Sermons tagged with Promises

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Jordan, it is interesting to me that you think profundity is what's required to get up on the stage when they parade me out here every week, falling woefully short of the bar. This is the third part in our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at times in Scripture where we see a blow-up or a blow-out or people with with just big overwhelming emotions because that is so much a part of our life. That is something that we experience just as we go through life. Sometimes our emotions are too big for us and they're overwhelming. And so this morning I wanted to take a look at big emotions in our prayers and what happens and how does God respond when big emotions creep into our prayers, when our prayers really become cries. And to do that, I want us to think about prayer together. It's really, when you consider it, one of the more interesting passages in the Bible, one of the more interesting interchanges that Jesus has with his disciples. They're following him around. They're watching him do ministry. And at one point, they look at Jesus and they say, hey, Jesus, will you teach us to pray? Now, this is a really interesting question coming from the disciples. And many of you have probably considered this before. The disciples knew how to pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed their whole life. They had gone to synagogue every week, maybe daily at different points in their life. I don't know. They had seen a ton of people pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed many prayers before, but there was something different, so different about the prayers of Jesus that they had to stop him and say, can you teach us to pray like you pray? Because that's different than how we pray. And Jesus responds by sharing with them the Lord's prayer. You guys probably all know it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. And so in that, Jesus gives the model of prayer to the disciples and to us in perpetuity. And if you break that down, I've always been taught prayer and I've taught prayer this way in church, in youth group, in camps, in different places, in men's groups, small group, when we talk about prayer, something that's always been really helpful for me is the acronym ACTS. And you guys have probably heard this before. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. So the way that Jesus opens up the prayer. When we pray, the first thing we should do is adore God. God, you're great. God, you're good. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. God, you are wonderful for this. God, you blow me away for that. And when we do this, it really puts us in the right posture for prayer, you know? It really reminds us who we're talking to. I had a Bible teacher in high school who was also my soccer coach, who was also my administrator because I went to a small school. And when he would pray in class, he would say, okay, everyone, let's pray, bow your heads. And we would bow our heads to pray, and he would wait 20 or 30 seconds. And so finally, I asked one day, Mr. Dawson, what are you doing? Like, that's awkward. Why do you make us just sit there in silence? What are you waiting on? Because it's almost like, does he want us to pray? Like, should we? And he told me what he was doing. He said he was taking his mind, whenever he would pause before prayer, to Isaiah chapter 6, where the throne room of God is described. And it says that God is on his throne, and the train of his robe is filling the temple with glory. And there's these six-winged angels flying around him saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And it's just so overwhelming that he cowers in a corner. And Mr. Dawson said that when, he said, when I pray, I like to take myself there to put myself in proper posture before God to remind myself when I pray, where am I going? I'm going to the throne room of God, the King of the universe, and I'm addressing the creator of the universe. That's a serious, somber thing. That's a place for humility. That's a place for penitence. This is why when we teach our children to pray, we teach them to bow their heads and close their eyes. It's a sign of reverence. It's a sign of respect for knowing who we're talking to and where we're going. It's why I encourage you as much as you can to kneel when you pray. Because it's hard to put yourself in the posture of kneeling and not feel humble, at least a little bit. And so Jesus says we should start with adoration. We should adore God. We should praise him. And then we should go to confession. What are the things, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. How have we trespassed against God? What attitudes do we bring into this day and into this prayer? What sins do we carry with us that yet remain unconfessed before the Father? What do we need to confess to God before him? And then we move into this time of thanksgiving, praising Him. God, thank you for your goodness in my life. Thank you for my family. Thank you for a church that I love. Thank you for the rain. Thank you for the day, whatever it is. It's John's second birthday today. Thank you for a great two-year-old son and for friends watching him in the nursery right now. Thank you for all of those things. We praise God for things. And then, suffocation. Then we ask for what we need. And you guys know, and you've heard this, that the tendency when we pray is to skip act and go straight to S. Skip all the other stuff and just go, dear God, I really need blank. I really need you to show up here. I really need this to work out. I'm really worried about this. It's all the I need, I need, I need. And there's a place for that in prayer. But the way that Jesus teaches us prayer, it follows this pattern of first putting ourself in the proper place and then confessing our sins, which remind us of the humility we should carry into the throne room. And then thanksgiving, let's acknowledge all the blessings God's given us in our lives before we ask him for more, and then in that proper mindset, say what we need to say. That's kind of the proper way to pray. But sometimes we pray when our emotions are too big for propriety. Sometimes we pray prayers that become cries. And the emotions that we bring into that moment are too big for acts. I've shared with you guys before that the first time Jen and I got pregnant, we miscarried. And I'm not in the business of doing comparative pain for miscarriages and who has the right to the most sorrow. But for us, the pain was particularly acute because we had been praying for a child for years. For years. We had struggled mightily. Our moms and grandmas were praying for babies. We had the church around us at the time praying that we could have a baby. We knew that's what we wanted to do. On my mama's deathbed, a few years before we got pregnant, the very last thing she did for me was direct someone to the top of her closet to get a stuffed animal that she made to give to my child when we had them. She went ahead and made it, and I think my sister finished it up for her so that we would have that to give to our first child. So when we got pregnant, we were elated. And then we went to the checkup for eight weeks, and the baby wasn't there. I don't know how long it took me to pray after that. But the first time I did pray, it wasn't Acts. The first time I prayed, it didn't look very much like our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. It looked a lot more like God. What in the world? What the heck? I would say different words if I weren't on this stage and there weren't children in the audience. That's how I felt, and that's how I prayed. What are you doing? Because we, and we're not entitled to this. None of what I'm about to say really matters, but to us it did. Jen's a school teacher. She loves kids. She's teaching in a Christian school, leading people towards you. We still have relationships with some of the kids that she taught in those days. I was a school teacher. I taught high school Bible. And then I worked at a church. We had made good choices. We were good Christian people. We had checked all the boxes. We had done all the things. And there was people who were living lives way more rebellious than us who were just tripping accidentally into family. And then we get pregnant and then you take it? No, I'm not praying acts. I'm not following the pattern for this one. There are some prayers that we pray that become cries. When we hear of the terminal diagnosis and we go to the Father and we say, really? This one? Him? Her? Why not me in your jacked up economy? Why them? There's a girl in our community. She's a young woman in our community. Just last week or two. She battled cancer for five years and came to it a week or two ago. Beautiful family, young kids. I don't know when that husband is going to pray again. When he does, those prayers will be cries. We've all prayed prayers like that. Where we're walking through what feels to us like the dark night of the soul and we don't have time or patience for propriety. We just go to our God and we are raw and we are real and we cry out, what in the world? How is this right? How does this make sense? As parents that send their kids to school in that private school in Nashville, what do those prayers sound like when they start to pray again? We've all prayed those prayers that are so big and so raw and so emotional that they become cries. And so I think it's worth it to look and see how God handles these prayers in Scripture. Because we get to see some. God in His goodness left them for us in His inspired Word. And so what I want to encourage you with today is, I know that we've all prayed those prayers. If you've never prayed those prayers, I'm so happy for you. I hope you never do, but I think you will. And what I want us to know as we look into the scripture this morning is that God is not offended by our prayers that become cries. I don't think God in his goodness and in his grace and in his mercy is offended when I look at him after the deepest pain that I've felt up to that point in my life and I go, what in the world? That's not fair. That's not right. That doesn't make sense. I don't think God gets offended by those things. I don't think he's so small that our broken hearts offend our God. And I actually think that there's grace and space for those prayers because we see them in the Bible. We actually see Jesus pray one of these prayers, a prayer that is so raw and so real and so emotional that it becomes a cry. This prayer is recorded in all four Gospels. We're going to look at the account in the Gospel of Luke chapter 22. Beginning in verse 39. And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, speaking of Jesus. And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, this scene, many of you know it, Jesus has just left the Last Supper with the disciples. He's instituted communion. He's told them, my body is going to be broken for you. My blood is going to be spilled for you. He knows what is going to happen. He knows when he gets done praying, he's going to be arrested. And he knows that when he's arrested, he's going to be tried. And after he's tried, he's going to be flogged and beaten, and he's going to be hung on a cross and left there to die and then face death and hell. He knows that. And so he brings the disciples with him, and he says, remain here while I pray. And he goes off a distance, one would assume, so that they couldn't hear him. And it is interesting that they all ended up hearing him, because there's nothing in the text to indicate that Jesus subtly knelt and clasped his hands and said, my Father who is in heaven. No, these prayers from Jesus that we see, in Luke it says he knelt. In another gospel it says that he fell with his face to the ground. And the disciples are a stone's throw away and they can hear him clearly. And then he gets so intense in his praying that sweat begins to mix with his blood, which we know is something that can actually happen in moments of