Sermons tagged with Tradition

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

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

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to share in another morning with you like this. Before I dive into the sermon, I just wanted to clarify something. This week I saw someone from Grace in person that I haven't seen in a long time. I happened to be wearing a suit. And as they got out of their car, the first thing they said to me is like, oh, you look slimmer. And I said, slimmer than what? And they said, well, you know, the camera, you know, it adds like 15 pounds. And so you just, I've only seen you on camera. And so seeing you in person, it's just a little different. I was kind of taken aback by that comment and just wanted to assure those of you who have been following along during COVID that if you think that makes looking a little chubby, that's the camera. I am the picture of health. If you could see me in person, you would note that I am both slim and trim and fit. So I'm just throwing that out there for the record. Now, as we jump into the sermon, we're in the middle of this series called We Are the church in the first century ought to still guide the church in the 21st century because we are still the church. This week we arrive at a passage that I think is really crucial to the story of the church and the story of Acts and impacts you in profound ways that you're probably unaware of. I've never heard a sermon on this passage before. We're going to be in Acts chapter 15. If you have a Bible, I hope that you'll turn there. I've never heard a sermon on this before. I've never heard it taught before. But as I go through Acts for myself, I see chapter 15 as this crucial turning point moment that has an incredible impact on the rest of Acts, but also the rest of the New Testament. It has an incredible impact on you and I think is super important in the narrative of the book of Acts. So I'm hoping that this morning, the sermon may be informative. It might be educational. This might be a place that we haven't stopped and camped out in before and sought to understand. And then hopefully it can also be inspirational in that it will encourage in us some behaviors and thought processes that we see come out of the story, and we can apply those to our own life. So in Acts chapter 15, the council, the leadership of the early church is getting together. By this time in the story, it's Peter and James and John and the disciples, but it's also a group of Pharisees and some other people who have now been grafted into the leaders of the church. Some other converts with leadership potential are now in this leadership council and they're faced with this question. This is a crucial question. And the tension that we see underlying this 15th chapter of Acts is a tension that we see massaged out in the book of Galatians. It's a tension that we see that exists throughout the book of Romans and in the book of Hebrews and a lot of other Pauline epistles, a lot of other of Paul's letters. This is a tension that runs throughout the New Testament, which is how is this new church going to handle the integration of the law and which portions of the law should we integrate? Here's what's happening. The church sprung up out of a Jewish culture and a Jewish faith. God chose the Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, to be his people. And he gave them laws through Moses that we're going to talk about in a minute. And then through those people, God brought the Messiah, Jesus, who died for the whole world. And now Gentiles, non-Jews, are being grafted into this faith. Paul and Barnabas are going out and they're reaching people throughout the region. They're planting churches in Asia Minor. And all of these Gentiles are coming to faith. And the Jews have only ever understood faith through the lens of the law. So they're faced with this question, how do we integrate the Gentiles who don't know our culture and our laws into our faith with our culture and laws? And this is a hugely important question. To understand and appreciate the importance of the question, we have to appreciate the law. The law was given to the Hebrew people by God through Moses. Moses comes down Mount Sinai. He's holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments. That's in the book of Exodus. And then in the book of Leviticus, God adds more laws to their laws until they have about 630 total laws. Over 270 thou shalts and over 330 thou shalt nots. And so when you start to look at all of that, that is the complexity of the Jewish faith and the Jewish law. And for centuries, they had adhered to that law. The law that they received dictated to them their rhythms of life, the ebbs and the flows of life. It dictated to them their days, the rhythm of their days and their weeks and their months and their calendars and their celebrations and even their decades. Even every 50 years there was a certain thing that they had to do according to the law, the year of Jubilee. It dictated to them their social structure. It dictated to them how they interacted. It dictated to them principles about marriage and about faith and about what they needed to do and what they shouldn't do. It was inculcated into them from a very young age. Not only did the law dictate to them the machinations of their society, but it was also the ruler by which your spirituality was measured. The better you were at following the law, the better you were at being what we would think of as a Christian. The better you were at being a believer, the more faithful you were. The sign that you were in, that you were a participant in the law, that you were a claimant of the promises made to the forefather Abraham was circumcision in the males. And so part of the law was to be circumcised and then everything flowed out of that. So to be a Jewish person was to know the law inside and out. It was to be raised to follow it well. It was to measure your spirituality by the law, and it was even to believe that your path to reconciliation with God, if you were to ask them, how can you be saved? What do you have to do? They would say, obey the law, follow the law well. And so Peter and the council are faced with this really difficult question. All of these Gentile people who have no knowledge of the law are coming to faith and want to be a part of the church. And we want them to be a part of the church as our new brothers and sisters, but how much of the law should we ask them to adhere to? What of these rules and standards and practices that we've been following should we now apply to them? This is an incredibly important question because whatever they answer in Acts chapter 15, whatever they say are laws