this. Did you know this? I didn't know that this passage linked to this passage. Did you know that those passages linked together? Have conversations about it. Talk to your children about Jesus. Just bring them up in conversation. Erin puts out, our children's pastor, again, she puts out parent cues. Just these short little one-sentence things, I think on Instagram, she can give you a bunch of them if you reach out to her. Just little prompts to have spiritual conversations. And here's the thing about having Jesus-centered conversations, okay? You've got to bring them up a lot to have a good one. If you have a kid, you know that having a good conversation with your child is a really life-giving thing. It's also a fleeting thing. It's hard to do. Hopefully, if you have older children, you're having better, longer conversations with them, and you're getting to a place where sometimes you have really meaningful conversations with them. But those are still fleeting. And you know that to get to a good conversation with your child, whether they're four years old or whether they're 20 years old, to find a good one, you've just got to have a lot of them. I can talk with Lily all day long. Give me a Saturday. We can talk all day long about this and that as she runs in and out and whatever it is. And then at the end of the night when I think she's about to go to sleep and I'm ready to go downstairs and do something else, she starts talking. I'm there. I'm present. I don't know when the conversation's going to hit, so I'm just here for them. Jen is far better at that than I am. It works the same with Jesus-filled conversations. You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your spouse? You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your children? Bring them up a lot. Talk about it a lot. Make Jesus feel like a regular figure in your home so that it's not foreign when we start talking about spiritual things. And then you know what? They'll know how to talk about spiritual things too. And really and truly, it's not really possible to have these Jesus-centered conversations if we aren't ourselves Jesus-centered. So if you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. If you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. That's as simple as it could possibly be. All of these things, one through six, you could put, you could implement all of them in your house. You could have family devotions, public quiet times, write scripture on the wall, pray together often and always. You can know your role in fashioning others, and you can have Jesus-centered conversations. But if you're not centered on Jesus in your own life, all that's going to feel fake. All of it's going to feel fabricated. All of it's going to feel like you're trying to push a rope up a hill, and you're just going to stop. You're not going to do it. These things have to pour out of you. Now, the good news is they work synergistically. It's impossible to do those six things and that not orient you more on Christ and him be more the center of your life. But you can't do these things if he's not. It's going to feel unnatural and you're going to quit. So if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, and I think we do because you're still looking at me, then we've got to have a Jesus-centered life. Jesus talks about this in John 15 when he says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about these six things. You abide in me. And if we're having a Jesus, if we have a Jesus-centered heart, he's going to spill out of it. We're going to talk about him all the time. We're going to want to read his word. We're going to get caught reading the Bible. We're going to want to go to him in prayer in every instance. If we have Jesus as the center of our life, then we're going to want to fashion other people in a way that he becomes the center of their life too. It would be like Psalm 1 when it talks about the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night and he is like a tree planted by streams of water and everything that he does he prospers. If we want to have Jesus-centered homes we have to have a Jesus life. And if we'll do that, these things will pour out of us naturally. So, I hope you'll do some of these things. I hope you'll have a family meeting. I hope that you'll allow non-hypocritical prayer into your life. Not be hard on each other. Let's be supportive of each other. Let's have family meetings. Let's do it today. Before we go to bed at night, let's talk about this or let's commit to a time where we're going to talk about this. And if it seems intimidating to do all of this stuff, pick two. Do them this week. See what your home feels like when you do that. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. We confess sometimes that we have pro-Jesus homes. Would you help us grow to a place where we have Jesus-centered homes? Would you fill our hearts so much with you that you are what spills out? God, give us the discipline and the determination to have devotions with our family. Give us the openness, the honesty, and the desire to have spiritual conversations with one another. Would you fill our hearts and our lives and our homes more and more and more, God, so that what happens here on Sunday is simply a small supplement to what's been going on every day in our lives and in our homes. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thank you for being here with us in person. Thank you for joining us online, if that's what you're doing. I am excited for this Sunday morning. I was probably more excited about this particular sermon in this series than any of the others, because this morning, this big rock is on a topic that I've invested a lot of time and energy thinking about, actually. We're going to be talking about time, and we should spend our time and how we should prioritize our time. And I will confess to you that I have nerded out on this subject. I've listened to podcasts and read books about productivity. If something comes across my news feed about this new study about how to be productive and how to maximize our time in the workplace and all that stuff, I will listen to it. I eat all of that stuff up. Now, it hasn't translated to actual productivity in my workplace, but I'm hoping that if I can just keep learning more things, like for instance, when you're in, when you're just, when you're locked in and you're focused, you're in the groove and you're doing the thing you need to do, you're maximum productive, you're being creative, you're knocking out emails, whatever it is. When you get interrupted, somebody texts you, somebody sticks their head in your office. Kyle starts to talk to someone in the office next to you if you happen to work next to Kyle. When you get interrupted, do you know how long it takes you to regain maximum focus? 26 minutes. Like it takes 26 minutes to regain maximum focus. I could do a whole sermon just telling you stuff like that. That wouldn't be much of a sermon. That would more be like a productivity seminar. So we're going to avoid that. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about time. Because of that, there are myriad directions we could go this morning as we think about the topic of time under the umbrella of God's authority. How would God have us spend our time? What would His priorities for our schedules and our calendars look like? We all know that if you really want to know what a person cares about, look at their calendar and look at their checkbook. And that will tell you what's really, really important to that individual. So we could talk about how to properly prioritize it. We could talk about how much time to make for God. We could talk about how would Jesus have us spend our time. We could do all of those things. And there's a bunch of different directions to go. And when I started out, the way that I write a sermon is I just write down everything I think about that topic, everything I know, all the Bible verses I'm aware of, every time the scriptures address it. And for this particular sermon, I had a big long list. And so the difficulty was on what do we focus on as we think about time? And I really landed on one sentence in the Bible. The first part of one verse that we find in Psalms. And we're going to spend the rest of the morning thinking about the idea of time through the lens of this one sentence that we find in Psalms chapter 46, verse 10. Many of you know this verse. It simply says, be still and know that I am God. Be still, God says, and know that I am God. It's this idea of at some point during your day, during your week, during your month, in your life, at some point, slow down. Be still. Quit doing all the things. Quit going to all the places. Quit stressing out about all the stuff. Quit being distracted by all the different things that can distract you. Be still. Stop moving. Stop going. Right now, I have a five-and-a-half-year-old who cannot be still. She cannot be still. When she's in trouble, I'll tell her, you sit on the stairs, and you sit there, and you do not move, and you do not make a noise. She cannot do it. It's impossible. And for many of us, with our schedules and with our temperaments, it's impossible for us to be still, to just slow down and be still and know that he is God, to focus on God, to focus on what Jesus has done for us, to remind ourselves of the gospel, to remind ourselves of God's goodness in our life. I think many of us struggle mightily to obey this simple psalm, to simply have regular times in our life where we are still and we know that he is God. This is why, incidentally, I think church attendance and involvement is so important. Because even if we're not prioritizing it at any other time in our week, even if our weeks just get away from us and it's just busy, busy, busy, and we're running 90 to nothing and we come into church on two wheels with our hair on fire, at least, hopefully, for an hour, we will slow down. We will be still. We will do our best to put aside all the other things that we've been thinking about that have been stressing us out all week long. And we will, in this service, collectively as a body, know that He is God. It's why I think the rhythm of church is an important one in the life of an individual and a marriage and a family. And so I want to talk about this idea of being still. And I want to talk specifically about why it feels like such a challenge for us sometimes. I think that there are really two camps of people. There's really two divisions of people as we think about how we spend our time and what kind of stops us from being still in the way that we need to be still. I think there's really two camps of people. And I'm not saying that you're all one or you're all the other. This is a sliding scale, but I would bet that everybody in this room has a lean. There are those who fill their days with nothing and those who fill their days with everything. There are those who with their margins, they fill it with nothing, just a bunch of nothingness. And then there's those who fill it with everything. And we're going to talk about what that means. But as we think about how we fill our time with nothing or everything, I want to be clear that I'm talking about the margins of our time. We all have roles in life to play that require time from us, right? Most of