incredibly intense stress in our lives. So the prayer that Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane was not, Dear God, if there's any other way, would you please point me in that? It wasn't that. It was Jesus on his face prostrate, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please, is there any other way? Is there anything else I can do? I do not want to bear this. I do not want to be on the cross and hear you and see you turn your back on me. I do not want to say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I do not want the crown of thorns in my head. I do not want the nails in my wrist. I do not want to do this, Father. Is there any other way? Please, please take this cup from me. That's a prayer becoming a cry. That's Jesus sidestepping propriety and crying out to his heavenly father. And in there, he finds what we should find when we pray like this. No matter how deep, no matter how raw, yet not my will but your will be done. Please give me the strength to accept your will. So I know that God isn't offended by those prayers because his son prays one to him in full view and vision of the disciples. And then he tells us about it in all four gospels. And that made me wonder, where else in the Bible do we have prayers that are raw and real and emotional? Where else in the Bible do we have prayers that have become cries? And of course, I went to Psalms. And I just started reading them and flipping through and finding them, these things where people are just raw. I am weary unto death. I want to die. Take my life. And I put them in your notes, Psalm 142 and Psalm 13 and Psalm 77. I think of Hannah's prayer in the temple when she's praying so earnestly and fervently for a child that Eli the priest thinks she's drunk. I think of the book of Lamentations, which is a whole book of tough, raw prayers. And I was going to kind of bounce around between those prayers, but then I was reminded of another psalm that's really dear to my heart, Psalm 88. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to turn there. I encountered Psalm 88 when I took a trip to Israel several years ago. One of the things most groups do when you go to Israel is when you're in Jerusalem, you go to Caiaphas' house. Caiaphas is the high priest that had Jesus arrested, had him tried, and had him murdered. And in the basement of Caiaphas' house is this makeshift small dungeon. And a portion of the dungeon is a cylindrical room that they would tie ropes under the shoulders of the prisoner and lower them into this pitch black, dark room. Now there's stairs that lead down, but in Caiaphas' day, in Jesus' day, that was not the case. They lower you in and they pull you up when they're ready for you. And most people believe that this is where Jesus spent the night after he got arrested, waiting on his trial before Pilate the next day. And when you go to Jerusalem, you can go down into that cell. And our guide pointed us to Psalm 88. Psalm 88 was written by the sons of Korah, we're told. But it's also believed by scholars to be a prophetic messianic psalm. And many scholars believe that this is meant to be the prayer that Jesus prays after he's arrested. If it's not the prayer that he prays after he's arrested, Jesus knew the scriptures, he knew the psalms, this could very well be a psalm that came to mind that he quoted. But when I picture Jesus arrested and alone and reading, crying these things out, it brings fresh meaning to it for me. And when we listen to it and read it, I think you'll be taken aback by how very real it is. So I'm going to read a good portion of it. Beginning in verse 11. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? And then verse 13, They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. That's a real prayer. That's not a prayer you pray in church in front of other people. That's not how we teach our kids to pray. We see accusations in this prayer. You have caused my friends and my loved ones to shun me. It is your wrath that beats against me and waves and covers me. The person crying out to God in this psalm feels the darkness closing in in such a way that they don't know if they will see the light again. My companions have become darkness, he ends with. And that's it. I am grateful to God for choosing to include in his Bible and his inspired word prayers that are that raw and that are that real. Prayers that show us that when our emotions are too big for propriety, that our God can meet us in those places and hear us. He appreciates those prayers so much so that he recorded them and fought for them and protected them down through the centuries so that we could see them too. So when we pray them, it's okay. When we need to cry out to God, we can. He's not offended by those prayers. He hears those prayers. He welcomes those prayers. And here's what else happens when we cry out to God, when our prayers become cries, when we lose all sense of propriety and we're just trying to figure it out. Here's what else happens when it's literally the dark night of our soul and the darkness is closing in around us and our life is falling apart and our children are making decisions that we don't understand and our husband is making decisions that we don't understand and everything that we thought was going to happen, this future that we had projected is not going to happen. This person that I love is not in my life anymore and I see reminders of them all the time and I don't know how I'm going to put one foot in front of the other. I don't know how I'm going to do it. When we pray those prayers, this is what happens. If we look back at Luke 22, there's a verse that I skipped. Verse 43. In the middle of his praying, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him. In the middle of Jesus crying out, Father, please don't make me do this. Please let there be another way. God says, son, you're going to have to walk that path. But he doesn't make him do it on his own. He sends an angel to strengthen Jesus in the dark night of his soul. And I can't help but believe that God will send angels to strengthen you too. When you pray those prayers, I think God sends his angels to strengthen you as well. And I don't know what those angels look like. Maybe it's a hug. Maybe it's someone's presence. Maybe it's a text or a phone call or an email. I know in our family it's cardinals. Maybe it's a southern thing, I'm not sure. But we believe that when a cardinal shows up in your view, that that's a lost loved one who's just stopping by to say hello. Just to check in on you. And so sometimes God sends cardinals just when we need them. Another big one in our family is Mallard Ducks. You know that we lost my father-in-law a couple years ago. And Mallard Ducks were really special to him. And I can't tell you all the cool places where we've just kind of looked and there's a duck there that doesn't belong there. And it's just God kind of reminding us that he loves us, that he sees our pain, that he walks with us in that pain. Maybe, for some of us, God's using this morning to strengthen you, to buoy you. I hope so. Maybe this is just what you need. My hope for all of you is that you never need this sermon and you never have to pray those prayers. But my suspicion is you have a better chance of dodging raindrops on the way back to your car in a downpour than you do of living a life without tragedy. And so I think all of us, at some point, need this sermon and this reminder that when our emotions are too big for propriety, God can hear those prayers too. And in the hearing, in those moments, he sends his angels one way or another to strengthen us. I just got done reading a book. It's actually Beth Moore's biography. I would highly recommend it. One of the best books I've read in a couple years. And in it, she was talking to someone who faced incredible tragedy. And she asked her, how is it that you have kept going through these years? And she said, God opens my eyes every morning. I have no other explanation than that. There are nights that I went to sleep and I did not want to wake up and God opens my eyes. And so I get up that day and for us today I use the breath that's in my lungs and I praise him and I go. We will all in different times and seasons and for different reasons and in different ways walk through dark nights of the soul. But when we do, we can cry out to God. And when we cry out to God, He will hear us. And when He hears us, He will send His angels to strengthen us. I'll finish with this verse from Isaiah, and then I'll pray, because it's one of my favorites. We're taught in Isaiah that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and that he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. You're big, you're good, and you're gracious, and we are broken. We need you so much, and we have no right, we have no right to pound our desk and shake our fist and demand answers from you. We have no right to do that, and yet in your goodness, from time to time, you allow it, and you hug us, and you weep with us. I lift up the people today who might have recently prayed prayers like these, and I just ask that you would strengthen them, that they would feel your presence, they would feel your goodness, they would feel your love, they would be strengthened by you. Father, buoy us and tether us to you. God, we also thank you that Jesus did drink of that cup, that he did die for us, that he did conquer death and sin and hell for us so that we don't have to. And God, we look forward to a day when we understand things just a little bit better. But in the meantime, may your presence and your love be ever enough. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here and happy Easter to you. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I get to be one of the pastors here, and we so appreciate you choosing to celebrate your Easter here with us at Grace. For the last six or seven weeks, we've been moving through a series called The Table. The series has kind of been moving through the book of Luke. One scholar says about the book of Luke, which is one of the four gospels, and the gospels are the books in the Bible that tell the story of the life of Jesus. And one scholar said about the book of Luke that in the book of Luke, Jesus is either going to, coming from, or attending a meal. Others have called it the hospitality gospel. And so we've been looking at the different meals in Jesus's life and kind of asking, how does he use the table, right? What does he do with meals? How does he integrate those into what he was trying to do in his life and in his ministry? And we've looked at the table as a reminder for us, the table as provision for us, the table to build community. And so this week, we want to point towards what is going to be the greatest meal, the greatest feast of all time. And this series, I think, has been a good one for Grace, because I was preaching it and they were awesome. But I think that it's been a good series for Grace because Grace people, we are table people, right? We love getting around the table. Our biggest event of the year, every year, the Hootenanny, the last is now we call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. But the last Sunday, every September, what do we do? We have a service. We celebrate. We go outside. We sit around a table. We talk with each other. Our meals are so much a part of all of our lives. Everything we do, every activity that we do, we tend to center around food, don't we? Even when we go do something that's not about food, when we get there, we make it about food. I took Lily, my daughter, she's seven, to her first basketball game. We went to see NC State. They just eked one out against the up-and-coming Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. Go Jackets. And the first thing we did, we're going to a game. There's no food involved with this. What's the first thing I do when we get there? We find our seats. Let's go get some stadium food. That's part of the experience. We need food. We include food in every aspect of our lives. I would be willing to