that still apply to you and I. Whatever they say here applies to Gentile, non-Jewish people applies to us in our faith. And that's the question facing them. How much of the law do the new believers who aren't Jewish have to follow? And so they get together in their council and they begin to discuss this. And there's a group of more conservative, they used to be Pharisees and now they're integrated into this new church, and they think that they should at the very least be circumcised. We should apply that part of the law to them. And what's helpful to understand is we know, hindsight is 20-20, we know now in light of history that the whole purpose of the law was to hold up a mirror in front of you and show you your need for a Savior. Because the law kind of comes out of this question of, God, what do we have to do to be right with you? How can I live to satisfy you? What can I do to reconcile myself to you and earn my way into heaven? And God says, okay, if that's what you want to do, here's the law. Here's all the rules. Follow these perfectly and you can earn your way into heaven. And so generation after generation of Jewish person did their best to follow these rules, fell short, and now we realize that the whole reason for the law in the first place was to hold a mirror up in front of you so that you would see your need for Jesus. This is why Jesus says, I did not come to abolish the law, I came to fulfill it. Romans 8 tells us that Jesus fulfills the law on our behalf because we are unable to. He came, he fulfilled the law perfectly, he died a perfect death for us, and now we live in an era of grace and faith rather than obedience to the law, and that's what reconciles us to God. The disciples are still working this out. They're still understanding how this new era of grace and faith integrates with this old era of the law. That's what makes this such a crucial moment in the history of the church. So there are some that are saying that the new Gentiles should at least be circumcised. There's other laws that they should follow. Which ones do we think are the most important? Which ones do we want to keep in this new church? And Peter has this remarkable moment of compassion in the midst of this discussion. I want you to hear what Peter says in Acts chapter 15. I'm going to pick it up in the middle of verse 7. This is how Peter addresses the leadership. He says, Now here's what he's saying. He's saying the early days. He's referring back to Pentecost, which we discussed in God has intended this whole time for Gentiles to be a part of this family of faith. He's made them His children too. He makes no distinction. He looks at the heart. In light of that, He says this in verse 10. I love this. Now therefore, why let's just stop for a second. As we stop and think which parts of the law should we apply to these new believers, which parts of the law should they have to follow, what parts should they have to obey, let's just stop and be realistic about something. We're not good at this. Neither us nor our fathers successfully followed the law. We've never been good at this. And you can read into that that there is no generation of people in the history of histories who should be better at following the law than Peter's generation. Peter's generation has centuries of family history poured into understanding this law, into following it well. They followed parts of the law instinctually by this point. It was ingrained into them. They had millennia of the law preceding them. They had teachings. They had methods of imparting it on children. They had known it their whole life. There's no generation that has ever lived that should better follow the law than Peter's generation, yet he looks around at the room and he says, guys, we stink at this. None of us follow the law well. He calls it a yoke or a burden, meaning he's acknowledging that everybody in that room had felt the disappointment of trying to follow the law perfectly only to fail and have to get up and dust yourself back off and double down on your efforts at discipline this time. Everybody in that room had experienced the disappointment and the sense of failure that comes when you can't successfully follow the law. Everyone in that room knew what it was in their heart of hearts to be woefully short of the standard of God, yet project this public image like they were exactly what God was looking for. He knew the hypocrisy in that room and the struggle in that place. And praise God for leadership like Peter's when he knows that so well and so intimately that he identifies it as a burden in his own life. And he says, with all compassion, why would we place that on our new brothers and sisters? Why would we ask them to do that when we can't even do it? They're Gentiles. They have every disadvantage in the world. They have no idea of all the laws. The learning curve on that would be so steep. It would be so discouraging to them and their faith. We have no learning curve, and yet we still stink at it. Why would we place that on them? It's incredibly compassionate. It's this woke moment of Peter to just be honest and authentic and admit where they all fall short. And he calls out the room. And they all agree with him. They all in their own way say, yeah, that's a good point. Let's not burden them with that. So then they begin the process of distilling down all of the 630 laws to the bare essentials. As we look at all of these laws, what are the ones that we think are so important that they still need to be acknowledged? And we've done stuff like this before. We've had done this exercise. This is how we plan series at church a lot of times. The last time we did this, where we whittled things down to some bare essentials, was when we as a staff planned the parables series. And what we do when we plan a series is we put everything up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables, and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40-something parables, and they're all up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40 something parables and they're all up on the whiteboard. And then I kind of look through them and I go, these are non-negotiables. These are ones that I love. I have to preach about it or it's going to just burn a hole in my chest. We've got to be able to do this. And then we look at some other ones and we go, what are the commonalities? What are the points of the parables? And we kind of look at ones that make similar points and then we pick the one that we feel like might be most impactful. And then from that group, we kind of say, all right, which ones are right for grace in this season and in this moment? Which ones do we need to hear and learn and be encouraged by the most? And so we