us in this room, we have to get up, we have to work every day. That's something that's required of your time. If you don't have to work every day, hopefully you're getting up and being productive. If you're a stay-at-home parent, you've got to get up and gosh, you definitely have to work every day. And so there's some things that we don't have an option. We've got to go to work. We've got to take care of the kids. We've got to run the house. We've got to do the things. There's some things where we just don't have a choice. But around those ways that we spend our time is our discretionary time. And it's that time that I'm talking about that we fill with nothing or with everything. The time when we wake up in the morning. Whether you realize it or not, I don't want to step on too many toes here, everyone has two or three hours of discretionary time in the morning. If you choose to fill that time with sleep, that's your business. But everybody can get up two or three hours just about before we really have anything that life requires of us. So most of us have discretionary time in the morning before our time is demanded of us. Most of us have a lunch break. We've got to drive to work, drive home from work. We have time in the car where we can choose what we're going to listen to and choose what we're going to do and choose what we're going to consume. We have time when we come home. I don't know what the rhythm of your house is. Maybe you have some dead space before dinner. Maybe it's just a mad rush to get the kids to bed and sit down and take a breath. And then you've got from then until whenever you go to bed as your own discretionary time when your parents have young kids to regain your sanity. You've got the weekends, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, where there's probably not much of a demand on your time. So now we've got this discretionary time, these times in the margins. We're trying to decide what to do with it. And my contention is that we tend towards either filling that time with nothing or filling it with everything. I would love to say I'm an everything guy. I'm really more of a nothing guy. So what I'm about to say, I'm saying to me too. But when we fill our time with nothing, we just jump from one thing that doesn't matter to the next thing that doesn't matter. We wake up in the morning, first thing we do is we grab our phone and we start to scroll. We check Instagram, we check Twitter, and we check Facebook, and we check our email, and we check our news outlets, and whatever it is. And we just lay in bed, and and instead of getting up and being productive doing something that we would probably be wiser to do, we just scroll on our phones, right? We come home, we turn on the TV. Kids go to bed, we zone out. We binge watch The Office again. We're in the car, we have some time that we could use to fill ourselves with some Jesus, and instead we just put on something mindless. We listen to music that just kind of puts us in a good mood or whatever it is that it does, or we listen to like sports talk or political talk or whatever it is that women listen to in the car that's talk. I don't know what you guys listen to. But we just, every gap that we have, we just fill it with more nothing. How many of you, don't raise your hand, can't sit at a traffic light without looking at your phone? I think that maybe, this is just a side note, maybe the most damaging thing about cell phones is how incapable we are of not being entertained for just five stinking seconds. If the line's too long at Jersey Mike's, well, let's see what's going on in the news. And we just jump from nothing to nothing. Our time's required of us. We're focused on this. Now I can do whatever I want. What nothing can I fill this with? How can I entertain myself? What's the next drama that's going to happen? What's on Yahoo News front page? What's the next thing going on? And then political stuff happens. So I mean, I was doom scrolling Twitter a lot in December and January. We were all locked into that stuff. And we just wake up in the morning and we waste a little time. We go to work. We have lunch and we engage in a little bit more nothing and we come home and we get the kids. We take care of the kids and we do whatever it is we're going to do. We eat dinner and then we engage in a little bit more nothing. Watch a little bit more trash TV and then we go to bed. And we sleep in and we do the same thing the next day. And it's just a day filled with nothing. As I was doing research for this, I came across a sermon by a guy named Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards is one of the great American pastors and theologians. He was a key figure in the Great Awakening in the late 1700s. One of the smartest, best theologians that's ever lived. And he did a sermon on time. And he noted within that sermon the unique scarcity of time. It is a uniquely limited resource that we cannot get back in ways that we can recover other resources. And about time, Jonathan Edwards says, there is nothing more precious and yet nothing of which men are more wasteful. There is nothing more precious than time because we can never get it back, and yet there is nothing of which men are more wasteful. I think, if we're honest, that we tend to waste our time like NBA players waste their money. I heard a story this last week as I was in the car listening to the sports talk radio show that I like to listen to, which incidentally was not a waste of time this week because I'm using it in a sermon. So how about that? And there was this author who wrote a book. She wrote a book on Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is