bet that you already know what you're having for lunch. You want to get there and you want me to stop talking so that you can have it. We're going to celebrate. We're going to go eat food. When we get married, what's the first thing we do? Everybody goes to a room. We have a meal together. When someone dies, what do we do? We go to the funeral. We go to the service. And then if the family has friends, they go back to somebody's house and all their friends have provided food. Even when we have babies, what do we do? People just bring you meals for weeks. We call it a meal train. There's a whole name for it. Everything we do is centered around the table. And so we've been asking, how does Jesus use the table to impact us and to do his ministry and to execute his goals in his life. And as we've done that, we've been building towards what is and will be the greatest feast of all time. Most people call it the marriage supper of the Lamb. This is what we do when we get to heaven. I want to read about it to you so that you know where it comes from and what it says. And then I want to unpack it a little bit and tell you what's happening there. In Revelation chapter 19, beginning in verse me, write this, blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said to me, these are the true words of God. I don't know what you think about when you think about heaven. And I don't know what all is going to be there and how it's all going to work. But I know that when we get there, the first scheduled group activity God has for us is to eat together. When we get there, the first thing he wants us to do is come around the table and celebrate the marriage supper of the Lamb. Now, the language that we read there in Revelation is a culmination of much of the language throughout Scripture, where Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God and where the church is referred to as the Bride of Christ. And one day, Jesus has promised us that he's going to come back crashing through the clouds and he's going to take his church and sweep us up into heaven, the church as his collective bride, and it will be the marriage of the church to the Lamb. Jesus will claim his bride, and then when the marriage is there and done, and the wedding has happened, we're all going to sit down, and we are going to have a feast. And like I said, it's the first scheduled activity in heaven. I don't know what else we'll do there. I would assume after this one particular session, maybe we'll have some breakout sessions, like some free time. The optional, I think they'll probably, it is Master's Sunday. So I think they'll probably, I don't think, I think God probably looks at Augusta National and says, yeah, that's as good as I can do. And he's just going to take it. That's why it's called Amen Corner. He's just going to take it and just put it in heaven and then we all get to play it, right? But before we do that, we're going to sit down to this meal together. We're going to have a feast. And I love to think about what will be at that meal. I love to think about who will be there. Easter is the holiday that gives us hope. Easter is the holiday that makes these promises. I love, and I share this quote every year from John Paul II. We do not give way to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. And one of the things that we hope to in the promises of Easter, or cling to in the promises of Easter, is that when we sit at that marriage supper of the Lamb, the people that we have loved and lost to know Jesus will be there too. I lost my pawpaw when I was 19. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. Because of him, I know that there will be fried catfish at that supper of the Lamb. And I can't wait to have it with him. I've sat with people, some in my own family, some of you, some friends, who are sitting in the wake of the loss of their parent or their child or their husband or their wife or their friend. And the only thing that you can say there is that there is a hope in Christ that you will be reunited for them. It's the only thing that begins to take away the sting of death is the knowledge that one day at this great supper, I will see them again. So when we think about what's there, the people that we have loved and lost and who know Jesus are there. And they're saving you a seat. But I also like to think about what's not there. You know what's not at the marriage supper of the Lamb? You guys are going to meals later, right? There's going to be family there. For some of you, it's going to be weird. It's going to be tense. You can't laugh right now because they're sitting next to you. You're not sure if you're really looking forward to it. It might even be one of these deals where you kind of be glad when it's over. None of that will be there at the marriage supper of the Lamb. There is no tension there. Nothing but love. And I love to think about this too. The people that you have loved and the people that you have lost and that you will have lost are imperfect people, right? You know that old saying, hurt people hurt people? The people who loved you and hurt you, because it's confusing sometimes, when you see them in heaven, they don't hurt anymore. They will be able to love you perfectly. They will be the best possible versions of themselves. That father figure that you grew up with, who you know they loved you, but they never said it because they weren't the type to say things like that. He's going to tell you when you see him again because whatever emotional crud that they taught guys in the 1930s and 40s won't be there anymore. That mom or dad that you watched age, whose memories, your memories of them, the most clear ones are sometimes the ones that you want the least, that person's gone. It's the best version of themselves. We love you most. You know what else isn't there? Your crudud. You're sins. You're guilt. Chasing you and hounding you when there's worship songs singing and when you walk into a church and when people talk about Jesus. When you're in heaven, none of that's there anymore. It's done. I don't know what song it is that we're singing this morning, but there's a line in one of them about when that final battle against pain is done. We don't have to fight ourselves anymore in heaven. You know what else isn't in heaven? Faith. Hope. We don't need those anymore. Romans 8 says that you don't hope for what you can see. In heaven, we don't have to hope anymore. We don't have to choose faith anymore. We don't have to wrestle with complicated doubts and issues anymore. It's just peace. It's just love. It's just joy and exuberance. It's just purity. And I'm talking about the marriage supper of the Lamb this morning. I'm trying to paint a picture for you of what it could possibly be. Because Easter is what secures our ticket to that meal. You understand? Easter, what we're celebrating today, the empty tomb, is what secures our ticket to the marriage supper of the Lamb. It's what we can place our faith in to know that we are invited to. And I love Easter, and I love the promise of Easter. And Aaron, in one of the songs, read one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and probably my favorite group of words in the Bible. It's my favorite statement in the whole Bible. We actually, this morning, I'm getting emotional. I'll calm down. Just hang in there. This morning, I was able to, I was home for Easter bunny stuff. And one of the things that Lily got this year, and Jen made sure, Jen's my wife, not just a lady I talk about. Jen made sure to tell Lily that we gave you the Bible. The bunny did not bring that, okay? So we gave you the Bible. And the very first thing we did is I opened up to Luke chapter 24, and I said, can you find verses four and five? And she read the Easter story, which is the only sermon I needed today. But in those verses, Mary, Magdalene, and a couple of the other ladies have gone back to the tomb to dress the body of Jesus with spices. And when they get there, the stones rolled away. The tomb is empty. And they're looking around. And the angel says, the best sentence in the whole Bible, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Do you understand that if that verse isn't there, if that tomb's not empty, and if that never happens, that none of this matters? Do you understand if Easter isn't true, that we're all stupid? Like Paul says, if Easter's not true, then Christians are to be most pitied of all people, because we just parade through life trumpeting this hope that's hokum. If Easter's not true, then we're just coming here and we're singing songs that make us feel good and we're leaving with our morals so that we can feel like we have something to teach our children and we can feel better about ourselves and our neighbor. And that's all we're doing if Easter's not true. If Easter's not true, then you will never conquer your sin. You will die fighting it and your crud will exist forever. If Easter is not true, then when you lost that person who you love, who believes in Jesus as well, then it was goodbye, and that's it, and death is final, and there still is sting, and we should not have hope. If Easter is not true, then all that's left is eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die. Everything hinges on Easter. And what I love about Easter is it brings everything together in our faith. I say often that to be a Christian, you need to believe Jesus. You need to believe that he was who he says he was, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. We need to believe that he was who he says he was. He's the Son of God who came to take away the sins of the world, and who else but the Son of God could raise himself from the dead? We need to believe that he did what he said he did, that he actually died, and that he actually rose again. And that there was actually an empty tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. And then we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which is to come crashing back through the clouds to claim his bride and take us to dinner. And to secure for us a perfect eternity. It is the hope to which we cling. And Easter is an invitation from Jesus himself to that marriage supper of the Lamb. So I would tell you this morning that if you want to be at that supper, if you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest feast of all time, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where you see your lost loved ones who also know and love Jesus, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where all of your crud is gone and people can love each other perfectly and we get to see the face of our Savior and we get to cry out hallelujah to the face of our God and we get to experience perfect joy and bliss and peace. If you want to experience that, then all you have to do is accept God's invitation. If you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, all you have to do is accept the invitation sealed through Easter and secured through the death of Christ. If you haven't done that, I'm not going to try to bring you to a point of decision right now. Because frankly, after doing a life of ministry, I just don't think that's quite how it works. But what I would invite you to do is to consider it. If this is true, then it's worth considering. If the marriage supper of the Lamb is real, I want to go. And I want to meet my Jesus. And if that tomb really was empty, and everybody who trumpets that hope isn't just faking it, then it's the most important thing that's ever happened. And you know, as Jesus extends that invitation to his supper, to the marriage supper of the Lamb, I think another reason that this series resonates with grace is because we think of ourselves as a table too. We're not a cruise ship or a battleship. We don't talk about being on mission. We consider ourselves a banquet table. And everyone's invited. Broken people. Hurt people. People who don't believe people who simply want to experience community and I think that every time we gather and we think of ourselves as a family gathering around a table and and every time we sing, and every time we raise our voices, and every time the Spirit stirs our affection for Jesus, that it's a whisper of what it will be like at the marriage supper of the Lamb. So I just wanted to finish today by inviting you to that whisper every week. If you're someone who churches in a regular part of your life, I hope you'll find a church that speaks to you. And if you think that could be grace, then we'd love to see you back next week and a lot of weeks after that. But I'm going to pray now and we're going to move into our last time of worship. And I'll just say this. It's good. It's real good. Let's pray. Father, thank you for sending your son. Thank you that he lived and that he died and that he rose and that he invites us to heaven with you. God, we look forward to that marriage supper of the Lamb, to being claimed back to you by Jesus. We look forward to the eternity that you promise and secure. And God, I pray for us in this room that we would make it a habit to gather with your family for the weekly reminder and promise of what's to come. As we close in song, God, I just pray that it would be sweet and that the Spirit would move and that we would turn our hearts towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see everybody. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby immediately following the service. If you're watching online, especially if you're doing that habitually, we love that you are, and that is fantastic that you're following along. But I'm just going to tell you as a friend, you're missing the best part of the service. Because the best part of the service is when we all get to worship together. We're just putting up with me in between more songs is all we're doing here. Because that was really great. Thank you, band, for leading us into God's presence in that way. This is our big spring series. This is the series that we have been planning since the fall when we kind of sit around and try to plan in advance what we're going to do. And what we always want to do with the series in the spring as we come out of February, we move into March, is we kind of want to take at least six weeks and point our collective attention towards Easter to prepare our hearts and to prepare our minds for the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, for the victory of victories, for what I believe is the greatest holiday in our calendar. It's the greatest day of the year when we get to celebrate that we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. And so the point of the spring series is always to kind of drive us to Easter and to prepare our hearts as a body for that celebration. And so that's absolutely the point of what we're doing this spring as well through a series called The Table. And we've got a couple things I'm going to, we've got a challenge we're going to issue for you. We've got something for you to take home. I'm going to tell you what this is. But the other thing I just want to put on your radar screen is we're going to have a Good Friday service this year for the first time since I've been one of the pastors. Yes, thank you. That's great. Okay, so if you clapped, you have to come. That's part of the deal. You can't be like, oh, I got plans. No, I'm telling you right now. Good Friday service, and for those that don't know, I'm not making a joke here. I'm just being kind. It's the Friday right before Easter. So you can go ahead and mark that off in your calendar. We've got that written and ready to go. We've been thinking about that already, and so we are looking forward to that. And the whole purpose of that service is really and truly to take some time on the Friday of Jesus's crucifixion, that remembers Jesus's crucifixion, and really ask the Lord to prepare our hearts for Easter so that the impact and the weight of it can fully rest on us. And so I hope that you'll be a part of that. This Sunday is intended to be kind of a setup for the rest of the series. So this Sunday, we're just kind of looking at the broad brush of it, why we've landed here, why we are doing this series called The Table. One of my favorite parts about this series is that we have a lady, Carly Buchanan, who is our part-time graphics department, among other things, right? She sings sometimes. Right now, she's over there watching my son and his peers in the hallway. And she gives a lot to the church. This series is her idea. When we sat around pitching things, I had my own idea for what we should do for series. And then she mentioned this, and everybody just immediately latched on to it. And it's a great way for me to highlight to you that you have a really great staff that works for you, that serves your kids, that serves your students, that serves us here. They're really, really great folks who are fun to work with. And almost none of the good ideas that we do are mine. I'm just leeching off of their good ideas. And so she brought this to us and we immediately loved it. And I immediately recognized that this series would resonate with grace. And I should have known that something like this would resonate with grace back when I started here. It was April of 2017 was my first Sunday at grace. It was the Sunday before Easter. And so prior to that, I think somewhere in late February, early March, they offered me the job and I ignorantly accepted it. And then they flew me up one Sunday in the middle of March to introduce me to the church right here in this room. And I should have known that meals were going to be a big deal to grace people because I landed Saturday evening around dinner time. And at the time, the moderator of the board was a guy, a good buddy of mine named Burt Banks and his wife, Terry. Now Terry is one of the elders. And so it's nice to get the good banks on the elder board. Now they picked me up at the airport and we were planning to go out to dinner and they said, hey, is it okay? We made reservations for dinner. I said, that's great, I'm hungry. And they said, we've also invited some other folks from Grace to meet us there that they wanna have a chance to meet you. Is that all right? And I'm like, yeah, sure. I mean, I'm the new pastor. I need to want to meet the people that I'll be working with, going to church with, that kind of thing. So absolutely. So we headed straight from the airport, straight to Winston's, straight to this back room. There was three other couples there, plus the Banks's and myself. And we just sat down and we had a time. And we talked for, it must have been two, two and a half hours. They were peppering me with questions. I was peppering them with questions. We just wanted to get to know each other, and so we sat down over a meal, and we did it. And then a couple weeks later, we moved the family up here. We rented a house off of Teal Briar over in Northridge, and that first week that we were here, I will never forget it. It had to be at least five of the seven nights we were going to somebody's house for dinner. You guys were just, you were peppering us with dinner invites. And over that first month, we went to dinner at more people's houses than I could count because people just wanted to get to know the new pastor and we wanted to get to know the new people. And that's what we did is we got together over meals, right? And when you think about grace culture, who we are as a church, one of our biggest events of the year, Hootenanny in September, what do we do? Well, we sit outside and we eat. You know, grace is big night out. What do we do? We stand around tables. We talk and we drink. That's what we do. This is what we like. We are a communing church. This is who we are, which is why I think that Luke is going to become our new favorite gospel. As we dove into this series, Carly had the idea based on a book, and we're going to see a quote from that book here in a second, based on a book called A Meal with Jesus. And so that book is based out of the Gospel of Luke. And I began to do research for the series. I was listening to that book on Audible. I like to listen to books so I can do other stuff while I'm reading. And the book really is based in the Gospel of Luke. And what I began to learn about Luke is meals are incredibly prevalent in this particular gospel. For those that may not be able to recall right off the top of their head, there's four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what's called synoptic gospels where they kind of tell the story of Jesus from start to finish. They follow the same chronology. And then John kind of stands independently as its own gospel with its own style and makes its own points and things like that. And so Luke is one of the synoptic Gospels, which means a lot of the stories that it tells are very similar to Matthew and Mark, to the two preceding Gospels. But what we don't necessarily see, or what I've never learned before, and I'm embarrassed to admit it, because I've read Luke dozens of times in my life. I've led Bible studies through it. I've taken classes specifically on the book of Luke. Like, I should know this, and I just never did. And maybe you guys did, because you pay closer attention to Scripture than I do. But Luke is actually called, in in Scripture the hospitality gospel. I didn't know this, but in Luke, there are 10 different instances of Jesus sitting down to a meal with other people. Only three of those meals are recorded in the other gospels, which means in Luke, we have seven completely unique stories of Jesus sitting down to a meal with others. Meals are so prevalent in the book of Luke that the author of A Meal with Jesus, a guy, Tim Chester, said this, in Luke's gospel, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal. That's how prevalent it is in the book of Luke. And so I just thought, frankly, what a grace series to focus on that, the power and the efficacy of meals. And then the author brings up this verse that, again, I had read plenty of times before, but I've never just considered it in an isolated way. It's never jumped off the page like it did to me this time. But if I were to say to you, complete this sentence, the Son of Man came to, how would you complete that sentence? The Son of Man came to what? For me, as I was listening to this and processing it, I would complete that sentence, the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. That's what I've always heard. That's what I understand. And that's what Jesus said, and he did. But in Luke, he also says this in chapter 7, verse 34, the Son of Man has come eating and drinking. And you say, look at him, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors've carried myself in my arrival. The Son of Man has come eating and drinking. Now, I want to provide you some context so we understand what's going on there. Jesus is speaking to people from his hometown who have rejected him, who do not believe that he is a Messiah, who do not affirm his teachings. And they've kind of turned him away and said, he's a glutton and a drunkard. He can't be trusted because of who he's carousing with, because of how he behaves, because of what he's doing. And so Jesus says to them in the verses preceding, you guys, you had John the Baptist. He fasts. He lives in the wilderness in complete piety and austerity. He abstains from everything. He lives this very aesthetic, like this very minimalistic life, and you rejected him as the devil. Then the Son of Man comes eating and drinking, doing the exact opposite of that, and you reject me too. You guys got to pick a side. You have to pick a lane. That's the frustration that Jesus is expressing in this verse, and he gets accused of being a glutton and a drunkard because of the company that he's keeping. And so as we move through the series, we're going to see why Jesus chose to keep that company. But I also think it's powerful that Jesus does say this. Even out of context, I do think it's a powerful statement, the Son of Man comes eating and drinking. The Son of Man understands the power of a meal, of what happens around a table, of how memorable it can be. And we're going to continue to unpack that as we go through the series. But we know meals are powerful because we've experienced that too. I remember, I think it was 2008. It was the year, or maybe it was 2007, the year after Jen and I got married in 2006, we went to Rome with her family. And we went with her family, and then we went with another lady and her two adult sons. There was eight of us total, and we went to Rome. And when we went to Rome, we were there for seven or eight days. We got to see a lot of really cool stuff. We got to see the Parthenon and something called the wedding cake that the people in Rome really don't like very much. We got to see St. Peter's Basilica and St. Peter's Square. And I got to go on Christmas Day to the papal address. He came out and he addressed the throngs of people gathered in St. Peter's Square, and Pope Benedict gave me a plenary indulgence for 2008, which was great. 