whittle it down to the six or the eight, like bare essentials. These are the parables that we want to cover now. And you've done an exercise like that in your workplace and in your life too, and that's what the disciples are doing here. Of all the laws, which ones do we follow? Which ones do we tell the Gentiles, hey, these have been taken care of, but these are the ones that we think you should be mindful of? We get that answer later in the chapter, beginning in verse 28. This is the distillation of all the laws. I have in my Bible a note that you can't see, but it just says, that's it, in all capital letters with some exclamation marks and question marks, because this is what they've distilled it down to. They write a letter to the churches declaring their decision. And the letter says this in verse 28, That's it. That's it. 630 laws distilled down to those four things, and the first three are essentially the same thing. The first three is don't eat food that's been sacrificed to idols, which was a pagan practice. These churches existed in pagan cultures, and so there's a lot of things happening in their culture that didn't sync up with Scripture and the heart of God. And one of those things was don't eat of that meat. That's a pagan practice. Don't associate yourself with those people. That's highly offensive to Jews. Please don't do that. Then it says, This comes from Leviticus chapter 17. If you have notes there, make a note or make a note in your Bible. I have one in my Bible and just write Leviticus chapter 17. And in your free time, you can go back and read. But there's this whole explanation from God of why you don't eat the blood of an animal. And God explains that the very life essence of a creature is in its blood and that it's not ours to eat. That is sacred to God. So he tells us not to do that. That's near and dear to God. And to eat blood or to eat things that are strangled, to kill an animal by strangulation was a way to maintain the blood in the animal so that you could eat it later, which sounds repulsive to us, but that was a practice then. And all of those practices, eating food that was sacrificed to idols, eating food with blood or food that was strangled, were things that were deeply offensive to Jewish people. And so those three things can really be summed up in this idea of just don't do things that are, like, please just don't do things that are super offensive to Jewish people. There's going to be Jewish people in your midst. That's incredibly difficult for them to get over. Please don't offend them in that way. And please don't portray that image in society that you participate in those things. That's not what's best for those around you. And then there's a provision in there to avoid sexual immorality, which is probably just a good provision to put any time we're advising Christians or a group of people on anything throughout all of history. It's probably a good addendum to just say, hey, be careful with this. But it's particularly relevant in this culture because in those pagan cultures, they had far different rules and standards about sexual morality than Scripture does. In one of the cities, in Ephesus, there's a temple of Diana, and there was temple prostitutes that were priestesses that you could go and partake in any time you felt the need to. I read that in some of these cultures, intermarrying and family and cousins was a regular practice. And actually, if you go back to Leviticus 17 and then 18 following that same passage, it talks about that practice and advises and clearly gives laws against it. So in some ways, this is just a distillation of just those two chapters of the book of Leviticus. But what's going on in these pagan cities is that the north star of sexual morality was their culture. And Paul is saying shift that north star of sexual morality to Scripture, which just as an aside is still good advice for us today. It's very easy to shift our north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral, and it is our job to constantly maintain the north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral. And it is our job to constantly maintain the North Star of sexual morality as dictated to us by Scripture, by God's Word. But to me, there's a common theme in these provisions. As we ask the question, why these four things? Why is that what they landed on? I think that there's a common theme and a common concern in these that tells us the type of faith that we're supposed to have. As I read this and I see these provisions and this direction to the new church, what I hear coming from Peter and the council is this simple admonition to have a faith that considers others. What kind of rules and things should we follow? What should we concern ourselves with? We should concern ourselves with things that impact others. We should have a faith that considers others. And this, to me, makes a ton of sense. Those rules about what to eat, That's all about how it looks to other people. How does it look to the Jewish people? How does it look to the pagan people? Have a faith that considers them and not wanting to give the wrong impression or not wanting to give offense. Just be unselfish in that way. Be selfless in that way. And don't let yourself eat or partake in those things because of how it might be perceived. Have a faith that considers others over yourself. And isn't that the root of sexual sin? Isn't all sexual immorality fundamentally selfish? Isn't all sexual activity outside the bonds of a loving marriage fundamentally selfish? Because we take things from that person that aren't ours, and we give things to that person that aren't ours to give because they belong to our spouse. And in the end, sexual sin is a fundamentally selfish and self-seeking sin. And when we avoid that sin, we consider others. And so I hear Peter saying here, have a faith that considers others, that is others focused. And as I think about practically how to do that out of this story, out of this instance occurrence in the book of Acts, what are the things that we can pull out of this that we can apply to our faith today so that we can live out a faith that considers others? I think the first thing that we can do is that we can consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. We consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. I love the example of Peter in this passage where he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait. This part of our faith isn't working for us. Why would we pass that on to the next generation of believers? Guys, we're not good at this. This is a burden. This element of our faith discourages us and actually causes distance from God, not a clinging to God. So why would we perpetuate that in the