the, he is the MVP of the Milwaukee Bucks. They just won the NBA finals. He is a phenomenal athlete and he is like, he's a gem of a person. If you could, if you could create an athlete in a mold, it would be this guy. He's a really neat guy. And he grew up really poor in Greece. And they would sell, he and his family would sell trinkets on the beach to rich tourists. And it was not a very easy upbringing. And so when he came over to the United States, he was drafted in the first round of the draft. He's playing for the Bucs. He has money for the first time in his life. He doesn't know what to do with it. And so he still brings over these sensibilities and he's very conservative. And this author said that he relayed some stories to her about how he was blown away about how some of these guys spent their money. And she said, well, give me some examples. And she said, well, one guy, one guy gave me $500 for a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He just, the dude was a veteran. He said, Giannis, go give me a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He did. And the veteran gave him 500 bucks. That's wasteful. Other guys, he had two guys on his team who liked playing PlayStation 4, but they didn't like to be encumbered with like packing it. So they would literally on a road trip, they would go into a new city, buy a PlayStation 4 and the games they wanted to play, and then leave it in the hotel room and buy another one in the next city. Just appalling waste of money. I just saw a financial planner shake his head like just, oh my gosh. Just an appalling waste of money. But I waste my time like that sometimes. I look at my weeks and know that I've just doled out my time as if it's $500 for a Mountain Dew in the way that I invest it and spend it. And if you think that's ridiculous, if you think I'm overstating that, what's your screen time report at the end of your week? I don't know what Android phones do, but Apple phones, every weekend you get a screen time report. You average this many hours per day, it is up or down this percentage from last week. You ever see that and feel good about yourself? It always brings deep, deep conviction. It should send us straight into prayer and confession when that screen time report comes up. I think we waste time like some people like to waste money by just jumping from one numbing entertainment to the next thing without ever considering what's important. And then I think on the opposite end of the spectrum are those of us who fill our days with everything. It's just one thing after the next, just a deluge of activities, one after the other. A workaholic could fit here because there's hours that your job requires of you, and I'm all about going above and beyond. I don't want to decry working hard to get ahead and to provide and to be successful and all that stuff, but I do want us to realize that when we get to work before we're supposed to, that's a choice, and when we stay longer than we have to, that's a choice. It's a way that we're choosing to fill our schedule. When we volunteer for something, that's a choice. We all know people, and some of us are people, who volunteer for everything and say no to nothing and then just do and do and do and do all day long. We just run around with our hair on fire. I am convinced that the busiest time of anyone's life is families, particularly if families have two working spouses with children from ages 8 to 18. I don't think you can ever be busier than that season. It's crazy. And kids have stuff and we have stuff and we fill every single iota of our calendar with something that we're supposed to do. We'll come up with projects on the weekend and disappear and do those. And we allocate our time to this and our time to that. We have no way to pause. We run around frantically and we just do and we do and we do and we jump from one activity to the next activity without ever stopping to be still and know that he is God because our schedules are so full that we feel like we don't have space for anything else. And to those people, I would just say gently, is it possible that the rhythms of our homes are so frantic that we've effectively scheduled God out of our lives? Is it possible that we've allowed some of us, that we've allowed ourselves to become so busy that we have effectively scheduled God and scheduled Jesus right out of our life? Somebody told me one time, and this is, it's deeply convicting. It's probably not all the way fair, but it's mostly fair. If we aren't spending time with God on a daily basis, then we're simply telling him that he didn't make our 24-hour priority list that day. Good luck tomorrow, God. I think sometimes the rhythms of our homes get so frantic that we effectively just schedule them right out of our lives. And what I really want us to see this morning is that wherever we are on the spectrum, whether we fill our days with just nothing, just jumping from entertainment to entertainment, from nothing to nothing, or from activity to activity. That nothing and everything are simply distractions from the right thing. All that entertainment, all that pulling out the phone, all that screen time, all that binge watching, all that late night stuff, all that sleeping in, and then all the busyness, all the activities can sometimes simply be distractions from the right thing. I've made this point before, but I think it bears repeating. I think one of the greatest tricks of the enemy, one of the greatest guises of Satan is to trick us into wasting our time, is to distract us with nothing, is to distract us with our phones and with TV and with information and with nothingness and stuff that is