2008 was the best year of my life. Thank you, Pope Benedict. But the thing that I remember the most from Rome, and I think everybody who went on that trip would agree, is the Christmas Day meal that we had. Somebody in our party got a tip from one of their friends that this is the place you need to go in Rome for a good meal. And we're like, all right, let's go. I had no idea where we were going, what we were doing. So we're walking to this address. We end up on some completely nondescript street in Rome. Gray cobblestones, and it looked like residential. It wasn't rough residential, it was just residential, like row homes or townhomes or something like that, just kind of all together, and we didn't know where to go or what to do. And we're just kind of standing around, looking at the map, like did we come to the right address, what's going on? And then out of this door to my left burst an Italian chef from Central Casting. I'm telling you, he was short, he was rotund, he was thinning on top, but he had his hair knocked back. He was yelling Italian things. He was like a volcano of Italian joy, right? Like just, I'm not going to try to make any Italian noises because A, I think I would sound stupid. And B, I think that might be somehow racist in 2023. I don't know. I don't want to get in any trouble. But he was saying a bunch of Italian things very loudly and very joyfully. And he just comes bolting right up to me and he grabs my hand. He grabs my wrist. He didn't even grab my hand. He wanted me to not be able to resist at all. And he grabs my wrist and he yanks me into the building. He just starts pulling me towards the restaurant. And I'm looking at the other seven, like, don't leave me behind. Like, you got to come too. And he's just spouting off things and making motions. And he pulls me into what I think is going to be a house. And we walk in, and it's a restaurant, and there's tables, and there's people eating. And he just continues to be an Italian volcano of joy. And then we just plunge right into the kitchen. And I'm like, what's going on here? And again, it's like from a movie. There's stainless steel and steam and fire and chopping and Italian words. And I'm like, this is all happening too fast. And then he bursts out of the kitchen into this private dining room, and he points at the table gleefully. We all get around it. And then he grabs my mother-in-law and kisses her square on the lips and sits us down. And nobody was mad. We were a little offended. He didn't kiss the rest of us. Like it was just, he just sat us down. And as soon as he sat us down, somebody else comes out of the kitchen with whatever the first course was, probably prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella and whatever. And they set it down, and he says his stuff, and he asks what kind of wine we want. He's got a great wine pairing, and nobody else there drank wine. And I'm sitting there. It's my first year in marriage. I'm with a teetotaling family, and quietly I'm like, well, this is stupid. I mean, can I get a little bit of wine? But no, no deal. But they kept just bringing the food, right? The first course is done. He comes and he joyfully sweeps it away. Someone comes out of the kitchen with the next course. And this must have happened seven or eight times. I don't know what we had. I don't know what we ate. I know it was the best meal I've ever had in my life. I know that I will never forget it. When you ask me what's the best meal you've ever had, I will always say that meal in Rome. That's what I remember more than anything. And one of the things that sticks out to me is his joy in hospitality and that infectious joy that spread around the table. And that that's a memory as a family that no one can ever touch, that you can never take away. There was power in that afternoon. And the Italians do it right. When you have a meal over there, you're not going anywhere for like three hours. And you better plan for a nap afterwards. He just keeps bringing stuff. And it was so good and so wonderful and clearly so memorable. And you guys know that meals are powerful too. That's why they occupy such an important space in our culture. When someone gets married, biggest day of their life so far, what do we do? Immediately following someone's wedding ceremony, we go eat together. What do we do the night before someone's wedding ceremony? We have a meal with our closest friends so that we can talk more intimately than when we have to invite all the acquaintances and pay for their meals at the big one the next day. When we have a funeral, what do we do at a funeral? While the family is at the graveside service, someone who loves them is back at their house collecting meals from everybody else so that when the family gets there, they can sit down and they eat. When someone comes over to the house, what's the first thing you say if you're a decent human at all? What can I get you? You hungry? You thirsty? When someone comes in town to visit, what do we do? What are we going to eat? What do you guys want? See, whether we realize it or not, meals hold a sacred place in all of our lives. They're special. They're important. The table is an image that all of us know, that all of us share, that all of us gather around. And those moments around those tables are sacred. And Jesus knew this too. And it's why I think on bright display in the Gospel of Luke is Jesus' commitment to sitting down and having meals with people. But he's not simply eating and drinking. That's not all he came to do. As a matter of fact, that's not even at all what he came to do. He came to eat and drink with people because around the table, conversations happen. Stories are shared. Laughter is exchanged. If it's a really good meal, really good meal. We'll tear up together. We'll learn something about the people we're sitting with. It forces us in the busyness of our lives to stop and focus on what we're doing and who we're with. And Jesus understood the power of a meal. And so over the course of this series, as we prepare for Easter, we're going to look at how Jesus uses his meals in the Gospel of Luke. We're going to look at what he uses the table for. Because Jesus used meals as ministry. He uses the table to symbolize provision. He uses the table to include those who feel ostracized. He uses the table to try to convert those who may be lost and wondering. He uses the table to build community. He uses the table near his death to symbolize what he's about to do. He uses the table to help us always remember what he did. And then most powerfully, I think, he uses the table as a shadow of the reality that is to come in eternity when we are promised in Revelation 18 and 19 that we will sit down one day at the greatest banquet of all time, the marriage supper of the Lamb, where we celebrate the bride of Christ, the church being swept up into heaven to exist with God in perfect peace for all eternity. The marriage supper of the Lamb and the truth of it and the existence of it and the hope for it is the hope to which we all cling. And every meal we have is a shadow of what is to come in heaven. And that's what we're going to talk about on Easter. But what we're going to see as we move through this series is Jesus using meals as ministry. And it's going to cause us to ask, kind of that prompt that we left in the video, it's going to cause us to ask, what would happen if we began to think about our meals the way Jesus did? What would happen if we began to look at lunch and dinner, I mean, not breakfast, like nobody does anything for breakfast, okay, so we don't have to worry about that. But what would happen if we looked at lunch and dinner as opportunities for ministry? To bridge gaps with people. To build relationships with people. Even just to solidify things within our own family and have good spiritual conversations. What would happen if just for this season, for these six weeks, we allowed ourselves to think about our meals the way that Jesus thought about his meals. To that end, we have some things to help you do that as we move through this series. The first is this. This is a booklet of conversation prompts, and you can fold it and it sets up like a triangle, like one of those calendars. And so these are all sitting on the information table out there. And what we're encouraging everyone to do, one per family, please, because we didn't print out enough for all you guys to be greedy. What we're encouraging you to do, if it makes sense at all in your universe, and I know that for some this is not going to make sense, and I don't mean to exclude anyone, and I'm sorry about that, but if it makes sense in your family, grab one of these. Every week, there's a couple of verses that tie in with the sermon that you or your kids can read at the beginning of the week so everybody has the right context what we're talking about. And then every day is just a different conversational prompt. It's just one. It's not a list of small group questions. It's very low bar, very attainable. It's just one conversational prompt that has to do with the sermon from that week. It's an opportunity for you guys as families to use your meals with some purpose, to have meaningful, important conversations around your table. And so I would encourage you to take this, set it up, put it on your kitchen table for this Lenten period for the next six weeks or so. Carly did a great job. It's going to fit in with your decor, Okay, it's going to look nice. Don't worry about that. Just go and put it on your table. And then every time you have a meal at that table, I know that it's not realistic to assume that five or six nights a week, we're all going to sit as families around a table. Maybe you do, and that's wonderful. But I know that a lot of us struggle for that. So if you miss days, don't beat yourself up about it. Nobody cares. But when you're sitting at that table as a family, grab it, flip to the day, and ask the prompt, and make everyone around the table answer. Sometimes this won't go anywhere. It'll be two minutes of awkward, and your kids will be mad at you, and then you'll move on to other things. That's okay. But maybe two or three times it'll spark a really important conversation in your house. And if it does, isn't it worth it being awkward a couple of nights? So I think we've got an opportunity to begin to use our dinner tables as families to have some meaningful conversations as we move through this series together. So I would really encourage you to take one of these. The other thing we want you to do in the next six weeks leading up to Easter is what I'm calling the dinner table challenge. Here's the challenge. We would love for you, if you're a grace person, if you feel comfortable doing this, if you're new here this morning, you're like, bro, I did not sign up for this. Okay, I understand. You're adults. Do this if you want. But here's the challenge, okay? Sometime over the next six weeks, we would love for you to invite someone to your table from grace who's never been around your table before. That's simple. Now, you're going to start giving out invites to people who have never been over to your house