next generation of believers? And as I think about my own life and the faith that I've inherited, I can see both sides of that happening in my life. I was led spiritually by people who grew up largely in the Southern Baptist Church in the 60s and the 70s. And when I say I was led by people, I mean my parents, I mean my pastor, I mean those that poured into me as I grew up. And in the 60s and 70s, the Southern Baptist Church was incredibly legalistic. Incredibly legalistic. You couldn't dance ever. You couldn't have dancing at your wedding. There's no talk of alcohol ever. Everyone's a teetotaler. If you did that, you're definitely a sinner and not a Christian. You could not go to the movie theaters. You could not play cards. Skirts had to be certain lengths. There was all these provisions and rules around the faith. And my spiritual leaders and my parents and their goodness and then their compassion looked at those elements of their faith and they said, these don't work for us. These aren't a true reflection of the heart of God. These discourage us and pull us away from God rather than encourage us to cling to him. So we're not going to pass on that legalism to the next generation. I grew up with a generation of leaders who passed on a compassionate faith and said, this part didn't work for us. This isn't from the heart of God, so we're not going to saddle you and burden you with that. But in the same way, as I think about what was passed on to me that I don't want to pass on to Lily and to those that I pass my faith on to, I think about how certain that generation was. I think about the certainty that people around me grew up with. My pastor was so certain about some things. People who poured into me were so certain about some things. They had very strong opinions about exactly when Jesus was going to return in the tribulation. I grew up with people who were so certain that Calvinism was right, that God chooses who he's going to save, and that we don't choose God. And I grew up around some people who said, no, you choose if you're going to choose God. He doesn't choose you. I grew up around some people who were certain that you couldn't lose your salvation and some people who were certain that you could. When I was growing up, it was so black and white. There was no gray. And as I've grown up in faith and become an adult leading my own family and now leading a church, and the rubber of theology meets the practical road of life. I've become far less certain about things. And I don't understand how things could be so black and white in a world that has so much gray, and scriptures that have so much nuance, and scriptures that lay things down next to each other like predestination and like self-determinism and go, yeah, both are true. And don't seem to want to resolve that for us. And so for me, I want to pass on compassionately the gift of uncertainty. I want the people that I lead, I want Lily to know, I want my church to know that it's okay not to be sure. Everything doesn't have to be black and white for us all the time. It's okay to wonder at God and not fully understand him. It's okay to not have all the answers. It's okay to go, is it possible that God chooses me to be saved? Yeah. Is it possible that I choose him? Yeah. Are both true? Yeah. It's okay to say, where does the intersection of my effort and then my prayer and asking God for his effort, where does that meet? What's the exact right amount of things to pray about and how long to pray for? And when do I just sit back and wait and ask God to come in and when do I meet him with my effort? I don't know. And that's all right. It's okay to not be certain about things as long as that uncertainty drives us into a deeper faith in God and his work through Jesus. So we ought to pass on a compassionate faith that's aware of the burdensome things that we might have added onto our faith We should maintain a simple faith. Jesus is constantly trying to get us to do this. This is what the disciples do. They distill all those 630 laws down to these four simple things that can be summed up and consider others. And Jesus is doing this too. Jesus says that the whole law and the prophets, all of those laws can be summed up in these two things. Love God with all your heart and your soul and your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And then later he says, this new commandment I give you, love others as I have loved you. Jesus is constantly simplifying a faith. And we generationally are constantly complicating it. Adding all of these rules and regulations and standards by which we judge ourselves and others that Jesus didn't ask us to adopt. I think we're constantly complicating our faith. And if we want to have a faith like Peter did, like the early church did, then one of the things that we need to do is be constantly simplifying our faith. And judging our standards by, is this loving of God? Is this appreciative of Jesus, and is this loving for others? Am I living out a simple faith that considers others? So I hope that that's what we'll do. I hope that we'll take this lesson from the early church, that each of us will have a faith that considers others more important than ourselves and that we'll consider others in our faith by passing on to our children and to those around us a compassionate faith and that we personally will maintain a simple, pure faith that prizes Christ and a love for him above all else and lets everything else flow out of that. And in doing that, I think we can capture the essence of the direction that was given to the church in Acts chapter 15. Let's pray. Father, we sometimes make being a Christian so complicated. We ask questions like, is it a sin to do this? Is it wrong to do this? Is this something that God wants me to do? God, I pray that you would help us clarify and simplify those things. I pray that we would be men and women who are after your heart, who cling to you, who strip away the things from our religion that only serve to discourage us and pull us away from you, that we would lean into you more, that we would know your son well. Father, give us a compassionate, self-aware faith that we can pass on to others. Give us a simple faith that is unencumbered of any expectations that you didn't place on us yourself. Father, I pray that you would bless us in this difficult time. I pray that you would bind grace together in the midst of COVID and not being able to see one another. I just pray and ask that you would continue to keep your hand on this place. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. It's so good to get to be with you in this way again. You know, I was thinking, typically in the summer, attendance and engagement in church, particularly in Grace, will fall off a little bit because we're all over the place. We're going to the beach, we're going on vacation, we're visiting people, and that's great. We love that we have the opportunity to do those things, but watching sermons this way and having church this way is actually kind of a nice thing as we get into the teeth of the summer that we can all come together from wherever we are. I know that by the time we are previewing this or premiering this, Jen and I are going to be at the beach watching it. So it's fun that we can all kind of scatter but still participate together as we come back for this moment. Last week, we took a break from our series in Acts, and we addressed the issues of racial inequality and racial injustice that we believe are still existent and pervasive in our culture. I can't imagine that you're watching this sermon and participating along with us at Grace and somehow missed that one last week, but in case you did, I would appreciate it if you would watch that. It was a special thing for me to share and a direction that I felt compelled to go. This week, however, we jump back into our series going through the book of Acts together called Still the Church. And the idea is kind of twofold. It's to help us understand where we came from. It's to help us understand that these are our roots, that we stand on the shoulders of this church, that these are our origins or our genesis, that the book of Acts depicts for us and details for us in a beautifully written letter by Luke. The activities and the behaviors and the events of the early church. I kind of picture a baby deer learning to walk as we watch the machinations of the church in Acts and we see it come to fruition and become the institution that we know it as today. But also as we go through Acts, we become familiar with that story and we see our roots and our heritage as people, members of the church, the body of Christ, children of God. So we're reminded that that's our heritage, but we are also extracting from it practices and principles and philosophies that still apply today. And we're saying that the church that we see in Acts is still the church that we should emulate now. What this church looks like is what grace looks like or should look like. And so when we started, we kind of have moved through the narrative. This is one of the narrative books in the New Testament. And it starts just so we can kind of orient ourself in the story today. Jesus goes to heaven. He leaves behind the disciples. He says, wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit and then go and share the gospel in all the corners of the world. That's your job. Go and build the church. That's what he leaves them there to do. So they go into this upper room and they wait for the gift of the Spirit. While they're waiting in this upper room, thousands of people in Jerusalem are clamoring around to see what they're going to say and what they're going to do and what's going to happen next in this great movement. And they receive the gift of the Spirit like flaming tongues on the day of Pentecost. And they go out on the balcony and they preach. They preach the gospel. They tell the story of who Jesus is and who he was. And the people hear it and they're moved and they say, we want in, what do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. And we talked about that repentance being the fundamental repentance of the church. That before we can become a Christian, that the very first thing we must do is repent of whatever we thought Jesus was and accept that he was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is. That's the repentance on which the entire church is built on. And then after that, we saw that after that repentance, 3,000 were added to the church. The church is now a mega church. It's's booming in Jerusalem. It's this movement. And then in Acts 2, verses 42 through 47, we have the quintessential passage that describes the early church. And we spent two weeks in that passage pulling out what we refer to as early church distinctives. What are the things that characterized the church then that should characterize our church now? After that in the story, as Luke, the author of Acts, shares, Peter and John are called into the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin is the religious ruling body of Israel. They're called in and they have to give an account for what they're doing. This movement is getting traction and they're put on trial for it. And at the conclusion of that trial, we see one of my favorite bits of advice in the Bible. This is a freebie. I can't go through Acts without bringing this up. I wanted to do a whole sermon on it, but it just didn't work out. But it's this advice from Gamaliel, one of the rabbis, one of the Pharisees, who is speaking to the Sanhedrin as they're trying to decide what to do about this movement. Do we quell it? Do we stamp it out? Or do we let it breathe? And Gamaliel says, if this is for man, then it will fade. But if it is from God, then there's nothing we can do to stop it anyways. And so they relent, and they watch, and they see this movement of the church begin to take off. And soon it's not just the disciples who are teaching, but it's others around them who are hearing and learning and who are being moved and who have the gift to teach. And so they're going out and they're doing that. And one of the people who's going out and teaching is a man named Stephen. It says that Stephen was teaching around the synagogue of the freedmen, which was a group of Hellenistic Jews. The synagogue of the freedmen, we assume, were former Roman slaves who had been freed. They were likely Greek-speaking Jews and not Hebrew-speaking Jews. And so they got together in their own synagogue and they met there, the synagogue of the freedmen. And apparently Stephen was working some signs and wonders that were having an impact on them. When we see Stephen in Acts chapter six, he's doing these things, he's performing signs and wonders, legitimate miracles that are drawing people into his ministry. And we assume based on their reaction that he's drawing people away from the synagogue of the freedmen. And so some of the leaders within that synagogue, we assume, it just says people in the synagogue, but we assume that they were the leaders, begin to get offended. They begin to get upset. They begin to get resentful of Stephen and his witness and his ministry and the power and efficacy of what he's doing. So they, we think, a lot of scholars think that they probably had a formal debate, a dressed debate where people came and attended and they argued back and forth with each other. But we know whether it was formal or informal that they debated and that the power of his words