frivolous and doesn't matter. And listen, that stuff has its place. You need to veg out and watch something that makes you laugh, that gives you an escape. We need to do that. But when it becomes too much, when it takes over everything, when it's just nothing to nothing to nothing, the enemy has us distracted. When it's activity to activity to activity that fills us with our own sense of self-importance, yet the activities that we're doing have no eternal consequences. The enemy simply has us distracted. See, I think for many of us in the room, it's one of my favorite verses these days in my life is Ephesians 2.10. It says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And it carries with it this idea that God made you, he gifted you, he designed you, and he purposed you. Each one of us. I think some of us walk through life feeling like we couldn't possibly have a purpose. I'm too small for that. And I would say, bupkis, God created you. He designed you in Christ for good works that you might walk in them. And in those good works, we know from other passages, we find the fullness of Christ. We walk with Jesus. Our hearts beat with him. We develop a passion for our Savior. I believe that we find Jesus in his work. So as we do the good works that we were designed to do, we grow more vibrant in our relationship with Jesus. We grow more passionate in our desire to serve God. And we live a fuller life that's filled with more joy because we are walking so closely with Jesus. And the enemy does not want you to experience that. He wants to rip you away from our Father's hands. And the deal is, for many of us sitting in this room, he's probably not going to rip us away with some addiction. There are some of us that he might be able to rip away with some sort of shadow life or sin going on, but for the vast majority of us in this room, it's not going to be some crippling addiction that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's not going to be some secret shadow life that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's simply going to be tricking you into spending your days on nothing or everything, day after day after day, until you look back on the month of the year and you go, what did I do? How much more of the work of Jesus for which we were designed could we do if we didn't allow the enemy to distract us with nothing or everything. I believe it's one of his greatest ploys. And I want to do everything I can to call it out whenever I can so that we can be, so that we can walk in the good works for which we were created. And it's why I landed on this one sentence in regards to time this morning, that we should be still and know that he is God. Because I firmly believe that being still is the first true step in the path to knowing God. I absolutely believe that this habit of being still is the first true step that we can take in the path to knowing God, in the path to our hearts beating like Jesus' heart. And I've said this in a bunch of different ways. I've said this phrase over and over and over again, and I will continue to beat this drum until God says this isn't my stage anymore. But as long as it is, I will continue to repeat, there is no greater habit anyone can develop in their life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. No greater habit. And that's what being still is. And I say that it's the first true step to really knowing God because we can come to church and we can hear about God and we can serve and we can do his work and we can go to small group and we can have conversations, but until it becomes personal, until it becomes intimate, until it becomes a habit to wake up and let scripture speak to us, not me speaking to you about what I think scripture says from my quiet times. Let that supplement what God has been saying to you all week in your quiet times. Until we wake up every day and we spend time in God's word and then we pursue him in prayer. For some reason, for some people, that looks like going on a hike and just allowing God to be with us in nature. For some people, that means contemplative practices or meditative practices. For some people, that means listening prayer. For some people, that means getting on our knees and speaking prayer. For some people, it's reading a spiritual book and supplement to the Word of God. But until our pursuit of the Father becomes an intentional, personal one, it can never become an intimate one. So this instruction in Psalm to be still and know that he is God is, to me, the first fundamental step in actually knowing him. And I believe this to be true because I have seen this in my own life. I have seen in the ebbs and flows of my own spiritual health. That when I am consistent in this practice, I'm a better husband. I'm more patient with my children. I'm even more patient with Ruby when I'm having quiet times. That's my dog that I don't like. I even like pet her and invite her over sometimes when I'm praying and reading the Bible and inviting God into every moment of my life. I'm a better pastor. In those seasons where Jesus is enriching my soul and my spirit every day, I can't wait for Sunday to share with you what I have to share with you. In the seasons where I'm not doing that, in the seasons where I feel like I'm running on empty because I've been filling my days with nothing or everything, just to be honest with you, there are Sundays I don't want to preach to you. I want to get done with the sermon so I can go do whatever it is I really want to do that day. And it's because I haven't been filling my days with Jesus. It's because I've been filling them with nothing or everything. And I'm forgetting to be still. And