before. And they're going to go, are you inviting us over because of the challenge? And then you go, yeah, but like, you know, do you like hamburgers? Let's go. Nobody cares. Let's just zoom right through that and have people over to the house from grace that we've never had over before. And I bet we'll start making new friends and new connections. And I bet different parts of the church will start getting connected with other parts of the church, and I bet this can be a very positive thing. The second part of the challenge is have someone around your table who's not from grace, who's never been around your table before. And I know that this is going to look different for different folks. If the idea of having someone around your table is terrifying because you're an awful cook or you're a hoarder and you don't want them to see your shame, like whatever it is, go out to dinner with some people. Make some reservations and go and talk with some folks from grace that you've never done that with, with some folks not from grace that you've never done that with. But I do think, and we're going to talk more about this next week, I do think that there is a power and an efficacy to having people over to the house, to preparing the meal, to going through those things to show hospitality. But however that makes the most sense in your context, that's the dinner table challenge here in the next six weeks. Have someone around your table from grace who's never been there. Have someone around your table not from grace who's never been there. And I'm just telling you, I really think God's going to do some cool stuff with that if we'll walk in it. I really think God is going to spark some good conversations. I really think he's going to make some good connections. And this isn't at all the reason why I'm doing this, but I think it's going to bring some people to grace. And if it doesn't bring them to grace, but it brings them to a church, great. Great. You guys know me. I'm not trying to get more people. We don't have enough room for all your friends anyways, and I'm not going to two services until the fall. Because Aaron Winston would quit. Just today, he would quit. But man, what if you invite somebody from your neighborhood who hasn't prioritized Jesus in a while, but because they interact with you, because they interact with your family, because you express friendship and hospitality to them, they decide that they want to re-engage with their Savior. Isn't that great? And who cares what church they go to after that? So that's the dinner table challenge. That's what we want you to do, and we want you to grab one of these and use that for the next six weeks. This is also probably a good time to mention something that I've been thinking about for a long while. I guess it was maybe the summer where Carly came to me and she said, hey, can I change the logo? And I'm like, what's wrong with the logo? That's grace, you know? It's fancy. And she's like, what? I don't like it. And then I looked at it. I don't know if you guys can see this. I'll show it to you afterwards if you can't. Yeah, but it looks better here, all right? Jeez. It is on the screen, and that is helpful. So you see it on the screen, and here it's all silver. So when it's one color, it looks like a helmet for Mickey Mouse. That's what it looks like. It looks like we stand for Sir Mickey Duke of Raleigh. And here it's in silver, so it's really pronounced. And once you see that, you just, you can't not see it. And here's the thing about the logo is like, what does it mean? Nothing, nothing. Well, there's hexagons. Yep. What do those mean? We don't know. There's a cross. We know what the cross means, and that's good. Pro-cross. But it doesn't really have any significance to it. And so the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I mean, yeah, sure. If there's something better that you can come up with, let's try it. And so with that kind of on the back burner, I also had this other thought about grace. And I think that we can marry the two and the logo. I don't have a logo to unveil for you this morning. I'm not like building to that, so don't get excited. We're working on it, all right? I just realized the anticipation I was building. No, that's not, mm-mm. I don't have anything yet. I can hand-draw you one. But there's a lot of different ways to think about a church. And after walking with you guys for almost seven years, I think I really know how we think about the church and how I think about the church. In Christendom, in church world, you can come across churches that kind of present themselves as almost this weight room, like this machismo, I'm going to just man up and be a good Christian and be a warrior for Jesus. And whether you're a woman or a man, you need to man up and you need to be tough for Jesus. And okay, in some contexts, that's effective and useful for the kingdom, and that's great. But that's not me, and that's not us. I grew up hearing this analogy to help us think about church, that church isn't a cruise ship, it's a battleship, right? Church isn't just this good time gang where you just have the best time possible and you just cruise along trying to have fun and get through life and just enjoying things. It's a battleship where we fight the enemy and we attack and we move forward and we're on mission and we press. And that has a lot of stuff that resonates with me. The problem is, when you think of the church as a battleship, we often get confused about who the enemy is, and we start to shoot at people that we don't have any business shooting at. So I don't really love thinking about the church as a battleship. So as I think about the church, and I think particularly about grace, I think grace is a banquet table, and everyone is invited. I think of grace as just this big party where we're celebrating our Savior, where we sit around a table every week, and we gather to share about our Savior. Where we sit around a table every week and we gather to share about our weeks and to hear what Jesus is doing and where he's taking us. I think about grace as this banquet table where everyone is welcome. If you want to bring your friends, bring them. If we fill up this room too much, I'll just walk around the room going to people who I know who have been going here for a long time and say, go stay in the lobby. Somebody needs your seat. We're fine with that. Everyone is invited to this table. There is not a head to this table. It's round. We're all equals. We're all together just trying to cling to the hope of the promises that we see in Scripture, knowing that one day we will sit around the great banquet table. Grace is a table where if you're sad, you can come here and you can grieve and you can mourn. Grace is a table if you're joyful, you can come here and celebrate and not allow that joy to terminate and the experience that's making you joyful, but turn in reflection to the God who is the author of that joy and share it with the people who love you most and best. Grace is a place for weary pilgrims to come and rest, for wanderers to settle. Grace is a table where the wounded can come and they can heal, where the weary can come and they can rest. It is a place where people who feel lonely, who need community, can come and find it. It is a place for those of us who have community to turn and offer that to other people who need it as well. Grace is a place where everyone is invited to come and celebrate in the majesty of our Savior. It is a place to come where we are loved and we allow ourselves to love others. And we do that in celebration of the God who loves us most and first and best. And so I think this series is most appropriate for who we are and for how God has shaped our faith, for how God has brought us to understand what it means to live the Christian life. And so more and more, I want us to see grace as a table that we bring everybody around to be refreshed and revived, then go back out. And I want us, as we go back out, to think of our meals more purposefully for the next six weeks and ask ourselves the question, how can we use our meals as Jesus did? And as we come back over now five more weeks, we're going to look at how Jesus used meals for ministry every one of those weeks. It'll culminate in that Good Friday service, and then hopefully we'll have the best Easter that we've ever had. But now I'm going to pray, and Aaron of the band is going to come up, and I don't know if we'll have lyrics for it or not, but if we don't, it's no big deal. Just listen for them. And they're going to sing over us a song that I think is thematic, not just for this series, but for Grace as well, and I'm excited for you guys to learn it and experience it. Let's pray. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for the gospel of Luke and all the truth that we find in it. Lord, thank you for opening my eyes to the way that your son used meals in that book in his life. I pray that we would use them in the same way, that we would see meals as sacred spaces, that we would invite others into those, that you would use those of us with gifts of hospitality, with gifts of conversation, that you would break some of us out of our shells and help us to make the connections that honestly our souls need so desperately. God, I pray over this series and what's happening at Grace. I feel like I can see you moving powerfully here, and so I pray that you would continue to do that and that nothing that we would do would get in the way of what you want to do. May we be sensitive to your guiding, sensitive to the Spirit in this season. Even as we consider who to invite, God, that you would move us in the direction of the connections that you want us to make. Lord, use this series in a powerful way, not for the sake of grace, but for the sake of the families and the individuals that comprise this place. We thank you for giving us a table here that we can all gather around. We pray that we would always be grateful to you for that. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Good for you for being here today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. Do we have anybody here who particularly cares who wins, feels very stridently about the Eagles or the Chiefs? No one's willing to admit. Okay. All right. I saw one fist up indicating neither team, but go your team, Kay. I will be cheering for them tonight on your behalf. This is literally, in my opinion, the worst weather possible. It's almost freezing and it's raining, but it's not cold enough to actually have anything fun happen, so we just trudged through it together, and here you are. Thanks for being here. This morning, we are appropriately talking, based on the weather, appropriately talking about mourning and grief and sadness. As we go through our series, The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the Beatitudes that come at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus's first recorded public address. And he opens up that address, that sermon, with a list of nine blessings in the book of Matthew. You find them in chapter five, and then the following sermon in five, six, and seven. And when he opens up with these blessings, he's speaking exactly to where the Israeli people are at the time. And he says, if this is you, then you're blessed. And so last week we opened up the series and we talked about that word blessed. And it's important that we define that and understand what it means to be built, to be blessed by God. And what it means very simply is to be fully satisfied, is to have all that you need, to be lacking for nothing, which when you think about it is a pretty profound definition of blessing. Because we can be in all different stages and all different instances in life, in all different situations, we can have plenty, we can have a little, we can be hurting, we can be exuberant, and in that moment we have all that we need, God says we are blessed. So this morning we look at one of the blessings, and it's probably the blessing that I find to be the most counterintuitive. It's when Jesus says this in Matthew chapter 5 verse 4 very simply, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. When this blessing is recounted in Luke, it says blessed are those who weep for they will laugh. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. And I don't know what you think of when you think of mourning, people who mourn. And maybe my perspective as a pastor is a little bit different than others. I don't know. I don't have another perspective. But there's things in life that we are sad about that cause us to grieve, right? The loss of a relationship when you're in middle school or high school. The person you like doesn't like you back. That's devastating. This causes us great mourning and teenage angst. We know about this. The loss of a job, the loss of an opportunity to get a promotion. Something bad happens to your kid and you mourn that. There's a little bit of sadness. There's different degrees of sadness and mourning. But what I think Jesus is talking about here, where my mind goes, what I think is implied in the Luke version of it, blessed are those who weep, what I think of is this deep, soul-aching sadness that there really are no words for. If you've lived life long enough, you have walked through a grief like that. Or you've walked with others or seen others as they walk through a grief so deep and so profound that words fail you. What do you say to parents whose eight-year-old had an adverse reaction to a prescription drug that they were given for a simple illness and it causes them to die and you have to do their funeral, what do you say to those parents? What do you say to people who are young who lose their parents way too early in a profoundly sad way. What do you say? What do you say to people who sit in the midst of the wreckage of their marriage? Sometimes because of decisions they did not make, and now they are grieving not just their marriage, but the future they had always envisioned for them and their kids. What do you say in the midst of that grief? What do you say to the wife with three kids under five who just lost her husband? What do you say when your friends have miscarried for the third time. When I think of mourning, grief, sadness, that's what I think of. Those times in life when the sadness is so profound, the ache is so present, that words fail you. And it would feel altogether stupid to hug them and say everything's going to be okay. Because it just doesn't seem sufficient. What do we say in those moments? Well, here's what Jesus said. That you're blessed if you're there. Because you will be comforted. Now, all those situations I just listed out for you are situations that I've been in. Situations I've seen. Situations I've walked with other people through. And it never occurred to me in those moments, nor will it occur to me in the future moments, to say to them, you know what, I know you're hurting right now, but you are blessed because God's coming for you. And yet, this is what Jesus says to a grief-stricken people, to dads who can't afford to feed their children, to a society in which the average age of death and infant mortality rate were respectively incredibly low and incredibly high. They knew pain and sorrow and grief. And Jesus says to them, you're blessed for you will be comforted. How is it that Jesus can say that to those people? How is it that Jesus can say that to us in the midst of our grief and our pain? And how is it that mourning can be a blessing? That in our mourning, we can see that we actually have all that we need. I think one thing that is helpful for me, it might not be helpful for everyone, but one thing that is helpful for me based on the Luke iteration of the Sermon on the Mount. In Luke's version of the Sermon on the Mount, there are blessings and then there are woes. There are woes to counterbalance those blessings. So when Luke records it, he remembers that Jesus says, blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh. And then later when he gets to the woes, he says, woe to those who laugh, for they shall weep and mourn. And so he introduces kind of this cyclical nature of life. There will be seasons of mourning and there will be seasons of laughter. There will be seasons of celebration. There will be seasons of sadness. And so what we see in life, what we see in Ecclesiastes, what we see in the biblical text over and over and over again, and what we know experientially is that morning is as natural as morning. Morning in life is as natural as morning in the day. What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that 18 hours from now, if Jesus doesn't come back and stop it, morning's coming, right? I don't know if I did the math right. I'm just throwing out 18 hours. You might disagree. I don't know when sun rises tomorrow, but technically speaking, if we don't have any more UFOs invading our country, Lord knows what's going on there. As long as Jesus doesn't come back, in 18 hours, it'll be morning. It's coming. There's nothing we can do about it. Whether we can see it or not, like today, whether we want it or not, unless Jesus stops time or returns and breaks the cycle, morning is coming. And in life, until Jesus returns, until he breaks in and breaks the cycle, mourning is coming. So when we mourn, when we hurt, when life is hard, we ought not be surprised by that. We ought to just think, it's my turn. This is inevitable. Everyone mourns. And I think it's really important to point this out. It's one of the large reasons. I had nine blessings to choose from. I chose this one, and it's one of the big reasons I chose to spend the morning highlighting mourning and the fact that it is cyclical and inevitable and will happen. Because as long as I am your pastor, I will do whatever I can from this small stage to beat back the idea that once we sign up for God's agenda, that he gives us a get out of grief free card. There is this pernicious idea in Christian history that when I begin to follow God, everything else is going to go okay for me. I'm going to close the sale and I'm going to avoid the big hurts and I'm going to avoid the big things and the raindrops of grief will miss my head and my family's heads. And yeah, sure, I mean, I'm going to have to go through some sadness at some times, but it's not going to be too bad. He'll never give me more than I can handle. The Bible has nothing to say about that. Nowhere does Scripture indicate that following God is a get-out-of-grief-free card for his children. And it's an incredibly damaging thing to teach otherwise. Because what happens is we find ourselves in the midst of mourning and we think, my God has betrayed me and let me down. Because he's allowing me to hurt this much. And what right and good theology says is, no, no, no. God never promised that those things wouldn't happen to you. But he does make a lot of promises to us in the midst of that morning. One of my favorite ones, it's one that I mention in funerals when I do them. It's one that buoys me that I am reminded of. There's a passage in Isaiah that says, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we hurt the most, God is closest to us. When we are crushed in spirit, when we are weeping, when we are mourning, when it's that soul ache is when God himself sees us most and clings to us hardest. I can't ever hear that verse without thinking of the dynamic, and maybe it's because we're in the season where we have young kids. I can't ever hear that verse without thinking of the dynamic of how a young kid, when they hurt, runs to mama or runs to daddy, right? How the only thing they want in the world is the shelter of their parents. Jen was able this week to see this play out in real time. Lily was involved in a spelling bee, and it was an off-campus spelling bee. So Lily, or Jen had to take her to another school. Jen is my wife, by the way. Lily's my daughter. They're not just two random people I talk about. So Jen was taking Lily to the spelling bee, and they get there. And the way that this thing was set up is they gather all the kids together, and they take them into the classrooms, and the parents sit in the gym. And they just silently watch these double doors. And it's grades one through eight. And as it's your kid's turn, you don't know what's happening in the classroom. As it's your kid's turn, they spell and you know, they get it right and they stay in the classroom or they miss it and they have to do the walk of shame in front of all the parents. They come trickling through the double doors, dejected, and everyone knows you're not very smart. And then here they come. And so the parents are just sitting there staring at the doors. I'm, I'm at the house hanging out with John, who is my son. And, and just, I can't get enough. I'm just texting Jen nonstop. I'm on, I'm on the edge over here. I can't take it. What's going on? What's going on? Who's coming out? She's giving me live updates. Oh, but someone like someone's been defeated from our little school. Uh, the, the, this little boy, this little girl, they've come out. They said, Lily's hanging in there. It's round 15. She's fighting hard. I'm like, go, Lily, you know. But as these kids come out one by one, they come through the door. And what do they do? They're scanning the room for their parents. And they run to mama, and they hug mama. And the first kids who get out, they're fine, you know. They didn't have high expectations for the day. They're good. Let's hit the road, mom. Maybe there's a Shake Shack down here. But the kids who lasted longer, man, they were in it, right? It gets stressful in that room, first grade for two and a half hours spelling words. They start to hope. Lily wore her gold shoes that morning. She thought she was going to win. And so gradually they start to come out. When they hug mama, they're crying, they're hurting. They're releasing the stress of the day, the disappointment, maybe a little embarrassment. And the only one in the world who can comfort them is their parent, right? They're hurting. They're mourning. And sure enough, Lily comes out of there. She looks around for Jen, runs to her. They cry together. Lily cries because she's disappointed. Jen cries because she's a mom. And she sees that she has a different perspective on the pain than Lily does. She has a different perspective on the disappointment that Lily does. And she cries mostly because she just hurts for Lily. And after a minute or two, classmates start to gather around, and everyone gives their condolences, and then one little girl tells Lily very happily, they have cake pops here. And then suddenly, the spelling bee fades, and we're cake pops and grilled cheese at Zaxby's, and the world is right. But this is what we do when we hurt. We come through the gym doors and we scan the horizon for our Heavenly Father. We're drawn to Him. And He's drawn to us. And He sees us in those moments. And then, in those moments, when we need him, when we need his arms to wrap around us, when our soul aches, and we will never be too big, and we will never be too tough, and we will never be too manly, or whatever other stupid adjective we could put there to need our heavenly father to wrap his arms around us. We will never be beyond that. And when we hurt the most, He offers Himself the most. He comforts those who are crushed in spirit. He is close to the brokenhearted. And when He is close to us, do you know what He does? John 11, 35, He weeps with us. He holds us and he weeps too because his perspective on our pain is a little different. Because he knows that we don't really understand what it is we're walking through, but he sees it for what it is. And he holds us and he comforts us. This is what Jesus does in John 11, 35 that I mentioned. His best friend Mary has lost her brother Lazarus who's very close to him too. And she weeps to Jesus, why'd you let this happen? And he doesn't answer her, he just weeps with her. I will never get over the idea that there is an all-powerful, divine being who spoke the vast universe into existence, who knows who I am, and he knows the hairs on my head, and