and his wisdom blew them away, that there was nothing they could do to touch Stephen. Everything they threw at him that he had an answer for. Everything he said they could not refute. He was leading this new church in this new way towards Christ away from what they were teaching at the synagogue of the freedmen. And when they couldn't defeat him in debate, they decided that what they would do is just levy false charges against him. That they would drum people up, that they would stir people up. Basically, what they did is they went to the Sanhedrin and they went and they told the principal. They told the teachers what they did. They were having a quarrel. They were having a spat with Stephen. They couldn't win. Stephen always got the better of them. And so they took their ball and they went home. They went, well, we're gonna go tattle on you. And so they went to the religious establishment and they told on Stephen. If you have a Bible with you this morning or wherever you're watching this, you can turn to Acts chapter 6. That's where we pick the story up. Acts chapter 6, I'm going to start reading in verse 12 and go all the way through 7-1. This is what the people from the synagogue and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council. And they set up false witness who said, This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law. For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us. And gazing at him, all who sat in the council saw that his face was like that of an angel. And the high priest said, are these things so? So his enemies, the people who opposed him, can't beat him in debate. They can't put down his movement or the movement that he's shepherding and participating in. And so they drum up these false charges and they stir up the people and they go and they throw him in front of the Sanhedrin, in front of the ruling body. And they levy these claims against them that are so funny and I think easy for us to understand. I think one of the big issues going on in our culture right now is the lack of nuance in our discourse. We don't know what news sources to trust. We don't know what tweets to trust. We don't know what Facebook posts to trust because what we do inevitably is the opposing side puts out a message or shares a thing or there's a speech or there's a statement or there's an action or an event. And then what the opposite side will do is pull the different things out that will fire up the base of their side and say, hey, this side said these things. When it's not an accurate picture of everything that they said, it's the worst possible picture of these little things that they said. And this is exactly what the synagogue of the freedmen is doing to Stephen. They're not giving the whole picture of what he's been teaching to the Sanhedrin. They're pulling out these little things that they know will be most offensive to them and accusing him of those things. They're saying he's claiming that Jesus of Nazareth came to overthrow the laws and the customs of Moses. Now that's an audacious claim because the laws and the customs of Moses, that's our Old Testament. That's what they refer to as the law and the prophets. That's their law. That's their Bible. That's everything that they know and cling to. And so for them to accuse Stephen of teaching that Jesus came to overthrow those things and to change them, that's a bombastic claim. That's salacious. That's a difficult thing to defend if it's true. And then to say that he intends to tear down the temple. That is the most holy place in Israel. That is the seat of power. It represents the very presence of God. It is the center of Hebrew worship. And to say that Jesus intends to tear that down, it's a big deal. And they get fired up too. The Sanhedrin hear this, they're upset, they're fired up, and they look at Stephen and they say, is this true? Is that really what you're teaching? Now listen, Stephen knows what's at stake with his answer. Stephen knows that if he navigates this poorly, he's going to die. And he knows that it's not an easy death. He knows that if he navigates this poorly, that they are going to kill him and they're going to kill him by stoning him. And just so we're all clear on what stoning is, they tie your hands around your back and push you off a cliff and drop big rocks on you until you die. It is death by blunt force trauma. Stephen knows that if he navigates this poorly, that that's what's waiting on him. When they ask him, what do you say, Stephen? He knows that if he answers poorly, he's going to pay with his life. And so I wonder, at this moment, if we put ourselves there in Stephen's place, how would we respond? What would we expect of Stephen? I wonder how I would respond. I think that I would expect Stephen, and I'm pretty sure I would want to calm everybody down. It's happening in a whirlwind. Emotions are there. They've misrepresented my story. I would want to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, hey, let's just take it easy. Let's just take a beat. Let's talk about this. And if you're Stephen, you can correct how they've been misled. You can say, yeah, Jesus is going to change the way that we adhere to some of the laws of Moses, but he said himself that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. He's the fulfillment of those customs. Yes, Jesus did say that he's going to tear down the temple, but in a way that he makes the need for it obsolete because the temple is the very presence of God. And now in this New Testament, in this new way, since the righteous one has died for us, we have the Holy Spirit in our hearts and we are now the new temples of God. That temple is good and we should respect it and it is wonderful, but it's no longer needed. If I were Stephen, I would want to show the Sanhedrin, listen, we're on the same team. We follow the same God. The things I'm preaching are a continuation of the things that you believe and have taught. I would want for them desperately to see that all I was doing is teaching a continuation of what they've always believed. And I would want them to see that Jesus was actually the fulfillment of all the things that they hold dear. I would want to throw the temple of the freedmen under the bus and say, they're just mad because they're losing people. They're just mad because they can't beat me. They're just upset. This is just sour grapes. Let's just calm down. And if that wouldn't work, because maybe the Sanhedrin would be resistant to that defense anyways, maybe that would be blasphemous, I can make a pretty good argument. If I'm in his spot, and I've got this successful ministry going on over here, people are being added to the church day by day, people are believing me, I'm working signs and