we could talk about how you should spend the rest of your time and what you should volunteer for and what we shouldn't volunteer for and what really is important and what really isn't. And we can talk about God's priorities for your schedule, but I would just simply say, man, if you'll make it a habit every day to be still before the Father and let Him breathe life into your soul, you're a grown-up. You'll figure the rest of it out yourself. You don't need a sermon about that. If we'll do this, if we'll simply be still, God will breathe into our life in such a way that our heart will begin to beat like Jesus' heart and suddenly all the things, all the nothing and all the everything that we use to fill as a simple distraction from what's actually important, those things will become less important to us and we will pursue more Jesus. I've seen it happen over and over and over again in the lives of others and in my own life. So my encouragement to you this morning is to be still and know that he is God. My encouragement to you this morning is don't let this, what I say, be the only source of God and Jesus in your life. Because I am broken and I am fallible and I am often wrong. Pursue him on your own. Let him breathe life into you every day. This will be the first true step that we can take in our path to knowing God. And so I would say to you this morning, how still should I be? Just a little bit more than you are. Take that step. If you have no habit or pattern of waking up and spending time in God's word and letting Jesus refresh your soul there and in prayer, then just give it a week. Do it for seven days and get to the end of seven days and tell me that that was a waste of your time. Just do it for a week. If you're already in that habit, God bless you for being in that habit. You know that I'm speaking truth. Pick another time too. Do it in the evening. End your day with prayer. Let's all just step up our stillness just a little bit and stop and let God wash over us and fill us up and so breathe life into us that we can be his workmanship and do the good works in which we were created to walk in. However still or not you've been in your life, be just a little bit more still this week and see how God breathes life into you in that stillness. As we close, I have a quote. It's a long quote, but I think it's worth it. Growing up, my pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, was one of my heroes, and he still is. He passed away right as I came up here to take this job, and it is one of my great sadnesses that I can't talk about being a pastor with Buddy. And every now and again, I'll go back and I'll listen to some of his sermons. They have them all archived all the way back to the 80s. And when I listen to them, it's like going home. I feel like a 12-year-old kid, 10-year-old kid sitting in church, just taking it all in. I really like listening to Buddy's sermons. Five or six years ago, I was listening to one. Actually, it was a little over four years ago because it was in my parents' basement when I was waiting for you guys to hire me so we could move up here. I was listening to one of his sermons and he was preaching on time. And Buddy spoke pretty extemporaneously, but this I could tell was prepared. He was reading off of a sheet of paper. He wrote it very intentionally and it was so good to me and so profound that I stopped and I typed it out. I would listen to a sentence and pause it and type it and listen and pause and type. And I've just kind of been sitting on it wondering when the best time was to share it with anybody at all. And it just feels very appropriate this morning to end with these words that have impacted me over the years so much. So I want to share them with you. And when I finish, we're going to have a chance to reflect and worship together. This is what Buddy says. Are we possessed with an inescapable passion to live in an intimate knowledge of God? The problem is not that we are engaged in actively evil. The problem is that we are just too active. It's not that we are criminally engaged. We are just inattentive to the voice of God. It's not that we're heretics. Most people I know are just hectic in their activities of mind-numbing nothingness. It should make sense to anyone that minds empty of God will be empty of meaning. Our hunger for God is numbered by our addictions to substitutes and stimulants that hide our starving souls. We are spiritual anorexics. We've morphed to a point where we don't even recognize what is the spiritual norm. Today's lifestyle is lived at a pace that makes contemplations all but impossible, and most people cannot imagine a life like Jesus lived. We can't imagine a life without constant informational connectivity. We live in a noisy world where there are a lot of things competing for our attention, TV, phones, Facebook, emails. But the unintended consequence of constant informational connectivity is divine disconnection. We are so distracted with inconsequential information, our brains and our hearts are overloaded with timely data, leaving no space for timeless deity. We're called to live with a preoccupation with God who is worthy to be pursued at all costs and is pursuing us. We find ourselves in an age that has pushed the knowledge of God into the margins. We arrogantly assume that God should be grateful for the crumbs of our overcrowded schedule. We call it efficient. But God has not called us first to be efficient. He has called us to be passionate. We are spiritually diseased. Never have we had more to eat and found ourselves more famished. Never have we had more stuff and been less satisfied. It is time we made time for the timeless.