when I weep and when I hurt, he weeps with me. He is that intimately involved in our lives. Whether it's a small hurt or a big one. He's there. And what I find interesting about the way that God comforts us is that so often if you say, well, how does God wrap his arms around me? I think so often he does that through his other children, right? So often God comforts us by sending his children to be the ones who are the vehicles of that comfort, to wrap their arms around you, and maybe to say everything's going to be okay, and maybe just to say, I know it seems like everything isn't going to be okay, and I don't know what to tell you, but I'm here and I love you. And I'm pretty sure God loves you too. And let's just let that be enough right now. So often when we hurt and it says that God is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. How does he do that? By sending his children, his hands and his feet into our lives to comfort us. And what's so amazing about this comfort when they offer it is that the best comfort, and you know it if you've been through it, the best comfort when our soul aches only comes from people who have walked that path too. Many of you know that part of our story is that in 2019, Jen's dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he fought that battle hard until the end of 2020. And it was in early December of 2020 that we were about to have a service and I got a call just before the service. Jen's uncle was down there with her dad in Athens and outside of Atlanta. And he called me and he said, hey, it's time. You need to get the family down here. And I said, okay. Did the service. Went home. Jen was packing up the kids, getting things ready. And in our scramble to get out of town, there was a knock on the front door. And it was her friend Lisa. She had heard that it was time to go. And she came over. And she knocked on the door and she hugged Jen. And I don't know exactly what she said, but it was not much. But she essentially just said, I'm so very sorry. And they hugged and they cried. And Lisa left and we went to Georgia. Now what makes that hug and those words so profound from Lisa is that she had just walked through that with her own mother. So when she looked Jen in the eye and she said, I am so very sorry. She knew exactly the path that Jen had walked for those previous two years. The ups and downs and the good phone calls and the bad phone calls and the hoping and the praying and the staying up at night. She knew all that. She knew how terrible that was. And she knew how terrible the next few weeks were going to be and what we were going to see and witness and walk through. She knew that. And all of that went into, I'm so very sorry. And those words brought Jen better comfort than the dozens, if not hundreds of people, including me, all along the process who had hugged her tearfully and said, I'm so very sorry. Because if you haven't walked that path, that's great. I'm glad that you're sorry. I know you are. I appreciate that. I received that. But you don't know. So when someone who has walked that path of grief, who's been through that divorce, who's been through that dejection or disappointment, who has experienced that loss, can look you in the eye and say, I'm so very sorry. It carries a different weight. And so it occurs to me that one of the things that makes us blessed when we mourn is because when we get to the other side of that mourning and we are comforted and we have all that we need and we move through it and our heart and our soul heal in whatever way they can, that we will also get to be the hands and feet of Jesus as God himself comforts his hurting children down the road. So you could almost say, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted and comfort. That in the midst of your mourning, it is cold solace. But the reality is for the rest of your life, you will be able to offer empathy and tears that will mean more to people because of the path you've walked than any other empathy and tears they might get. The hardest thing I've ever walked through from a mourning perspective is our miscarriage. The first time we got pregnant, the time before Lily, we miscarried. And before that, as a pastor, and I'm also just ridiculously pragmatic and stupid sometimes, as a pastor, when I would hear that couples had miscarried, my honest, dumb thought was, oh, well, that's too bad. They'll have another one. Which is just mind-numbing, but I was also in my 20s. I just hadn't experienced enough life to know that that's not what a miscarriage means. It's the loss of a dream. It's the loss of hope fulfilled. It's incredibly devastating to walk through that. Particularly if you've tried really, really hard to get pregnant. Particularly if it's not your first one. And in some ways I'm glad that we have walked through that because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt it has made me a better pastor for couples who are walking through that as well. And I would never again cheapen that grief by trying to move past it and look ahead. But I can hug them and look them in the eye and know their pain and say, I'm so sorry. And so in that small way, through our grief, God allows Jen and I to be blessings to others when the time comes. And so part of the blessing of mourning is knowing that in this cycle of weeping and laughing, when other people enter into a mourning phase, we can walk with them and be used by God to bring them comfort. And here's what's really interesting about the comfort that he brings us when we are hurting. When he brings a person along, when a song shows up in an unexpected place, when we are scrolling and we just happen to see something that touches us, whatever it might be, whatever that temporal comfort is that he gives us, that temporal comfort is intended to point us to our eternal comfort. This comfort that God offers us as we hurt is temporary. It's a salve. It's a balm. It's a band-aid. It helps our scarred souls, but it does not fully heal us. It is a temporal comfort intended to point us to and remind us of the eternal comfort that we cling to. As I was preparing this sermon, I sat down with Jen and I just said, listen, you've been through profound grief and I feel like I have not. What do I say? What do I talk about? I actually pitched a couple of ideas. I said, here's what I was thinking about saying. And she looked at me and she was like, those are not helpful to me. All right, cool. Well, then what should I say? And she shared this verse with me and told me that this is something that sustained her and continues to sustain her. And I think that there is tremendous power to this idea. And honestly, she said, it's that Hebrews verse that talks about hope being our anchor. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a good verse. Googling off to the side. Which verse is this? It's one that had not stuck out to me before, but it is now one that I will never forget. But it says this in Hebrews chapter 6 I want us to hold on to is this idea that this hope anchors us. It anchors us. And one of the things that she kind of pointed out to me is that that cycle of mourning, that cycle of weeping and laughing, of mourning and celebration, of times of plenty and times of little, That's inevitable. Those things are artificial. Life ebbs and flows around us. But the thing that keeps her anchored, that keeps her steady, that keeps her pointed at God is the hope that she clings to. Whether life would seek to buoy you in exuberance or drown you in sorrow. There is an anchor that holds us there in the middle, and that anchor is our hope in Jesus. That's what our hope is placed in. The anchor is the hope, and the hope is placed in Jesus. In Jesus doing what? In Jesus doing what he says he's going to do. I say all the time that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And the way that I always say it, and it's particularly applicable this morning, is that he's going to come back one day and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. In the midst of our mourning, and for that matter, in the midst of our celebrations, the comfort that we have in each scenario reminds us of the eternal comfort that Jesus has promised us. That one day he's coming back. And one day he's going to break the cycle. There's not going to be any more weeping and laughing. There's only going to be laughing. What God's promise is and what our hope is, is that one morning there will be no more mourning. There will be a day that breaks at some point in the future. We don't know when and we don't know how long we have to wait, but there will be a day that breaks. And when that day breaks, the only mourning that's left is the next day. There will be no more mourning with the children of God. And one of the great solaces we have is that if our grief is related to loss, the loss of a loved one, if they know Jesus, they are experiencing that mourning already. And so in the midst of the ebbs and flows of life, when our soul aches, we can hold on to that anchor of hope that reminds us of who Jesus is and what he came to do. That reminds us that Jesus promises us in Revelation 19 that he's gonna come back and on his thigh is gonna be written righteous and true and he's gonna conquer death and sin once and for all and there will be no more mourning. Revelation 21, I love to remind you of it. There is coming a day where God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things, the things that bring you grief, the things that scar your soul, the things that make your heart ache, that make you wonder if you can go another day. Those things will never happen again because they will have passed away. That is the promise of Jesus and that is the hope that anchors our souls as we go through the ebbs and flows of life. And as Christians, that is our greatest hope. That is our greatest encouragement. That is what we cling to. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes that I share every Easter. I believe it's Pope John Paul II who says, we do not give way to despair for we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. Because Jesus died and rose again on the third day and conquered sin and death and promises us a day, promises us a morning where there will be no more mourning, we believe that he will come again and do what he says he's going to do. And so what we can say for sure, when we find ourselves in the depths of despair, when we find our friends drowning in sorrow, is that we can whisper into their ear, hang on, cling to the hope that one day things like this will not happen anymore and that one day you will be healed and that one day, because of the hope that Jesus gives us, you will be reunited, you will be restored, you will be made right. So how is it that Jesus can say, blessed are those who mourn? Because he knew what he was going to do. And he knew that one day he would take away all of that mourning and make sure that for eternity we exist in joy and laughter. And so we cling to that hope in Christ. Let's pray. Father, I just pray for those right now who hurt. Those of us who are walking through a season of mourning and hurt and grief. I pray that they would feel your presence. That they would feel your love. That they would feel your comfort, that your church would serve them well. God, I pray for those who are in seasons of joy and celebration. Would we honor you well in those? Would we use those seasons to comfort others when we can? Thank you for the hope that you give us in Jesus. God, if there's anyone here today who doesn't know you, who hasn't yet professed a belief in your son, who hasn't yet claimed that future that you promised, I pray that they would. Even right now as we pray and sing and finish up, stir our souls and our hearts to you. Bring comfort to those who need it. Give the rest of us eyes to see that need. And give us the strength as we need it to cling to that anchor of hope. That one day you're going to come get us. And you're going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. In Jesus' name, amen.