wonders, and we see this movement happening now that's spreading out of Jerusalem, and I'm a vital part of that, I can totally see the validity of the thought process of just thinking to yourself, I'm going to say whatever I have to say to survive this day. I'm going to just do whatever it is I have to do to live through this. Whatever they want to hear from me, whatever I have to admit, whatever I have to confess, I'm just going to get through today. I'm going to tell them what they need to hear, and then I'm going to continue on with this ministry because it's valuable ministry. And honestly, if that's what Stephen did, I'm not sure that I would judge him. I would understand it. He's doing good things. Shouldn't he want to preserve those things and not die right here on the spot? That's what I would expect of Stephen. That's what I would do. But for the rest of chapter seven, we see Stephen's response. He goes on for a long time, 53 verses. And Stephen's response is not what I would expect. If you look at chapter seven of Acts, it is the best summation of Genesis and Exodus that exists. It is an incredibly succinct summary of the events that unfolded that led to the nation of Israel. If you're unfamiliar with that portion of Scripture, if you've never read through Genesis or Exodus, I would highly encourage you to read the cliff notes that we find in Acts chapter seven. It's a very good read. And so in the midst of these false accusations, in the midst of the stress, in the midst of the urgency, in the midst of the anger and the Sanhedrin, pressing upon Stephen and saying, hey, is this true? Are you really teaching this? Stephen, knowing that he was facing death, tells them their own story. He tells them a story that they all know. And he starts with their father Abraham, the one from whom all Jews have descended. And then he moves through Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. And then he fast-forwards the 400 years to Moses. And he talks about different events in Moses' life where he murdered the Egyptians and he has to flee to the wilderness. And he comes back 40 years later after being moved by the burning bush, compelled by God in the burning bush. And he frees the people and they move through the wilderness and he installs the law and they get to the banks of the Jordan River and Moses passes away and Joshua leads them across and they move into the promised land where they all now, Stephen and the Sanhedrin and the synagogue of the freed men and all the people watching where they all now sit. And he tells them a story that they already know. He tells them their story. And it's a story that they could all tell. Every one of the men sitting there judging Stephen, assessing the situation, they know the story. They know their Bible. They can all tell it. And so it makes you think that Stephen's building the case to do exactly what I said I would do, to say, hey, we're on the same team. Listen, I know all your history. I share it. I'm with you. And you feel like as he's saying it that he's going to end up making the point of we're all on the same team. Listen to this clarity. But he finishes telling the story and he punctuates it like this. It's unbelievable to me the confidence and the boldness that he has in this moment. Stephen finishes telling the story and then he says these things, beginning in verse 51. Yo, he stuck his face in the wood chipper, man. He just put it right in there. He tells the story. He brings everyone along. He shows that he has an understanding and a grasp of the scriptures like they do. And then he calls them uncircumcised of heart and eyes, which flares up the whole room. Because you have to remember in this context, circumcision was a sign of the covenant. If you were a Jewish circumcised male, then you were saved. You were in. You and God were good. That was the sign that your parents had committed you to the same God that was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the rest of their forefathers. It was the visible sign that you are in, that you are what we would refer to as a Christian or saved, that you and God are good. And Stephen says, no, forget it with your circumcision. You're uncircumcised in the heart and of the eyes. You're uncircumcised where it matters. You think you're saved. You lean on this tradition that you have, but that's not it at all because you don't mean any of the things that you teach. You've missed the point. You've gotten it wrong. You're not even a Christian. You're not even a believer. You don't even preach. You don't even live out the stuff that you preach. He's calling them hypocrites and false teachers. And then he associates them with the people who killed the prophets. The very prophets that they uphold, the very prophets that they teach, they consider the prophets their fathers. And Stephen says, no, no, no, no, no. You're not descendant from the prophets. You're descendant from the ones who killed the prophets. And then he goes to the last prophet, John the Baptist. You even killed him when he came and was preparing the way for the righteous one, for Jesus. And when he showed up, when God finally sent his son, the promised Messiah that you're supposed to have been looking for, you know what you did? You murdered him. He says, you've received the word of God from angels and you did not uphold it. Stephen, with boldness and audacity and faith, blasts the Sanhedrin. He spoke truth defiantly and righteously to power. And they respond exactly how you think they would. They rush him, they yell. It says that some of them covered their ears, a bunch of drama queens the Sanhedrin were, and they run at Stephen and they seize him and they carry him outside the city and they stone him. They bind up his arms, they bind up his legs, they drop him off of a smaller cliff so he's incapacitated and then they drop big rocks on him until he dies. And it says that in that moment Stephen looked up and he saw the Son of God at the right hand of the Father and that he prayed for them because they didn't understand what they were doing. I've read this story a few times in preparation for this week. And every time I read it, I've had to just kind of put my Bible down and sit there for a minute and marvel at the boldness of Stephen. Marvel at how brave he was. And note that what Stephen did in that moment was Stephen chose the consequences of action over the comfort of inaction. He chose the consequences of action. He knew that what he was going to do, he was inviting it. He stuck his chin out. He said, let's go. I know what's going to happen, but you need to know the truth. He invited it in. He chose action and invited the consequences of those actions rather than sit in comfort and inactivity. He could have placated. He could have lived to fight another day. He could have chosen comfort. But he stepped away from comfort and into fear. And it is a profound story. I'm honestly tempted to just leave it here because that's in some ways what Luke does. He just tells the story, sits it in the middle of the narrative. We don't come back to Stephen. I'm not entirely sure why he shared it with us, except to let us be moved by the boldness of Stephen, except to allow us to be inspired by the faith of someone who was facing certain brutal death. And part of me wonders why he did it. Why didn't he try to convince the Sanhedrin that he was right? Why didn't he try to convert the Sanhedrin? Why wasn't he more gentle with them? And I think that the answer is because when Stephen said those things, when he called them uncircumcised of heart and he said that their fathers were the ones that killed the prophets, that they murdered the Son of God, that they received the Word of God and that they did not hold it up. When he says those things, he's looking at the leaders, but he's not talking to them. I think he's talking to all the people who can hear him. I think he wants to inspire all the listeners, all the other young pastors who are watching him to see how he's going to handle this moment, all the people that he preached about the goodness of God to that are watching him to see how he's going to handle this moment. He's not talking to the Sanhedrin. He's talking to everyone around him. He's talking to the crowds because they needed to hear the truth. I think he knew that the truth was going to land on deaf ears when the Sanhedrin heard it, but he also knew that what they need, that what the crowds need, because it matters, is to hear the truth. And the truth to the crowd is that your leaders have let you down. They are false teachers, and Jesus was not. And so he chose boldness for their sakes. And I think all of this presses a question upon us. What is worth our boldness? What's worth our boldness? What in life is worth choosing the consequences of action over the comfort of inaction? What in life is worth stepping into that fear of the unknown, of giving up our comfort and our safety and security and saying, no, this is actually a place I'm willing to plant my flag and I will not be pushed off of this. Hopefully we all have things in our life that push us to boldness. Hopefully we all have things in our life where the comfort of inactivity is just simply no longer attractive enough to not choose the consequences of action. But as I thought about this question, we have different answers. But one answer that we can and should share in common is that if it matters to God, it is worthy of our boldness. If it matters to God, it's worthy of our boldness. If God says, hey, this matters to me, then it should matter to us. If God says this matters to me, then we should be willing to run from the comfort of inactivity towards the consequences of action. That's why last week I felt like I had no choice but to be bold. I would have much rather preferred to just stay comfortable. Not risk ruffling feathers, not risk being divisive in a church that I love so much. But I meant what I said when I said that oppression and injustice matters to God, that it breaks his heart, and it should break our heart too. So we step forward as a church in boldness, choosing the consequences of action. What matters to God is worth our boldness. And what matters to God more than anything else is the souls of men. What matters to God is that people would become his children. So your neighbor, the one that you've been getting closer to in quarantine, the one that you've had more conversations with in the last three months than you have in however many years you've lived there prior? Jesus died for that person. He was so bold that he faced death for them. They matter to God. They're worth your boldness. Have the uncomfortable conversation. I know it feels weird to start talking to people about faith. I know it feels weird to ask them what they believe. I know it's uncouth. I know it's uncomfortable. I know we have to leave the comfort of inactivity to do that. I know that we have to choose some consequences that might scare us, but I'm telling you, be inspired by Stephen. It's worth it. Be bold for the sake of your neighbor. Be bold for the sake of your children. Fight for them. Don't let things slide. Impress upon them the good news and the love of God. Be bold for the sake of your Christian brothers and sisters. Do you know somebody who might be sliding into sin? Do you know somebody who might be making choices that are leading them on a path that doesn't have a good ending? Do you know somebody who's dropped their guard a little bit? And you're seeing some things begin to leak out of their life that aren't good, God loves them. God wants that person near to them. They're worth your boldness. Have the conversation. Invite them to coffee. Invite them to the back porch. Talk to them. They're worth your boldness. Your marriage is worth your boldness. Your marriage matters very much to God. God designed marriage to be a picture, to be a manifestation that people should be able to look at and say, that's the way that God loves the church. And that's the way that Jesus loves us. That's why our marriage should be a picture of the gospel. And if it's sliding, and if it's unhealthy, if it's rocky, if it's murky, if it just feels distant, be bold for your marriage. Say the hard thing, have the hard conversation, Choose the consequence of action. And be bold for your marriage. The things that matter to God are worthy of our boldness. Listen, I mean this. Write the book. Start the ministry. Have the conversation. Send the email. Say the prayer. Open yourself up. Let us be inspired by the boldness of Stephen who in the face of certain death told the defiant and righteous truth. And let us, like Stephen, in the places where it matters most and the things that matter to God, choose consistently the consequences of action over the comfort of inaction. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We thank you so much for your servant, Stephen, and for his story here. Thank you for moving Luke to share it with us so that we could see it and revisit it and marvel at his sacrifice. Thank you for his boldness, for wiring him in such a way that he did not lilt or fade away from that moment, but that he leaned into it. Give us a little bit of that fire, God. Give us the strength to lean into things. Give us the faith to know when we ought to do it. Give us the courage to face consequences of necessary action. Make us a church full of Stevens. In Jesus' name, amen.

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